THE POET’S VEST

When I wear the poet's vest,
people stop and stare.
When I walk down the street,
they follow me. As if mellifluous words
were trapped in the hemline.
My poet's vest has bolstered me
through many poetry readings where
I doubted my words, but they became whole
and imbued with context.
My poet's vest made from war-torn Highland
huipils of women no longer alive.
Their voices speak to me
when I wear the poet's vest.

My poet's vest, older than all my relationships,
I bought on sale, it cost a month’s rent.
My friends urging me on, saying: it's so you.
It was a great thing to do, I am so frugal,
especially when it comes to the self,
I counted out my money,
friends chipping in $10 here, $5 there.
Leap of faith that all would work out in the end.

See, I had just given a reading in the gallery
where the walls were cloud banks.
All that investment of summer sky
and night secrets. Susan says
nichtallaludi, she says it’s a Greek word
of hidden muses wanting to dance
on the jasmine tongue of night.
To paint flowers on the tongue
iI was not a feathered cloak,
but it was my passage to another world.

8/19/2016
Ellen Bass Workshop

Jim Dodge, Stone Junction, The Paper, Sept 27, 1990

I couldn't find my finished story or tear sheet, so I made an alternative post, which has gone on to have a life of its own, including being shanghaied by other blogs, so I'll post this separately for now.

Jim Dodge: Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler...

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