Senator Milton Marks congratulations letter for winning the SF Bay Guardian Poetry Contest

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN                                                  

The first hunters who crossed Siberia

survived winter's ancestors

because they wasted nothing—

something of the Inuit remains.

What do we know of Siberia?

We say Siberia, naming the nameless zone

between the taiga  and the tundra.

We say it because it conjures up the idea of wind and snow

unfettered by man to come and go where it pleases.

When we say Siberia the air fills with tundra flowers

and we mean the Siberia of stunted pines

and caribou migrations, but it's also the Siberia

of strip mines and  nuclear physics.

We say it midsummer, under a curtain of fire,

where night never begins;

and in winter, where it never stops.

We say it to sustain us as the invisible wolf

testing the strength of double-paned glass

stares in from the pupiled eye of night.

We say Siberia, stretching out syllables

until it becomes the wind's voice.

Sigh-bier-ria.

We say it as a punishment to our children.

We will ship them off to Siberia.

Banishment is always another country.

We make jokes about it,

and so I touch your golden skin in summer,

how it radiates the sun

while mine is the white of winter.

In the land of exile,

the land of the long ruble,

of opportunists and political prisoners,

where does the Siberian tiger sleep now?

We say Siberia and know nothing about it.

You tell me someone has to be the first

to love across political boundaries

until nations put down their ideals.

There's little comfort in knowing tears or blood

are the same chemistry as their mother, the ocean.

In Novosibirsk, scientists in white rooms

play nuclear physics with God—

like ours at White Sands and Alamagordo.

Something of the landscape must touch them—

surely they dream?

Last night, the sky wore red

and I stood between two rainbows.

Prisms and physics could not explain away refracted light.

There are those desperate enough to drink perfume.

They must've pissed the very heart of summer flowers into snow

only to go blind, was it worth it? Nosdrov'yeh,

a toast clawing olfactory nerves and tissueó

the period between midwinter and spring. Asylum.

But you've been there too, a spy among inmates,

your drawings record far better than any camera

life within the walls of insanityówho's more insane:

the Georgian man over and over again in pencil,

the scientists who turn their backs on the earth,

or those who send the flower of their youth

to front lines to bathe in jellied gasoline

in the name of an idea?

We are all crazy.

It comes with the territory.

Did I tell you Solzhenitsyn lives in a fortress

of his own choosing, deep in the mountains of Vermont?

It's the Gulag  all over again.

He brought his Siberian islands with him.

Dogs patrol the electric fence in regimented intervals.

Stalin's been dead nearly as many years as we've lived.

America is also an experiment,

an armed song singing itself

toward extinction like all the rest.

Yes, we are victims of historyó

fill the silos with grain.

But I touch your face,

my fingers memorize geography.

You ask, how does it feel to be living with bears?

Everyone loses their teeth in Siberia

and you never met a woman before who bites.

I cannot forget your eyesóall that blue,

not of glaciers and ice but of the soft secret heart of stone.

Translucence leashed and folded like linen bedsheets.

Your hand reaches for the moon hidden beneath my shirt,

seeking familiar patterns in a gesture that's timeless.

Learning to live with the land is something the Inuit knew

but even they've begun to turn their backs on it.

We should be around the fire telling stories,

buried in thick furs, safe in each other's arms

but we're not dressed in skins.

I carry a bear's tooth in my pocket

and keep skulls outside my window, just in case.

We live on opposite sides of the earth,

lovers in exile, but love is like that.

We need visas and annulments.

By naming it, it's too late,

we're no longer in the country of origin.

Siberia is singing from the heart of deepest night.

Small hooves pound in our chests.

We live on blubber,

savor fatty tissue and cannot sleep.

V'kusna ? Out of death comes life;

from life, death follows like wolves

trailing the caribou herd.

9/28/89

Poem poster in the style of Kenneth Patchen for Bay Guardian poetry contest

I love how the scanning process resurrects bits of this and that, and only when I began to assemble the bits in this blog, that I discovered the date, and my working notes, as well as the original Bay Guardian poster. These posters were in color, BTW. I might have a copy of one of them somewhere in my silk paintings (to do).

Scanned 2015; added 3/18

MANTLE

           —for Bob Kaufman
              April 18, 1925 to Jan 12, 1986

News travels slowly.
In the time it took God to make the earth
you died and a voice fell from the sky.
I've been looking for you
in each bent and ragged head
of those stumbling down Telegraph,
of those ranting in Brautigan Square,
of those who live in Market Street doorways.
They say Lenin's legs were blackened
when the shroud slipped off.
I saw the map of death on your face
as you wandered the outskirts of your city.
The same map in my mother's eyes
and in the faces of those in the streets
who followed me even in sleep
but who held my hand in the dark?

A crowd laughed at the screaming woman
whose hands beat against our car window
as a man dragged her into an alley.
Another woman, still drunk, comes over
and complains of lost car keys and stolen children.
And in that order.
The sky caught fire
and seven astronauts were swallowed
by a blue-mantled snail.
Film makers converge upon us,
their eyes taking in odd angles of light.
It's like watching Kennedy shot over and over
with Jackie piecing together bits of skull and memory
with ineffective hands.

Bees carry the skull of night back into the hive.
The dead have taken to scratching poems on the water.
Even if we scatter your ashes to the wind for ten years
and listen for lyrical translations from the other side
it still won't cleanse this place.
Ten years of silence is buried.
We had a vision but the map is lost.
Who will collect the messages?
We confuse pinholes of light
leaking from rotted buckets
for the ancient rain of stars.
In my dreams they are coming and the door won't lock.

While in exile, lean closer to the sun.
Become birdlike
until you land spread-eagled
on this bone of the word
and in this endless blue
your flexing soul
will be the sound deep space sings.

2/2/86      


1988 Green Fuse
1986-88 Falling to Sea Level
1987 San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2nd Prize
         Thread Winding the Loom CPITS

MANTO                                                                        

                                    —para Bob Kaufman

Las noticias viajan lentamente.

En el tiempo que le tomo a dios hacer la tierra

moriste y una voz cayo del cielo.

Te he buscado en cada cabeza agachada y harapienta

de los que tropiezan por la avenida Telegraph

de los que viven erl los zaguanes de la calle Market.

Dicein que 1as piernas de Lenin se ennegrecieron

cuando se deslizó el ataúd.

Vi el mapa de la muerte en tu cara

mientras vagabas por las afueras de tu ciudad.

El mismo mapa en los ojos de mi madre

y en las caras de aquellos en la calle

que me seguían incluso en el sueño

pero ¿quién me cogió la mano en la oscuridad?

La muchedumbre se rió de la mujer gritona

cuyas manos golpedban nuestro parabrisas

mientras un hombre la arrastraba hacia un callejón.

Otra mujer, todavía borracha, viene para

quejarse de las llaves perdidas y los niños robados.

El cielo se encendió y siete astronautas fueron tragados

por un caracol de mano azul.

Cineastes convergen sobre nosotros

sus ojos toman originales ángulos de luz .

Es como mirar a Kennedy tiroteado una y otra vez

mientras Jackie junta pedazos de la calavera

y la memoria con manos inefectivas.

Las abeias llevan la calavera de la noche a la colmena.

Los muertos ya están granando sus poemas en el agua.

Aunque esparéramos tus cenizas al viento por diez años

esperando traducciones líricas del otro lado

ni así se limpiaría este lugar.

Diez años de silencio están enterrados.

Teníamos una visión pero se perdió el mapa.

¿Quién reunirá los mensajes? Confundimos los agujeros de luz

goteando de las cubetas podridas

con la lluvia antigua de las estrellas.

Vienen en mis sueños y la puerta no se podrá cerrar.

En el destierro, inclínate al sol.

Hazte como pájaro

hasta que aterrices extendido en este hueso del mundo

en este azul sin  fin tu alma desdoblada

será el sonido que canta el espacio profundo.

2/2/86                        —traducción John Oliver Simon y Juvenal Acosta                                           

1986-88 Falling to Sea Level

SIXTH OF AUGUST

SIXTH OF AUGUST

The personality of the dead woman in the storage room escapes
from boxes of silk scarves, photographs, letters
cellulose toys, yellow mother of pearl buttons and cloth scraps.
Inside her white plastic purse;
a checkbook, unclaimed raffle tickets,
a tiny snapshot of a girl who still sends her love;
an envelope dated 1937,
some eight-cent stamps and a life insurance policy.

On this 40th anniversary of Light,
I pull stamps of Einstein and Eisenhower apart.
Glued on top of a glib Eisenhauer grinning seven times
a haunted Einstein broods in purple; the color of mourning.
Beneath them, postage stamps of Apollo on the moon,
black-wreathed earth against the sun;
the birth of Man in space.

When I was three, the linoleum to cover the stairs
was put in the storage room to change it from green to red,
my uncle told me. And so it did.
I admired the miracles that happened in darkness.
In that same darkness, copper pennies
dropped into the piggybank turned into steel.
Dressed in khaki-green, my uncle tossed me into the air
and the known world spun past my forehead.
He held a suitcase of darkness in his hand.

Now, I've gone and brought the dead woman's things into light.
A photograph of her husband holding a silver-plated trophy
by the tall grey horse at Longacre track:
He stares at me with such frankness, that with his passing
I feel the loss of an intimate stranger.
The bent and tarnished trophy rests in thick dust.

When I wear the clothing of the dead,
they see glimpses of light again.
The poet's shirt gives me strange dreams
but I forget the words by morning.

Rotted with age, the boxes of yarn
in this half-light makes tufts like the manes
of cloth horses I ride in my dreams
where the landscape grows wilder with each visit.

August 6, 1985
rev. 1986

1987 San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2nd Place
         Thread Winding the Loom, CPITS anthology
         The Paper
 1995 Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, ( version 2, below)

 see my post,  Atomic Ghost