Scanning old negatives of the Napa Poetry Conferences 1981-1986 (photos)

I've added more photos under the Comments section on Facebook. Check it out.

While scanning old negatives of the Napa Poetry Conferences (1981-1986), I didn't realize how profound a sense of community there was with the Napa Poetry Conferences (NPC), a tribe of poets, similar to California Poets in the Schools, that met once a year, and included poets from the Americas, and beyond.

Founder Dave Evans began the NPC with a group of Berkeley poets in 1981, the original series, where no one was ever turned away for lack of money, and the series ran until his death, in 1987, The late John Leggett, who retired from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, developed the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference (NVWC) fiction portion of the workshops in 1986, and the NPC took on its present form. Not the same. That's my uncredited photo on their web page (albeit a terrible copy). I hope to rectify that soon.

I'm still friends with many of the original NPC poets, among them, I treasure my long-term friendships with Donna Hilbert, Florence Weinberger, Kathleen Lynch, Sharon Doubiago, Sandra McPherson, Carolyn Forché, Bob Hass, Robert Pinsky, and others. I just found Joan Maiers on Facebook and I'm thrilled to connect with her after all these years.

I found in my Napa Poetry Conference negatives from 1983, a photo of Susan Herron Sibbet! I didn't realize that I knew her way back then. So many poets are gone, founder Dave Evans, Susan Sibbit, Maggie Meyers, Mary Rudge, Carolyn Kizer, Galway Kinnell. So many writers whose names I've forgotten. Let this scanfest be the beginning of an homage to our extended writing community, to both the living and the dead. In some small way, what I can give back to those who have nurtured me, are these old memories, photos chronicling the past. 

So many people I wish I had kept in touch with: Tess Gallagher, Diane Glancy, Laurie Deusing, Jess River, Cindy Frank, and more.

This is a sneak preview. I’ve scanned all of the 1983 negatives, and am about 2/3 through 1984. Need to clean them up before I post (mostly artifacts, or dust embedded in the negatives). Still to do, 1985....and I’ve only found a few 1982 negatives. Hope they turn up.

If you can figure out a way for me to get funded for doing this work, a grant, a scholarship, a residency, please let me know. Also, I am daunted by how I can present these photos, so many of them. I made a Facebook prototype where I used one photo as a main subject and the comments section to post related photos.

Here is a link to the NPC Bahamas poetry conference on Facebook, it's open to the public. A gathering of poets, Orange Hill, Nassau Island, The Bahamas, 1985. There are many more photos posted as comments below each main photo, which you may not see on a smartphone or tablet unless you click on the comments. You might notice the photo has three comments, that’s three more hidden photos.

— with Dave Evans, Robert Hass, Marcella Taylor, Glenna Luschei, Nathaniel Mackey, Carolyn Forché, Gary Sange, Kris Lauritsen, Sharon Doubiago

See A gathering of poets, Orange Hill, Nassau Island

More poet scans from National Poetry Week: Poetry Flash marathon reading, 1983, Fort Mason. With Gene Ruggles, Herman Berlandt, Mary Rudge. QR Hand, AD Winans, Max Schwartz, Darrell Gauff, Diana Sainz.

Mystery poets, 1980s, early 90s? National Poetry Week. Fort Mason. Herman Berlandt is the only poet I could identify.

A gathering of poets, Orange Hill, Nassau Island, The Bahamas, 1985. )photos)

The Bahamas, 1985 more photos posted as comments below each Facebook photo

A gathering of poets, Orange Hill, Nassau Island, The Bahamas, 1985. There are many more photos posted as comments below each main photo on Facebook (the link is public), which you may not see on a smartphone or tablet unless you actually click on comments. You might notice that a photo has three comments, that’s three more photos embedded in the comments.

I arrived in the archipelago of some 700 atolls and islands spread across 550 miles, a week early to help set up the conference. Dave Evans, founder of the Napa Valley Poetry Conference, was the brainchild and midwife of an exotic adventure into poetry. The cast of poets is pretty extraordinary too. With the underwriting of a famous novelist's wife, we managed to relocate the entire conference from the Napa wine country to the Bahamas. We drove to the tiny airport to welcome the poets. Nearly all the poets were from California, and a few from New York, to attend this first international Bahamas writers' conference.... —from Monster from the Deep

Sharon Doubiago, ? Kristine Lauritsen, ? Nathaniel Mackey, ? Robert Hass, Carolyn Forché, ? Marcella Taylor; Dave Evans,??? me.

I’m so tickled I was able to finally get a clean copy of the group shot. This is where going digital really pays off. I scan the negatives in color @ 3200ppi, to get wider range of greyscale, then reduce the saturation level so that there is only the greyscale band left, no RGB. That's what gives them depth. (The richness and depth of the background makes me all drooley. Also the crosslight on faces. Or the way the presence of light can create the framework for the photo. It's a Vermeer thing.)

The original photo was Tri-X 400 ASA, probably pushed to 800 ASA. I never could get a decent print of it. By digitalizing it, I was able to bring out the details. Something I never managed to do in the darkroom. Ilford glossy paper (vs. matt paper, which had a wider range of greyscale) gave the best overall results but much was lost in the stark contrast between black and white. Paper choice was always a juggling act.

Scanners don't do well with B&W negatives, part of the problem is that the silver bromide left on the film reflects back light to the lens. I'm using an Epson Perfection v550, which has a single lens. I really should use the Epson Perfection v850 scanner with its dual lens system. It handles the reflected light much better. I realize this is all Blah blah blah Ginger to most of you (WTF is she nattering on about?)

For the Bahamas (scans from 1985) (photos)

For the Bahamas. That fragile strand of atolls, jeweled necklace of the sea. We were in the Bahamas in 1985 for a writers' conference, and became friends with many local writers. I hope they are safe, especially Gareth on Cat Island, near Freeport, and Eleuthera, or Cigateo, the birthplace of the Bahamas, home of the Arawak/Taino. To see the related photos posted as comment son Facebook visit my page. I found and scanned the b&w negatives of the poetry conference. I will post them later after I’ve cleaned them up. I'll be posting some of the B&W photos of us soon.

Napa Poetry Conference cartoon

Once upon a time we were an extraordinary group of poets who met each summer in Napa. Organizing poets for this photo shoot was like herding cats. My photo traveled far and wide, so I made a parody drawing of it. Can you recognize any of the poets? It's 1985. Some of the poets no longer walk with us.

Napa Valley College English Chair, Dave Evans founded the Napa Poetry Conference in the summer of 1981. It began as a collective of Berkeley poets and students who came together to share their expertise and perfect writing skills. 

I'm not sure how I got roped in, probably to do a potential story. But I attended most. if not all, the conferences through 1987; Dave kept the tuition low. In my case, he waived it entirely in exchange for photographic documentation. At first, I merely observed, but then, Dave brought me in as a participant and presenter. My writing life was irrevocably changed.

Word got out and poets from all over the US and beyond attended the workshops. Several came from the Bahamas, of all places. So during the spring of 1985, we all packed up and flew south—to Nassau, for an international conference. Extraordinary times.

One of the unique aspects of the Napa Poetry Conference was that we were all housed within the community, no motels. I stayed as some extraordinary homes, one place on top of Mt. Veder, another ranch in the Mayacamas, replete with lake and rowboat, our hosts were a medic and a combat helicopter pilot, each was carrying on a secret affair, so life was intense. Because we were all poet-roommates, we made deeper bonds.

After Dave died, John Leggett took over, and the direction of the Napa Poetry Conference drastically changed. It became the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. Some of the old guard were invited back; Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, but the flavor had changed, with Dave Evans gone, there was no community housing offered, and tuition was stiff. A tony new era was ushered in. I never went back.

Stay tuned, I found a large box of photos from NPC, and am scanning old memorabilia.

Another photo, Poets on the landing. Still can't get everyone's attention.

Why I Teach, or Why I am a Writer, final draft

WHY I TEACH, OR WHY I AM A WRITER   MANIFESTO   —Maureen Hurley

due 12/13 SAT  5 min presentation/performance.

It's hard to choose between teaching and writing

each process informs the other.

See, I was an artist before I became a poet.

I was a poet before I started teaching kids art,

but I was also literary jailbait. It was a bootstrap affair.

 I arrived late to poetry all out of breath,

with things to say and nowhere to channel them.

I was a bad student in high school and college.

Least likely to succeed. I couldn't keep what I learned.

It was like a hive of bees swarming inside my head.

Stinging my tongue so I couldn't speak.

Journal notes Napa, Dave Evans' death

Driving back from the hospital, I couldn't help but think of Dave Evans, realizing he's dead and no longer living on Evan Street. Kristine and the new baby. Was it the arrival of the baby who killed Dave in the end? Born into this world with a heart problems, and the irony of Dave dying within months of his birth from a heart attack. Circular file. Kris is keeping mum about the inevitable questions that arise. Did I put in my foot in my mouth telling Dave's daughter, Lee, that her father had had a vasectomy? I thought everyone knew. And Kris saying: God had different plans for us. He sure did. More than we bargained for. But that's the way it is with the capricious gods. Be careful of what you wish for. And now she's a widow. My heart aches for her. And for the baby. And for Lee who has no one to help her shoulder this burden of grief.

Napa Poetry Conference, 1981-1987

I've been scanning and organizing old files. Yesterday's gem. Once upon a time we were an extraordinary group of poets who met each summer in Napa. Organizing poets for this photo shoot was like herding cats. My photo traveled far and wide, so I made a parody drawing of it. Can you recognize any of the poets? It's 1985. Some of the poets no longer walk with us.

Napa Valley College English Chair, Dave Evans founded the Napa Poetry Conference in the summer of 1981. It began as a collective of Berkeley poets and students who came together to share their expertise and perfect writing skills.

I'm not sure how I got roped in, probably to do a potential story. But I attended most. if not all, the conferences through 1987; Dave kept the tuition low. In my case, he waived it entirely in exchange for photographic documentation. At first, I merely observed, but then, Dave brought me in as a participant and presenter. My writing life was irrevocably changed.

Word got out and poets from all over the US and beyond attended the workshops. Several came from the Bahamas, of all places. So during the spring of 1985, we all packed up and flew south—to Nassau, for an international conference. Extraordinary times.

One of the unique aspects of the Napa Poetry Conference was that we were all housed within the community, no motels. I stayed as some extraordinary homes, one place on top of Mt. Veder, another ranch in the Mayacamas, replete with lake and rowboat, our hosts were a medic and a combat helicopter pilot, each was carrying on a secret affair, so life was intense. Because we were all poet-roommates, we made deeper bonds.

After Dave died, John Leggett took over, and the direction of the Napa Poetry Conference drastically changed. It became the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. Some of the old guard were invited back; Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, but the flavor had changed, with Dave Evans gone, there was no community housing offered, and tuition was stiff. A tony new era was ushered in. I never went back.

10.23.13

Journal, Enroute to Hawaii, Bearing Witness

Having returned from Guatemala, and unable to write about it, I depart for Hawaii and I marvel at the strange turn of events. I'm still on the road seven weeks later. This fast life and I'm not sure why the images won't come to me.

Yesterday, at the CPITS conference in Ben Lomond, I got a copy of American writers abroad edited by Carolyn Forché, from Tomi Nagai Roth, whom I know from the Napa Poetry Conference, and I haven't written about Dave Evans' death yet, or the one I am about to commit in two weeks.

And while reading prose, one of the things that struck me was that muteness is not singular. Carolyn Forché calls it "conscious preoccupation." It's as if (war correspondent) Harry's camera suddenly became too heavy to record yet another atrocity. 

My camera didn't record it all all those National Geographic shots of peasants being held at gunpoint, nor did it record them being quaintly ethnic either.

I didn't want to document this, become a witness, so that I, too could say I've been there. The shock value of the unreal postcards – somewhere between the two is what I wish to record. This muteness that lives inside me remembers much and I have to trust that it will all come out in poetry.

It's hard to find lyric images from the soldiers with Uzis stats who stopped the jeep for the third time in 6 miles, or when the women lying on the sidewalk in rags, hold up a gnarled hand for cambio, her milky eyes can no longer focus, from too much alcohol and abuse. Our bag ladies are quite yuppie by comparison.

Next to me, a man in uniform is reading a Star Trek novel while waiting for his flight. I wonder how many men he directs towards the war machine with his three color bars like so many Guatemalan belts. The title of his book is called Deep Domain. 

Two men discuss the existence of potential planets. One, an astronomer, complains of light pollution. The other sells airline insurance. I've been in so many planes the past few weeks I'm afraid the chances of being in the crash have increased. 

I can't forget those flaming horses falling from the sky in Mexico City when the Belize cargo plane crashed. I can't help but think of the irony of those six legged gods conquering the Indios one more time. 42 dead. All this numbs one.

I am preoccupied by what I have seen to the point of muteness. How can I begin to write these things? Also, the knowledge of what I already know to be true, I bring to my writing. Bearing witness.

The soldiers have Uzis, they got them from Israel, with US money to make those weapons. Therefore the US is offering military aid to them, albeit indirectly. 

This also means that guerillas have AK-47s because of the nature of the war beast. I don't know what AK-47s look like. I know that the guerillas of El Salvador and Nicaragua are armed with AK-47s. And I assume that they are Russian guns. I dont' want this knowledge in my head. But I can't unlearn it.

After two weeks ranging fires, the air is finally clearing a bit. The sun was a red ball in the gray sky. On August 30, 15,000 lightning strikes lit 1300 fires. Most of the northern state is on fire. The moon is filled with dragon blood at night. This smoke blends in with the night sky. The stars are imperceptibly less visible.

I amuse myself with scientific metaphors. How to demonstrate gravity with a bucket of water and a rope swinging it overhead.

Or how to demonstrate how a black hole can swallow light. Inconceivable to me until I remember learning how to go into a fast spin on ice skates, one leg at an angle helps to gather speed putting me into an orbit, then lifting it off the ice, drawing it in at a right angle, along with my arms, closer to my body, until the spin becomes a blur. 

It's so hard to hold oneself in. The centrifugal force wants to pull your limbs back out and slow the speed in which you spin.

An imploding star condenses, becomes heavier like the ice skates— PSI. Spin faster than the speed of light so that nothing escapes. Like these events that frame our lives, the actions, louder than words. We are not in control of our destiny after all.

9/14/1987

In November, John broke up with me, leaving me desolate.

Napa Poetry Conference notes : chiastic order

Write a poem that is an exercise in connecting the dots. Look at the order of the poem, it's not a ABAB but ABBA. Chiastic order. Chiaroscuro. It doesn't need to have line rhymes by order but by order of information follows this pattern.

Sometimes we settle for an image too easily. Challenge it.

The third eye knows, but it cannot see. Close your eyes and try to see with your third eye.

Emily Dickinson is like that, with all those abstract nouns capitalized, the orthographic notion that ideas themselves are real. Hope is a thing with feathers.

Look at the ordering of information, in your revision process. Look up the root meaning of words, the analytic process. Media, medium, immediately. Channel that information. Follow the words to their sources.

Fascination, fascist, fascism, the power of the erect penis, Priapus worship.

Poesis, is the maker of poetry, is the maker of recognition.

7/30/1987
no idea whose workshop this was. Still Pinsky?

BLUEBERRIES

— for Boschka Layton

From the ivory piano keys comes an ache

that cannot fill the cavity of this room;

the desire for slim youthful bodies,

love, and chocolate at midnight.

I am a guilty house guest rummaging through drawers,

and in the overabundant cabinets filled with canned food;

prune/apricot soup and small pyramids of jars

filled with seven kinds of mustard.

In the freezer, diet meals sleep in cybernetic suspension.

From this feast of dark chocolate and blueberries

my cheek numbs and swells like a beesting. Allergy.

Small, opaque stones; pills glistening in my hand

to push the darkness back into its corners.

I have trouble breathing & I'm afraid

of dying in the intimacy of a stranger's house

like my friend Boschka, with her wild drooping cheek,

and aslant smile which provoked

occasional screams from unsuspecting infants

and even the most seasoned of friends.

The melodious Bell's Palsey resounds in my ear

and my face takes on the same shape as hers.

She died in a bed not her own

and her ashes under the gravenstein tree,

were made into apple pies as she wished

but something in her hungers for this world.

I feel like the outside cat, close to death,

desperate to come into the forbidden house

one last time.

7/28/1987
Dave Evans died in right after the conference. I never went back.
rev. 11/88
Napa
Steve Kowit's workshop

1989 Outerbridge

LAX to SFO

LAX to SFO 

Last to board the plane 

my crutches caught on the steep ramp. 

No use at this speed. 

You say about yourself 

that any woman with any sense at all

could see that you're a walking disaster area 

when it comes to love. 

Your daughter just turned 18 

and the gaps are too big for us to bridge. 

7/28? 29?
Steve Kowit's worshop

Napa Poetry Conference: Steve Kowit workshops

Assignment for Thursday.

Write a short poems under 12 lines. Think of four or five lines mostly built with images. Think of a title, and then think of another title to transform or change it. Change the first and the last line also to transform it. (not sure whose workshop this was).

Other ideas:

Write a poem about the death of an animal.
1. use one long sentence, graceful clear and muscles with thirst.
2. Put your name in the poem.
3. Make one line where the poem seems to shift into another direction.
4. In a matter-of-fact tone, write a shocking fact.
5. Use at least one other technique you learned this week.

LAX to SFO

Last to board the plane
my crutches caught on the steep ramp.
No use at this speed.
You say about yourself
that any woman with any sense at all
could see that you're a walking disaster area
when it comes to love.
Your daughter just turned 18
and the gaps are too big for us to bridge.

MH

Steve Kowit workshops

1. Write a short poem of personal crisis, with another person
2. an active incident that occurred and exemplified the crisis. Use three lines out of the incident and move into the natural world. Think of it as a correlative think of it as symbolic of this experience. Use only 4 to 6 lines.

3Think of one person, think of another person, think of another person
4. add a place, a memory where you are alone.
5. Add a loss.
6.something you cherish
7. a person you've not written about.

Some other ideas:

Write a dark short political palm about breasts

Write a long sentence problem

Write an image and an abstraction in every other line

Write a sentence fragment without a verb, now throw out all the ifs, ands and buts— all the connections.

Write a parody of your own work

Write a non-positive portrait

Write about a person in relation to an object.
Write a poem directly addressing a person that use no descriptive language

Write a narrative around a single incident using the self is as a detached observer and use a very very long lines.

Do a surreal dream image

Use five unrelated objects with emotional meaning and interest. Think of it as an exercise in nimbleness and synthesis.

Make up five titles for poems

Make up five opening sentences for poems

Write about music, person, landscape, building, weather, time of year, a book, someone you love, a card game, a prize.

Write a poem or a page of prose that connects, or brings out the underlying unities, use three elements. The links might be through lines, ideas, or images. 

Write a poem: how I knew Harold.

Who was Harold?

Dream image: I'm walking the highways of Napa

Dream image: I'm walking the highways of Napa, there are stairs, and canals. I'm making beds and cleaning the rooms, I'm a maid shaking out a rug. A woman invites me in for a cup of tea. And she thanks me for making her bed and cleaning her small rugs.

Then I dreampt an odd turn of phrase:
take all the good lines that were ever written

and then divide them by all the good poems 

that's the definition of the length of a line.

This morning I wake up to discover it's my rug that needs shaking. I am moved by her kindness. I don't know why I wanted to help this stranger. An older, plump mistress of an inn, or a B&B, it's so very Chaucerian. I thought maybe it was an image of me later in life.

7/27/1987
Napa Poetry Conference

ONE NIGHT STAND

Too drunk to stand, he lies on the floor,
declares he wants to marry her.
She tells him, no because he drinks.
He denies it. She denies her interest
in his proposal. They fall into the tub
and make love until their toes shrivel.

7/27/1987

Notes for a draft of AKAD DZIB

Notes are a draft for AKAD DZIB 

Akad dzib, dark writing, from the Quiché Maya

Creation myth:

The first world people were of mud but they melted 

the second world people were mindless mannikins made of wood 

the third world was flesh, pure evil 

the fourth world was made maize dough

Cobá is the sun's center 

Fill my mouth with food and jade beads. 

The new year image of snakes 

wearing robes embroidered with human footprints.

The four Atlantean gods held up the sky. 

The cardinal points 

North is white 

black is west 

yellow is South

red is east 

and green is the center.

The sky was held up by four trees of different colors and species 

with the green Ceiba, or silkcotton tree, at the center.

Each of the 13 layers of heaven had its own god, 

the uppermost was Muan, a type of screech owl.

There were nine underworlds.

There was a flat earth on the back of a monstrous crocodile 

resting in a pool filled with water lilies 

and the sky was a double headed serpent.

7/27

Napa Poetry Conference: Robert Pinsky workshop

Robert Pinsky  asks: What would you like to accomplish in the poem that you haven't written yet? Who is the reader? Where does the poem begin? Language  is social. When you write a poem, it's a social act though you're in the privacy of your own mind, there's somebody already in your mind.

Drama is the process of passing it on. The stories. Writing for the clan. Ethnicity, local information prop writing for all the people. I am. Perspective: where to write from to get the eclecticism, the areas of language that are exciting. How do you begin: with an image? The rhythm of a long line, a mood, a smell, a color, texture, moments of conversation?

Write for 10 minutes on what you want to achieve in a poem. Don't think

Listen for alliteration in your prose, it's probably the place where your feelings come alive. Look for words someone may want to repeat over, or savor it slowly and repeatedly.

Bad writers borrow, good writers steal.


MH:

I dreampt an odd phrase last night:
Take all the good lines that were ever written
and then divide them by all the good poems
that's the definition of the length of a line.

The poem I'd like to write is similar to Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country in that I want to be able to sustain the flow and the energy of a poem, the ordering that is so long and encompassing. Something that flows effortlessly, is sustained, doesn't bog down, or lose energy.

I write in series of loosely connected images. Like staring at an optical illusion of black and white squares and in between, the illusion of a red or green one appears. I want the reader to be able to imagine a line, or remember an image in between each of mine.

I want to involve the reader intimately like flashbacks, mini eternities. Yet I don't want the reader to get lost in thought. I want them to be guided by my images like guided fantasy or meditation. The danger is in losing the reader, or the energy of the poems.

Also in each line, I'd like to make startling compact transitions from one idea to another, a nonpredictable line. The roses at dawn bled coats of color into the sky. Dawn/flower/sky is too predictable. I'm looking for something more compact, more of a surprise to the reader, and to myself the writer.

If I were to fold the poem in half lengthwise how would it read? How much information to put in? How much shorthand to use? Private language?

Then there's the content. In the ease of driving long winding country roads, my mind follows multiple convoluted trails much faster than I could possibly ever write, or even speak. The synapses or, leaps of conscious thought interest me. Especially the spaces between thoughts.

What triggers an idea, or an image and the next? I want to capture all those thoughts that encompass so much of the world. Not just the new ideas I had in my mind, but more than the summation of of ideas. It's subduction.

I tend to write in spurts. There are weeks, even months in between where I have no tangible poems, and then one day I can't stand it any longer and it just pours out.

I want to write deceptively simple poems that end suddenly and the reader is left hungry for more. Something like Seamus Heaney's oyster poem— so much is encompassed in a handful of lines. I haven't even begun to mention context.

When I write, there is a poetic direction, a poetic driver—sometimes it's a runaway carriage. I'm not in control of my craft, though I try. My ideas are strong in natural imagery, but weak in order.

I want to be able to title poems the way Hemingway does: The Sun also Rises, the tongue of the ocean, these lines resonate.

7/27/1987
added 9/17
I cleaned this up, and Blogger stalled on the upload so I lost all my corrections and had to start anew.

Blue Horses in the Rain—after Franz Marc

BLUE HORSES IN THE RAIN

A child's watercolor set invited me to the breakfast table of a house perched on the crest of Mount Vider. The Napa Valley, shrouded in fog, barely visible caves, like puncture marks on the ridge opposite. I am a houseguest applying color to pale toast and blank paper. I fill the pages with color and think of Franz Marc's Blue Horses in the Rain. He died very close to Lascaux. Calligraphy of bison before the hunt. Ochre pigment. Hemitite. When a child found the painted caves, at first no one believed her stories of bison and horses running across rock ceiling. Not even her father. Especially her father.

As I paint, a woman silhouetted against the morning sun, comes over and asks me if I always awaken like this. We are both writers. A small flickering arrow in my stomach—and I wonder why I no longer wake with a brush in my hand, tracing a pale yellow wash across the white of morning. I cannot write, the blood clots my pen. The sunlight on her hair blinds me. My father, an absence of light, I am torn between the obsidian darkness of two worlds.

Yesterday, my notebook stumbled down a steep ravine and landed face-down on a branch of poison oak suspended above a creek. My writing saved by poison. On the way back up the ravine, the sound of an oncoming car hurried me and I tore my skirt. I though of the swaddled mummies of Nazca, and the cycle of earlier fires—tree carbon transformed to ink markings on the page. The land is the color of cinnibar and discarded shells.

I can’t shake this aftermath of sleep and the deaths I dream of: those I know, and those of strangers. The night is becoming too crowded. A friend blames the ghosts in my mirrors, there are too many of them. That’s why they come. I am shivering from what I have heard. Someone asks, Are you a mother? This paper becomes a rock wall. I hold my brush poised in the air waiting for the blue horses to come pouring down from the sky.

7/86 & 3/94

TO SLEEP ON THE WAY HOME

TO SLEEP ON THE WAY HOME

The blizzard enters into this room

making my bones white.

The door to the right hip bone

opens into a howling snowfield.

These spaces between teeth echo 

in dark corridors.

I climb the night sky

where the ice of Saturn circles

for millenia on end.

Chrysanthemums on dark velvet.

November running low on the eastern sky.

Loosened arrows 

invade the heart.

Torrent after torrent.

Rain on my roof.

I remember each dress my grandmother made me.

And this deep season

like buzzing of flies in late afternoon,

dry rattle of corn harvested in late fall.

Thinking of death.

When we rode the Clydesdales to the river

bareback, & without a bridle.

rev 7/7/94

TO SLEEP ON THE WAY HOME

The door to the right hip bone
opens into a howling snowfield.
The blizzard enters into this room
making my bones white.
These spaces between teeth
echo in dark corridors.
I climb the night sky
where the ice of Saturn circles
for millennia on end.
Chrysanthemums on dark velvet.
November running low on the eastern sky.

I subtract another year from my death date.
Loosened arrows invade the heart at any age.
Torrent after torrent.
Rain on my roof.
Deep under blankets
I remember each dress my grandmother made me.
And this deep season
like buzzing of flies in late afternoon,
dry rattle of corn harvested in late fall.
Thinking of death
when we rode the Clydesdales to the river
bareback
& without a bridle.

11/16/1985?

Poetry Flash: Napa Poetry Conference (front page photo of Carolyn Forché & Gerald Stern)

VOTIVE OFFERINGS

Votive offerings

     —from a photo by Jean Mohr

1. I grew up with the habit of leaving the window open.

By the time he arrived, my hands and cheeks were numb.

I kept back to the shadows, not wanting to be seen.

How could I explain this? That there was something
so private about the way he walked alongside his bicycle,
as if there were a secret they both shared.

I think of horses in the rain
with water drizzling down damp forelocks,
leaving pockmarks in the dry dust inside the stable.

The clatter of boots, the purring of cogs.

The wind rubs the lace curtain like silk velvet.

Mixed with snow, the mud made a chocolate slurry
of the photographic image of winter.

What interested me most was the way the eyes appeared first
on exposed white paper in the developing tray,
under the darkroom red light.

Sometimes, I just went in there to look at them and stare.

I forgot what happened next.

It was 1946. I remember,
because there were dark uniforms everywhere.

When we walked, the frozen mud beneath our feet
cracked like distant gunshots.

2. He pushed his bicycle across cobblestones;
the clatter of boots and the purr from the spokes of his cycle
ricocheted from stone slate to plaster walls.

Leaves under the tree gathered cups of snow.
His hobnail boots announced him like a lone horse.

The road winds to a field where a girl with loaves of soggy bread
waits as a rail thin cat weaves its damp fur between her legs.

The forgotten are remembered – pressed between glass,
on silvered paper.

3. Will she still be waiting? The fields will be wet.

Wire spokes ticking off time like a clock.

Late. Late. Walk the bike through town.

Don't attract attention.

Dark clouds. More snow in the air.
How far can one ride to snow on a bicycle?
Tracks draw less attention than two sets of prints in the snow.

4. You there! Always behind that curtain.

What are you looking at? Stealing pictures again?

Don't you think I know about you?

Tomorrow, you'll notice when I don't come by
but that is tomorrow, not today.

5. I see the hood of his long jacket thrown back
as he holds something small in his hand.
I see the warm breath hanging about his face like a cloud.

I see the glistening street through the spokes of his cycle
and the reflection sharply in focus with the muddy spray of water
flips up on the back of the tire.

In the thin snow, faint circular tracks from other riders.

6. Clutter clatter of boots, purring of cogs.

The wool of her scarf, like wet sheep.

A windblown curtain.

In wet fields, by granite slabs,
the forgotten are remembered.

Photographs, silver – a metallic weight
around the eyes, under glass.

Votive offerings.

date?  8/1985?  Possibly 1987.
Added 11/16