Remembering Mary Smith Taylor, & a backstory of The Birds, & Warm Springs Dam

As I was moving boxes of old papers, I stumbled upon some writing fragments in a copybook dating back to a time before I became a writer. As I added the nascent scraps, written in a naive, childish hand (though I was 22), to my blog, and as I transcribed my notes, I also uncovered writing fragments with little pockets of memory attached. 

As I followed a wild hunch, I discovered that I was indirectly related by marriage to my Native American studies teacher, Mary Taylor, who was Coast Miwok. Then, I discovered a link that also led to the Warm Springs dam project (1974-1984), thanks to the internet. The aha! I always wondered how I became involved with the rescuing of native Pomo basket sedges.

Mary Taylor was a Bodega Bay Smith of Captain Stephen Smith infamy—who at 57, married a 16-year old Peruvian, Manuela Torres, in order to claim the Rancho Bodega land grant, but Smith also had a Coast Miwok "wife," Tsupu. The story goes, there were others.

Their son, Bill Smith had 12 children with Rosalie Charles after his first Miwok wife, Walla Walla, died. The Smith clan was a massive clan, with whom I would later be related to by marriage, when Bill Smith's youngest son, Young Eagle Smith, married my widowed aunt, Mary Azalie Howard Reilly (her husband Myles was my uncle) at St. Eugene's Church in Santa Rosa. 

I remember talking to Mary Taylor at the wedding reception in Santa Rosa. And I was puzzled as to why she was at our family wedding. Thanks to the internet which most definitely wasn't around in 1975, I was able to place her as Young's older sister. Wow! So my wild hunch wasn’t off.

Remembering The Buk

(Beat poet Al Winans posted a photo of Charles Bukowski on Facebook, with an amazing letter from the Buk for Al’s 50th birthday. I liked the letter (see below) which shed some light on his bad behavior, and with that, came understanding. But so much faux idolatry emanated from that post it made me gag as my reaction to meeting Bukowski was decidedly different. So I posted my own not-so-pretty two-cents-worth. And, thanks for the unexpected writing prompt, Al!)

I met Charles Bukowski around 1982, when he was crashing on a friend’s sagging couch in a farmhouse perched by the railroad tracks in Cotati. My friend wanted me to meet him to organize a reading at Sonoma State. So, Becca (Rebecca Clintron Osvald) took me over to her friend Ricky Appelbaum’s old white farmhouse over by the trailer court to meet the Buk.

Ricky‘s house was a crash pad for thespians, artists, and wandering poets. The rent was dirt cheap. Every time a freight train rumbled by, the house shook, we’d all scream Stella! like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, because Ricky was playing the lead at a local theater. 

Unfortunately, Charles Bukowski was dead drunk by early afternoon, nursing a gallon of cheap Red Mountain wine. He had been at it for a while as empty wine jugs circled the perimeter of the couch. The Buk was also in audition-mode on Ricky’s chintzy couch, already in training for his semi-autobiographical screenplay, Barfly. 

I guess by that point, the Buk had already thoroughly burned his bridges with his sole poetry publisher, my friend, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, who wouldn’t let him crash at his place up in Healdsburg anymore. John, who had founded a successful office supply business in LA, hunted Bukowski down in 1966, and found him working as a letter clerk in a post office. 

In 1969, John sold his collection of DH Lawrence first editions to fund his Black Sparrow Press. And then he made an offer that Bukowski couldn’t refuse, $100 a month to write full time. A month later, Bukowski submitted his first novel, Post Office. John made Bukowski famous again—as a poet—after he had burnt his literary bridges as a writer with a 35-year-long drunken binge which led to a hiatus from the publishing world. 

Bukowski‘s myriad poetry books put the fledgling Black Sparrow Press on the literary roadmap. John, whose first words when he finally met Bukowski, were, “I worship you,” Buk’s reply was “That’s nice, you wanna beer?” But this time John was done with the Buk. (Note to self, need to find Barnes & Noble PR on John.)

I introduced myself. The grizzled, greasy-haired poet, enveloped in a thick grey cowl of cigarette smoke, didn’t even get up off the couch, but he grabbed my proffered hand, said something rather nasal, and then tried to drag me down to his level on the couch. 

Because I was living out of my car, I was rather formally dressed for the times, kitted out in a retro 1940s long teal pencil skirt, and my Irish grandmother’s peach-colored lace insert crepe silk blouse with a maroon leotard beneath. So you couldn’t exactly blame my demure wardrobe for his dirty old man social malfunction. 

I fought like a banshee, red lacquered claws extended, and I had some pithy words to say. I hissed like a car, escaped unscathed, but I was so furious, I was shaking. He was so lecherous that he literally had me puking, Though I was attractive, men rarely hit on me. Ricky used to call me the China doll because I was so pale and wan. It was my anorexic phase (I’d lost a lot of blood from an abortion), so I was fey, not quite of this world.

To be fair, Bukowski tried to call me back after my dramatic rebuke, quite possibly to apologize, but I was gone. I remember running out of the house, and throwing up in the rosebushes, tripping over an orange tomcat desperately weaving around my ankles. all I could think of was handcuffs. I sped off in my old rustbucket of a VW bug, a trail of gravel spluttering behind me. I never talked Charles Bukowski again.

I never could read Bukowski’s work after that. I was running a poetry series at Sonoma State. Ironically, all he wanted was a reading, but he thoroughly burned his bridges with me. Having growing up with far too many alcoholics in the family, I had zero tolerance or coping skills for that kind of behavior. You might say my judgment was colored by the deep well of the alcohol school. 

I ran into Bukowski later in 1984, he was celebrating the sale of his screenplay to Hollywood at the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati. It was drinks all around the house. A deep well at the bar. Needless to say, I gave him a wide berth. He never saw me leaving.

Years later, in an Amsterdam bookshop, circa 1992, I discovered I liked his work. He was wildly popular in Europe. People were amazed that I was probably the only person that ever refused to give the infamous Charles Bukowski a poetry reading. Sure, on some level I regret it. It would’ve been a booking coup. But between The Buk and Gene Ruggles, I was so fed up with the bad behavior of macho male alcoholic poets with flagging egos, I didn’t want to babysit them.

I did produce a couple of disastrous readings for Gene. Unfortunately, he was alway falling down drunk. I was humiliated and horrified. I had known Gene since I was a child, he was a friend of my mother’s, so I couldn’t say no. Only two people would call me up at 3 AM for crazy drunken phone calls in the middle of the night: Gene and my mom. I guess it was a good thing that the Buk did not have my phone number.

I curse you, Robert Bly

It’s interesting when the real personality emerges from behind the hero’s carefully constructed persona or façade. I mentally spit on the thought of Robert Bly‘s grave whenever he is mentioned. He was a poet I admired until he let the social veil slip and attacked me in public. I had produced a big poetry reading event honoring a Calliopea Press art book for his Rilke sonnet translations at Sonoma State. Since I was a singularity, I worked like a dogsbody navigating the bureaucracy to rent the room, raising the speaker fee, setting up the stage, I did mike and sound check, placed chairs, was emcee, etc., and at the end, I politely asked him to autograph my hard-earned copy of the hand-letter-press book, with a gorgeous embossed imprint of a purple iris on the cream cover. I guess he was done with his Mr. Nice face. He ripped me a new one in public and refused to sign my copy. Not a clue as to why. Carol Denison, the broadside artist and pressowner, who witnessed the tirade, was equally mortified, and gave me her signed copy. I was completely humiliated and devastated, not to mention exhausted. I am not one to cry, but that evening he made me cry, and that is unforgivable. I have never been able to even read the book. I heard the book is worth a bomb. I need to sell it to exorcise the bad juju. To this day, I curse him. That night, I got to see the real Bly, mysogenist and ogre that he was, in his dandified cravat and knitted vest. Iron John, my ass.

ok, I confess this was from a fragment I never finished, so I posted it on the day of his death tho it was written in situ 7/21/22.

Remembering Diane diPrima

College classmates Jack Crimmins and Gregg Lowe were reminiscing around the death of Beat poet, Diane diPrima, who once read with Elizabeth Herron in Cotati when Loba was first published. At Sonoma State College, 1979-80, we resurrected a defunct reading series, called the Public Poetry Center, where we hosted community readings with local poets paired with luminaries including Michael McClure, whom Jack introduced, Lewis MacAdams, Joanne Kyger and Bobbie Louise Hawkins at the Cotati Cabaret and the Inn of the Beginning.

As Jack and Gregg reminisced, I realized I was quickly being written out of the collective post-narrative, and it was my project. So I did a diPrima, I chimed in, and reclaimed the past, and then I realized I’ve never properly documented the project, as I was living in the moment producing events.

I told Jack, Yep, The Public Poetry Center, the idea, or concept was to bridge the gap between the writer community and the isolated university. I wasn’t entirely happy with the name, I think it was something my professor, poet David Bromige had coined, but it stuck, and served its purpose. Before that, there wasn’t much going on at Sonoma State. Jack said he came up with the title.

Our job was to resurrect SSU’s defunct Public Poetry Center and to create a liaison between the university and the community We hosted campus literary and art events for the English Dept., The College of the Humanities and the ASUC InterCultural Center. We also had to negotiate around David Bromige who wanted to present a very different poetry scene.

I began booking readings as an undergraduate art student, after attending The Child in Changing Times Conference in either June of 1978 (I don’t have a notebook for 1978, and so, can’t look it up) and/or another conference in 1979, The Arts in Everyday Living (they could be one and the same conference), that changed my life’s direction. It was hosted by the SSU Dept. of Psychology, coordinated by Terry Doyle, psychologist, and poets Michael Dow and Lee Perron who both taught for an organization that would literally change my life, California Poets in the Schools (CPITS). 

The organizers were setting up kiosks with photos of children, and their poetry. I had my calligraphy kit on me and offered to make signs. I was the signmaker for the Sonoma Student Union. Once they saw that I could make huge banners, they roped me in, made me part of the conference. 

• Summer Workshop: A conference on developing more effective, loving relationships with children, Growing Up Sane: The Child in Changing Times, will be offered at Sonoma State College from June 22 to 25, 1978. The conference will provide new insights, practical skills and usable methods in raising and educating children. For information call Neil Schifiman, 565-9280. 

That conference is also how I got roped into both the Russian River Writers’ Guild, and CPITS at the same time, via poet Lee Perron. Anyway, by circumstance, or by accident, I became the default student liaison between the university and the Russian River Writers’ Guild. The Cotati Cabaret was off campus, and it drew much large crowds. (Besides, there was booze). The other tenant was that we always paid the poets, no matter no small the stipend was....

The Arts in Everyday Living: The Real Basis of Education Conference, 28 June - 1 July, sponsored by Sonoma State University, Office of Extended Education. The workshops and an ongoing art project are geared toward teachers, parents, administrators, artists, counselors and community members. Kenneth Rexroth, poet and critic, and Jose Arguellos, educator, artist and writer will be the featured main speakers. Also included are an Arts Festival and Resource Center. For further information, contact the Office of Extended Education at SSU, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park, CA 94928 or call (707)664-2394. 

Ultimately that Arts in Everyday Living conference was where I was first exposed to accessible personal narrative poetry that even kids could write. Hooked, I took to the streets running: I undertook the equivalent of a second BA in Expressive Arts, a cluster school offshoot of the psychology department, along with my BA in Art Studio (my connection with the English Dept. was a bit of a fluke), and I trained to become a poet-teacher for California Poets in the Schools. 

CPITS Area Coordinator for SoNapa counties, (we called it SOCPITS) Michael Dow’s writing workshops were vitally alive and I wanted more, but I was also simultaneously taking poetry workshops with David Bromige, so to ameliorate the schism, I created a bridge of sorts between the three groups to make sense of it all. It was an octopuses eight-handed nightmare, as I didn’t quite fit in anywhere. Besides, I was an art student.

Without poetry I never would’ve gone back to school as I had dropped out of SFSU, and was floundering around at Sonoma State trying to finish my BA degree in Art Studio at a school where few art classes were being offered. Luckily, both David Bromige and Psychology chair, jazz musician, “Red” Thomas became my SSU liaisons. But the English/poetry department and the Expressive Arts department, even though it was a cluster school, were not connected at the hip, or anywhere at all. So that was yet another matchstick bridge to build. When I landed in Expressive Arts, I felt I had finally come home.

“Red” Thomas, more than anyone, gave me belief in myself and lent credence to what I was doing, even if I hadn’t a clue as to what it was. He gave me blanket permission to “follow my passion.” What stayed with me were those weekly seminars, group meetings when we had to report back to our peers our successes and failures.  I was always so terrified but poetry was this large brontosaurus rucking round the room, I was merely holding on for dear life. Even tho I wasn’t officially in the program, I joined in. It was like a 12-step program for enabling artists and poets in their communities. “Red” Thomas and Mac McCreary were at the epicenter of change.

And because we didn’t know any better, we all dreamed big, and that’s how Diane Di Prima came to SSU to give a workshop and a reading—either in the fall of 1979, or the spring of 1980. Her exploration, and navigation of the feminine archetype as a she-wolf, a hunter of lost things, became my mantra. Her epistolary manifestos in Revolutionary Letters gave us permission to address the universe not just as participants, but as activist poets on the cusp of change.

Some say that she wrote Loba as a counterpoint to Ginsberg’s Howl. None of that matters. She was a woman before her time, and she ran with the wolves long before it was a concept. I took workshops with her in June, 1979, at the SF Zen Center, a converted Victorian flat. Her open narrative process allowed us to generate our own major arcana of mythos and symbolism unimpeded by the tight corners of male-dominated academia.

Another college classmate, Rebecca Clintron reminisced, Diane was palpable, she was elegant Wildness itself bringing 'Loba' workshop to us almost immediately upon publication, fresh and clear w a subdued gravitas. what i recall most poignantly was her speaking of the 'vulnerability of youth' (our ignorance and openness) was nothing compared to the vulnerability of an aging woman in our culture, approaching cronehood. i recognize now that she was barely into middle age!”

Jack answered, “ Rebecca, very cool, your recollections of Diane...thank you..."Wildness"...! Diane's book "Loba" such an important cross-cultural, mythopoetic long poem, written over years, added to as she went, and as Diane said, as she heard the poem voices emerging, a poem that powerfully explores feminine consciousness and beyond...so cool Diane was out teaching early and throughout her life.”

There is a woman whose poems are bread & meat 
hyacinth nightmare crepe paper 
I close a window, she is not reflected in it 
but I see her silhouette against the glass 
she is crisp as ice, is soft 
as russian vowels”

—Diane diPrima, Loba

From Altar, Diane diPrima's workshop, SF Zen Center, June 1979.

From the Naropa broadsides 1974

Cyclamens silk (art)

These cyclamens were for a SSU art exhibit, It took me a few tries to get it right. I always work from real flowers, so imagine my surprise when a snail crawled out of the pot.

Habotai silk, metallic gutta, salt, and dye; 9.5" silk hoops. 

I was asked to make a square for a quilt for Neil's ashram gardener who was retiring. This was the first cyclamen I drew. Habotai silk, metallic gutta, salt, and dye; 8x8".

see also

Lilies, silk (art)

Lilies, 2 silk (art)

Nasturtiums silk (art)

Facebook photo album: Mo's silk painting (photos, art)

Celtic beasties on silk (art)

Celtic beasties on silk 2 (art)

Fur Heart Valentine for Art form the Heart (art)

Watercolor and collage. I painted two images of hearts onto heavy morilla board then I sliced them into strips (one vertical, one horizontal) and then painstakingly wove them together. I did a series of woven paintings after a trip to Guatemala in the mid -1980s. Most are gone, sold to strangers at the annual Art form the Heart art auction fundraiser at Sonoma State University. I made a color xerox of this one. so, it's a collograph of a painted collage.

I lined the two woven heart pockets with rabbit fur. There are candy hearts and ribbons and and even a slender pencil. You never know what people will buy at the auction... One pieces that I submitted I thought no one would buy, there were fierce bidding wars on it. Other pieces that I thought would appeal, no one wanted. This little jezebel was left behind. I guess whimsical fur lined hearts didn't appeal.  January, 1998? or 1988?

Sonoma State University Valentine art auction

At the Sonoma State University Valentine Art from the Heart art auction, I eavesdropped on people discussing my art. The woven watercolor collaged drew admiration, but no sale. The oil stick drawing sold for $55 to a Japanese man buying it for his granddaughter who chose my piece out of all the pieces in the show. 

I was amazed when she later asked, Do you know my father? pointing to Michael Schwager who runs the art gallery. Last year, his father bought my volcano collage photo as well. Michael said he gave the photo to his sister. I said Michael, Your family keeps collecting my art. But I'm pleased to know that a young girl will hang my art in her room. 

And I ran into an old College of Marin painting classmate, Joe Schmo. Joe and I were in the same painting class with Chester Arnold whose painting sold for more than $500, a sweet little piece.

I remember giving Chester a ride home once to a garage at the top of Wolfe Grade in San Rafael. Chester was extraordinarily odd even then. And I assume he's no less so now. Only now he's famous, or, at least, collectible. His weirdness now labeled as eccentricity. 

Joseph still looks the same, tall, swarthy, and handsome. I never remember his name. I see him once a year at the Sonoma State University events. He is never friendly to me but I say hello anyway. He used to live in Forest Knolls near the Manning's place, but he was always cold, even then.

Speaking of old friends, Greer Upton was saying to me tonight that the only time she ever sees me is at this event. Her friend Robin was with her. I said stuffed trout! When I first met Robin, some 15 years ago, she had printed a photo  of a fish on muslin and stuffed it. and Robin, who married someone I once knew, Riley, became a very young stepmother, but now she looks old and emaciated, and though Greer is getting heavy, she radiates a classic cherubic beauty. 

As to friends, so many people at this art show are not really my friends. Professional friends, co-workers in the arts, yes. But not friends. Unfortunately my connection with Greer and Robin is through a teaching arts organization we helped found. But the friendship never developed beyond that. She is a friend of Lee Perron's, and I've always been on the outside of that circle. Especially when I had to distance myself from Lee. My only real friend to emerge from that group is Marsha Connell who has a piece in the show as well.

Making a white heart for SSU Art from the Heart show (journal)

White on white, a map of the heart. For the Sonoma State University's Art from the Heart Valentine show, I made a piece of art on Morillo board, a papier-mâché heart on a sheet of paper, a heart cast from paper pulp. I added a section of urchin shell, a spotted guinea fowl's feather, some silk from a dead grandmother's shawl, and fragile coral from the Bahamas.

This is what the viewer sees. What I see: a break up of a seven-year relationship, too many belongings stored under my damp house, an accident, my whiplash, a long slow recovery, and an unusually wet winter – not a passage of time. But flooding stole memory from me.

It took me another seven years to heal before I could confront the loss of my possessions. Negatives without emulsion, glued photographs of random color and shape, this once was Yosemite. This once was a photo of my horse, my cats, me as a child, my friends. Imagine 20 years of documentation of childhood. Gone. My first books, Bambi's Children, books of fairytales illustrated by Arthur Rackham, and Kay Nielsen, The Bobbsey Twins, and The X Bar X boys, an outdoor girls' adventures series, all rotted to pulp.

All my art books. Dali's gold foil candy covered book with drooping watches glued together, now a large rotting laminated piece of cardboard. Janson's History of Art is now a gray pulpy mass. I won't miss that book. Or Mr. Johanson who insisted that we read it cover to cover. He hadn't updated his teaching skills in 50 years.

I mourn for my Encyclopedia of Natural History book with its lists of all the plants and animals of North America, now gone. I spent hours poring over that book as a child. Rereading each section over and over, collecting feathers, fur bits, chipmunk tails (the cats brought in), etc., to augment the hokey illustrations, now barely recognizable. A painful loss. How I loved those books! That one really really shaped my childhood interest in plants and animals.

I saw my very first coatimundi in the Yucatan, which we promptly ran over in our rental car, a rare jungle animal. And we ran over it. Whoops! John said, it was his time. I first learned of coatimundi from that book. The Spanish word is tejón, foes that mean there once were coatis roaming Tejon Pass? Probably not, as it means badger.


My horse's pedigree fell out of the back of the truck as I headed for the dump, taking what was left of my recorded memories of childhood with it. A pamphlet on the US equestrian team, and the Olympics in Mexico City fluttered to the ground.

As a child I fantasized about going to Mexico City. I read up Tenochtitlán and of the canals of Xochimilco, the floating islands. I was going to get there and visit the Museum of Anthropology too. Someday. I was.

Well it finally happened, I did get to Mexico City. You still can see some of the canals and the standing patches of water, but most of the lake bed is filled with cement. The temples have been torn down. I walk on paving stones that once were part of Tenochtitlan. The basilica of the church is made of ancient dressed stone. Tenochtitlán lives in the hidden hearts of stone. The lake lives beneath the city. You can see glimpses of it beneath the sewer grating on the streets. the ancient sure hidden in those cavernous depths.

How can I put all this in that white pulp slurry of a heart? Old art folders, once full of pristine watercolor paper, mildewed and rotted with age. I shredded the rag paper and bleached it . I used the pulp to make valentines of white handmade paper. Who will noticed that there are shreds of fine silk from Bob's grandmother's shawl?

When we got to Oxnard to visit Bob's grandmother, she was so excited that she had a heart attack, and died soon after. We were devastated. I know that Bob's father somehow blamed us for it. He was that kind of man. Hard to believe his mother was so loving. A bon vivant who knew Diego Rivera, and once showed us a mock-up of a mural he was painting.

When Bob left me, the shawl was one of the few things he didn't take with him. Probably because it was rotted at the time, like him, the decay from within. I used it as a beautiful curtain that let the sunlight in but blocked out peering eyes. The cross-sections of pale blue ribbon silk against sheer gauze, and a hand-knotted fringe. Someone said it was a bar mitzvah shaw. Hidden Judaism in the most WASPish of families, there was even a menorah in the closet. Her husband was Dalmatian, and what else? The story is lost forever.

Someone bought the heart at the art auction, I don't know who, I have no photos of it. Somehow it's fitting, since it was made of lost things from the past. Nostalgia tinted with pain of things lost forever, except for a glancing blow in this writing.

INSOMNIA at 3AM, Imaginary letters to Wiley

Insomnia after the art opening at Sonoma State. We went to Christine's and I think my decaf mocha was indeed very caffeinated.

So odd the bidding started right away on my piece, a sculptor from Occidental finally bought the piece. I think it was a major shock to see how well people responded to my work. Last year's piece too. It seems that the whimsical quality of the pieces combined with the words is a major attraction.

I'm glad the writing is important because it's a challenge for me to place the words on an art piece. How do you use the words so that they don't dominate the piece? We are such illiterate society. That's what I need to work on as a series.

It's hard for me to just do a piece of art. It has to be for someone specific, the personal aspect. That's what I tell the kids in class: the personal becomes the universal.

I have the 3 AM jitters, rapid heartbeat, a breathless feeling, and a racing mind. The things that keep going around my head. I imagine that I'm writing a letter on adding machine tape inside my large fish box piece dedicated to William T. Wiley. I'm carrying on about this and that, my urge to thread the words together meld with my desire to ask him for a watercolor.

The imaginary letter goes something like this:

Dear Bill,

This is just to say, to borrow a line from the good Dr. William Carlos Williams, that I admire the work you've been doing lately as an antiwar protest. Our work's been in a few shows together. Your piece in Megabark with Jane Hirshfield's poem. Mine with Ann Faught.

Last year's valentine from the Sonoma State art show drew a lot of attention, and some of the crossover between painter and poet interest me because I was a painter and now I am a poet. A painter-poet.

I wanted to tell you for years I fantasized about writing to you, to ask you for a watercolor that you did of my grandmother's house. I'm sure you probably don't even remember it. It's a picture of a red house with a painted black crooked chimney surrounded by the hills above Baranca Road.

That painting of my grandmother's house is the family homestead. You may not know that she is the oldest settler in the Valley, she's 93. The former champion, the old Frenchman in San Geronimo, is dead.

I rode past your house a couple of weeks ago but no one's home. Probably the last time I rode past your house was when I was a child on donkeyback. No, it was on my horse.

I remember when the Raynes sold the house after she choked on a piece of steak and died. You moved in soon afterward and placed various bits of debris in the yard. I was coming from the fire trail from my usual ride. There's another house up there now, so I can no longer trespass—I didn't even remember where the road comes out anymore. But I remember the sweet sizzle of bugs. I used to think it was the grease brush singing in the heat of summer to the tortured rocks.

It was dusk, something new was visible in the crotch of the madrone. Something large and white like a ghost. I thought of Mrs. Raynes with her clipped English accent, how her horse turned up that road, sides heaving, flecks of foam on his chest, as he carried that fragile load of human flesh home.

I was terrified to go past the tree, forcing my horse closer. I thought perhaps it was a phosphor from the deadwood. So I sat outside your window on horseback and watched you in the kitchen preparing tea, until the fear subsided. I suppose I could've screamed but the horse was already nervous enough.

Once when I was coming home from second grade, we had afternoon session and I when got home around 5 PM, it at dark. The low winter light on the fallen tree trunks glowed as though ghosts were living in the limbs. I was afraid to walk home in the dark. No one believed me. And, worse, Billy Joe Bianchi laughed.

Years later he told me he went up there to see if it was true, but the trees didn't glow at night. The timing wasn't right.

As I came closer to the madrone, the apparition began to decode itself. I saw that you had placed the white Styrofoam torso of a woman in the blackened recess where the lip of the Cambrian layer eked out a dark smile.

That torso gleaming white in the winter dusk, transfixed me to the spot. I couldn't move, it follows me still. I see something white in the darkness out of the corner of my eye and when I look at it, I can see nothing.

This is why you have to look at the Andromeda Nebula or Orion's supernova shoulder, out of the corners of your eyes. The Pleiades are a blur when you view them had on. You can see more when you look indirectly. And that's also so with art too. Sublime.

And that torso trapped in the trunk of an old tree was like an escaped dream let loose in the dark woods at night. Signs of habitation, a new owner. The light from the kitchen window knocked against the darkness. From within the encircled garden below the kitchen, the clatter of deer antlers, as they lifted their heads to watch us pass.

2/7/86
added, rev. 9/17

LOTUS IN HALF DARKNESS

LOTUS IN HALF DARKNESS
      —for Marty Goldstein

         Oct 14, 1949 - Jan 15, 1983

The sound of whistling
escapes from the lips of a solitary walker.
Down the empty corridor
a ringing sound echoes
from an empty can rolling across the cold cement
An escapee from the junk piled in the corner.

The corridor with its empty straight

lines and right angles leading no where. 

No one standing in the closed doors

and darkened windows.

The whistling sound—
a forced breath escapes 

from a friend 

who lies waiting
in a hospital bed.

His hand, a fragile lotus curled
on the white sheet can't stop the darkness
from creeping out of its lair
and spreading its viscous fingers of cancerous ink
across the soft grey carpet of his brain.

A song without words echoes through
the corridors of the brain.
The sentinel note sounds.
But there's no one there 

to open the closed doors
and the windows are locked shut.

We are all walking.
We take turns walking.
We all walk unannounced 

on that long, dark road.

6/29/82


A poem for Marty Goldstein, the first of my SSU classmates to die, of brain cancer. He was such a brilliant man, one of my close compadres in the Senior Seminar Literature survey class, and in the MA program. He died too soon, probably why this poem never made it to the electronic realm. Too sad. I still miss him. He died Jan 15, 1983, he was 33 years old. There wasn't a memorial, or if there was, we didn't know about it. So we never got closure. Next to go was Jim Montrose. We thought we were immortal. Here's lookin', at you, Kid.

Added 10/16

Women's History Month poetry reading, Sonoma State, calligraphed poster

Art, Poets, Technology panel, SSU

 

Robert Bly reading at Sonoma State

I worked so hard to produce that reading, workshop, and book party, and Robert Bly was such an ass towards me and treated me badly. He wouldn’t even sign my copy of the Rilke translations.

SSU Women’s History Week

Fiction class with Elizabeth Herron Fall 1980

Since I can't date most of my fiction and memoir, and it looks like I revisited some old pieces for this class, which, sadly, turned me off to fiction, I'll file them here, at the end of the year. I pretty much abandoned the prose process after taking this class and it wasn't until I established this blog that I was willing to revisit prose. 

I still have an aversion to fiction. I'm much more comfortable with memoir. I do like Elizabeth (as a poet), but I sure didn't like her class. I came away feeling like a complete failure in both poetry and prose. I'll own it, not blame others, it was all on me. My doors of perception, self-doubt, and vulnerability conspired against me. I wasn't very good at pleasing others with my work, which required a wrestling match before I got it down on paper (who knew I had dyslexia?). I guess I learned something from the class. But there's still a bitter taste in the back of the throat some 36 years later. 

The one good thing about the class was that I became fast friends with Ockly scientist/engineer Michael Fulton, who was working on a sci-fi novel. We saw each other for a few years, and kept in touch through the 1990s. Worth the price of admission. I've added most of this prose on 10/2016. It's hard not to resist fixing them.   Onward, as they say.

Petaluma Argus Courier, SSU,Poetry of Love

Ear to the Ground Poetry festival, Sonoma State University, 1980

I made a 40-page chapbook, did most of the grunt work.

An early version of  WOMAN IS OF THE OCEAN

WOMAN IS OF THE OCEAN

WOMAN IS OF THE OCEAN

As the earth unleashes its hold upon spring,

bees brush morning with their wings.

The eye gathers in clouds of apple blossoms.

Is it a woman's desire to wait upon the land

with the sound of the ocean filling her

leaving only the fish to nourish her

during the long drought?

The whale returns to the north, toward home;

she returns south to mate, to give birth

and to feed upon the krill.

There is where home lies.

Man talks in symbols.

He spreads sperm in damp wings.

The labial fire burns and dies.

Veins carry in the eye of the storm

and the coastline of the mouth 

is treacherous.

4/18/1980
rev 7/1980
Ear to the Ground SSU Poetry Festival chapbook, 1980

Poetry time log, getting paid was an illusion

I was simultaneously holding down several jobs for SSU, the Public Poetry Center, the InterCultural Center, and also CPITS. I was still under the illusion that I would actually get paid for my work so I kept note, but when I realized it was dust in the wind, I quit worrying about it, and just got on with it. But then I lived for poetry. It defined me. And I was also teaching at several schools as well. This log begins with the dreaded Robert Bly, reading where he mistreated me, and I put on the event for him, got him paid. I never forgave him.

 

Ghost trees, Michael Dow Workshop

During the winter it got dark early, we had double sessions at school and I got home after 5 PM. The cantilevered boughs of the trees reached across the long road that wove in and out of the trunks like a gray snake heading north. There were fallen trees decomposing along either side of the creek that ran alongside the road. My flashlight failed at the bridge. In the twilight, their light bark glowed faintly and they lay in waiting like great lumbering phosphor worms  and my fear rose up within me like a great black cape of smothering darkness.


3/20/1980 ?
added 5/3/2016
Michael Dow Workshop
freewrite