Letter to Jim Dodge

Jim,

Without any further ado about late American model cars (you can look under my hood any time), I came away last night feeling like I’d played jimdodgeball with a pitbull bearing carnations and a crowbar—I was both laughing and growling. 

My friend Sharon Doubiago once asked mountain men Gary Snyder & Wendell Berry “Where’re the women on the bearshit trail?”. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it. Especially the sidetracks. Dinner, trucktalk. They’re always more interesting anyway.

Don’t forget to send me the bio, etc, and other clippings? I get antsy. Blame it on being a Sagge/Scorpio. Gotta jump on it now while I’m arguing with you in my head—it’ll be too diluted a month from now. I could go with what I’ve got, but I feel like I haven’t got the whole picture, just tidbits. So now to construct an article but I’ve got all these unanswered questions.

As a writer, I guess what I’m most interested in is how the sense of place affects one’s art. The writer’s process. The idiosyncrasies & anomalies. Training grounds. (How to avoid burn-out?). 

Tom Roth wants me to focus on West County influences; the before and after shot. Too bad I don’t have a copy of Stone Junction in front of me. . .maybe I should include a sidebar review. 

Where can I get a review copy? You, your agent, Copperfield’s or Atlantic Monthly? Shelling out $20—I’ll earn about as much—seems a little extravagant with April 15 stomping over the horizon. And if I wait for the paperback ed., inflation will eat up my paycheck!

Dammit, I think I will claim my bed as a business expense. Oof, that sounds bad, I meant dough for the IRS. 

John Oliver Simon was always saying what a great bread baker he was. 

I think moving the “r” one word over is a more apt spoonerism. Well, I didn’t go into details about John. Just felt a little shy about it. Suffice to say, he experienced male menopause with a blonde not unlike the ones you were admiring at the walk-up teller last night. You know, firm bodies (his daughter’s age), etc. 

Thanks for the pep talk. Or whatever it was. Yeah, it is all inseparable. Writing, love, hell, intestinal flora & fauna. 

You ask me why women quit eating? Because we turn it all inward. Starve the self. Deny nuturing. Yes, I too am guilty.

Anyway, I uncracked your earlier books looking for clues and found a yellowed postcard you'd sent to me dated 1984 saying you were about to leave for Mexico. Shit, how time flies. I guess the grey hairs (mine too) aren’t an illusion. 

That’s what’s different. Less hair. Found a photo of you from way back. Wooly beard, etc. No, I ain’t gonna write about your bald spot. Liked “Palms to the Moon” in Poet News. Send me some poems. Not much useable info about you in it though.

Last known address for you is a PO box in Cazadero. (Don’t know how you managed to live in a PO box all those years). I think I have your Arcata address buried somewhere in the depths of a journal...but you know how it is with old journals, who wants to disturb dust? Can’t send this to the house next door to the Oddfellows Hall now can I? Would you care to update the address/phone file?

I’ve been threatening to visit an old boyfriend Geoff Davis in Alderpoint for a couple of years now, and do a CPITS workshop/reading with Dan Brewer in Redway beginning of June. Maybe I’ll see you then. 

Or if you’re down this way, Elizabeth Herron and I are doing a reading the first Monday in April at the Russian River Writers’ Guild in Sebastopol with Lynn Watson—yet another Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate. The PeeDee did an article on Eliz and me--thought you’d like to see it.

Guess what I’m having for lunch? Spring egg rolls & manchurian beef. Forgot to say thanks for dinner. Or should I thank Atlantic Monthly? Gracias por todo. Spaciba. Etcetera.

Dosveydanya

Maureen

1/11/1992—the date is relative as that's the file date. 

See my article on Jim Dodge 

Teaching notes 11/3/88, SISTER City, John Oliver Simon, Geoff Davis

What an incredibly busy teaching day yesterday. Tuesday and Wednesday I taught the kids Pomo creation stories, Wednesday afternoon I raced down the freeway to Petaluma to do an in-service on rocks, I got a great review. And then I raced back to Santa Rosa for a meeting with our sister city USSR group with Marilyn Stocks.

John Masura was very interested in my poetry and art grant idea. He said he knew of a few translators at Sonoma State and at World College. The CEIF grant wants university participation. Mark West, Binkley that is Marilyn’s school, are interested. Link up with Karen’s school? Sister City-USSR would offer a great school network. And it wouldn’t have to be every teacher from every school. A teacher from the selected schools.

I met many great people, Sonya and Rio. We all had dinner at Burbank‘s and I forgot my pain and misery for a while. The exhaustion levels dropped away and I began to enjoy life once again. How I’ve been coping is by keeping incredibly busy. No downtime to feel sorry for myself.

A message from Geoff. I told him about John and he was shocked, he thought we were going to have babies together and all that stuff. So did I. He said we seem so right for each other. I thought so too. I thought I had met my perfect match. It’s always an interesting ritual to show off your current lover to your former lover. Sort of a compare and contrast list. And you know you’ve truly gotten to the other side when you can wish each other well.

Anyway, Geoff invited me to come up and visit and it sounds like he wants me to share the bed, long talks about electric blankets as replacements for lovers. I prefer cats. Sounds like he’s gone through a lot these past few years. And I’m not convinced I want another relationship with him. See how far the mind wanders ahead? He brushed me off like John. I don’t take abandonment lightly. I don’t know if he’s an alcoholic, or an alcoholic in progress. His father was a raging alcoholic and that is a huge turn off for me. He also lives too far away. 

John must’ve sensed the possibility, he said that I’d rot away in the woods, my mind needs the stimulation of the city. I’m surprised by that observation. But there is my career as a writer and I agree, but the pull is they are just the same.

CPITS Journal, Alderpoint, 3/30/88

Alderpoint, 3/30/88

John and I teach poetry workshops at the Hoagland-Zenia school, not quite a one-room school house, but close. We teach poetry to three different groups of kids. The soccer ball becomes a metaphor of the moon. We toss it around the room. We play catch with the sun and moon.

At lunch we talk of incest and child abuse, the eighth grader I took photos of earlier, couldn’t take it anymore and shot her mother after graduation, that fine hair trigger. The toy uzis at Geoff’s door brings it all back home, a life I could’ve had, living on these rough mountains in the middle of nowhere where the smallest denomination of barter is a $50 bill. We accept an ounce of buds and leaves for services rendered from Geoff and consider it payment for working three hours, about $200. Not bad.

Geoff points out, you see the lights, that farthest ridge is Zenia. What I learned from the Davis household was to fill a haunted house with music and with laughter. Putting on words, you feel them deep inside. The magic all over my body tells me the  memory of hands going up and down, is never far off, and I can’t find my way. The what if‘s don’t come as strong, but the same basic attraction pulls us into a vortex with ex- and current lovers and unalterable destinies. Geoff’s arms are massive logs. Not the slender boy I once knew growing up.

There are no streets in Zenia, there is no town. The only phone for miles looks out over the ridges and the postmistress reads the mail in the farmhouse perched on the cliff that serves as a general store, post office, message center for the folks miles around. It is either that or drive miles of winding gravel road to Kettenpom or Alderpoint. 

Zenia, Xenolith, strange rocks. Does Zenia mean a place of strangers or a place where strangers lived or are all of us strangers here or is the strangness related to the fact no one is here and we’re all alone. The wind reads my book on rocks and minerals in no time at all. There are rare rocks here that grow nowhere else in the world, the gift debt of the San Andreas Fault, sheet silicates. In my rock book there’s a special section on sheet silicates, the rare rocks of the north coast. Rare minerals in blueschist and serpentine. For the first time in my life I am reading everything I can lay my hands on that has to do with geology of the north coast. 

At Hayfork, there is a suspension bridge, fences divide the valley and at Irene‘s café, once the old high school we eat boysenberry tarts. Hayfork is miles from Zenia and we are more than a half a day’s journey apart in both times, and worlds.

• ZENIA as prose poem (corrupt text) 1984
• HORSES RUNNING THROUGH THE STREETS OF ZENIA AT NIGHT

CHICKEN SOUP

draft

    —for Ruth Stone

1. With my hands full of the dilemma unborn chicks

ready, but too weak to escape their smooth white prisons,

I have trouble undoing the henhouse gate—

itís like convoluted love mounting in the afternoon hammock

where the intensity of sex was equal the heat of the argument

and blinding orgasms forestalled the inevitable equation

leaving me to count days and eggs with an exhausted passion.

Seeking solace in the henhouse,

Iím confronted with the argument head-on.

Details become significant: minute pinfeathers,

like venial sins, fringe the broody hen's eyelids.

She croons; the chicks gather up courage from under her wings

to answer the four hatchlings I attempt to rescue.

With the precision of a surgeon, I carefully tweeze

a piece of shell from the membrane of a half-born chick,

a bright ruby wells up over wet yellow feathers.

I remember how Binty stood on her colt's umbilical cord

to stop the bleeding. The belabored desire of my breasts and belly

swell and point accusingly at the parched earth, wanting

to masturbate with death in the chickencoop.

I mid-wife the second embryo: a miracle—

a neck, longer than what I think is possible

uncoils snakelike, from the opened shell.

With trembling haunches and sealed eyelids,

the chick blindly slides from the shell into my hand.

A pale necklace of pinfeathers ring the tiny winglets.

I move the chick closer to the brood;

its loud call doesn't rouse the maternal instinct of the hen;

she distractedly pecks at it, and tramples it

in her hasty mothering to protect the others.

Poultry yard facts are not news,

but cruelly catches me by surprise anyway.

2. In restaurants, heat lamps to keep the chicken warm

reminded me too much of Mary Bianchi's incubator:

a fortress of blue doors and windows.

Easter: I crawled through fields of yellow chicks

blooming furiously at the speed of light under 30-watt bulbs

to find just the right one. Under the miracle of chickens,

unnamed possibility opened up like infinity.

I was so angry when my grandmother simply said No,

and the dream quietly closed in on itself;

a small child covered in sawdust

fiercely clutching a downy chick to her breast.

From the poultry yard we learned uneasy truths—

suicidal stampedes in pens with lethal corners,

pecking order, what blood-smell was capable of rousing.

We taught the survivors how to drink,

clipped beaks and wings. We learned euphemisms,

practiced what we learned in the school yard.

I took a squeamish clinical interest

in deveining drumsticks during Sunday dinners.

When things got tough, I retreated to the sanctity of illness.

Feeding me chicken soup, Grandma always explained,

You've got to boil it until the bone-jelly comes out.

Was it really the bones of the chicken

that healed us when we were sick?

3. As I struggle to save the final chicks,

you say to me, I believe in letting nature take its course.

The dog loves the ones that don't hatch out.

So, I place the tiny ember back in its nest

The wind to catch this spark will not blow.

Long shadows crawl over yellow madrone leaves

toward the empty hammock supplicated by the evening breeze.

I fishtail down the valley; my rage and headlights flirt and neck

with the center line of the long highway toward home:

how many accidents are born in the aftermath of lover's quarrels?

This time we were lucky (or, unlucky, as it seems).

4. Your postcard arrives: Another chick hatched out;

it made me think of you. We shouldn't make a go of it.

I think of how cold bone-jelly quivered like a wild trout

in my grandmother's capable hands.

You didn't see how the chickís blood rusted

like a stigmata on my palms and thighs

during the hot summer heat.

1985?

rev. 8/13/ 87 rev. 2/ 93  still not there...
Humboldt County
& Napa
another version was published in Kamel Klaxon 1985
the first draft may have been written in 1984.

LONGRIDGE, MORNING ON THE EEL RIVER

Seeping from beneath the windows
golden motes drift like webs in the sun.
Your smile, soft at dawn,
the lips of darkness
melt in the morning light.
I rise like fog, like a dancer.

Across the valleys
mist rises in unison,
like voices of birds in the pines
Strung on pitchpine fenceposts
barbed wire hums, plucked
by the feet of birds.
The dog groans softly in sleep,
the cat pushes darkness from his bones.

As you kindle the fire
smoke rises in the morning fog.
In the canyon, distant sounds
of the Eel River gurgling.
If you listen closely
you can imagine conversations
spoken in any voice you want.

5/1985
CPITS workshop Mimi Albert
added, rev. 2/18

San Francisco to the Bahamas at 27,000 feet

April 26, 1985

Below me is an unnamed lake in a bowl tinged with green mountains on the west. One  side of the range is green, the other is brown, in a rain shadow.

The Central Valley and the edge of the Mohave Desert, a dividing line of plenty rain and no rain. Soft undulations of land and hills give way to pinnacles and mesas, fantastic forms, and the patchwork of crops along the I-5 highway.

Trees cluster on the north sides of slopes, etched on the steep mountainsides, are giant stairstep terraces, from the departure of the great inland seas and lakes. 

Waves of topsoil flow from one field to the next. Commuting in the wind. Playing out the dustbowl. Again. You can literally see the wind patterns in this great inverted bowl. The Imperial Valley is moving itself southward towards even less fertile ground.

It's agribusiness as usual, enormous grades and scars from where small farms once stood, now turned to alkali flats. Toxic nitrogen poisoning in the soil. We passed an enormous cloud of dust that hangs over the middle of the valley like a brown fog bank, but it's too early for the photosynthesis of smog at 8 AM.

Miami is almost 3000 miles away. For every thousand miles, the clock goes forward an hour. It takes the sun three hours to travel across the state, not distance as the crow flies, but distance as the sun shines, or as the Earth turns. 

We travel down the West Coast, the plane buckles in the wind. Air is something you can't see or touch. But if you take one quart of air and compress it into a pint, you have a working knowledge of E = MC2. It's all relative. 

How do I tell the kids what Einstein is remembered for: the bomb, and he is responsible for Reagan being in office? Write him a cowboy poem about how life used to be. Write him a postcard of what you will miss. That redwood tree. Because I haven't yet seen them all.

Brown brown brown San Fernando Valley. Alkali peeling off like skin from the sunburnt earth. Runoff hurries down to the sinkholes before the sun plays havoc with it. Small truck farms fringing the edge of existence.

Below me, is the trajectory and support system of the space shuttle. Call it Edwards AFB. Call it China Basin. Mothballed planes. And Jim just cinched up his car, belly kicked it, and drove south across the Mojave, just like that—so desolate, hills freckled with creosote and mesquite.

Dry riverbed – the Colorado? Funny circular irrigation: Israeli style farming kibbutzim? Kidney-shaped farms. Renal failure? A vast circular disc glints: maybe it's a colander in the desert. Panamint Mountains emerge from under a low tide of drifting sandstorms, that obliterate the view of the Sierras.

Reservoirs and dams abound, like small jewels in a land so arid, even the river can't coax the green out of its banks. Borax mines further south, drain the sky of color. White noise of the desert, extinct species, and dry riverbeds meander through the silent desert.

Now you can see the oases: 29 Palms. I wanna know who counted them all, and if they got it exactly right. Will they have to change the name of the town if another palm tree grows, or dies?

You can't have an oasis without a drought. So many beginnings and endings of dreams in this agricultural desert, this cultural desert, this emotional, just desserts? People come, and go, but the desert remains, obdurate as an enigma, this is the truest face of the desert.

The last plane I rode in, you couldn't see out the windows because the sharp ash of Mount Saint Helens had ground the surface into frost. Helens—why is she plural? Is she more than one duality? Sovereign mount?

We fly back out to the coast. The fringe of habitable land. Living on the western edge of this continent becomes a real phrase. Owning language, reclaiming it, mean what you say. Say that again until it becomes you, and you become it. 

Like geography, I remember making that topo map of California out of dough and salt on the rusted stove. Grease catcher tray, little top knob at the Mexican border. My mother's blue oil paints became the inland sea. I painted. I remember feeling ashamed because my map looked so different from the other kids' maps, but I used what tools I had.

Magnificent cloud formations across tumulous clouds, or is it cumulous tombstones? Rain and a dusting of fresh snow on the peaks. A desert plateau with precipitation, is a gentler desert.

The buttes jigsaw together, I marvel at how the land fits sublimely together. On the banks of this conundrum, houses and greenery. Clouds change they become cirrus, they become fog, as we enter into the heart and the soul of clouds patterns, changing slowly with the shape of the land.

I never seem to tire of looking at the land from above, it's pure magic. We fly sandwiched in a free zone between two cloud formations. Quite bold, white below. Flying over Arizona. 

Poor dear Stephanie. I am not response from my pain. Did she object to the line where I wrote how the Arizona sun is soaking her dry? We were best friends once. But years go by without a letter, without a call. So much flatland out there. Arizona? Texas? How did she suffer in her silence? I grieve for her. My best friend.

And Jim, I forgot his address, he's down there in the suburbs—somewhere in Houston. After all this time, I'm surprised by how much I miss him, and I don't know what to make of his wife Rochelle calling me up on their 18th anniversary just to have somebody to talk to. Didn't think I would miss the friendship. 

Carolyn says you feel all this because at one time you really loved him. It was over at least a year ago, it was really over. I guess the body never forgets. We made love before he left. It was dry like the back of the throat after a bad dream, and a thirst that leaves you wanting.ut not for more.

And now Geoff. God, I sure know how to pick them. One minute wanting to live with him, be with him, have babies. Then he goes away to Fiji for three months. And I go through it all. Again. The doubts the fears, should I, or shouldn't I, and the decision is out of my hands once again. In balance. What do I do this time? Stick around? Like I did with Lee? Become a masochist? 

Last vacation, it was Jim I was pining for, this time, it's Geoff. Will I spend all my vacations mooning over one man or another? With Geoff, it forced me to consider what I wanted out of life, besides make babies, that is. Something I do have to come to terms with, and soon. 

I am ambitious. I want recognition. I am getting it slowly, slowly. I have a fear sometimes, but my writing isn't good enough, so I do a little bit of everything to make up for it. Journalism, photography, anything to get my name, my persona out there—and it does. But what are my goals? How do I envision survival one, two or five years from now? 

Part of me wants the whole ball of wax, the kids, the home, the dream. But it's not real, though billions of people go through the motions. Desperate, like the cat wanting in, only to want out again. It becomes a dream of nirvana. Or rather, the Maya veil. 

I can also picture the other side too. I know how awful it can be to be tied down with responsibilities that I couldn't get out of. I thought of Geoff. Would I be the type of woman to abandon her children for a career if it came to that? Assuming it didn't work out but that's just how love is. Be with a man of few years, have kids, and then what? 

A fragile thing, love, but maybe that ball of wax is the placebo. I think I won't have to worry about supporting myself if I have a relationship with kids. I won't have to worry about the future because I will no longer be in control. Then there's no fear of failure but it's a case of real bad yeah-buts. Is important to keep a clear perspective and not be flooded with emotions and fantasies of a life not lived.

Not having children, is that something I can live with that without? Sure, if I wanted to. I could find an anonymous father, or a turkey baster, but that's not what I want. I want love too. 

This is a very occasional diary journal. I write this stuff when I travel because this is the only time when I'm free. Free of the confines of home and the narrow paths. Last year, I made a vow to travel two times a year. So I could free myself. Perspectives are so different. 

Geoff took off for three months of travel, already his perspectives have changed, and what he writes of now, is not having to own the other person's life. Fear of what? Jealousy? Need, let it go? To hold your need in your hands, there's the question.

There is a strange shimmering blue light below the clouds, or should I say, between the clouds and the land. It looks like water. Must have something to do with atmospheric conversion, illusion more got a Fata Morgana. A mirage. All that flat land, the wonder of it all with no boundaries.

Below me is a dam, and another reservoir, the land is so flat that the waterways training into the lakes are backed up for miles, and there are many lakes. Two huge links. We must be flying over Texas right now. Three and four huge reservoirs. Maybe it's Phoenix, Lake Havasu or Lake Powell? The waterways go on for miles and miles and the distance never comes closer, not matter how far you travel.

April 26, 1985

slightly revised 11/8/2015.

HOME RANCH

HOME RANCH
                       —for Geoff Davis

1. The ancestral path led to the adobe ruin;

a buckled porch shifted its ghostly weight.

This was Wild Bill Walsh's house,

& later, it was Julia's.

When the liquor ran dry,

he drove his truck into the town of Ione

and sold it for a five-gallon barrel of whiskey

& a good game of cards—or so the story goes.

They said that when he wasn't drinking,

he was a fine blacksmith.

After a hundred years, his handiwork, still in use—

I fondle the door hinges, the gate latches,

even the twisted juniper beams in the barn

preserved by the dry desert air.

Birds flew among the rafters to open sky.

A half-century of melting snows

dissolved the adobe into rich chocolate streaks

on the whitewashed walls.

2. At family gatherings there was talk of incest.

First cousins, my grandmother said.

From that union of Wild Bill and Julia,

one daughter sat in the corner by the stove

sewing with imaginary needle & thread.

What wasn't mentioned was the other

became a scientist. Jornada del Muerte.

Alamagordo was like Home Ranch,

Los Alamos, White Sands, New Mexico,

& Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Pioneer names for home.

Code name: Manhattan Project.

July 16, 1945, Fat Man.

Oppenheimer's trinitite, green desert glass

from ground zero was the dowry for my cousin Mary.

Ghosts of the Cold War swarming in the singing sand,

& the sound of war growling across a cloudless sky

were what survived her.

I spent eternal moments under my school desk

during bomb drills, thinking of Russia and Cuba,

not knowing Mary was implicated in all this too.

3. She let her thoughts go out the same way they came in

through the ruin of the back door.

What she wanted was to feel was his rough hand on her skin,

& in the ruined kitchen they'd couple in the alkali dust,

their bodies, stone mills to grind the earth to powder.

On the porch roof, a baby bird,

mistaking me for his mother,

ravened at the edge of his nest,

the red lining of his mouth, a wound.

I sat on the far side of the old well

watching a cloud cross a minute patch of sky

in the dark eye of water, to worn out to cry.

I was composing a letter in my head—

what I should have said, but . . .

Tired of waiting for god-knows-what,

I knew he'd laid aside the hammer & tongs &

cracked open another bottle in darkness.

What could survive that?

4/85
rev. 3/90

HORSES RUNNING THROUGH THE STREETS OF ZENIA AT NIGHT

HORSES RUNNING THROUGH THE STREETS OF ZENIA AT NIGHT

"The post is the consolation of life."

            —Voltaire

PART I

The road into Hayfork winds along a narrow valley.

In the fields, a man stops, wipes his brow and waves as we pass.

The alders and poplars shake yellow sunlight out of the sky.

I still can't get used to the idea of snow.

You say it gets old fast.

The silver twigs and trunks etched against grey sky

are familiar like an ache out of childhood.

It is difficult to start a poem

or to find the beginning of anything.

An abandoned grape arbor shades the once-tiled floor

of what we called Lew's cabin--

I can still see you along the river, green as cat's eyes.

In photographs, we are all strangers frozen on film

but in the mirror we recognize ourselves.

If only we could get to the other side of the mirror.

* * * *

In Lagunitas, Father Connery died

and so did Marie Rexroth.

As kids we thought they'd be around forever.

Grandma used to point them out in church

and tell us of the hikes into Devil's Gulch.

In old age, he was a gruff, cantankerous poet.

He didn't remember me--

a thin child on a bony bay nag.

They say Marie never got over his death

even after all those years of separation

and his other wives. She did nothing,

just let the cancer grow,

and kept his poetry dusted, waiting.

I remember stopping by her house

but there was nowhere to tie the horse.

I wanted to say to her:

bless me Marie, for I have sinned.

I am a poet.

* * * *

The De Rutte boy opened his door one night

and the Zebra Killer pulled the trigger.

As an altar boy, he served me communion.

His youngest brother was convicted

of raping and drowning an old woman in her bathtub.

His mother testifies, "He was an angel.

Wouldn't hurt a fly." She said,

"That old commie woman had bags of dope

under her house. It was her fault."

We relived the details of Mark's death.

I have friends on both sides of the courtroom.

To this day, I awaken screaming and choking

with a black weight upon my chest

and I see the edges of ghosts

even when the light is on.

A friend blames the mirrors in my house

for letting all the ghosts out

and burns sage to banish them.

It works for a while. Then they're back.

My landlady asked me to tell her father-in-law

"We love you. You have another fine grandson.

You can rest now," the next time he comes

in the night to fix my leaky faucets.

* * * *

I dreamed my grandmother had fallen

and a weight had dropped.

Her lips were blue.

During the night, a slag of iron

pierced the sagging dewlap of her arm.

I held her in my arms, thus,

as she must have held her own children

and later, me. Hallowe'en she slipped quietly off

to the other side talking of those hedgehogs

loose in the livingroom again

leaving me to face this world alone.

At night she keeps telling me they've made a mistake.

She's not dead and shakes her white head, no—

when I tell her it's true. Is it an accident

both she and Joseph Campbell chose the same day to

travel the road to Tír nan-Óg?

I dream of calling her long distance

but I haven't got the number.

In the mountains I gathered stones for her.

Jasper, obsidian, quartz. I left her food, water,

and my hair so she'd find it. Genetic code.

* * * *

In the mail today, a photo of Hayfork

suspension bridge arrives holding up the sky.

I remember a boy who grappled the bellies of steelhead

resting on the banks of Papermill Creek.

Do you remember how the fish slipped up the ladders

with a motion almost quicker than the eye can see?

The fish no longer return.

* * * *

What is better: fucking on the river rocks

in the hot sun or minutely examining

the wanderings of dung beetles

for some revelatory cipher or glyph?

After photocopying Lew's book I wrote a poem

to all those whose hands that book had passed through.

All, part of our childhood.

* * * *

To Whom it May (or May Not) Concern:

This illegal version of On Out

was photocopied during work hours

on their machine when no one was looking.

I got the original from Geoff

who got it from Chuck Sutton

who was, at the time seeing Grover Sales

(to whom this book is signed—

For Grover—

"If you can't kill it,

shoot it."

Lew

8/19/66 )

who was seeing another woman

whose room mate was seeing Geoff's brother

(I think) and Geoff who is seeing me still

so I can't steal the original yet.

This thief hopes that Lew, wherever he may be

will appreciate the spirit in which this book

(and everyone else) was taken.

* * * *

PART II

"Each particular erases from the clarity of a general idea."

—Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas"

Definition in Ten Parts for DNA

*

You ask who I am.

At four a.m., I am not "I"

but a dream as I pour your coffee.

Write me a poem about the fine line

between earth and space

and I will dream a river of blood for you.

If you return before the apples drop

it will be soon for they are picking them now.

When I come north, we'll plant trees.

*

Without definition

I feel luminous at the sight of you.

Our bodies keep us honest

if nothing else will.

They've been reading our mail.

Nothing is confidential.

*

A tunnel distills the familiar world

into a thin passage. I feel a little lost.

Am I dreaming and the rain coming down?

*

I fed you pomegranates to bring you back.

But your yard is littered with cases of beer cans

and I have seen my aunt's face

after her husband beat her during a drunk.

*

The story goes, "When God loves a mortal woman, pfffft!

She goes up in smoke when he touches her," said the monk.

Winter is coming like a cat hunkered up on a porch rail.

I rock back on my heels, Indian fashion

and weather the storm.

*

Lew said, "Poetry out to be as vigorous

and useful as natural speech."

I have no words for the loaves of craziness,

my mother—likening it to love—fed me.

I learn the inside of every hospital ward is the same green.

No one wears shoes and pens are lethal weapons.

Ring of bone. Each suicide, an attempt at life.

*

Dioxyribonucleic Acid. DNA.

Taken one syllable at a time

it becomes a simple ladder.

Double helix. Specific pairing.

Suddenly it's no longer a game.

Then the long silence.

*

A psychiatrist tells me craziness is not inherited.

Red roe floats in the silt of Papermill Creek.

Life takes strange twists and turns

until we come back to what we are.

*

I spend another season alone

and watch the moon pull on my blood.

In a Garberville motel, Suzie Campbell and Paul Turner

likening it to love, made a pact and took dead aim.

Did they make a ritual as they loaded each bullet?

Warhol's soup can; target practice with grace notes.

*

What grey kinship of brain,

black squiggles, dunghill beetles,

cartouche of phaoahs? This writing.

Who measures the sanity of psychologists or poets?

One person in five is clinically insane.

We need something to take with us before we go.

* * * *

PART III

At Hoaglin-Zenia--a one room school I teach poetry.

The soccer ball becomes a metaphor for the moon.

At lunch we talk of incest—

the 8th grader who couldn't take any more

shot her mother after graduation.

Such a fine hair trigger.

The toy uzi at your house brings it back home--

living on the mountain in the middle of nowhere

where the smallest coin is a $50 bill.

But the same attraction pulls at us, your arms

like a massive bear hold me with the weight of the life

I might have lived. The children we might have had.

And you say the postmistress still reads the mail

from the front porch of the farmhouse-cum-post office/general store.

You say hang onto those negatives because Blanche and Hank

are going down for the count.

Tonight I thought of Eric Satie, the composer

who ate only what was white.

White sugar, cauliflower, wine.

Things are not what they seem.

This poem, familiar, out of childhood.

We hold each other up like mirrors

and send occasional postcards.

I am sleeping under the stories that are all true.

Not true. Only fiction.

The fact is, that we lie.

There are no streets in Zenia.

There is no town. I made it all up.

But when the bars close in Garberville and Alderpoint

you still call me from only phone booth for miles

with the best view of Longridge and along the Eel River,

xenoliths, strange rocks that grow nowhere else in the world,

seeth and twist. In fall, the blanket of snow tucks

itself right up to the glass walls.

The last toll station in California is mechanized.

No more listening in on the line.

And Lew, with a gun to his head

walked into the forest because there was no way left

to remind the planet of its gentleness.

Hayfork is miles from Zenia or Lagunitas

and we are a half a day's journey from anywhere.

* * * *

DATE? 84 85?
I rewrote this poem many times.
Only date I found was 11/16/1984

Other horse bits

Horse chestnuts

Sitting Deep

Helgar the Horrible
The Little Shits

There is so Much We Save from Childhood
AFTER THE SOLSTICE, MACHU PICCHU
WILD HORSES IN THE RAIN
LATE HOUSEWARMING POEM TO WM.T.WILEY

SLEEP

SLEEP

 —for Geoff Davis

Sleeping beneath the window,

the tongues of darkness

melted into morning mist;

as he tended a fire of smoke & fog.

I arose like a dancer,

the dog softly groaned,

the cat pushed the blackness

back from his bones.

Plucked by the feet of birds,

the barbed wire hummed like a harp.

In the canyon I overheard

the endless conversation of the Eel River,

but not the distant song

eroding the shore at our feet.

Longridge, CA

4/15/84
rev. 87, 2012

                 —For Geoff Davis

Sleeping beneath the window,

the tongues of darkness

melted into morning mist;

your smile, soft as dawn,

as you tended the fire

of smoke and fog.

I arose like a dancer,

the dog softly groaned,

the cat pushed the blackness

back from his bones.

Plucked by the feet of birds,

the barbed wire hummed.

In the canyon I overheard

the endless conversations

of the Eel River, but not

the distant song eroding

the shore at our feet.

Longridge, CA

spring 84