The collector

I collect photos of landscapes and paintings that move me, an inspiration bank for new art. I never know what will grease the wheel but I do know if I collect enough imagery, it fuels the tank and fills me with longing, or if I am lucky, an urge to create. I don’t know which photos I will use, or how it will come out. That isn’t the point. Captured beauty, whether my own work or by the eyes of others, is still beauty.

Sometimes I gather chert and jasper red and green, abstract art embedded in lakes or creeks. Jewels glistening in sunlight and I feel rich when I add quartz and agates to the dragon’s wealth, in the layer of memory. Our small creek filled with treasures in the crimson roots of the alder caressing the water, so like blood, tiny dark seed cones like announcing Christmas in summer.

Sometimes I collect old coins and nameless iron gleaned from the garden, and admire the way that copper mimics the plants with their verdigris dreams. The rudder board of an old boat, brass screws. And my latest treasure, a big brass number six, part of someone’s address purloined from I know not where. The nail hole to mount it to a door or fence, both long gone, turned it into a swan’s eye and once I saw that bird I couldn’t let it go. It rides shotgun on my dashboard along with the river rocks and a brass cleat waiting for a jib line to tighten the sail.

8/10 Write On! Susie Terence

Lemon Rustler

Agh! Full moon loonies have taken to walking around in broad daylight, I caught a woman from up the street walking up and down our private driveway, tweaking, stopping off to rustle some lemons from our tree (with her own stepladder, no less). She's stealing the new lemons. Babies. Some of the big ones from last year too. She hid the old ones in the shrubbery for later. Meyer Lemons don't keep once they're picked. We won't mention her equally crazed chihuahua who was having a pissing contest with the neighbor's cat. Then, she had a long screamfest with the neighbors who were rescuing their own cat. All this while I'm trying to write. My knee is really cranky today. I barreled out the front door. All of us standing in the driveway ready for blood. I told her she needed to leave, she was trespassing. She called Ricky the manager white trash. It got worse from there. This may be Oakland, but don't mess with us, this is our hood. Police enroute. Welcome to hot summer in the gritty city.

Bill Truesdale

If it wasn't for Bill Truesdale's constant encouragement, I would've never thought of my zany email letter to him as a possible prose piece for House on Via Gombito: North American Women Writing Abroad (A broad!). (I had just returned from the USSR; I was abuzz, agog, as well as jet-lagged.)

Bill rejected my Peru travel piece and said—work on the letter. My flabber was ghasted. My shell was shocked. What letter? My email? So, from my emails, I drafted a train piece about traveling across the Russias. First big prose piece I'd ever tackled. Something like 10k words, it went through many drafts, and it also opened up the doorway to writing prose. And here I am, right now, writing prose....

Bill believed strongly in supporting emerging writers, and founded New Rivers Press in an old barn in 1968; Bill picked up lead poisoning from setting type as he set the first books by hand. The legacy press, with some 300 titles in print, is oldest continuously publishing press in the country. It was also the first book publisher to obtain a 501(c)3 nonprofit status, thus changing the role of small publishing forever.

So, yeah, I Bill, New Rivers Press editor extraordinaire. Bill died in 2001, after a long illness. Wherever you may be, Bill, riding that great zephyr in the sky, thanks for reading my zany eleventh-hour emails and seeing a potential story in them.

Nearly fifty women writers from North America contributed to the House on Via Gombito, an extraordinary anthology, published in 1991, long before the likes of Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, and other women traveller-writers came into the limelight. These women writers (and myself) were pioneers exploring the inner emotional landscape of travel, as well as the outer landscapes, in a genre stolidly set in a male-dominated world of heroic adventure writing.

My memoir about traveling across the USSR, Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace was reprinted in Writing the Rails: Train Adventures by the World's Best Loved Train Stories—by a subsidiary of Workman Publishers, Black Dog & Leventhal. It was a great line up (of mostly dead writers), Paul Theroux, VS Naipaul, Edith Wharton... I kept thinking they'd made a mistake including me.

Sadly the book was stood up and remaindered after 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading or book signing at Barnes & Noble. Alas, I do not have an electronic facsimile of my story, it's on the ever-growing 'to do" scan pile. It's done! Visit the page, Writing the Rails: Train Adventures.

C.W. "Bill" Truesdale

Letter from New Rivers Press 5/10/2001

House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad

When these prose pieces were written

This is just to say that I rewrote and endlessly revised these West Marin prose pieces so I don't have exact creation dates, just the year, and I chose to post them all during the second half of this year, as they were all thematically related. I also had a lot of free time recovering from the car accident in June, so I worked on these pieces, to keep my mind occupied as I convalesced. It was also a way to collect family folklore, ever an ongoing process.

When these pieces were transcribed to the electronic publication format arena a decade later, I was also posting pieces in my blog thematically vs. by creation date. So creation dates are relative.

Once I went back to school, then another revision process began. And more versions were spawned. I began to lose track of all the dross and bits and pieces—first drafts, for example. Then the quest was: how to deepen the pieces. How to push the edged of the envelope of prose. I was terrified of prose. This was an attempt to quell my fear of prose and also stay true to the poetic voice.

I also was moonlighting at UC Berkeley in the Celtic Studies department, while going back to school at San Francisco State, and adjusting to urban life in the Bay Area. I was holding tight onto the past, while bootstrapping my way into the world of prose. So, there are a lot of Celtic references as I reclaimed my past and made history personal. — MH 3/18

• The Christmas We Had Two Trees (Prose) v2
• The Christmas We Had Two Tress rev 3 
• An Inarticulate Hunger
• Blue Willow
• White Deer
• Celtic Fringe
• The Sky is Falling
• Huckleberries
• Anim Chara 

The Healer (prose, no efile)

Summer squash, prosepoem

Sunday, November 6

The yellow squash plants are beginning to show the first signs of succumbing to winter. It begins as a small vegetable mold on the roof eventually coats the whole plant. Amid the new buds, one yellow summer squash shaped like a perfectly inverted bell. 

Acrid squash odor, crushed umbilicus. Pale white streaks among the overwhelming yellow, brighter and glossier than a lemon or an apple. Yellow, pure cadmium from the tube, so intense, it pushes the green garden air away with small vibrations of life. I want to ask it, why so yellow? The jealous sun takes its warm from the south, or are you kin to the summer sun? Small reminders of summer. 

Those vessels of light burn against the cooling soil, those furry leaves glisten with snail tracks prisms for the sun. Pale green stems against yellow orange blossoms curling their five arms around the fruiting body like fingers, or brain coral as it rises up, so phallic. The base root swelling and bursting through the boundaries of the star shaped bell, until it becomes crenelated like the sunset over the sea.

Green veins end in small claws. One set at the tip of the star-shaped flower, the other at the base, like two hands. One holding up the sky, the other holding up the sun as if from victory like a tiger without stripes, a coat of fine hair velvets the soft throat of the flower.

I remember picking the ones unpollinated, my grandmother taking the small egg suns dipped in flour pollen, frying them in butter like dinosaur tracks of the sun feeding me in late summer.

Long French curve of young leaves wrapped around embryonic clusters, diamond shaped, small flying saucers on launchpads. Large leaves jagged green hearts. Umbilicus, a small green eye, a rusted navel where the flower once raised its victorious hands towards the sun. Pointing in radical asymmetry in the direction away from the center. This extravagance of life too soon dies.

In the heat of summer, you can almost hear them growing, taught-skinned, ripening and bursting with seed—genetic code to carry them through winter. Small blind eyes in the soil waiting for the signal to begin.

The kitchen knife reveals their hidden star charts, the marrow and veins of space. Seeds sliced in half like a photographer’s negative of the night sky. Stars align in the direction of orbit.

These blossoms, bell-shaped, wine cups to drink the sun from, or knobby flying saucers severed by a knife. You rejoin the halves but the breach within your venous dealings but you can’t bridge the tension released by the knife, all that round symmetry released from a circular chamber discovers the straight edge and can never go back to that innocent immortal promise of eternity so lightly taken in summer’s mounting passion.

11/6/88

this eventually becomes 

• SUMMER SQUASH IN A WINTER GARDEN

On the Day Robert Duncan Died

Point Bonita:

The scratchy sound of pen and white page, the drip drip of noses, and the scratchiness of the throat. Brokenhearted Sharon sighs, and I wonder how much my art piece sold for. Layer of marine haze tinged with brown, the ozone hole growing, closing in biological arithms, dedications to death, the healing power of green and the fire of magenta. 

The man with the guitar surveys his handiwork in the garden. With a few cord changes, Eurydice is looking back over her shoulder where darkness sat waiting to find the center of her eye, jostling her with paradox how much we savor without knowing the sense of vision. 

Mount Vision in Point Reyes with its strange helicopter pad and orange mushroom radar. Like a Stonehenge of sorts. What's strange quarry gave birth to them? 

The chupping of a robin in the chaparral, such comforting sounds – the dead one on my doorstep. I guess it's time to draw the robins again.

I am a mover of small rocks. From Oaxaca, and Monte Alban, the small pottery shards fit into the. niche on the north peak of Mount St. Helena. We invent ritual. I take back five rocks and find a huge quartz crystal, my talisman. 

At the big rock, with no other name, this megaliths on our hill, the Christmas day ritual, was to visit it with my grandmother. The sorrow washing over me and waves, caught between laughter and rock. 

From Mount St. Helena I take volcanic red rock and leave it there, and from this place I take ouartz from the ridge outside of Guerneville. I placed both rocks in a pyramid, making a triangle. Cairns to keep me safe.

At Armstrong Woods, after my ritual, four vultures came. Three from the north and one from the south. They converged over my crude altar made of stones – I left corn and bread, cranberry juice and smoke from sage. My crystal rocks pointing north receiving instructions, the rocks I brought back from St. Helena, the one from the top of my childhood hill. 

At the big rock, a bluejay and a hawk were my gifts. On the volcano, a crystal was my gift. On the ridge, for vultures circling and weaving feather and sky with shiny black feathers.

Blue schist slabs. I understand something more of geology. I have become a connoisseur of rocks, igneous, Franciscan, metamorphic.

I have forgotten all the rules. The club flag keeps whipping out prayers to the wind.

The sea answers. She is our mother. These shells, these rocks, are gifts and we will clean oil from the wings of birds because we were born into this passage. 

The passage of a fellow soul is marked in the striated silver of my bracelets, dentalian and Jasper. The churning breathing of the sea, I've begun to tell the trees things I never knew I had inside. 

The whispering of women, all those sea sounds. Surcease of wave, the crunch of rock and rolling of tires on pavement. Coyote brush in bloom. Timeout. People laughing. Just keep on going, one says. The whisper of the sea, the flag, we are all learning new languages to keep us on the shores.

 I am in a camera facing the iris of my thoughts. The diaphragm open and close, open and close, like the contrasting and expanding universe. I capture some snippets of emotion after 20 days of testimony from the sea. The elegance of necessity crystallizes into a single vortex, the sea churning and churning, rising like a cover for sleeping bodies.

I dreamt I was in the city house, the twin beds of my grandparents hiding their arms, were they dead? No, only sleeping. I say, excuse me I didn't know you were there. 

My grandfather is someone I don't recognize, he looks Italian and is smooth with the ladies. We talk soft so not to disturb my grandmother, she needs to sleep. And I comply, but who is this man to tell me this? He is my father whom I have not seen in 15 years. I dream of guns and falling over backwards, of sickness, and rolling on the ground with dogs. All this on the day Robert Duncan died.

2/5/1988

CPITS wokshop
this freewrite morphed into two poems

• TURNING STONES (after Layer of Marine Haze)
• LAYER OF MARINE HAZE (aka Turning Stones)

Mt Veder 1

I awaken to the conversations of two women. The finches under the bedsheet beeped and nibbled upon its edges. The women were silhouetted against the window in the morning sun* I couldn't hear what they were saying. 

I dreampt my grandmother had fallen and the weight had dropped. Her lips were blue. A piece of iron had pierced the sagging flesh of her right elbow during the night. I hold her in my arms, thus, as she held me. I can't hear what she is saying. A woman comes in as we write, apologizing because she interrupts us, and then she leaves before she tells us anything. 

Driving down Mt. Veder, the mountains before me seem like cardboard cutouts against the solid sky. A balloon having more dimension than the mountains drifts like some great beast against the sky. Hot air rises. It is a given fact. I can't shake this sleep and the deaths I dream of—deaths of those I know and the deaths of those who are strangers. There is rust everywhere. A child's water-color set is on the table. I apply shapes of color. Soon I am carefully filling pages with color and I think of Franz Mark's blue horses in the rain and Bob was saying how close to Lascaux he died.   

Our alphabet comes from the caves of Lascaux. The calligraphy of bison before the hunt. Ochre pigment. A child finding the cave. The woman asks if I always waken like thus, and I say no, and leave, wondering why is it that I don't waken like this—the brush tracking pale yellow across the white of morning. 

My notebook tumbles down a steep embankment and lands face-down on a small overhanging branch suspended six inches above the water. Carolyn says, I'm surrounded by mothers. Are you a mother? 

I take off my kimono and thongs. I place my bare feet on the lateral earth. Poison oak lovingly strokes my ankle. I hear a car coming. As I ascend the ravine, I grab my pillows, sleeping bag, kimono and shoes. I step on my white skirt and the sound of stitches giving way like rotted flesh, or like the feeling of a job well done and I think of what we do to protect this writing. 

There is so much to write about—war, phlegm on the streets, someone wretching in the next room. I think of Lebanon, the way we ignore those in pain, the aged, death. I am shivering from what I have heard. How can I write of this? I have nothing poetic to say. 

This becomes a letter to an imaginary reader and what I really want to say is locked deep in some crevass waiting for the morning sun to melt the ice. It turns to water and disappears, turns to air before I have time to drink. I hold the brush in the air, waiting for paper.

Maureen Hurley  
Napa

Mr. Abatni of Avelar Road

There's a man from my dreams, whose name is Mr. Abatni. He's a smallish, balding man who lives on Avelar Road. I don't know much about him except it's been over a year now, and still his name randomly crops up like a mantra.

It's like the two are intertwined Avelar Road and Mr. Abatni. I have no idea why. Maybe it's the way the two words sound so close together that haunts me each time I pass the road. Maybe Mr. Abatni doesn't even exist, except in my own mind. Even so, he's clamoring to get out and I keep stuffing him back in. Because I don't know what the story is. What if there is no story?

But you see, I've been so busy dreaming lately and it seems that I just don't have the time to write about him. I resent the way he keeps introducing himself and intruding upon my life. Especially since he's a fictional character. Especially when I'm feeling depressed. Especially when I dream.

I like to hide out at home and make plans on catching up with myself. Put away my clothes that are still draped all over the bathroom since the last time I went away, how many months ago? Do my laundry properly, not this wash the underwear, and the white dress I've gotten so fond of, in the sink.

Actually, I've quit wearing underwear because I hate to wash them. It doesn't really matter when I wear a dress anyway. No one is looking. Who has the time for a born-again virgin in a white dress?  The best part about hiding out from the world is that you can break all those plans you made.

Sometimes I don't answer the phone, especially when it's Lee on the other line. I always know when he's there. I always know when he's calling. He has a way of calling whenever I think about him—which is the most of the time. It drives me mad.

At least, when we're fighting, he won't call. Sometimes the fugue state can last for weeks. That gives me plenty of time to catch up with myself—except, then I'm so preoccupied with rewording and analyzing what I should've said, could have said, that I sit in a stupor. There goes the laundry.

That's when the story of Mr. Abatni crawls out from under the pillow I'm sitting on. Sometimes I think I'd like to banish him from my memory banks forever, but he's like a bad tune that gets stuck in your ear, and plays over and over until you want to punch your own ears out. Even now he is haunting me, and yes, I still can't seem to write about him. Because I don't know who he is. Or what he wants. So this non-story will have to do.

Ah, the sound of Avelar, like the halls of Avalon. It jogs the memory like a fairytale, or a novel that one becomes so absorbed in, that reality seems less likely than the story.

The dreaming at night gives birth to the credence of the tale. Enter into that landscape of far distant pavilions. Avalon, huge halls where knights still dwell. King Arthur, in my dreams, yes, Avalon. Avelar. Echoing through the cavernous depths of my brain.

But I detract from my story, that's the way he is. Puts a fog over my brain. Doesn't want to get born. I guess. I heard  rumor that he and the missus ran Casini's Campground in Duncan's Mills for a while. That was before she got religion. It seems she didn't want to live with him anymore after that.

So he moved over to a small cabin on Avelar Road. He didn't have a whole lot to look forward to. No job. No missus. The TV was the only saving grace, I guess, or maybe fishing. He used to tell stories about the one who got away. I was never sure who is getting away with what, the fish, or Mr. Abatni.

The choppy sound of Abatni. Short, rotund, and balding—like the man. He drove a little sky-blue car, a Toyota, the valve rings were so bad that that little circles of black smoke drifted out from the exhaust pipes like twin fumes of dragons.

Who says dragons aren't real? They've just been reincarnated. Get it? The pun: inCARnated. It could be worse, dragons mating with cars. In this advanced technological age, anything is possible.

Grendel really does live in the bottom of the mirror. That's why I avoid the looking glass. Beowulf was right, you know. But it's too late to do anything about that. The treasure's long gone. A mere reflection of itself.

Abatni. There is no Mr. Abatni. It's a name my dream made up. It's a bit hard of hearing. Oh, I get it: abat ni—it's all about me, or not—with a headcold. Or I'm dreaming in Church Latin again. Or is it Provençal? It happens. Pay no heed. Carry on. Abat means blind. and clearly I am blind. Or not. Said the knights of Ni. Nay. Ave Maria. And avalar is to to endorse. Endorse nothing.

The ducks bobbing along the coast of Santa Barbara are nursing black milk from the mother. Long live Beowulf. He slew the wrong enemy. Grendel and his dam were not the enemy, Herrot, the meeting hall, and civilization—were.

Blame is due, where credit is given. And when I walked along the shore, my feet were covered with black milk, black gold. How crude. Oil companies insists the crude comes from a natural seep at Coal Tar Point. What a wonderful way of covering it all up. The not me syndrome. Do they think we are blind? Where is the dragon when you need him?

The oil companies feed the nursing public a cockamamie story and they all swallow it. Blind endorsement. Good milk. Black milk. Milk drips like honey from the open sores along the coast of Southern California. SoCal, lo-cal. Calories from the black mother. Feed the children. Nursing. Weanling. The great teat. And there's rumor that they want to drill off our northern coast too? I think not.

May all the oil companies get udderitis.

August 1982? Other poems bundled on the same paper, on 8/13. Friday the 13th! It fits.
added 10/16.
Minor changes and connections to make the story work. I still don't get it, but it wanted to be written, so, I indulged.

At the Lotus Sutra Spa, Entering my 30th Year

 At the Lotus Sutra Spa, Entering my 30th Year
(Or There's no such thing as a quick fuck)

One of the men attached to Josh's stable clambered out of the cold tub. I notice his penis is shriveled, wrinkled and uncircumcised and I sigh. It is a difficult and lonely search for an uncircumcised male. Here in America, Judaic tradition affected the better judgement of most doctors and the mothers of sons.

I think of X, an unusual example of a man. The woman sitting next to me jabbers on,and I discover we have many mutual friends in common including X. She asks me how I knew him. What could I say? Yes, in the carnal sense. After three years of torture, the male denial of love, an infant seed torn from the uterus and thrown out with the other garbage chatteling our lives? Yes?

This thing called love has become a symbol of death; leaving behind proud flesh— the irreversible scar tissue that never heals? And last night, for the first time in six months I sat across from X at the dinner table wondering where it was all going to take us this time. We each try to carry on with our daily living one breath at a time.

Sometimes I forget to breathe. Each breath brings us a little closer to dying. Answering the woman next to me, I say, Yes, I know X. Loaded gun. The biblical sense is never mentioned. I take a deep breath and smile.

X's uncircumcised cock holds an almost mythical fascination for me. The man lived with for seven years—before the seven-year itch set in (ten years, and I've spent it all with two men.) Y chromosome said to me once in the middle of lovemaking that he was angry with his parents for letting the doctors circumcise him. His bereft mother said, I didn't know...it was the thing to do at the time. Like sheep, their lives lead them closer to the slaughter and they quickly go forward, afraid to cause a stir.

Y said his pleasure in sex was limited. He blamed it on his parents, the doctors and on America. I said, How can you know if the whole sum of your pleasure has been lessened because you've been circumcised? You've never experienced sex as anything other than as a circumcised man. Y proceeded to show me the pucker, a crooked stitch-mark from 1949 where some doctor took up a surgical needle in hand, and forever altered the foreskin on Y"s cock.

The first time I saw X again, was after the summer solstice. X worked out a slow seduction game. Y was working nights, and I was sleeping outside on the patio because the smell of frying bacon at 4 AM and an  man angry at the world climbing into my bed at dawn demanding ransom for the world's wrongs, left me cold. It was easy not to come home one night. Y left for the weekend without telling me he was going. Or where. With whom.

X undressed me by candlelight. How many other women has he seen with their skin bathed by the pale dust of candlelight? Did he reach out and take women to his bed like ripened persimmons just before the final turn of rotted-flesh slumped in the bowl—in this world of eat, or be eaten? My parched bones reveal no new secrets or truths. My body hungers for no other  man's touch. Even after all this time. My relationship with X was a lesson on survival, how to endure life.

Another birthday comes, and goes. And X's birthday in two days. They all seem to forget me. I hurt somehow. Birthdays are supposed to be special. I spent the whole day at the Lotus Sutra soaking it off as I ceremoniously entered my 30th year.

Even this place was not devoid of X. I thought I heard his familiar pssst! Turning, there was no one there. Just the empty room and a startled glance over my shoulder as I spread the plush rust—colored towel over the massage table.

That pssst reminded me of the time I thought I heard angels when I was five. I was playing with toothpicks—striking them across the rough rusted green teeter-totter that was buried in the tall oat grass. It was mid summer, probably August. The oats had long since spilled their seeds because my socks had the tiny seed birds hidden in their grooves. Oat seed birds, like herons on slender legs and their beaks pointing skyward.

Out of nowhere and that intense summer heat, a strange woman's voice said Don't do that! Startled, I dropped the toothpicks and looked over my shoulder. There was no one there. I forgot about what I was doing in the tall grass. Perhaps they really were matches. Or angels. Who knows?

Later, at dinner, X said, I saw you at the Lotus Sutra, you looked like you were having a good time so I quickly ducked out. It seems his presence is always walking through the rooms of my life. We tried to sever our connections. I don't want to see him again, ever. I'm furious with him. And Maury. She's here too. She even has the same name as me.

It's like one big drop-in party at the Lotus Sutra. Who needs ghosts when the present is so full of appointments? She stepped out of the jacuzzi and my eyes burned holes through the back of her skull. The welling up of unfamiliar jealousy, and I wanted to follow her, jump on her back and pull her hair. It's true what they say about the jealousy of a woman. Suddenly I understood why crimes of passion are committed.

Like an animal, ready to bite with fangs bared in the traditional cliché, I watched her long loveliness, so like Modigliani's nudes, shedding water in the half light. I could see why X made love to her. Suddenly, I was moved to pity watching her slow ponderous weight and bovine gaze. Her acceptance of my rage, the brutality of life, no joy.

Somehow, I knew it was already over between them—less than three months after X wrote me that Dear John letter when I was away on vacation. But still, I wanted to taste the coppery saltiness of her blood. That animal inside of me circled her and I cornered her just for revenge's sake.

Later, at dinner, X said between clenched teeth, How often are you going to resurrect it? I'm so sick and tired of it all. I just wish it would all end. I answered, I won't let it die—not until I'm ready to. I later sent him my Dear John letter. Three pages single spaced guaranteed to enlarge any holes in the
Swiss-cheese conscience of X.

I carried that unsent letter with me for months as a reminder not to go back on my vows. The ultimatums... I thought that through all that incredible craziness that there was something worth fighting for...  Love stronger than most loves; a connection of the mind and body that would last lifetimes. Hah. Was I naive. I told him we certainly couldn't be friends either.

I thought intelligence had something to do with emotions. Intelligence has nothing to do with emotions. His desire to have me as a friend as he pursued other women would lead to a lot of corpses dotting the proverbial landscape. I was patient. Patience is something women are very good at. I was more patient with him than most women are with their own children.

If he had any emotions to share with me, then I probably wouldn't have sent the letter but the post office delivered it anyway. No time for regrets. What's done is  done. I told him that he, in his secret male paranoia, was afraid of being raped (or maybe he secretly wanted to be seduced, but the way he used it against me was a sperm grenade waiting to explode on contact).

My capacity for pain had been more than filled, or, so I thought. What I've discovered is that pain lives in the same wellspring that jealousy does. Slake your thirst. Its only temporary. Soon one's thirst needs slaking, to be quenched again. And again. I shut another door in the room of my heart (life?) Why am I attracted to men who resent their mothers? I too resent my mother. But it's all Oedipal with them.

I'd forgotten about all the childhood dreams I'd had as a kid about the leopards and the lions who lived up the hill by the water tank. At night they'd catch scent of me and come charging down the path in search of fresh meat. I'd run to the house for safety but every time I got past the front door, closing it on the lion's paw, the door would shrink and swing free on the door jam. Like cocks too small for the cunt. Totally useless.

I'm a fugitive in this world of small cocks. My hunger is larger than this room and no man can feed me. No woman either. The rejection is another element dotting the landscape in this world of retreat.The societal substrata of the Lotus Sutra unfolds from the cushions and reveals itself to be a bandy-legged man looking for another aesthetic piece of ass. In this world of hustler, and be hustled, there is no room for me. I laugh at then absurdity of it. I fob him off. He struts off to another conquest. A numbers game.

I once thought I'd have to become a nun because my second cousin was one.  I tried to be bad. Maybe that's where I learned to suffer. Thats the real nunhood. The suffering, not the abstinence.

There's no such thing as a quick fuck. At the Lotus Sutra I am the only woman looking at cocks, their size and shape, and whether or not they've succumbed to the surgical needle. My jaundiced eye scours over their bodies. Too lean. Too fat. too, too... It doesn't matter. I'm not interested anyway. I practice my breathing. Each day brings me a little closer to the source.

See Letter to Lee Perron 10/19/81
Looks like a first draft. Two dates: 12/8/81, and 11/24/81. Probably written 11/81, on my 29th birthday.
added 10/16

Sangre de Luna (dream)

Sangre de Luna

The cloudbank rests on the Olympics like a shelf or a tree fungus, cuts off sunlight with mist a thousand feet thick. While Victoria is in full sunlight across the Straits.The smell of the tide overpowers the odor of breakfast, it was a bargain for $0.69. I got a whole-wheat sticky bun, coffee in a Styrofoam cup, muddy coffee by Cremora.

Last night was an unusually high tide, was it the full moon? In the water, within the foot of the ferry dock, a flood tide. The sand shifts, races like the water, only in a slower syncopated rhythm. Fish leap towards the dock lights. Its red glare rippling on the water, the same lights that flooded our high ceilings.

 Under flannel sheets we snuggle. God I haven't had those since I was a kid sleeping in my grandfather's bed, in my grandmothers room painted green. When he died, I moved into that green room, and his quilt became mine. It had roses on it, I remember.

On the beach an old dog barks and howls, more like the way a child who is forgotten why he is crying, does, but likes the way air passes through his vocal chords, weaving primal sounds around the human heart. I understand his loneliness, like the way the waves understand the slant of the shore.

It's a soft Irish day. No it's a grand one. A fucking grand one. It doesn't matter which. Take your pick, they all mean the same thing in the end. This is not Ireland. My grandfather, dead these past 25 years.

The rain drizzles, the shower drizzles more rain on my body. Somewhere in the building, another mass of water is being flushed back into the sound, and I stand there soaked up like a sodden cloud in a dry shower, waiting for the toilets to fill up, and the drains to quit backing up.

There's the odor of kelp in the shower stalls, and all I can think about is a woman I made up in a dream, named Jasmina, whose red roses could almost be plucked off her skirt, and she danced to the strains of the guitar. Sangre de Luna. Her kelp hair, thick fistfulls of it, like a prayer rug down her back.

She was in the cantina where you didn't stop off. She invited you in, and you entered like a demon lover. For two dollars you drank all the tequila you could hold, balanced like a tightrope walker on a slack rope, you swing great hunks of sky across the room.

2. But I am telling you this you, you wouldn't remember, you were never there. Jasmine never was a Mexican queen with the silver earrings, in the red skirt who danced for you.

Late in life you decided to take up climbing trees. The apples were as red as the roses on her skirt. You remember the scent of apples that hung heavily in the room. Windows and doors covered with old woolen army blankets. A gift from someone who couldn't pay.

She danced for you. The old record player rasped out a melody. She danced on the fire of the rhythm that beat it's way back into the floorboards and dust seeped into the drinks in the barroom below.

No, you were never there. You woke up in bed alone, a red line running from your ear to your throat. The only thing missing was your pants.

In the next room, the hissing of a needle on the old record, the alcoholic snores of an old man. The spittle, yellowed and dry on the corners of his mouth and the three days growth on his beard contrasted with the oily black smudges on the pillow.

Outside the window, a steady red glare in the water, I am not afraid of its undertow. What if my feet should get stuck under its advancing embrace? What if I had stepped off that ridge? Or in front of the moving car stolen by this kid who ran away from yet another foster home, and the town police knew him by sight?

Only I am hearing the strains of the guitar. I am throwing back my kelp hair and dancing. I have been dancing so long, my feet no longer have shoes. of the light brings about a perpetual day.

The primordial volcanic sun viewed through red smoke and ash. You thought you heard the swish of a skirt, but a seagull lands on the dock and creosote is a kind of oil oozing up from the pores of fallen trees and great lumps of tar float in from the tankers offshore.

And in another part of town, a kid climbs an apple tree. His red shirt does not have roses embroidered on it. From the tree, he can see the ocean and the tankers anchored offshore are old US fleets sold to foreign countries for scrap. He jumps down and runs along the sand singing a song about a dancer named Jasmina.

3. In the Town Tavern you sit and drink down another American beer and see how the sunlight is shining in Victoria across the border. This weather hangs over at the Peninsula like a great shelf fungus jutting out from a tree. Only the clouds are attached to the mountains that raise nearly 8000 feet up from sea level.

Did I tell you I followed one of the canyons in from the ocean. I penetrated deep into the heart of the mountains. At the pass, I turned towards the ridge. A spine of land, and I stood a long time looking down at 2000 feet drop.

On three sides, one step out could've saved me. But I was distracted by the color of flowers growing in a crag, that the mountain goats, for some reason, avoided. There were alpine roses in full bloom, like the ones growing in the Swiss Alps that summer nine years before.

The glacier is retreating. All glaciers over all the continents are retreating, except the one I stood in front of, the Columbia glacier, and I listened to it crack and shudder like some great God trying to get out. His only method of escape was by water, drop by drop. It was as if he waited for summer, a day warm enough, to melt ice, but ot always brought the chill.

I placed my hand on the edge of that dirty blue tongue but could feel no sensation in my fingers, it was more of a burn and ice. My fingers went into my mouth instinctively, like a child.

I am not afraid of the frozen wave of this glacier, or its undertow. What if my feet should get stuck under its advancing embrace? What if I had stepped out off that ridge? Or in front of the moving car, stolen by the kid who ran away from yet another foster home, and the police knew him by sight.

Only I am hearing the strains of the guitar playing. I am throwing back my kelp hair and I am dancing. I have been dancing so long my feet no longer have shoes.

I walked 17 miles in one day just to get out of that valley and away from that cliff. I am barefoot, my calves are swollen. Who is playing the guitar? The room is dark except the red light coming in from the docks. Sangre de Luna. I hear the swishing of skirts. This seagulls are asleep. That red light shining on the water. Sangre. Sangre. Somewhere a man cries out in his sleep the name of Jasmna. The scent of apples hangs heavily in this room.
Port Townsend
7/29/1981

missing final prose hardcopy so it has typos. Needs revision.
See also  SANGRE DE LUNA (poem)
added 12/16

Port Townsend journal, Michael Daley

7/25 it has taken me three days like Christ to come home. The transcendence into pain, self-pity, thoughts of suicide, quitting teaching poetry, quitting organizing readings, putting my past – all is an act of self pity.

Galway Kinnell said that and Sexton indulged in the ultimate form of self pity, selfless suicide. I have been sulking, I've been pouting inward, no lower lip projecting anymore. No longer acceptable.

Waves of sorrow are flooding the rock strewn beach. My heart unwinds itself like a snail poking its antennae out to see if the coast is clear.

The clouds paint an illusion of color over Mount Baker and is smaller twin poking out of the marine layer of mist, whether the cloud are real, no matter. It exists behind those islands, floating on the water.

Galway says to me: you can't quit writing, ever. Not the way a dog quits killing chickens when the carcass is tied to its neck till it rots.

I wanted to hang my heart around my neck. Proclaim myself smarter, saying I cannot love again.

My wounds run open with black blood deep inside my heart lies, my heart lies. The day and not days and nights of poems yet to come.

The clouds of Mount Baker are expanding back into cloud. The smoke has subsided.

The true skin of writing never buries itself moisture like under the waves of sorrow.

The mountains and the curves of land are breasts of the earth. The clouds milky teeth white breast in the air and sky. And while I sit on Michael Daly's porch, contemplating dusk, I wait for time to pass. I evaluate the sunset. I saluted the sunset yesterday with a bottle of California wine, drinking little sips from the stems of grapes before the harvest, calling me home.

Michael Daley founded a literaty journal, Dalmo‘ma

The sun reminds me that it rises again just as surely as it sets, like the low hum of the well oiled machinery the ships on the Straits of San Juan de Fuca interrupt the whispering of waves along the island shore. I've spent so little time writing. I do not offer my craft a place to sail. I'm learning to sit study and listen.

Michael confesses he was an altar boy, but his face darkens. He escaped the seminary after studying to be a priest. He carries the wrath within still. Our common thread, we're all poets teaching in the schools. All, on the outside, looking in. Poet fugitives.

Last night, I swung the double headed axe, splitting wood to earn my keep. Michael thinks I'm a lightweight. I resent it. The kindling flies off into the bush. I glare at him. He shrugs, re-evaluates, and smiles at me beatifically. Breaks the silence with his broad Boston Irish vowels.

I'm striking at the anger off my bones the previous night, the news of losing both my lover and my friend. My lover and my friend have found something to ease their souls and my burden becomes weighted doublefold and that axe is unsteady at first, becomes sure, the pile of kindling grows exponentially from out of nothing.

Michael resents my presence. He is like a jealous god. Doesn't want to share Sharon. Last night I heard them whispering. I lumber off to sleep in the backseat of the VW bug. He says to stay another night. He doesn't know I overheard what he said. Where will I go?

I have exercised hard, I have stretched and used muscles. I have poured new oxygen into my blood, the tissues and my heart are becoming fine-tuned as I run through the pineleaf forest. Sharon says you must listen to your heart.  You must write about it no matter what. I am learning the readiness of lung and leg as I take the time to stop and eat the thimbleberries and the blackberries. But my tongue awakens to acidic fruit, rotting before it is ripened.

Sharon Doubiago

7/24-25/1981
Pt. Townsend, WA
added 9/15

See True Writing, another version of 7/25 entry

Dream Sequence journal

7/24  dream sequence

Didn't sleep till 4 AM. Thought of Lee and Mora together until it drove me frantic with rage and I was saturated with sweat. When I finally did sleep the dreams that came forth were bizarre.

I was given a rare mouse with purple fur. I had to transport it to the other end of the school corridor where some lockers were. I got on someone's case for having my key to the locker. She was using it for too far too much. 

And I was also dragging this heavy lamp base and stand with my left hand. No one would help me. It caught on a crack and struck me. My hand was wet. I looked down at the blood, feeling no injury. 

The mouse was on the pavement facedown. Death twitches, its right side eviscerated, and from his stomach, protrusion, like a clam foot, he was struggling for life. I thought for a moment he could be saved by a few stitches but I realized he was too badly injured. The mouse, other than it's purple, and cuddly, didn't mean that much to me. That I had gotten attached to it.

While walking down the corridor I wondered what shall I do with it? Kill it myself? Finish suffering? I, who it accidentally inflicted it all upon this mouse? From under a sweater crawled a white cat who immediately grasped the situation and started to eat the mouse before it fully died.

7/24-25/1981
Pt. Townsend, WA
added 9/15

See True Writing, another version of 7/25 entry

True Writing

1. The clouds of Mt. Baker and its smaller twin poke out of the marine layer of mist. Whether cloud, or real, no matter. It exists behind those islands floating on the water. Galway says, "you can't quit writing, ever. Not like the way a dog quits killing chickens when the carcass is tied to his neck until it rots."

The lenticular clouds of Mt. Baker expand and contract into cumulous shapes. The true skin of writing never buries itself oyster-like under the waves of sorrow. The mountains and the curve of the land nourish the horizon of the sky, and, the milk teeth of clouds sink into the air.

Like the low-oiled hum of machinery,  the sound of ships on the Straits of San Juan de Fuca interrupt the waves of sorrow, and, the whispering of the inland waves tells me that I've spent too little time writing, denying my dubious craft. I am learning to sit steadily laden with words, waiting for wind, to set sail.

2. Last night I swung the double-headed ax, striking at the anger in my bones. The axe swung unsteadily at first, became sure-bitted, and I find my rhythm, swinging the singing blade that bites the smooth inner grain of gleaming heartwood. Stacking wood for long winter nights.

My  lover, and a friend have found a way to ease the ticking of clocks, and a way to outwit the silent whitewashed walls standing in evening shadow, I wanted to hang my heart around my neck and let the open wounds run into the streets with the black blood of the sewers. Deep inside is where the days and nights of poems lie like sleeping dogs.

I imagine waves of sorrow flooding the cobbled beach of the Sound, and my heart is tucking itself in like a snail, afraid to poke wayward antennae into the air. Stasis. The shell of home, a prison.

Climbing the mountains, I have labored long, stretch unused muscle, sucked new air into my lungs. I am learning the readiness of lung and leg. As I stop to browse on thimbleberries and wild cherries, my tongue puckers to the strange acidic tang of fruit, rotted before it's had a chance to ripen. Like my writing.

At the end of my journey, I sit on the beach at sunset with a bottle of California wine, taking in the secret green heart of grapes before the harvest, this lifetime vow of words, a rare vintage calling me home.

7/24/1981
Pt. Townsend, WA
added & revised 10/16

The Close of the Year (prose) Trailside Killer

The  Close  of the Year (prose)

Below me  a  fog lake slowly wells up aid roils  over like milk flowing  down  the  hillsides in a slow dance that bathes the trees with dew and moisture on the slopes  of Gilliam Ridge. The peaks  of the Cedars  and the  Red Slide jut out of angular winter shadow like pyramids catching the sun.

Below me, hikers climb out of the  ravines of Austin Creek, and a chainsaw buzzes, a woodpecker calls to her mate, and somewhere far off, an early lamb bleats for its mother. Somewhere to  the  south near Point Reyes a killer is stalking unwary hikers and the corpses are an unholy offering in a place such as this that cries "no more blood".

A bloodthirsty killer who  knows these woods, who somehow lures young women away from the relative safety of numbers, and places precise bullet holes in their heads. Why this? That these woods have come to harbor such evil? The sunshine is so warm. I take off my woolen clothing, my bare skin and feet are stroked by feeble winter sun. My eyes grow heavy with sleep. Should I also expect danger from that intruder this far north?

The body of fog roils toward me like spores furring on excrement and three ravens  cut across its surface making their own kind of offering to the land.

The sun in the southernmost position of the sky needs fire, not blood, no bone-fires  to bring it back from solstice. I hear the  ticking of the clock. The ticking of the clock... a line from one of my earlier poems.

I learn to settle down and rest comfortably like a cat among lines of my own choosing. I inherit them, I, who disavowed them, they keep coming back in all of their angular beauty—an untamed vision to haunt me—like those nameless faces of those murdered women of Point Reyes.

A roaring sound is heard. Does the fog roar through the trees as it passes through? or is the fog a lake, and do the the waves lapping up against the shore of the ridge roar? or is it the eyeless souls and mouthless tongues of all those murdered women of Point Reyes?

12/22/1980
added 7/17, minor revision
A reference to the Trailside Killer

• THE CLOSE OF THE YEAR
• Winter Solstice, 1980

In the Garden

In the Garden

She was at the bar ordering the Calistoga water when she saw him. It seems that their paths were always crossing these days. She suspected it was a mutual sabotage, neither one willing to let go of the other.

She knew he might be at Garbo's Niteclub but decided to go out anyway. She was tired of avoiding all the places he might have gone to. There weren't many places a single woman could go to have a quiet drink and dance off the day's tensions.

Besides, her friends were there. Should she give up her friendships just because he was there? It was a public place. He didn't have his name stamped in every corner the way a dog leaves his scent when staking out territory. She had just as much right to be there as he did.

She didn't want it to seem like she was avoiding him, even though she was. If she made it obvious, then he would think she was mad at him and then a confrontation would follow, and she would cry a little, making a firm resolution to never see him again. But she knew she could never keep that promise.

She had tried that one before, God knows she had tried. It was after she had lost the baby. It was probably for the best, but her arms ached to hold that baby. She wanted to put that baby in his arms and see his face often as he held his firstborn son. She often thought it was a son. She never knew. Didn't want to know. Somehow the guessing was always more satisfying.

They had tried to make a clean break of it, the moving on that would eventually need to happen, or so he said. What she hadn't counted on was falling in love with him. It was the last thing she needed. Her marriage of five years was breaking up. His being there to help her through the adjustment period, and surprise pregnancy on top of that, was more than she could handle.

No, she went into this relationship clear eyed, and in control of her feelings. Who knows why the blind Seraphim aims at random with his deadly arrows. Arrows to the heart. More like porcupine quill's. Can't pull them out. Not even with pliers. Sometimes they work their way out, emerging on the other side of pierced flesh.

When she knew she had been struck, she no longer resisted. She figured it was fate and she may as well just accept it. She certainly didn't want to be tied down just yet. She wanted to sample some freedom. All those men out there with extended cocks waiting to be tried. Nonetheless, it had happened.

Maybe she was a prime candidate not having been in love for a couple of years. Her husband and she lived together for reasons of convenience. They thought they were surviving in a tough world that require two people banded together against the common enemy.

And when there was a cease-fire, she popped her head out of the manhole and discovered there wasn't an enemy in sight. There was never an enemy out there

The enemy existed all right, it was right there in her bed, sleeping with her at night, feeding her by day. The common enemy raised its snake eye and hissed her name. She fled in terror, right into the open arms of this man sitting at the bar as she waited for her drink.

He walked over to where she was sitting. She could sense his presence and it excited her. She could feel the subtle variations in body heat the way a snake does when it is blind and in summer molt. The snake sheds his entire body including the eyes. That's why rattlesnakes are so deadly in summer. They can't see, and blindly striking anything warm.

The hostility rose up to her abdomen and lodged in her throat like a fish bone hastily swallowed – she tried to civilly answer his queries. How was she doing? And so on. She wanted him to go away, leave her alone. She knew there wasn't much chance of dancing with anyone else that night now that he had come over to her table.

Everyone always fled whenever they chanced to meet up like this. It wasn't just his physical size that made people avoid them, it was something else almost intangible, as if people sensed that that they had some unresolved business, and perhaps there was a presence of danger. Maybe they sensed the volatile nature of their relationship and thought it best to clear off.

It wasn't a case of the roving men realizing that they were no match for him, mutual friends were uncomfortable as well.

She got up to leave, and he walked her to her car. Once outside, they felt freer and breathed more easily. There wasn't that awkward sense of his hovering over her when they were inside. They walked close together, almost but not quite touching one another. They lingered at her car, talking of nothing to make time pass more slowly. Neither one was willing to say good night to the other.

He said, hey, you still owe me a massage, I'd like to collect it now if you're not too tired. Or, if you are, tomorrow morning would be fine too. She wondered did he really want to massage, or was this yet another clumsy attempt to reestablish contact? She was half angry half intrigued. It didn't occur to her to be upfront and asking precisely what he had in mind. Chances were, he would deny any interest in her, that all he wanted was a massage.

They had often spent the night together as friends. Was this the big showdown? Would you want to sleeping partner for the night, and then a quick goodbye, nice to see you in the morning? If that was the case, then he was in for a surprise because she was going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't want to fuck her.

If he laid one hand on her she was going to really let him know what a bastard he was and if he wanted to fuck her, then he was going to have to own up to the whole affair, that he did love her and if he wanted to sleep with her, then he damn well better marry her and be done with it.

She was tired of the cat and mouse roulette and she wasn't going to get sucked into making the first move because he was unable to make it himself.

Sex wasn't a deciding factor in their relationship. If it wasn't there, or so he thought, they weren't having a relationship – regardless of all the other aspects of their time spent together.

She slept in his arms, holding hands and thighs, they clung to each other the whole night long until dawn separated them from dreams and reality.

At breakfast he said, it's nice to know we can still innocently sleep together without the confusion over a relationship. She thought, yeah, we didn't fuck. Are we innocent? Who's garden are we in anyway? And who let the snake out?

No, we are not innocent, just blind and unable to help ourselves. And we keep on trying to reach each other in our own pathetic ways.

Fall 1980

Orange Cat

An orange cat ran across the road tonight. I tried to avoid him. The car stalled, a tuft of fur drifted up and caught in the light of the headlamp. Just a few days ago, I noticed the Cat Crossing sign as I drove to work, and, I thought I'd never be in a position of breach of faith. You said, "I hit an orange cat the other night too." And we talked about karma and abortion, as if the cat were the karma. Or the dogma. But we didn't really believe in that. So, tonight I hit my first cat. I felt so guilty and  sorry for the owner of that cat who would look in vain for her wayward tom. Then wondered about fate. Are we merely instrumental in the scheduled deaths of others whose time has come? Where are we in the right place at the right time for the accident to occur? Do any of us die before our time has come? What about all those people who try to ended it, and then live? Is it destined as to who will live and who will die? What about all the men and women who abort their young too soon? Is that karma of the unborn? Or are we all murderers whose time has come?

Fall 1980
added 10/16
slightly revised

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.

The Lingual Arch of the River and the Sea (dream) (prose)

The Lingual Arch of the River and the Sea

River mouth bathers, I want to go in the water. There's a dock being built where the ocean meets the river. It's a dock with a wooden wall around it. There will be several doors and windows put in so the view won't be blocked. Someone will probably eat breakfast there during good weather. The people who live there are friends of mine, I don't know who they are. It's a dream. It's hot. I want to go swimming. I think I'll go thru the unfinished door porthole—it's a lot closer than going all the way around to the shore.

I spot a mighty wave building up out at sea. My God, it's another tidal wave like the one that reappears in this other recurring dream except in that dream the sea is always tropical and there are lots of islands. Hawaii maybe.

This ocean is definitely not tropical. It has that black-blue quality of brackish water. Bright sunshine and blue sky summer afternoons of intense summer heat. The beach is reddish crumbly granite. Lots of iron stains from the hills that tint the river red. Its probably the Russian River but I'm not sure.

The wave, as it collects on the far side of the horizon, exposes much of the rocky beach. I grip the redwood 4x4 being used as a dock piling and I wonder if I can hold on to it tightly enough during the tidal wave. I probably will have thousands of splinters in my hands if I do. Better splinters than drowning I guess. My fingernails will probably break off at the quick from the intense pressure of fighting the wave.

The mighty wave crashes up against the dock and I am terrified that I will be swept away , but the dock takes up the shock of the wave and it protects me. The wave gently laps up through the doorway where I'm standing, and , as it passes through the doorway, I hear the ocean speak for the first time in my life.

It's probably the first time its been able to speak to anyone in god knows how long. How many incomplete doorways are built along the shore for an ocean to speak: through? I didn't know.

How could anyone know that the ocean needed a doorway to speak through, or that the ocean has just been dying to talk to anyone, anything—for centuries? We've all misunderstood the ocean. It speaks in a low breath, whispering profound truths of pure rhetoric. I am hearing it, and for the first time, my life makes complete sense to me. It all makes complete sense. We are all at home with it all.

I try to remember a sentence or two to quote from so I can plaijerise upon some of the ocean's many truths. People will think I am so wise, so zen. But just as it speaks, the words empty out of my ears as fast as they go in.

I can't remember one thing that the ocean told me. All I can remember is that the ocean needs a mouth to talk through, that the waves are tongues, that the river too is a tongue leading into the dark whispering ocean of many tongues, that the mouth of the river is interlocked in an embrace with one of the many mouths of the ocean, that the ocean is polygamous. It tongues rivers everywhere.

All those mouths exchange the souls of those who are indifferent to life, the dead who slip into the grey snags of willow growing along the river shore. They slide down through the roots of the willow and into the river to that long journey downward into the sea.

The river is a molten tongue carrying them downward into the sea. The words on the tongue of the river are words of all those who still wait to speak. The ocean is a tongue. The river is a tongue. They share the same mouth. To speak they each need separate mouths. Men have one mouth and two tongues. Women have two mouths and one tongue.

Mouths and tongues each need a place to lie in before they can speak. We need the lingual arch of the river and the sea.

8/15/1980
I revised this for ELizabeth Herron's prose fiction class. A version was written in the summer of 1979. So, the origin of this could be 79.
added & slightly revised 7/17.

THE LINGUAL ARCH OF THE RIVER AND THE SEA 1979