At Paul Mariah's memorial reading

At Paul Mariah's memorial reading, Jack and Adele Foley, Gene Ruggles, Mike Tuggle, Susan Kennedy, Noni Howard, Vernon Edgar, Herman Berlant, Jim Byrd, Michelle Bertrand, Earl LeClair, Leland Stoneys, Clive Matson, and Glenn Ingersoll. After the reading, we learned that Paul's archives will be sent to the University of Texas in Austin. Bob Berner's poetry workshops led to Minotaur, and ManRoot press. We head on over to Michelle's place with Mary Norbert Körte, Jim Byrd, Herman Berlandt, Vernon Edgar, and Eugene Ruggles—it's a small sendoff party. I was tired and depressed, was home by 9 PM, and asleep by 10:30 PM. I slept nearly 12 hours—like the dead, is it a residual flu, yet another confrontation with death, or the energy of too much people?

2/11 1996


Undated fragment:
Noni Howard said that I had a poem in The Parnassus of World Poets, which one? The day she told me that Paul Mariah died.

1/24/96 returning home from teaching

24 January

When it rains, it floods, literally. After spending the day at the Higham Family School teaching poetry to kids, and doing individual evaluations, I drove home in the pouring rain, tributaries feeding into Brush Creek, overflowing the road, new potholes since this morning.

Nearing home I think about Jim, and arrive home to find him reading in my bed. The cats are in the kitchen crunching on cat food, it's a scene of domestic bliss that I wasn't prepared for. 

But I was very happy to see Jim regardless of the fact that he and Nancy are once again on the skids. It was April when he went on the good red road, and I saw him very briefly again in August, or September. And he returned at the end of October. It's been more than six months since we spent any time together. 

I told him he's been my longest continuous lover, and we reminisced a bit, old friends and lovers since 1981. I queried him about other sex partners, and he assured me that there's been no one else except Nancy. Because he's involved with Sundance, the AIDS issue becomes more critical. The bloodletting in a community where AIDS is skyrocketing. He says he's very careful though. 

I just want to be careful who I let enter my body and Jim's been the only one inside me for more than a year except for Sean the other night. It's safe to say that since Marcel left in 1993-94, I have only fucked one man, save Sean. But if Jim is promiscuous and lying, then I'm in a precarious position. It's not his nature to lie. 

And the sex is great. I've slept with him for longer than, or as long as he's slept with his wife. At 43, it feels fine, though it's been nine days since my period. We talk about fallopian tubes, his grandson, and the eventual aging of parents and taking care of them. Looking at futures, he shattered once again by this break with Nancy, and me thinking before that, we had a little in common for a long-term relationship, and that feels different now. Wouldn't that be an odd change of events? 

I still want to check out the vibes with Edwin Drummond. I'm certainly recycling all the old lovers and friends these days. No new man on the horizon. It's amazing how once I was fully free of Sonny, how my sex life radically changed. What's different about me, besides being free, is that I'm not advertising, nor am I looking for it. 

My availability has been mysteriously transmitted to the universe and these men who in turn, called or wrote expressing interest, after many years of non-interest, equally mysterious. 

On the Red Road: sweat lodge

11/5/95 

In the sweat lodge at Westerbeck Ranch, 

the lava rocks glowed red, 

the cedar offerings ignited like stars. 

I prayed for Nathan, that he would find his teachers, 

that I would be worthy of teaching him, 

for the good Red Road is not my path, 

though I am of it. 

I prayed for the release of my parents. 

I prayed for the release of Sinead's father. 

I prayed for my cousins who wanted us to sell the land, 

to understand that land is more important 

than just money.

I thanked Jim for bringing us here, 

I thanked the land we met on etc.,

Lakota Sioux chants to offer us up.

He said there would be some discomfort, yes, my muscles ached, was all this from playing pool the night before? I don't think so. I was in a vulnerable position several times because of my whiplash, and I began to hurt. I didn't accomplish much yesterday so couldn't have been food that made me so violently ill. The night before, I have a hamburger and a half a Newcastle on draught. 

Uneasy sweat rolled off of me. If I had toxins, they were plentiful. By around three PM, my outer layer of skin began to itch, and I thought of how like a snake shedding its skin it was. We shed the old, burdensome layers, and emerge with new skins. I washed under the nearly full hunter's moon, my breasts like answering orbs. 

I thought I wasn't going to make it to the last sweat round. I was dizzy. Jim Byrd talked about the lodge being the womb, and here we were,10 people in a tiny space filled with hot glowing rocks. I did not feel well, and my dizziness increased, my headache became a migraine. It was the carbon dioxide and smoke.

I resorted to Advil after the sweat, to relieve the blinding headache, but my stomach had other plans, and it was a battle just to keep it down to drive home. My mouth was foaming, preparing to upchuck. I wondered what if I'd have to pull over, and the drive home was long. Many close calls. I was tortured beyond belief  but soda crackers and bread relieved some of the symptoms and Pepto-Bismol took care of the rest, but it took some time. 

It was good to see Jim and Nancy. They seem to have healed the rift between them, and all was as it was last year, before he left her. He left on the red road, only to find it led right back to her door. Family. Roots. Right in his own backyard.

(11/4) excerpt 

RRWG, CPITS student reading, Burbank Activity Center

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.

CLARIBEL AND MUNCH BEFORE THE VOLCANO

CLARIBEL AND MUNCH BEFORE THE VOLCANO

      Dream segment involving Claribel Alegria's Flowers From the Volcano

        For Julian Beck

Edvard Munch dreams of iron beds dotting the landscape

and outside, a woman screams in the night.   

Light catches the dull gleam of your eye                           

as you are torn from sleep                             

and I feel the coolness of these bars,

cool as rainwater in this torrid place,

he said, and he listens to her vanishing in the dark.                     

Your breathing is like footsteps, like cool air. In what country?

The waters of the trench surround this bed.

This heat. I cannot swim. Will I never see home?

A faint light catches the dull gold on her hand.

In this marriage of darkness and sleep,

the iron bars of the beds grasped

during orgasm, abortion and death

keeps us anchored to the land, Claribel said,

There is no time for children.

It's all the same thing in the end.

The whiteness of her hand clutches the bars like a silent scream.

No one has ever let go of the hand holding the dream.

And we dream of our homeland, a place where we've never been.

Ashes of Izalco in my mouth. My eyes are dreaming.

Fitful sleep ties us to this bed like incomparable ropes.

He said, We breathe beside each other, 
   almost, but not quite touching.

In this conspiracy of sleep we have committed the crime

of breathing together. When they arrest us,

they will bind our hands and feet to the iron bars of this bed.

And we will be lost but they are afraid of what we are.

What remembered countries, 
iron bars placed there for you to hold?

What white doves on smooth painted iron?

I'm afraid for you. Will you never stop?

She said, They are stealing our land from us as we sleep.

Bars of the bed grasped by a woman who dreams of love or prisons—

it is the same thing. In my country, my remembered country

ashes fall like rain. Yes, they will bind us

and death keeps one anchored to the land.

Each of us sleeps alone—

especially when we sleep together, said Munch.

All that we remember sleeps with us

on the bed where the sheets bind us

like long winters of my northland.

She said, We, on this bed form new islands.

We, on these islands, form a plan of escape.

The bridge between our continents is a kiss.

The iron bars on this bed are a kiss.

The screams in the night—our hands do not touch.

Our breath like footsteps running through the dark streets,

like a woman pursued, whose scream 
       hangs like a thread across the abyss.

Why are we tied to this? Edvard, I am brushed by my own silences

and even your strong arms cannot contain the screams of a woman

We keep our ashes inside the volcano of Izalco.

Pale ashes bloom in the country of the dead, said Claribel.

Are we silently mouthing this with slack codfish jaws,

our hanging lips opening and closing like doors

where pools of sleep gush in at high tide?

There is nothing to be said, he said.

We are marooned, stranded on the rocks of this island

and the chasm keeps us from wandering in this country.

I can no longer paint, he said.

She said, The only thing tangible—

the only thing we hold, we need to let go of.

and in the letting go, we hold what we need.

We hold our need.

10/5/84

San Francisco Art Institute

Julian Beck Benefit

Letter to Jim Byrd: Mid-Ocean, Enroute to Oahu (Hawaii journal) 7/31/84

Mid-ocean, somewhere,  July 31, 1984

Jailbyrd –

The only problem with initiating a conversation about the ends of relationships on the steps of BART and then leaving, is that all that gets left unsaid, rolls around in my head as if in dreams, unresolved. I guess if I hadn't said anything it wouldn't have made any difference – I still would've known what Zara said… Leave me hanging here.

Well, there's land out there— Must be getting close. Mauna Kea. Through the clouds, the low flat tongues of Molokai's shore.

Much later: tthe water is so warm, I had forgotten the sheer joy of it all. I spent last night at Kaiser Emergency Center, three fucking hours for a self-diagnosed yeast infection from the antibiotics. (And they will leave me with a gift in return: pinkeye.)

Welcome to Hawaii. I'd forgotten about the slow pace here. Fun, hokey tourist stuff. In spite of  9 million tourists, Waikiki is still manages to be friendly. Sure, they want the tourist dollars, but it's not just the shaka-buck shakedown. Actually, I like it. Sort of like television serials becoming reality— everyone relates to Tom Selleck and Hawaii 5-O.

Waikiki is like Disneyland, or LA shrunk into a dream. That dumb stuff on Fantasy Island seems to be be for reals here, and I can't believe that businesses are run this way. I suspect California was laid-back like this not too long ago. The ones who hustle don't have Polynesian paralysis. Can you imagine New Yorkers struck with Polynesian paralysis? Businesses still functioning?

The reason for all this trivia is that I am an involuntary prisoner, shut in for the day. I'm surviving on one orientation breakfast. You know, buy this, buy that, etc. I'm in a room crammed with first-time haoles and not so haole visitors. So my mind's very trivial. No, relaxed. Very difficult to think. Heavy. Pacalolo means I no can remembah, with an H. So much for intellect.

Continental breakfast means one donut, Styrofoam coffee, and Hawaiian punch. Not Kona coffee. It's too bad I have to sit through this, but it's the only time I can find out who I made my reservations with. She-it.

Somehow I don't think I'm ever going to get out of here, much less finish what I started to write about in the beginning of this letter. I am practicing writing meditation to withstand the deluge. Wish I could leave. Hanamua Bay is waiting, and all those fish. Trouble with drinking coffee and being the captive is that you go crazy faster.

Oh God I'm losing it. Bananas, mangoes, and coconuts, give me some strength. Mahalo.

Real life, like a loose tooth with a mercenary bench for the tooth fairy, they shake it out of you. National pastime is to spend money. I'm part of a Third World group, practically the only white person in the room and I feel more and more uncomfortable with them— they are the polyester class. All these honky bitches.

Did you know they take photos of you at the airport while you're getting lei'd? Five hours of sardine mentality on World Airways and a quick lei, everyone looks worse than wash-and-wear. For eight dollars you can have Kodak moment permanently reminding you of how you don't want to look.

Everyone buys a photo of themselves. Something I find astounding. Something for a washed up unemployed photographer to look forward to?

You should see this hot Chinese number I'm looking at in red heels and very short white jumpsuit. The man she's with seems to have two women. Or is it three?

Like I said, being in the city is a trip – too much visual stimuli. I'm beginning to reel from voyeur mentality. I can't seem to stop creating fictitious backgrounds for everyone. Just let me out of here… 

The bus is coming. Help! I'm being held captive in someone else's material dream. Sometimes I get a little flipped out being alone in a strange surroundings. Not here, not today, the observer behind the camera sans camera. Taking imaginary photos.

This seething, wriggling mass of humanity, I'm part of, astounds me. Being related to all that imperfect flesh. Earlier, on the crowded bus, a man was standing, he dripped sweat from his forearms onto the seat of the passengers below him, who recoiled in horror at that liquid. Having nowhere to wipe off his fellow passenger's sweat, he fastidiously avoided looking at it.

The standing passenger lifted his shirt to cool off, showing the twisted, melted flesh. Pahoehoe lava, seared pockets of flesh. Scar tissue cannot sweat having no sweat glands. The only places that this man could sweat was from his forearms and his belly. What napalm melted his flesh? We are all veterans carrying the war damaged flesh from one place or another.

The reason why I travel is because memory jogs, and random action becomes significant when patterns are created. Our bus arrives. Aloha!

On the bus, a middle-aged woman named Gladys asks: how does this look? Smart with biwah pearls. The reality of it is locked away in tablecloth mentality. A dapper gentleman in an Indonesian wedding shirt, white linen pants, white shoes with holes punched out, smiles at me with gold teeth, his pigeon blood ruby ring, worth a lot of blood.

She leans on me, cowlike, obliviously her cheap perfume fighting against the odor of her plumaria lei.

Something happens here, an imagined reality. For a moment I know longer know what it is I am writing, nor to whom I write, or why.

This letter, if it is one, has taken hold of its own reality, is consuming its own history, its fictitious past.

If that odious woman plants her green and gold heels on my bare foot one more time, I'm going to bite her ass off, but then there would be no comprehension for the dead.

It is so crowded, and hot, I cross my legs with a fellow passenger as her fat presses against my inner thigh. Violation of space. I am very touchy about personal space. They are German, it is difficult to be rude to foreigners.

I am a bitch. I bite my tongue. I carefully fold the tips of my fingernails over my fingers, testing their tensile strength into the palm of my hand—where is the breaking point? It is different for each of us.

How many of us eat before we are truly hungry to sate some trivial god of greed? And I still haven’t sent what I mean set out to say in this letter. It’s a case of the avoidance syndrome for the both of us.

July 31, 1984

• Hawaii Journal, August 5 -12, 1984
• Kamapua'a and Pele on Kilauea

FIRST TIME

FIRST TIME
              —for Jim Byrd

Our canoe rounded a sheltered river bend—
collecting calm emerald water
'til it glistened in a slow, curved smile.
The towering trees punctuated its mirrored speech.

From our raised paddles words escaped—
unannounced as water droplets
spawning concentric ripples
in an undulating desire towards shore.

Who is naming these silent tremblings,
sneaking up, canoe-like along the river,
where,  coming down for their evening drink,
our hearts stopped,  afraid to slake their thirst?

Who will stand guard over them
so they can safely come down to the shore
and ask the river where the trees stop
and the reflection begins?
Through the trees the wind is trickling.
Only the shore answers in a slow, curved smile.

8/4/1983
added 10/16

FIRST TIME

FIRST TIME
— for Jim Byrd

Our canoe rounded a sheltered river bend

collecting calm emerald water

until it glistened in a slow curved smile.

The towering trees punctuated its mirrored speech.

From our raised paddles, words escaped

unannounced as water droplets

spawning concentric ripples

in an undulating desire toward shore.

Who is naming these silent tremblings,

sneaking up, canoe-like along the river

where, like deer coming down for an evening drink,

our hearts stopped, afraid to slake their thirst?

Who will stand guard while they ask the river

where the trees stop and the reflections begin?

Through the trees the wind is trickling.

Only the shore answers in a slow curved smile.

Years later, while drinking from separate rivers

we keep asking each other the same questions,

and our hearts, no less thirsty or afraid,

find nothing in the backwaters, except ourselves.

1983
rev./88
Forestville

1984 Deepest Valley Review