Remembering Lew Welch

There's been a bit of a buzz on Facebook lately about Beat poet Lew Welch. Poet/guitar maker, L. Layne Russell posted a link from PennSound and I found myself listening to audio bytes of Lew's poems and writing a small memory fragment on David Meltzer's wall. I realized I'd never written about that memory as there wasn't very much to it. No context by which to frame it other than our family names.

But then the little bits of Lew fragments began to add up into a strange constellation of words wanting reassembly. Like Brodsky, I'm "caught up by the relentless centrifugal nature of language." So I guess I have David Meltzer's Two-Way Mirror to blame for this wee blogeen. Go raibh maith agat! They are so few and far between.

David wrote on his wall: "Lew was mentor & friend & we all miss him & keep waiting for him to buzz the bell & visit & listen to Lester Young & knock back a fifth of something strong & then say goodnight & split."

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine:
people live in one another’s shadows.

My mother, nee Maureen Reilly, then, Maureen Hurley, who chucked out all her given and married names, and went by the stage name, Kellé Hurley, and later, Kellé Green, as the name Maureen Hurley was already taken at SAG. She was a Project Artaud artist-painter, an actor, fey poet, and friend of Bobby Kaufman, the first poet who was reputed to have been called a "Beatnik." (Thanks to the press in Herb Cane's weekly column, the moniker stuck).

My mother occasionally hung out with the Beats in North Beach but they were really an exclusive bad boy's club. No women need apply. Many women who later aligned themselves with the Beats were ex-girlfriends and hangers-on. She was no one's girlfriend. She was her own woman. (I once saw a photo in a coffee table book, of my mysterious mother dressed in a striped Marseilles style sailor shirt and black capri pants. Several Beat poets and artists are standing on a street corner. But she's standing off to one side, by a street post, as if not quite with the group, slipping out of the confines of the frame and time. But she was like that.)

I was raised—not by my mother, but by my Irish grandmother who hailed from Bantry Bay, County Cork—out in the west country, in the wilds of Forest Knolls, which in those days, was light years from Fairfax, let alone, San Francisco.

We lived in an red iron oxide stained house perched on railroad ties; it had a summer porch with copper screens and windows salvaged from St. Vincent's School for Boys. It sat alone on a southwestern slope above the watershed of Arroyo Creek on Barranca Road.

My grandmother named the land Coom an-nÓr, the Hill of Gold, with twinned live oaks lining the gateway. Our place looked remarkably like my grandmother's lost family farm in Bantry. Hence the name.

Living out so far in the country in the late 1950s without public transport or a car, meant we were fairly well isolated, and dependent upon neighbors and relations to go Over the Hill (White's Hill) into Fairfax for shopping, or out to Point Reyes, where my doctor, Dr. Whitte (the poet), lived. (But I didn't find that out until years later). But the land was good to us, it fired and fed the imagination.

My grandfather had died a few years before, of throat cancer so I was my grandmother's sole companion. They sold the City victorian on 131 Third Avenue after he died. Forest Knolls was always our country home since the early '20s, we were Old Marin. My grandfather bought the house back in 1910 and the two other lots later from a railroad man who kept his silver under the floorboards. We had thirteen acres straight up a steep coastal hill replete with its own dolmen and artesian spring, facing westward towards Mt. Barnabe, was home.

During the Great Depression, my family lived in Forest Knolls year round, with my grandfather commuting into San Francisco by train and by ferry. The train tracks were all pulled up during WWII for the steel. We used to love hiking and riding along the level railroad beds. No greasebush meant no ticks.

Anyway, one bright afternoon, this yellow checker cab came bounding up our long dirt driveway, lurching and leaping the potholes like a wild pony. The white cab sign perched on the roof, like a nurse's cap. Maybe it was a Red Cross rescue mission. Who was being rescued will never be answered in this lifetime.

We rarely had visitors. In those days, there was very little traffic in the San Geronimo Valley. In those days, it was so quiet, you could hear the progress of a lone car shifting into third gear up the long mile stretch of Arroyo Road from Sir Francis Drake, the highway that bisected The Valley.

We were trapped on an island lost in time and place, caught somewhere between a metaphoric incarnation of Appalachia, the Ozarks and the Azores. We were a backwash of immigrants and welfare families. Not part of Marin proper. The Point Reyes National Seashore was still working ranches, not an urban escape route.

Seeing a cab this far out in the wilderness was akin to seeing a mirage or maybe seeing the bus, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (but neither Priscilla nor the Magic Bus had yet been born—there's a story about that too.) In those days, there was an unwritten rule: a San Francisco cabbie didn't cross the Golden Gate Bridge. Ever. Besides, there was a $50 surcharge. A bloody fortune in the 1950s and '60s. If my mom had paid that cab fare, it would've taken her SSI checks for the next six months.

Whenever my crazy mom got her SSI check, we could expect a visit, so it must've been at the beginning of a month. What month, I couldn't tell you. Or what year. Or whether it was spring, or fall, but it felt like it was a Sunday afternoon in the fall. Perhaps because my grandmother was lying on the couch reading the Sunday paper, or because it was sunny and there was something evocative about looking up at that indefatigable blue sky of childhood so irrevocably linked to memory that will haunt me forever.

The cab pulled around the Bishop pine at the bend by the big live oak into the turn-around in front of our house and came to a sliding halt at our front door. A puff of dust. My mom and a tall fellow unfolded themselves from the car. My grandmother looked out the kitchen window and said, "Oop, it must be the beginning of the month. Here's your mother." She put the kettle on.

In our house, the ritual of tea was required to properly welcome all visitors, whether they were family, friends or strangers. Fill the kettle to the top with spring water from the tap. Bring the water to a full rolling boil, scald the big teapot, measure in a rounded teaspoon of loose Irish tea (McGraths, Barry's or Lyons will do), one for each guest. Don't forget to put in an extra spoonful for the pot. Reboil the water. Fill teapot to brim. Brew 5 minutes.

Mom and the cabbie, Lew Welch came in and settled in on the other couch by the window; my grandmother got up from her couch, stooped over the tea tray atop old Life magazines and the Sunday paper scattered on the heavy octagonal oak card gaming table, with sawed off legs cut down low to coffee table size. As my grannie poured tea, it was the music of running water and ancient healing wells. My mom had resurfaced the"coffee" table with an awful gold and white mottled faux marble finish, and in the middle of that gold lake, a large crescent black and gold moon shaped ashtray floated; it matched the painted black legs. Very homegrown '50s moderne.

Scores of escaped cigarette butts had burned and scarred the table surface so that it puckered up like tiny craters. But a permanent layer of newspapers hid them from sight. Besides, over the decades, the original oak surface had been burned so many times it looked like a herd of tiny black feet had trompled across it.

What made that oak table really great, was being able to put both your feet up on it, and kick back. It was funny to watch a guest realize that he was expected to put his feet on the table—thinking he'd died and gone to heaven. Someone said those old oak tables were made heavy on purpose so that no irate gambler who lost a fortune at a bad hand of cards, could tip it over in a rampage. It was made to keep gamblers honest. It was so thick, it could probably stop a bullet too. I sat on one corner and watched my mom and Lew chat.

My grandmother poured the properly brewed Irish tea into big mugs, mixing it with milk and sugar, the spoon beat out a melodious rhythm like the clapper of a small bell— like the ones the altar boys rang during the mass. Lew was in luck. There were thick wedges of her famous sodabread hot out of the oven, slathered with butter too. He settled back with a jailhouse mug of tea in hand. Put his feet on the table and kicked back while the Bushmills was released from its prison of closet and shoes to baptize and benedict their cups.

Conversation droned on, sonorous as bees converging on the hive. My grandmother launched into yet another long diatribe about the ancient Celts or politics and such…. Her index finger punctuated each point. My grandmother's maiden name was Walsh. She was busy telling Lew that Walsh and Welsh/Welch were all the same name, meaning the Welshmen who came into Ireland with Strongbow during the Norman Conquest (1169) and settled in Wexford and Bantry.

By the second cuppa tea, we were practically cousins in her telescoping of time. She was deep into the abduction of Dervorgilla, a Breifne chieftain's wife (Tiernan O'Rourke), by Dermot MacMorrough and his traiterous deed which led to Ireland's downfall and played her into the hands of King Herry II of England.

At the creek of Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won.

Welch-Norman lord, Richard FitxGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, AKA Richard Strongbow (moniker for Welch longbow archers), had fallen out of favor with Henry and saw the invasion of Ireland as a way to curry his back into Henry's good graces. Strongbow's forced marriage to Dermot's daughter Aiofe and the fall of (Viking) Wexford in 1170 pretty much sealed Ireland's fate; when Dublin fell, she would be forever wedded and chained to England.

The diatribe of Cromwell the antiChrist, was up next. My grannie was on a roll. We were well beyond the Pale. My attention wandered, I was a child, and I wanted to play outside, so I don't remember much else.

What I do remember was looking up at Lew; he was a tall, thin cool drink of water, with his auburn hair slicked back, looking so much like my uncles, I thought we were related. They all had the same pointed widow's peak, freckles, and a toothy Irish grin. Lew looked like a cross between Uncle Myles (who had recently died of melanoma) and Uncle John. We were down to two men. Lew was a shoe-in.

But Lew's widow's peak was more pronounced like Uncle Bill's. He looked closest to an old picture of my Uncle Feilim on horseback, but I never met my Uncle Feilim as he died at 17, in my grandmother's arms, of a ruptured appendix right in this very room. Perhaps that's why my grandmother and my mom took such a shine to Lew. Family resemblance. My grandmother never got over Feilim's death.

How my mother and Lew met, the details are lost to history, or herstory—interrupted by death, but my mom probably was a fare he'd picked up in San Francisco, and they got to talking. You know how gregarious the Irish are, with the gift of the gob, I mean, gab. I suppose Lew was living in Corte Madera or Fairfax (or maybe Bolinas) in those days, so he was probably on his way home after a slow day trolling for fares.

But Lew did rescue my mother from the streets of San Francisco more than once. She was a damsel in distress (I'm sure it didn't hurt that she was a a tall, willowy stunner with a long mane of fiery auburn hair and a classic Irish face). Those two crazies decided to take a ride out in the country to meet my rather remarkable Irish grandmother who was an active bearer of the oral tradition and language.

Besides, Lew had friends in The Valley. Grover Sales was living right down the road with Chuck (Charlene) Sutton, the jazzman's wife, in Lagunitas. Sutton and Tristano were hot in the New York jazz scene. When I was in my 20s, a boyfriend, Geoff Davis loaned me a copy of Ring of Bone autographed by Lew over to Grover Sales. But Geoff took it back when we broke up. So I made a photocopy of the book because Ring of Bone was out of print and Lew hadn't yet been "rediscovered" so there were not reprints and posthumous collections in their second incarnation.

In those days, Kenneth Rexroth still had his summer cabin past St. Cecelia's Church on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard between Dead Man's Curve and the cutoff to China House by Shafter's Bridge and the Inkwells. Though Rexroth probably wasn't there as he lived mostly in town.

Come summer, we saw his wife. Marie in church on Sundays. Never Rexroth Himself (my grandfather once hiked up Devil's Gulch with him). My grandmother religiously read Rexroth's weekly column in the News Call Bulletin. Mrs. Rexroth sat in a pew near my grandmother. They always sat on the left side of the church, facing the altar, third pew from the front.

Well, my mom came home that afternoon for tea, stayed a while and then, inexplicably, she left again with Lew. Oxymoron. I was pretty upset as I rarely saw my mother as it was. Sometimes it was months, or a half a year or more between visits. I pined in loneliness like a dog. Hid my scalding tears so no one ever knew.

I guess my mother was no longer just a fare, but an affair of sorts, she got around, some memories are better lost or forgotten and buried along with the dead. She was always leaving me behind. The road, always longer than memory. I carried an ache that was never erased by posthumous promises and tearful embraces at Christmas.

I remember Lew coming back up to the house a couple more times, dropping my mother off. I used to confuse him with Keith Bullock whom I knew long before I met his son Ken, in high school.

I don't remember meeting Huey Lewis, Lew's stepson (it was plausable), but we went to different schools. I knew of Huey because when he played at Uncle Charlie's in Corte Madera with Alex Call, we'd make a pilgrimage to see Lew's stepson play music on Monday nights.

I remember meeting Magda and Honey (Lenny Bruce's ex-stripper wife) in the '70s at The Sleeping Lady Cafe in Fairfax. I may even have a photo buried somewhere. I knew that Huey took Lew's name as his own. But I was not a writer. I had to wait until I was 30 before I began to write. So it comes in transparent dream fragments—shattered, reflected images trapped in pur-blind mirrors.

I can't help but wonder if my grandmother's Irish stories affected Lew, did he remember them? Who was Alice Herlihe? ("Winter") Herlihe is the Irish form of Hurley.

Mt. Tamalpais from Big Rock Ridge, Lucas Valley.

One of my favorite Lew Welch poems is "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings," perhaps because I was conceived on the western slopes of the Sleeping Lady. I imagine my mother looking over my father's shoulder at the jewel, Bolinas Lagoon, sparkling in the distance at sunset, whenever I read this poem.

Mt. Tamalpais from Loma Alta/White's Hill, Fairfax.

THE SONG MT. TAMALPAIS SINGS

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

Human movements,
but for a few,
are Westerly.
Man follows the sun.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

Or follows what he thinks to be the
movement of the Sun.
It is hard to feel it, as a rider,
on a spinning ball.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

Centuries and hordes of us,
from every quarter of the earth,
now piling up,
and each wave going back
to get some more.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

"My face is the map of the Steppes,"
she said, on this mountain, looking West.

My blood set singing by it,
to the old tunes,
Irish, still,
among these Oaks.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

This is why
once again we celebrate
the great Spring Tides

Beaches are strewn again with Jaspar,
Agate, and Jade.
The Mussel-rock stands clear.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

This is why
once again we celebrate the
Headland's huge, cairn-studded, fall
into the Sea.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

For we have walked the jeweled beaches
at the feet of thr final cliffs
of all Man's wanderings.
This is the last place.

There is nowhere else we need to go.

—Lew Welch

Speaking of Lew the Cabbie, I found this poem:

AFTER ANACREON

When I drive cab
I am moved by strange whistles and wear a hat.

When I drive cab
I am the hunter. The prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures.

When I drive cab
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air.

When I drive cab
A revelation of movement comes to me: They wake now.
Now they want to work or look around. Now they want
Drunkenness and heavy food. Now they contrive to love.

When I drive cab
I bring the sailor home from the sea. In the back of
my car he fingers the pelt of his maiden.

When I drive cab
I watch for stragglers in the urban order of things.

When I drive cab
I end the only lit and waitful thing in miles of
darkened houses.

—Lew Welch

In 1971, while staying at Gary Snyder's house on Kitkitdizzie Ridge, Lew Welch walked off into the wilderness carrying his shotgun; his body was never found. So the story goes. Fare meter up. He left a note for Snyder:

"I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make anything out of it — never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor — use MSS at Gary's and at Grove Press. I have $2,000 in Nevada City Bank of America — use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don't owe Allen G. anything yet nor my Mother. I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch."

And at a fateful reading of Gary Snyder's at Olney Hall, College of Marin, CA. 1976, I heard Gary read Lew and Manzanita. He was reading poems about MY watershed, my ridges and groves, that's when I decided to become a writer. I said, "I can do that." Little did I know what I was in for...and some 33 years later, I'm still teaching the children about the life cycles:

FOR/FROM LEW

Lew Welch just turned up one day
live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,
"you didn't shoot yourself after all."
"Yes I did" he said
and even then I felt the tingling
down my back.
"Yes you did, too" I said -- "I can feel it now."
"Yeah" he said,"
"there's a basic fear between your
world and mind.
I don't know why.
What I came to say, was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All the other cycles.
That's what it's all about,
and it's all forgot."

27.IV.76

—Gary Snyder

from An Appreciation of Lew Welch,
edited by S. Fox, Stone Soup.

Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen & Lew Welch

For more Lew stories, check out "Hey Lew." Clew Press, Bolinas, CA,1998.

Audiotape of Lew Welch reading at SF State Poetry Center (via Ron Silliman's Blog).

Tristano & Son (Amie Street)

NB: A double album called "Jazz Memories" came up on Amie Street Music. For pennies a song, I downloaded a veritable candy store of music: 31 tracks from the gods of jazz. And I'm not even a big jazz fan. Celtic music is more my thing. 

 But "Jazz Memories" is an extraordinary compilation from the great jazz masters including jazz divas Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, with jazz legends "Satchmo" Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, to name a few. These are all clean tracks of major hits from major labels—not muddied side B recordings. What's not to like?

(You can go to Amie Street News to read the review in situ. …Alas, Amie Street is no more—bought up by Amazon.)

Seeing the name Lennie Tristano on the track, "Judy" (perhaps named for Lennie's vocalist Judy Niemack?) startled me. My grade school classmate Steve Tristano's mom was named Judy too so the name Tristano took me down memory lane and I found myself enthusiastically recommending it on Amie Street despite the fact that I know nothing about jazz—which landed me a guest blog spot on Amie Street! I'm pretty jazzed by the whole thing. (Pardon the pun on oh so many levels!)

---------------------------------------------

Back to the Tristano memory lane: since my grade school classmate Adair Daley (Adair Lara) is off somewhere writing about her childhood days growing up in Lagunitas, and it looks like I'll have to wait for the next high school reunion in 2010 to see her as her SF Chronicle email bounces—by then, I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, that even more of our gray cells will be severely challenged—I thought I'd better contribute a few Lagunitas memories of my own to the great sphere of blogdada art now while I can still remember most of it.

Steve, b. in 1952, died Nov. 21, 2015

In the late '50s, I went to Lagunitas School in the San Geronimo Valley out in the wilds of West Marin in Northern California with many interesting, if not downirght quirky characters—including Lennie Tristano's son, Steve.

During recess, after a jazz assembly performance by stride pianist Ralph Sutton (Pete's dad), we found ourselves alone in the classroom, and Steve went over to the piano to strut his stuff.

We weren't allowed to touch the old carved oak upright so this was pretty big deal. Steve opened the lid (we gasped at his audacity) and then he gave it an experimental trill. Soon Steve was honkeytonking tunes on that piano for us like "Tea for Two" and Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," and he played the rockingist "Boogie Woogie" you ever heard.

Letter to Herb Gold

Herb Gold, c/o Letters to the Editor

Image Magazine

110 Fifth St.

San Francisco, CA 94103

It was interesting to read your reminiscences of the other Sausalito; I found myself looking for the other story, the characters and places I remember as a child: The No Name habitué, Lew Welch, and bartender/novelist Don Meredith. The Gate Theatre (my mother was an actress, costume/set designer); where I first met Sterling Hayden—one of my favorite babysitters. I liked Tommy Smothers better because he was so goofy.

At The Gate Playhouse Theatre, I sat through countless performances of Pipe Dream, Of Thee I Sing. My mother was the wicked witch in the Hansel and Gretel matinee. After the performance, we birthday kids were nervously lined up on stage, the audience singing Happy Birthday to You as the cake was carried out by my mother—while still in costume. When she hugged me, there was pandemonium; all the other kids ran off the stage crying and screaming.

No story about Sausalito is complete without some mention of Juanita Musson, the legendary restaurateur who, to my horror, kept a fawn in the back of her white Ford Falcon station wagon. Meals at Juanita’s (the Bridgeway parking lot on weekends) were always a surprise. Juanita’s wrath was legendary; customers quickly learned to shut up and eat, even if what they got wasn’t what they ordered.

Instead of pancakes, Juanita brought me runny eggs and rice. I was crushed, my mother (the waitress) signaling, Let it go. . . When I burst into tears, Juanita exploded, Fer Chrissakes! her cursing louder than her parrot or her muu-muu. The more experienced patrons instinctively ducked as she charged back to the kitchen. Juanita pysically endorsed the clean plate club; for my crocodile tears, I got a lovely stack of pancakes the size of dinner plates, and as tall as Everest, my work clearly cut out for me. . .

Juanita’s apartment above Bridgeway was a realm of filtered pink light, with beaded curtains, gizmos in every available space—and the menagerie—a monkey who might pinch, pee on us (or worse, fling shit), if we didn’t feed him the grapes Juanita handed us. At least one big rooster strutted his stuff in the living room.

At the Village Faire, and the Trade Fair, a converted ferry boat, we were regular little filching Olivers with our five-gallon wide-mouthed black naugahyde purses. We’d sit on the retaining wall outside the Village Faire, pool our money for fish and chips, and compare the day’s catch: wooden mice and cheap silver Navajo rings that we later mailed off to Micaela’s parents’ puzzled friends and relations.

My friend’s father, Patrick Wall, was a retired art dealer from Carmel, and his wife Betty, a potter, so we ran wild through many an artist’s party including one on Varda’s ferry boat. The Charles Van Damme was so rakishly angled that Varda had to nail his cobalt and vermilion montages to the walls. Caught stealing food in the kitchen, and compounded by a case of mistaken identity—as some guest’s brats—we were sent upstairs to the captain’s deck, prisoners with nothing to do but watch the Spreckles House slowly sink further into the mud.

When we were 86ed from another party, we balanced on the thin warped boards that threatened to toss us into the raw sewage as we peered in the portholes of Piro and Alice’s houseboat at Gate Five. Piro Wolfe, who founded the successful Anchor Steam Beer Company, once made legendary history when he and Alice, dressed to the nines, took a dingy to the opera—neglecting to check the tides—only to arriving hours after the opera was over.

The first major influx of tourists came hard on the heels of the flower children. Comedian Robin Williams (with whom I went to school) was right to repeat the Marin adage early and often: If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t really there. I will forgive you for bungling a few facts. We’ve all had to reconstruct our past from the literary fragments that followed. We had no idea we were living through a significant era until after it was over and done with, dead and anthologized, taken from us by the coffin of time and by the tide of eager hordes that followed.

Maureen Hurley

Preparing for the Summer Solstice

Father’s Day and Verona's birthday, the actress as Lady MacBeth, cannot distinguish between stagelight and perfumed sky; she weeps for the death of her 60 years. The day burns lust-red. We raise champagne glasses and read poetry to the sky. The guest proves this on film for posterity.

A young Peruvian offers an armload of long-stemmed red roses to the actress. I pin a rose to his lapel and come to understand that brief moment of bronzed youth is disguised as a name. We compare ages. Sing the old songs to keep from falling off the earth, recreating the words that dreamed us into being. Verona blows out the candles. We run naked into the sea at sunset.

Floating in the chill depths below the Mesa, we look back at the North American plate. Mt. Tamalpais, place of my conception. Nothing came between my mother and father: this is why I exist. The moon slides over the water. Bioluminescence scribes itself upon the waves. Our tongues answer the ocean.

The suicides of Bolinas: literary invention proscribing reality. A woman boasts she was the last one to speak to Brautigan. I think of Lew going off into the forest. No heroes, words failed them. Sick to death of the intertextual “I”, I vowed not to write about love, and so, became mute; but the poetic Left has sacrificed the author. We need a new altar for the new millennium.

Afraid of the nunneries, I was a deliberately bad child. I collected an insurance of venial sins—white lies—to keep back that abiding fear of God’s prison gate. I thought “zounds” came from the slurring of “God’s wounds.” As did “swoon.” Wounded, we’ve lost the group art of oral tradition. Blame St. Augustine, the first man to read without moving his lips.

The slow sibilance of speech went underground, the death of the spoken word. The monastery scriptoriums fell silent. The esophagus interred in the sarcophagus; subterranean words devoured the silvered sleep of bones. My father died silent in winter, alone on his birthday. A stranger by choice, his heart failed him. Word of his death restores something of my father to me.

We bring in summer, talk about ancestors. The names we carry into the future. Pegasus wheels across the sky. Orion no longer hunts. The Bear dances. A name spoken, a gift crusades into the west. I want a dragon constellation for the dragonslayer. A name place where eagles come to land. Like a cloistered lady-in-waiting, I swoon from the scent of kisses. Orpheus’s tongue in our ears. Other than ourselves, we have little to offer; no talismans or silk scarves. The enduring song of the storm approaches.

At the end of the millennium, protocol demands we exchange sexual pedigrees. The dread acronym: subtext and context. I weep for the extinction of spontaneity. Dress code: who’s got the raincoat? No longer embarrassed, I come prepared for any storm, though months may pass without sign of precipitation. Except it could be any century.

Wounded, we heal a little of ourselves on this raft, ride the transitory night to completion. We don’t take issue with futures, take no prisoners. Only small translucent sacks flung in the midden heap for some future archaeologist to contemplate. Donning my habit, I celebrate the longest day, my vows clearly written—protean words spilling onto the page.


1999, revised 2000

Ascending the Muse of Mt. Tam 4/10/93

ARTISTS UNDER THE INFLUENCE

by Maureen Hurley

Basements are either the penultimate scrounger’s paradise—or the déjà vu epicenter of nightmares—things juxtaposed in every corner. In the lower depths of the Sonoma County Museum one rainy afternoon, the source of my muse (and, my beginning) was waiting for light.

We skirted the gold velvet casting couch guarded by an army of ghostly headless mannequins—one sprouting hairy vaquero’s chaps and another sporting my purple jacket; we waded through narrow labyrinths to reach the object of our desire: the preview of an upcoming art exhibit of Mt. Tamalpais. After viewing racks of paintings, I was struck by the sheer volume of art the legendary peak has inspired in artists and writers over the years.

Mount Tamalpais: An Artistic Interpretation , Sonoma County Museum’s second major Landmark exhibition, opens April 16 and runs through August 8. The mono-thematic exhibit primarily focuses upon the Hudson River style ofnature painting popular in the 1850’s. This premier show is the result of over a year’s worth of negotiation with public and private collectors across the US, and it’s a first for so many paintings of Mt. Tam, to be been displayed under one roof.

Almost every major California artist has painted the mountain. According to curator J. Eric Nelson, “this is an important exhibit of historically significant paintings and literary interpretations.” He views historical art as an integral part of history—necessary to interpret the past.

Marine painter William A. Coulter’s “Mount Tamalpais from the Mouth of the Petaluma River” and “The Genivieve,” a sailboat under full sail, accurately depict turn-of-the-century life of a bygone era on the water-roads, as does Charles Marple’s “Mount Tamalpais from the Napa Slough.”

Though the most recent canvas in the exhibition of oils, watercolors and pastels from 1850 to 1930, is over 60 years old, within this 80-odd year period, most of the major modern schools of painting evolved—from the French Barbizon School to the flat planes of fauvism and sculptural social realism so prevalent in WPA murals of the ’30s. Add Impressionism sandwiched between the American Lumenist- and the Hudson River schools for an aesthetically intriguing collection of paintings.

Several of the represented artists studied in Europe, and were influenced by the plein air outdoor painters of the Barbizon School (which evolved in reaction to studio-painted classical themes favored by the Academy). There are paintings in the style of Papa Corot, replete with cows, to keep the traditional realist happy down on the farm.

Based upon an awareness of structure, and solid forms, Hudson River style paintings depicted majestic nature themes as an expression of the sublime mystery; distilled movements of the elements—light and water—as a metaphor for the religious experience—studies of theosophy and light.

Mt. Tam grows taller, becomes more rugged. . . It’s said that landscape painters enter a sacred inner realm—a place no one else sees. But not all that meets the eye is pastoral. Ironically, while the painter was recording these timeless primordial visions, the exploitation and collapse of the natural world—mining, logging, siltation, overgrazing and the extinction of native species—was in full swing.

Theodore Wores turn-of-the-century painting, “Mount Tamalpais from Corte Madera Creek” is a pleasing blend of styles—reminiscent of the sculptural and flat planes of the Munich School—with impressionistic energy and sensibilities, as is S. C. Gile’s “Mount Tam from Belvedere Lagoon.” An early California painter, Gile was a member of the “Society of 6” along with Percy Gray.

As we unwrapped these paintings, I kept thinking of WPA projects—especially the Coit Tower frescoes. I am drawn to the solid pieces—Fauvism? perhaps best exemplified by Xavier Martinez’s canvas with its blue shard of sky poking the horizon. Sidney T. Daken (“Mount Tamalpais, Early Evening”) was a fresco painter in San Francisco. After the 1906 quake, he moved to Santa Rosa and opened an art school, and Edwin C. Siegfried (“Mount Tamalpais and Sausalito”) was a WPA artist.

Another important aspect of the exhibit is the emphasis on the rich literary tradition that arose a century-and-a-half ago, that continues to flourish. San Francisco’s Golden Age in the ’30s owes much to the influence of the Muse.

The exhibit includes a collection of early books and poetry as well as memorabilia from various hiking clubs. Avid hikers and readers, my grandparents were on intimate terms with the mountain and her lore.

V.S. Naipaul states “No city or landscape is truly rich unless it has been given the quality of myth by the writer, painter or association with great events.” Mt. Tam, The Sleeping Lady, the Indian Princess, a.k.a. The Magic Mountain, the North Bay and Marin County’s most visible landmark, is associated with great events (from the oldest west coast cross-country race from hell, the Dipsea Race, to myriad groundbreaking rock concerts—with debuts by the Doors, Steppenwolf, Maria Muldour), and has served as resident muse for countless artists of all disciplines.

Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, may have been responsible for Mount Tam’s tune-in, turn-on & drop-out nickname popular in the 1960s. The Spanish couldn’t agree upon a single name, and gave it several: La Sierra de Nuestra Padre de San Francisco (The Mountain Range of our Father, St. Francis); Pico y Cerro de Reyes (Peak and Hill of Kings); Picacho Prieto (Sharp Dark Peak).

British explorers monikered it the “Table Hill of Beechey,” the French christened it “Mont de La Table,” one homesick Mexican alcalde called it “Palma,” and the Italians dubbed it “Palermo Mountain.”

General Vallejo used the Miwok tribal name, and their name for the mountain: Temal-pa. In the days of yore, spelling was at best, a creative act; the Spanish corruption of Temal-pa resulted in a dozen different spellings and theories—i.e., the name came from the Mexican state of Tamalipas.

Searching for Indo-European linguistic roots, my grandmother transliterated it as the land of the Tamals (of India), grumbled, “Maybe they got Columbus all wrong.” Most likely the name Tamalpais is of Coast Miwok origin: tamal for bay/bay-country or west and pa-is for hill or mountain (depending upon which linguist you read).

Contrary to how she may look, Mt. Tam is not a volcano; the crown jewel rising from the world’s most beautiful bay is metamorphic. At 2,560 ft., Mt. Tam (the West Peak was 2,604 ft. until the military shaved it), Marin’s tallest, is one of three prominent Bay Area peaks (4,344 ft. Mt. St. Helena and 3,849 ft. Mt. Diablo are taller). She has been compared to Japan’s sacred volcano—bestowed with the honorific title of the Mt. Fuji of the West by the Japanese.

And she has real treasures: East Peak’s rare metamorphic dark quartz-tourmaline (normally found in igneous rock), is a geologic enigma not listed in field guides. We used to find other treasure—tiny opals and garnets at the pale green serpentine and blueschist outcroppings where ancient stands of pygmy Sargent cypress, with trunks the size of broomhandles, compressed time. And there are even rarer endemic plants. . .

Like Mt. Fuji, Mt. Tam has spurred generations toward great passion since the idea of speech was first whispered into the ear of the air. The Coast Miwoks of Southern Sonoma and Marin Counties called her the mythic turtle the island of the earth rests upon—Turtle Island—and when she moves, the earth trembles.

There’s another creation story of two struggling giants (Mts. Tam and Diablo)—their fighting divided the earth—the bay came to be, and their severed limbs formed the long coastal ridges.

The romantic stories of Temelpa, the beautiful Indian maiden for whom many a brave warrior had fallen, is Anglo—with roots in the tales of Brothers Grimm. Some say Temelpa was troubled by all the fighting, and died of sorrow, or, to stop the warring, sacrificed herself/or was martyred to save the village. Her lover carried her to the top of the mountain and died next to her. The gods took pity and turned her into a mountain; the foothill by her side (Mill Valley) is the Fallen Warrior.

Others say she is merely sleeping, waiting for the bridegroom sky to wake her with a kiss.

Seeking the source of the Muse, California’s first official Poet Laureate (1915), Ina Coolbrith was said to have written The Ivory Tower one summer atop Mt. Tam’s East peak. Also under the influence were Ambrose Bierce, Kathleen Norris, Juaquin Miller, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who said of Tam’s charms, “I never had a more glorious experience,” (elementary, my dear Watson!).

Donn Totheroh’s pageant of the Indian princess, Tamalpa, staged at the Mountain Theater in 1921, became the official Mountain play. (In 1966, we too were under the influence—stoned and listening to rock & roll music in the Greek-style Mountain Amphitheater. . .)

In the ’30s and ’40s, poet/journalist Kenneth Rexroth, and later, The Beats readily succumbed to the Muse and got immortalized in the process: the character Japhy Ryder (poet Gary Snyder) in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, said that Tam is as beautiful a mountain as anywhere in the world.

Poet/Zen master Philip Whalen wrote extensively of (and on) Mt. Tam as did Lew Welch (Huey Lewis’s step-father): Praise is Tamalpais/perfect in wisdom and beauty/she of the wheeling birds. And in Lew’s much-anthologized “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings,” he wrote:

Centuries and hordes of us,
from every quarter of the earth,
now piling up,
and each wave going back
to get some more.

This is the last place.
There is nowhere else left to go.

For we have walked the jeweled beaches
at the foot of the final cliffs
of all Man’s wanderings.

This is the last place.
There is nowhere else we need to go.

The mountain served as a place where all manner of rites of passage, from conception to death, took place. Rexroth wrote of his dead wife Andree: “These are the forest trails we walked together,/. . . your ashes scattered on this mountain/ moving seaward on this stream.”

I have a particular attachment to the mountain. My grandparents spent weekends courting, and hiking on the slopes of Mt. Tam. And, according to my mother, I was conceived on the mountain as well. I speculate: if my mother hadn’t been so deeply moved by the sunset at summer solstice, would I even exist?

In “Journey to Mt. Tamalpais” Sausalito poet and friend, Etel Adnan writes: “When you realize you are mortal, you also realize the tremendous sense of the future. You fall in love with a time you never perceive.”



The Western Sonoma County Paper April, 10, 1993

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