STROMATOLITES, BAHÍA CONCEPCIÓN

One Easter during the late 1980s, I was standing on a boulder, 

on Playa Santispac, overlooking the Sea of Cortez, 

when I realized the rock I was standing on, was strange,

then, that sudden flash of insight, it was no boulder, 

but a stromatolite colony—a city of bluegreen algae, 

the first I Am the earth uttered. Words failed me, 

I yelled a primal scream, startling campers and shore birds.

The colony was surrounded by strange commas in the sand, 

small carcasses of dried baby hammerhead sharks, 

the size of pencils, as if trying to swim away.

3/18/23

HEADED FOR CHIAPAS

We rode the overnight bus cross-country, 

snaking our way from the coast up dirt roads, 

13 hours of hairpin bends threaded

up steep mountain passes like a tapestry.

You can only hold your breath for so long.

Near the Chiapas border we stopped at a pullout

to stretch our legs, while waiting for the engine to cool, 

clouds of fireflies circled us. We were so high up,

I mistook them for the stars overhead.

7/27/22 rev. 2/18

Laguna Salada and the Salton Sea

Before I was aware of its ephemeralness, one moonlit night, I swam in the Laguna Salada ca. 1985, and wondered why the boatdocks were so far from shore. And why there were barnacles growing on what looked like dead oak trees, still standing in the middle of the lake? 

An anomaly I couldn’t even begin to fathom. I mean, barnacles perched like birds in the trees? What kind of siren song were they singing anyway? This was all before there was internet. Shocking, I know. I surmised, that means at one point the Sea of Cortez came moseying in for a visit. What’s even more shocking is that by 1990 the Laguna Salada was almost completely evaporated. And yes, it was very salty.

We had no idea that the Salton Sea was dying, nor of its sister sea. It was like landing in the middle of an apocalyptic dream. One Easter vacation we drove down from Berkeley enroute to Baja, Mexico thinking we could get a motel at the Salton Sea. I always wanted to go there. It was late when we arrived at Bombay Beach, everything was closed. As in permanently closed. 

We eventually found a dirty cockroach-infested motel, we had to hop the fence to get into the swimming pool, swimming under full moonlight in the hot desert night was brilliant. But the morning light brought a shocker when we saw where we were. It looked like bombs were dropped on the buildings. 

What kind of hellhole did we land in? We could’ve used a Piña Colada with tequila shot chasers for breakfast. Originally we were planning to have breakfast somewhere, but we couldn’t get out of Dodge fast enough. By comparison, Laguna Salada was like paradise. We camped along its shores and swam by moonlight as if in a dream, but this was a freaking apocalyptic nightmare on steroids.

Did that huge 1892 7.2 earthquake have something to do with shifting the mouth of the Colorado River, and opening the rift to the Sea of Cortez? The presence of barnacles in Laguna Salada certainly suggests something like it. I’m fairly certain those barnacles didn’t spontaneously fly in on little bird feet, cute as their feathered toes are. (There is also evidence of marine intrusion during the Pliocene era.)

So hard to find solid info. Maybe they came in by boats. If there was a boatdock, there would’ve been pangas. And there are also barnacles in the Salton Sea. (Turns out the military was using the Salton Sea for target practice, and the barnacles came via the seaplanes.)

One study I found suggests the barnacles arrived in the 1980s. Well, the question begs, how could barnacles grow that big in such a short time? I was there in the mid-1980s, and they were already well colonized. Also they were stranded well above waterline. By then, the lake had dropped by at least 15 feet, if not more. I postulate this assumption that barnacles arrived in the 1980s is dead-wrong.

OK this gets weirder yet: since I got nowhere on Laguna Salada, I googled barnacles, Salton Sea. I found this “The barnacles arrived as stowaways in boats and seaplane ballast tanks, back when war came to the desert. B-29s dropped dummy bombs, full of concrete and a belief in the greater good, aimed for a white dot in a sea of blue. They dropped a Little Boy dummy and practiced fleeing the consequences.”

Balanus amphitrite
Balanus amphitrite saltonensis.

https://invasions.si.edu/nemesis/species_summary/89616

Introduction of barnacles to the inland Salton Sea in the 1940s probably resulted from non-native amphitrite barnacles attached to navy planes, boats, buoys or other equipment transferred from San Diego Bay for training purposes (Carlton 1979). That explains the barnacles in the Salton Sea, but it does not explain them in Laguna Salada, as we would not have been using Mexican territory for military target practice. That would’ve been tantamount to declaring war on Mexico.

It’s good to have a mystery somewhat cleared up after so many years. Also, contrary to popular belief, the ephemeral Salton Sea has spontaneously filled and evaporated many times since the last prehistoric massive freshwater Lake Cahuilla disappeared sometime during the 1730s. It wasn’t just a one-off man-made fluke that was the results from a busted dike. The sinkhole basin has been an alternate route for the Colorado River for ages. Maybe someday soon it will return again if we ever get out of this drought mode.

The Salton Sea & Laguna Salada basins (bottom) from an altitude of about 62 miles.

This blogpost was from a Facebook post. John Aubert, Thank you for your post inadvertently bringing me back to an ephemeral moment in time where it was pure magic. Above and bottom graphic from California Geology Forum, thanks to William A. Bowman and Keith Ensminger.

Baja Journal from the air: Lagunas Hanson, Salada, & the Salton Sea

Laguna Salada 1984-2016 Laloxtreet, YouTube

Lake Cahuilla 1731–1733 (Lake A); 1618–1636 (Lake B); 1486–1503 (Lake C); 1118–1165 or 1192–1241 (Lake D); 1007–1070 (Lake E); 930–966 (Lake F); and 612–5 BCE (Lake G)  Science Direct.

Porque Anadrio!

I am re-reading Otto-Raúl González'
Diez Colores Nuevos en Españo, aloud, badly.
Porque Anadrio es el color allegria!

Re-reading old journal entries from 1985, I was surprised to discover that John told me about Otto-Raúl's poem, Anadrio, when we first hooked up. No wonder I've been fulminating over that poem lately.

Funny, how the mind works circuitously, and circles back to settle like an old dog in front of the hearth. I guess I am seeking joy in a time of sorrow.

After I had helped John's daughter Kia scan photos last Thursday for the memorial, she was browsing John's bookshelf, and out of the blue, handed me the book. Of all the books on John's bookshelf, why that one, the one I wanted? Surely it was fate.

Looking up into that exact blueness of sky, I say, I begin to understand the how the theory of time and space continuum began. You say the word, Anadrio, an invented name for a new color for joy. You tell me of a Mexican poet, Otto-Raúl González, who invented ten new colors, and you said Anadrio is the color of joy and of good luck. —from Long Distance Relationship, 1985

see also Mexico Journal: getting our Guatemalan visas

It took several years for De Diez Colores Nuevos to be published (1993), and John was beginning to translate them in 1985.

Anadrio

Quien primero vio una nube de color anadrio
era un joven pastor de diecisiete abriles
que más tarde fue monarca de su reino
y hombre feliz hasta decir ya no,
porque el anadrio es el color de la alegría
y de la buena suerte.

¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!

En mil quinientos veinte
un español porquerizo de Castilla
vino a América y cuando se internó en la selva
vio un árbol de color anadrio
ese mismo soldado de fortuna
más tarde comió con Carlos V
y fue virrey;
porque el anadrio es el color de la alegría
y de la buena suerte.

¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!

En la época moderna otras personas
han visto objetos de color anadrio
y su suerte ha cambiado en forma radical.

Un pescador vio una sirena cuya cola
era anadria y desde entonces
pescó y pescó y pescó y pescó y ahora
es dueño de una flota ballenera;
porque el anadrio es el color de la alegría
y de la buena suerte.

¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!

Vendía periódicos un niño,
rapaz sin desayuno, de pobreza trajeado,
un día en su camino vio una piedra
que era, por supuesto, de color anadrio.
Ese niño actualmente es accionista
de una inmensa cadena de periódicos;
porque el anadrio es el color de la alegría
y de la buena suerte.

Pinte usted
las paredes de su casa
de color anadrio
y le irá bien.

(Otto-Raúl González, De Diez colores nuevos, Editorial Praxis, 1993)

Camping in Baja

One time we were camping in an old abandoned mission in Baja Norte, in the Sierra San Pedro mountain range, and in the morning, I awoke to find the canyon wall glowing in the early morning sun—filled with petroglyphs, and padres' marks—curly Spanish crosses from the 1760s. We arrived at dusk the night before, set up camp in the dark, and hadn't seen the ancient graffiti. Astounded, I gathered the top of the air bed to my body in a big hug, to revel in the sight, only to discover the small rounded rocks beneath my arms began to move on their own: a family of scorpions, seeking warmth, had moved in beneath the air mattress during the night. I believe some rather primitive an ancient form of screaming and dancing ensued on my part. John, who was still asleep, leapt up in a warrior stance to meet the enemy at his feet.

Wrong passport at the US-Mexicali border

I am cranky and cold back home in Alta California after a tedious 13-hour drive north (and I very nearly wasn’t able to cross the border to get back into the United States because I grabbed an expired passport. A part of me was hoping I’d be turned away at the US-Mexicali border because I just want to return to Baja pronto! Was it appropriate to see the huge Mexicali iron fence on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, or what? Maybe someday we can tear this wall down too.

Surprisingly, the border patrol accepted my expired passport that I had written void across the front pages with a big sharpie marker. He explained to me that even a voided passport was valid, because there was no way I could get it unless I was a US citizen. The last time I was in Mexico was with John Oliver Simon in 1987. A lot has changed. San Felipe is unrecognizable. My aunt owned a barren lot there for decades. She won it in a card or bingo game. Wish we had it now.

Paul Hardstone‘s wife owned a place in a fancy development in San Felipe, that she needed to check up on, so it was a mad weekend dash all the way from Oakland. We were there for the jumbo prawn festival. Everywhere people were selling barbecued prawns the size of sausages, and I couldn’t even eat one of them because I had developed an allergy to shellfish.

And when I don’t know which way to go, I flip a coin, freewrite (photo)

Yes, it’s come to this, flip a coin when stasis sets in. John the Ambiguous was always a great one for a coin toss. Have a kid, get married, whatever impasse flummoxed him was reduced to a 50-50 chance. 

A good thing that coins aren’t built like dice to increase the odds. Otherwise, we’d be all day setting up the parameters and permutations for radical changes in life. Or not. So once we were at Casa Bombeck in Chiapas, he flipped a coin either we go to the Lacondon, jungle, or, the Mayen village of Chamula. We chose our coins carefully. The Quetzalcoatl head came up on the antique five peso coin. Feathered serpent grinning at our feet. 

And so we rode green horses into the jungle, to the village in deep in the San Cristobál Mountains where gringos were still an anomaly. When I showed him the coin, the old man at the Mayan church took a shine to me, it must’ve been the aguardiente he was sipping—for strictly religious purposes. 

He gave us a personal tour of the church, which was once Catholic and the floor was strewn with pine needles. Their sweet smell unreproducible with chemical scent, the rafters draped with bolts of calico cloth, and all around the walls was an army of obscure saints all wearing smoking mirrors on their chest so that a worshiper saw themselves in the saint’s image. Self affirming. I recognized a few of the saints, but saw my face blazing on the pectoral mirror of each one.

The old man set up a small portable altar on a shoe shine box with Coca-Cola, copal and aguardiente. I put the Quetzalcoatl coin on the altar and he was pleased. We had somehow broken through the culture and language barrier. By that action, none of us having any language in common, other than the language of the oppression between us. All of this came down to a toss of the coin. The ringing sound of destiny on the floor. We never know what the wish was, or what it offered up.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

Stage notes for LA LLORONA, a performance I did for Oakland Readers Family Night

LA LLORONA                                                                                   

Welcome/bienvenudos. Me llamo Maureen, o Marina o Maria pequeña.  

BEGIN with HOOK: This is a tale, a very old tale...about a girl, a beautiful girl, who...

Sientate mis hijos. Come closer. Donde esta mis hijos? Closer so that I may see you. Venga aca! Sientate.

This evening we are going to visit Mictlan/ the Otherworld para Todos Santos. Cuantos personas comprenden Engleis? How many people understand Spanish? Bilingual? 

Bueno, yo hablo solemente en Russo. (To make them laugh).

I’m going to tell you a real Californio ghost story. 

This evening we are going to invoke el duende/the goblin wind with a story that’s at least 500 years old. Cantadora, cuentista, curandera, seanachie...huehuetatlolli (words of the elders), tlapuetzali (story) historia para todos santos. a real temblón, a shiver story.

Listen well to all the parts because after, we’re going to act out the play for the audience. Insert historical info about halloween/Aztecs /oral tradition whenever possible.

XIBALBA

XIBALBA

In Teotihuacán, the place where men become gods,

under the place of fear, under the Fifth Sun,

the scorpions at the base of the world tree are asleep.

In Xibalba, the place of ancestors, the underworld is dark.

The eliptic band of constellations that marks

the daily path of the sun across the night sky

is searching for the beginning of dreams.

From dreams comes information: the time to plant,

the weavings, the time to sacrifice.

It is said nourishing the gods nourishes the people.

Where is the king whose sexual blood was spilled

         onto the codex for the good of the people?

Whose bloodsmoke rose to open the door to the sky?

When a woman puts on her huipil

it is said her head emerges at the center of the world.

A door designed by dreams weaves

patterns from the beginning of the world.

I dream of scorpions stinging me again and again.

Under the Fifth Sun, under the place of fear,

six-legged gods were born from smoke

                                                of inquisition.

Nourishing only the sterility of yourself,

in a tragic falling off from myth and history,

                                    like a despotic Aztec rey,

you lanced yourself with thorns,

spilled only ink on parchment, not royal blood.

It combusts in the darkness of desk drawers.

No holy smoke for the gods of the sky.

In a door designed by dreams

my head emerged in the center of the world

to where I no longer feared you.

You no longer wounded me,

my conquistador

mi amor. . .

4/94

LA MALINCHE

LA MALINCHE

If poetry is the flowered word

and Mexico City is the moon’s navel,

and Huitzilipochtli, the God of War,

killed his 400 brothers and sisters, the stars,

and Quetzalcoatl—after having seen

his face in the smoking mirror—

made love to his sister, then walked off,

only to return under the Fifth Sun,

in the Year of the Reed—

did he return as Cortés

to make love to la Malinche?

(Marina of the sea was baptized like me.

Mi lingua, la Llorona, my sister, my voice;

who spoke in tongues, was betrayed by her body,

blue-eyed mestizos fell from her like stars

to populate the cities of the sky.)

La Malinche, the traitor, she was called,

(as Spain deliberated—did the Indios have souls?)

Our feet climb temple steps

to the sacked pyramids crowned

with a thin veneer of churches—

coffins for the war of the souls that followed.

(The Indios came bearing gifts of jade and gold

to the returnéd god, Quetzalcoatl.)

Lost in the streets of Mérida,

I gave away the clothing of your promises.

In the smoking mirror made from a fallen star,

I saw the clouded reflection—two sets of eyes—

not knowing I too, was La Malinche.

The unborn eyes of a child

in the mirror you held to my face.

Hummingbird hearts beating

at the War of the Flowers.

Quetzalcoatl, the god of Time,

lost the stamens and pistols of words

when he bared his heart to obsidioan knives

at the altars of Xochimílco.

In the Year of the Reed, an eclipsed sun

hid in the cities of the moon.

Only the roots of the ceiba tree

hold up the walls of Cortés’ house.

No monument in stone,

no flowered words buried

in the underbelly of the continent

awaiting a rediscovery.

Only the pale afterbirth of the moon

to survive us.

9/6/93

On the Gringo Trail, The Paper, May 10, 1990

CONDEMNED FLESH

CONDEMNED FLESH

Below the mission outpost of civilization,

three cultures clash with time:

tarpon roll in the Múlege River,

holding midnight's secret under their skins.

Desert palms clatter, venetian blinds in a storm.

Copper women walk barefoot & wash laundry by hand.

We live in a hostal with feeble electricity,

by the prison walls, satellite disks track quasars.

You are my companera of the mythical journey,

my lover whispers, buying me with turquoise.

We don't look too far beyond condemned flesh

and eat only what is offered—sea turtle steak

under the bouganvilla arbor of El Candil—

rationalizing: the turtle's already dead anyway.

A tide of carmine blossoms eddies at our feet.

Even from the beginning, we were planning

the extinction of love, silent tapers in the church;

the turtle's plight beyond salvation.

11/11/89, Mulegé, Baja

HUNTER'S MOON

HUNTER'S MOON

How many men have sworn undying love
under the last full moon of summer,
bartering for it like blankets in native markets
of the Andes, Oaxaca, orTikal? In Iqiutos,
where the Spaniards sailed upriver looking for El Dorado,
and dolphins are thought to be half-human,
men still rub dolphin oil on their pricks,
calling them bufeos, then fuck them for good luck.
The canoejueras, plying their profession from bank to bank,
who harvest gold with their porpoise mouths,
suck and lick the river with such skill, it is said
they can make even the dead come in the rocking boats.
A woman walked along the banks of the Amazon—
where truth becomes a seductive blur—
miscarried a small dolphin,
and they burned the poor creature
who flew up into blue smoke.

I believe in anniversaries.
If you want to talk, go back to that night
when the stars wavered under a moon so full,
there weren't enough arms to hold it,
and undo those promises made on the road to Oaxaca—
because something in my reptilian brain
still waits for you under the marriage blanket.
But an unseasonable seed sprouted
in my garden, and so, you wanted my death
in the Temple of the Jaguar at dawn.
I should have known darkness devoured each shadow
our feet planted and we never escaped the jungle.

The cats are fighting tooth and claw again.
At least each knows the other, and in this knowing,
the separate sheets of memory are shrouds
for the eventual death of stars and angels.
Something of the past resurrects in telephone lines,
satellites orbit loneliness and other notions of guilt.
After your call, the house rustles, things fall from shelves,
I think rats & opossumsóno, the earth is trembling again
and I blame it on my wildly beating heart.
Inconsolate weeping has little to do with why we failed.
And so, we wear this badge, our voices prayerwheels
carved from heartwood of felled ceiba trees.
Mending broken shards to tell the future by
is almost like reconstructing the past to fit our needs.
The cat does his laundry with his tongue.
Southern birds rub wings with a milder winter.
If you go south long enough, it becomes north.
One can argue almost anything but I'm tired & want to sleep.
This poetry which preserves us
is our final inheritor,
our final judgement.

11/5/1989

TALKING LEAVES

TALKING LEAVES
        Trabaja el mar en mi silencio.
             —Pablo Neruda

We watch the sky for clues.
Birds proclaim unchartered territories.
A certain slant of sunlight grows wings.
Keepers of the circle, we sit on a blanket,
listen to translations of wind in the sycamores;
palisades     summer grass      cicada song
and pass the drum. Someone hands me a piece of paper.
The source of my freedom is what I fear most.
Bluejays argue, scissor-sharp, which direction to fly.
Words fall from the mouths of bees,
deer hooves rattle—first breath or final inspiration?
It no longer matters what we believe in. It happens anyway.
Watermelon rind on the blanket—not the marriage blanket
where he undid me with promises under the stars of Chiapas
only to bury a child's eyes beneath the stones of Tikal.
From inside the drum of my heart I howled
under the solstice moon rising over Mt. St. Helena
and from deep canyons coyotes answered. What more do I want?
I wear trophies of where we've been:
Baja, Peru, the Galapagos. An equator of pain visible
to the naked eye takes on the green form of air above the pond.
I struggle for balance, drawn to obsession like fire to air,
and learn first-hand the meaning of words: betrayal, abandonment, she.
She stalks up the path; a pathetic fish skewered to her stick.
Taking my man wasn't enough, she had to kill the sunfish too;
not to eat it but to prove some senseless notion to herself—
because it was alive, an irridescent trophy. A bauble.
Its carnal colors bleed into the sky; drab corpse forgotten.
He will comfort her, call her a brave hunter.
They will build shining deceptions; whatever it takes.
Mirate, I hiss at her. Look at yourself.
The cardinal rule of the hunter: eat what you kill.
He devoured me clean down to gleaming bone.
The poets cloak me with feathers and shake the gourd;
they say the Tarot gave her Death mounted on a white horse.
I dream the medicine man uncovers a word on the photo—
heiau, and he asks me for silver coins to bury it with.
For the grandfathers, for your vision, he says.
On a yarrow stick, an "i," the letter of death
becomes a plumed serpent, Quetzocoatl.
He smudges me with wild tobacco smoke and sage,
kisses me, says, you will find what you seek.
I remember how it felt on the outside:
this circle becomes a source of acceptance.
I am the drum, I learn the drumsong.
We are standing on ceremonial ground.
A wobbly prayer lifts up, takes flight
across the valley. Heiau he way,
he noni noni ne he, heiau he way.
Oh!

9/18/89

ABORTED WORDS

ABORTED WORDS

In the Chiapas dust I have found stone

And from beneath the moon's gibbous face; bone.

Owl's feathers candle the sky into flight,

And the lactating stars witnessed that night,

A marriage blanket. We built a landscape,

Imagined futures to harvest and rape,

Though dew on the grass is primordial,

And memory transmuted into glass, real

As blood—the things said that cannot be undone.

And love we have killed before its begun,

Comes back to haunt us in our dreams, like birds

To ply the Icarus inside us with words.

In dust I've found the ancestor of stone.

It is this life we choose to live alone. 

2/27/1989 

EL SOL

EL SOL
             —for Jorge Luján upon the birth of his son

With his birth, Uriel divides the year in half
because he unites two continents and cultures,
his father says. Jorge writes of his new sun,
making apologies for his poor English.
His words glow with such paternal pride,
there is no mistake of grammar.
He asks if I'll write a poem for Uriel.
And to the unasked question–
No, my life didn't end when I gave back the sun.
The magician's fruit was filled with bitter seeds,
a womb of fish eyes glistened under his knife,
but the heart of the papaya was no less sweet than any other.
Once severed, we couldn't put the two halves back together.
Excuses issued from the corners of our dreary hearts
into the small casket where the moon sleeps.
Jorge, you hold the sun in your arms
while I continue to chase shadows in darkness.
And these unintended words, a labor of love.

1989

I Won $50 for Horseflesh at National Poetry Week

National Poetry Week, II

I won $50, second place for my poem, Horseflesh, poems on everyday experience.

Horseflesh was a dream fragment. John and I were in Mulegé, Baja. I was going out to the bathroom and I met someone outside in the moonlight. It was unnerving. Another guest at Nachito's.

I'm not sure if I was awake or asleep when the Horseflesh poem came to me. Whether it was dreamed before I woke up to go to the bathroom, and I added this skull image, or whether I was still in the dream state, as I stumbled off to the bathroom.

And I don't remember if it was happening and I wrote it down when I returned, or if I wrote it afterwards. What I do remember was the brilliant stars above. The broken bed, the sandy sheets, the abject poverty, all contributed to the imagery. And there were many more fragments which I wasn't able to retrieve.

10/1988
DATE?

HORSEFLESH

TURNING STONES (after Layer of Marine Haze)

TURNING STONES

I am a mover of small rocks.

From Monte Alban I bring small pottery sherds

to Mount St Helena. I leave volcanic rocks

for my dead grandmother and take quartz crystals

from the mountain.

On the ridge facing the ocean

I've made a triangle of stone cairns.

Four vultures wheeling, circling as their want—

shiny black feathers in the deep forest

and blueschist

converging over my altar of stones—

I left them corn and bread,

water and sage smoke.

We invent ritual.

The elequence of necessity crystalizes all thought

into the single vortex of the sea

churning and rising like a cover

over sleeping bodies.

The sea answers, she is our mother.

These shells, these rocks are our gifts.

The passage of a soul is marked

in the muted silver of bracelets,

dentalium and jaspar.

In the firepit, rounded cobbles—

What quarry gave them birth?

I've begun to speak of things

I never knew I knew.

We are learning new languages to keep us on shore

and I am a camera facing the iris of my eye—

the diaphragm, open and close, open and close

like the contracting and expanding universe.

I dream of machine guns in the jungle

and of falling over backwards.

I dream of sickness

and of rolling with desire on the grass with wolves—

After all, we are pack animals.

On the day Robert Duncan died

I dreamed of the green meadows I am called to

again and again.

2/5/88

Baja, Mulegé, Cabo San Lucas, watercolors

ON TURNING 35 IN CABO

On turning 35 in Cabo, I reflect back.

In this life, I've stood on pahoehoe and aa,

new lava at the crater of Kilauea, steam forests and ferns.

I've watched the sunset from Haleakala,
a volcano that rises 30,000 feet above the sea floor.

I've seen the tongue of the ocean from the air,
swam in the Caribbean where a shark followed me home.

The aurora borealis glowed, but I didn't understand
northern latitudes when the sun set at midnight.

At the end of California, El Arco,
I watched frigate birds with 8 foot wingspans soar overhead.
I walked in rain forests of Kauaii and the Olympic Peninsula.

From Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain
in the continental US, I witnessed a forest fire.

I stood barefoot at Badwater, 282 feet below sea level,
and I followed worn trails in the salt flats
to hidden streams where pupfish from an earlier sea
still swim.

It took me 20 years to get to Tenochitlán,
the ancient lakebed of Mexico City,
And in the Yucatán, I climbed the pyramids
and crawled inside El Caracól, the observatory
during the winter solstice. The sun danced.

I rode to the stars while on ether, farther than
the combined distance of all my horses.

In Switzerland I climbed the Jungfrau,
rode the highest cog railway in the world
to crawl inside a crevasse in the glacier
to see the layers of ice and striations of every blue imaginable.

At the Columbia Ice Fields, I listened to the growl and hiss
of the great wall of ice that created its own cloud system.

I bathed in the Skeena River on an Indian reservation
where the glacial river numbed my skull til it cracked.

A week in the Sierras, a black bear slept on me,
I was too tired to get up and run. Probably saved my life.

I stood on the lips of Glacier Peak
and Half Dome without a rope or harness.

Half Dome I climb twice because
I forgot what it was like the first time.

At Loch Ness I didn't see Nessie
but I crawled through a dungeon in an abbey.

I had tea with the governor's wife in the Bahamas.

I didn't know that when Taikaido drummers danced
my relationship was about to end
but it took me two years to find out.

My first abortion at 24, my second at 27.
I meddled with nature, paid the price, lost the men,
stayed sick for two years, kidneys, uterus,
then a whiplash. My body weakened. My knee tore.

It took me eight years before I could ski again.

I rode an Icelandic pony called Helgar,
fiercely primitive, like a Celtic pony.

The fossils of clam shells in Central Valley cliffs
convinced me of an inland sea, but at 10,000 feet,
there are freshwater clams, how do you explain that,
or the reef fish in the sacred cenote well at Chichen Itza,
trapped miles from the sea, or hidden rivers.

The circle of candlewax in front of the stela at Cobá,
With the odor of sacred copal we welcomed the New Year.

We saw he two cuatemundis cross the road,
we ran over another one that night,
running over an endangered species.
Third time's a charm. I won't mention the turtle steak.

I saw the edge of night, the bell curve of the earth,
I saw stars and a daytime sky all at once,
sunset from an airplane flying over the North Pole.

From the air, the rift of the Grand Canyon
looked like a vast crack in the earth.

At Tikal, the temple of the Jaguar,
the howler monkey kept hidden in the canopy of trees.

Soldiers stopped our car searching for undesirables,
800 peasants have disappeared in Chiapas.

All for agrarian reform.
In downtown Mexico City, armed guards
in bulletproof vests direct traffic.

And the blood that didn't come with the moon
and the question rises once again.
The end of another relationship.
Few couples can survive the guilt.
Until I return home, I won't know if the slow bleeding
is a sign of division or multiplication.

Guerillas hide in the forests of Tikal,
the Indians, stoic in the face of soldiers,
On the Harmonic Convergence,
we celebrated at the Mayan church of Chamula,
all these roads less traveled,
but the universe unraveled....

November 24/1987
Cabo San Lucas
It looks like a page and the ending was lost, I found this in my sketchpad.
added 10.16 minor revisions.