Bill Wiley

I remember when BIll Wiley moved into the Raine's cottage above the Sutton, then Fullick house on Arroyo Road. The Raines were from England—and so, they were exotic. We kept our distance.

Mrs Raines, our stern substitute teacher, who rode her big bay English, choked on a piece of steak at a dinner party—so we all knew the house was haunted. Death was an admiral dressed in jodhpurs, carried a whip but lived a lot farther away than England. Mr. Raines wasn't himself afterwards. Soon, the big bay dressage gelding was sold, the house along with it.

I used to ride bareback up to the cottage and Brenda Fullick and I would peer in the french doors at the long dinner table where it happened. Mrs Raines' cherished delphinium—a touch of Oxford in California—was blooming, tall blue pillars of grief. Campanula and coral bells tolled in the islands and eddies of wind. The abandoned riding crop, a snake in the grass.

I imagined that she wore the black cocktail sheath with pearls. The rustle of taffeta. Their first formal sit-down party in their new home in the New World. Settings for twelve. Was there an uninvited Judas guest? One for each moon? The silent white Os of their mouths as she slid to the floor. Facing east toward home.

In those days no one knew Heimlich. We were too far from town for rescue. Second-hand story. Tragedy travels on swift wings. I gave up red meat. Their fairy tale cottage stood idle, as if in mourning. They had built the house on a rocky knoll and the land and the seasons were taking it back, board by board. No one wanted to buy the house someone had so tragically died in.

When Bill Wiley eventually moved in, the first thing he did was to wedge a foam core dressmaker torso in the crotch of the madrone tree. I was riding back home late at night—I thought it was Mrs. Raines' ghost come to haunt us but the red mare was more sensible.

Bill didn't mind us kids riding by his back door. He'd smile and wave to us, from his stockpile of interesting junk. Stroke his handlebar moushtache and readjust his wide-brimmed leather hat, and get back to work.

Mrs. Raines would roll over in her grave to see her prim yard like that. But now the place fit right in with the rest of the Valley. Abandoned cars and TV sets. Twisted iron and weathered wood. He was an assemblage artist. I was the girl on the red horse. He was a stranger too. An outsider. We kept our distance.

Funny, how decades later, translating an idea into image, Bill etched plates of horses at Crown Point Press. A red and a bay. The whip and the Buddha of compassion. The horse she's riding is blue. The circle complete. I like to think it was in unconscious memory of Mrs. Raines resurrecting itself. I never did know her name.

On his etching, these words were inscribed:

Some horses respond to the shadow of the whip

Others respond to the first light tap

Still others must be flogged

Until they feel it in the marrow of their bones

So which horse are you

For which horse does Buddha have the most compassion?

—William T. Wiley

TWENTY YEARS AGO

TWENTY YEARS AGO
       —to William T. Wiley

You made a small watercolor sketch
of my grandmother's house
from the ridge, canted chimney,
red walls against the green valley
and I wanted it for her
but the child riding a red horse
past your house each afternoon,
too shy to knock at the door,
is gone now, like all the rest.
Today it is raining, it could be any day.
Exhile is a sleek river, and this poem,
a small, nagging seasonal thirst.

3/14/90

TO W.T. WILEY

This is just to say
that once I was a child on a red horse
who rode past your house
when you moved in
to replace the dead Mrs Raynes
who choked at a dinner party on a piece of steak.
but I was shy in the presence of strangers.
At nightfall, the styrofoam woman's torso
you'd nailed to the madrone tree
came alive to haunt me.
My horse danced nervously on the fire road
and I had to return in daylight
to lay that ghost to rest.

5/16/1987

LATE HOUSEWARMING POEM TO WM.T.WILEY

After you'd moved in, something new

glowed from the deadwood of the madrone—

Wedged between the cambian layer and heart,

a white torso startled my horse.

I don't know why, but I've always been afraid

of fallen trees in the forest at dusk—

a ghostly reflection of downed limbs.

Maybe it's because things unseen by the iris

come more clearly into focus: night vision.

These exponentials sharpen the artist's eye:

Andromeda, Orion's shoulder,

a Styrofoam torso, the half-life of memory,

branches learning to meet the ground.

The last time I rode past this house,

Mrs. Raynes choked on a piece of steak

at a dinner party; small white O’s

of the guests' mouths, as each searched

for an appropriate response—

and found themselves wanting.

I remember how her clipped voice resounded

like hooves churning up the steep driveway.

Flecks of foam & blood dappled his eager chest

the last time the horse carried her home.
Her husband and children moved back to Britain.

The light from the kitchen window

slaps against the corralled darkness,

antlers knocking on the garden fences

like the dead, my grandmother says—

Deer raise their heads as if in welcome,

to watch us pass.

1985/86/87/90 Solstice

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