Ancestor dream

Moonlight fell like slivers of light on the sea, as the ship circled the island. She gathered up her carpetbag to disembark, not that she had very much by way of possessions to begin with. She had with her a sewing kit, and Irish lace to earn her keep. Luckily, she wasn’t alone. Her brother Joe looked after her, but he soon he would leave her  to ride the train from New York to Battle Mountain, where her uncle and cousins would meet her with the wagon. He would work on the boats and come to her by way of Galveston months later. She clutched the old carpetbag to her chest, the stars overhead wheeled a brilliant mantle over the desert sky. She wanted to sing about the halo she saw around the sun. That sundog of music filled her with wild dreams. Then the low lying fog that muted all sound, spoke of other futures, and no one would hear her silent screams tinged with fire, her earthly inheritance, or the lyrics of blood coursing through the generations that she would beget.

5/24/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

Pandemic freewrite

Ghosted, we were lost. A splash of blue on the canvas of the sky. The birds took to the air, the raiments of spring, so much relentless beauty in the midst of all this darkness.

We clung to our sanity in any way we could. We took to our minds. Our inner sanctum. Our inside worlds flourished in a hostile world where the faceless enemy waited, ambush at every encounter. 

Despite everything, I needed to take care of Sam. I was rich in responsibility for his safety, my care provider job knew no other boundaries, and so we persevered. 

Which saved us was ourselves, alone. The psyche explored new boundaries and took no hostages, only ourselves. The floor of darkness waged with open borders, we were refugees all.

Life during a time of COVID

We all erred on the side of caution from this unknown disease that arrived from a distant shore. We were unschooled astronauts suiting up to face an invisible foe shining in the dark. We relied upon caution, where every encounter could prove to be fatal. We experienced stranger danger and friendly fire. Suddenly ordinary actions were potentially lethal. We could not see the enemy, it was unnamed and faceless. We saw danger everywhere. The gas pump, doorhandles, cardboard boxes, even the mail was suspect. We hunkered down and hoarded toilet paper. We came to selfish blows over our own asinine priorities. The fear was palpable, it was like the time Chernobyl blew, and we all hid indoors. Only that danger could not be avoided. The late April rains brought lethal isotopes to our doors, and as we watched the rain fall, we knew that the eaves of our houses or the metal roofs of our car offered no protection from the invisible fallout. Then, there was the nightmare of Fukushima. But despite everything, we survived, though we couldn’t see the enemy glowing from within the cellular walls. During Covid, we didn’t know the face of the enemy. It too was nameless, though it had an acronym and a number. We also learned that the enemy was us. I knew it would be a long time before the world as we know it would be safe to return to, some semblance of normality was beyond reach. It was a long wait. During the barrage, we turned inward. We examined the star charts etched on the cave walls. We didn’t realize that the tools of resilience were embedded within us, and as we explored the unplumbed depths of our collective psyche, we arose like singed phoenixes, and then we turned our dark isolated realms into global villages, and the airwaves created an electronic renaissance studded with starlight. We thrived in that limelight, despite everything.

5/10/23 Write On! With Susie Terence

Spring arrives

The wildflowers were late in arriving, all that rain, deluge after deluge nearly had us building arks or doing glacial prepping. The trees, too long without adequate water, are cautious, having shed most of their leaves during the long drought, including the coast live oak, and redwood. It’s hard for me to witness the miracle of spring when all the backroads are aligned with dead and dying trees. Still, spring arrives all out of breath, the distant hills are losing their first blush of yellow against green, and the sky lupines seep into the crevices to fill the void. It’s as if small bits of the sky have fallen and landed on the steep hillsides. Of course the poppy gangs are shouting like cheerleaders on their thin rock outcrops, they are unable to compete with the foreign grasses that the cattle dote on. This year, the sun too was slow on the scene and the grass was a pale shadow of itself which kept the cattle working overtime. But now the sun has returned, and they graze contentedly, none of winter's sparsity nipping at their heels. First up are the spring calves snoozing in small hollows, their ears like small sails luffing in the breeze, while red shouldered hawks circle and careen with the vultures, looking for an easy meal. The light is still low on the horizon and you can see in the way it drapes itself over the hills, as if dressing the curves in a shawl of chiaroscuro light.

4/26/23 Write On! prompt Terri Glass

Early morning trail ride

Some Saturdays I rose before dawn for early morning trail rides with my friend Stephanie. Everyone else was asleep. Her father never knew of our morning escapades, and my grandmother didn’t seem to mind. But I also didn’t tell her where we were going, as it was too far from home for a child on her own. I was on my horse, somewhere deep in the hills, and therefore, safe. At least she never said anything to me. My own parents were in absentia, my father deep in a bottle, my mother in one asylum or other. Steph‘s dad was a little more controlling. See, her mother, who was a Russian translator for the UN, blacklisted by McCarthy, knew all about silence. She drank in silence, and because of that silence, she died in the fire. A short in the dryer. Because Les couldn’t protect his wife, he was over-protective of Steph. The boys, her two younger brothers, not so much. Bucky was close to our age but Gooby was still in diapers. We’d simultaneously sneak out of the house just as the sky was beginning to lighten, and meet up at the county road. The morning fog was like a tight glove protecting us from the mid-20th century. We could’ve been anywhere in time. Sometimes we’d sneak through her upper pasture, past Old Grandad, the Hereford bull, to get to the fire road that led up to Mt. Barnabe. But the stiff barbed wire gate gave our small hands pause. The top of the mountain facing due west was our goal. It was always a spectacular view from the crest of the ridge, the morning mist parting to reveal the sheathed silver sword of Tomales Bay, tracing the trench of the San Andreas Fault, and the clenched bare fist of Elephant Mountain. It restored my equilibrium to see the word from a raptor’s viewpoint. These refuges, these steep hills and valleys were the coping weapons of my youth.

4/12/23 

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

     —after Naomi Shidab Nye’s Alive

Dear Cat, yes, I know it’s raining outside every door at the same time. Meowing at the back door won’t fix the situation. I know you haven’t seen rain before but complaining to me won’t work. I know you think I have the power to move heaven and earth, but, seriously. Besides, it’s so cute watching you take dainty steps across the void, shaking each paw as if you were dancing hokey pokey in double time. 

Dear Road, I watched in astonishment as you opened up your maws and swallowed all those entitled SUVs, tires and all. You were like Saturn eating his children. I don’t blame you, I hate them too. I bet you’ve been waiting a long time to do just that, to open up. And then, how you bared your underbelly to the sky, with the drought and all. How did it feel, did they taste good to you? Did they taste good to you? Like a box of See’s candy?

Dear Meadow, yeah, sure, often I am called onto you, just like Robert Duncan said. It’s the buttercups reflecting sunlight under your chin. But he left out the messy part about your feet stuck in the mud, like cement boots. And that running carefree part, The Sound of Music wafting from the cloud-speakers. Yeah, no. Surely you must know by now that rolling on wet grass is never a good idea. My granny warned, that when you caught a chill, it meant someone was walking on your grave. Horsemen pass by.

Dear Mr. President, did you really grab Marilyn behind a closed door after she sang Happy Birthday to you in a bias-cut sequined silk dress—so tight that she had to be sewn into it? Or was it the other way around? We witnessed your fall again and again in slow-mo on that grassy knoll, with Jackie piecing together the star maps of your soul. Something was lost that day. Call it a loss of innocence. We are still struggling to find our way back to the garden.

Dear Self, may I call you Self? It’s more polite than saying, Hey you! I know you feel that your life was put on hold, shelved in a dark closet. But surely you know by now that life isn’t fair, and admit it, it was a void of your own choosing. You didn’t play the game right, and 1997 was not a good year for you. But if you latch the door, and then look up, you will see a trail of stars sliding across the darkness that engulfs us all in the end.

1/18/23 Write On! With Susie Terence

I write this poem beginning with Mr. President, then I flipped it from the bottom up.

Naming one’s duty

Naming one’s duty is a tricky business. I suppose I could be a tree or a horse, but then what? Having shaken off the shackles of Catholicism, the Lord’s Prayer is too deeply ingrained in my psyche to casually cast it aside. Shall I name my last request? Give it a reason? Shall I finish it off with a bird of praise? Pluck its feathers from my teeth?

7/24/22

Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti

       —Cormac McCarthy July 20,1933-June 13, 2023

I can almost hear William Faulkner sluicing a vein with all that O-negative blood resonating in Cormac McCarthy’s writing. A seething ghost informant. Both of us distantly related to the first Cormac McCarthy, having canted back to kiss the Blarney Stone. In love with conjunctions. And, and, and…. A man who couldn’t keep his day jobs, who carried a 100-watt bulb so he could write at night—no matter what fleabag hotel room he called home. And I love the fact that Cormac used an old Olivetti that cost $50 from a Knoxville pawnshop. And that hand-to-mouth living from grant to grant, a story I know well. A well that goes dry when you least expect it. Nothing but dust and bitter darkness aligned with distant stars. There is something poignant about Cormac auctioning off his 50-year-old Olivetti for a quarter million in order to fund his writing residency at the Santa Fe Institute. A haven of scientists, and of course, Cormac. And a friend found him a replacement Olivetti for $11 in a thrift store. Those Olivettis were the Italian race-car typewriters of writers, sleek, svelte, built low to the ground, and extremely transportable. He’d take the old Olivetti to the gas station for its yearly blow-out with the air hose. To think 5 million words poured forth like a river of regret from the paten of that old Olivetti. Talk about mileage. May he be granted 5 million more words. I learned to render my random scribblings into poetry on a enameled powder-blue Olivetti purloined from my mom’s paramour. That Olivetti was more like a moped than a race car. The matching zippered case was like a mod-squad mini dress. White go-go boots and all. All those bottles of whiteout. But when I couldn’t find new ribbons for it, I let it go. I had to let it go.

Black Bart, a life of crime

Imagine a self-styled Robin Hood intent on leveling the playing field between bankers and everyman, by robbing stagecoaches from Wells Fargo. See, Wells Fargo did him wrong, they screwed him over a lame land deal, they robbed him blind, and no, he never forgave them. Whenever there was a shipment of gold, he arrived on foot, unannounced, wearing the dust coat of a clerk, and a flour sack over his head. He was a gentleman poet, he never relieved the passengers of their trinkets and keepsakes. Only Wells Fargo. He offered up a poem, a posy, and a white handkerchief which he left at the scene of each crime. But Wells Fargo never surrendered. For years he harassed and robbed the stages, always on foot, having walked across California more times than he could count—to carry out his revenge. He was undone by a laundry mark on a handkerchief. No use crying over spilt milk. He was done with his life of crime, and poetry as well.

6/22/22

• Black Bart Rides Again
• Black Bart, Gentleman Poet

Blackbird and crow

In the sky, a blackbird dives and pecks at a crow flying too close for comfort. Tiny speck, like a period at the end of the sentence, the blackbird harries the tail of that interloper in his airspace. With this airshow, we begin to understand the fable of how the wren became the king of all birds by hitchhiking on the back of an eagle to see who could fly the highest. That little bird, well out of his comfort zone, dived and swooped in the air like an acrobat, leaving the crow so perplexed, he headed for safer skies.

Wild grasses

There is that moment of utter beauty, when the non-native grasses grow tall enough to ripple in the wind with a certain sheen like watered silk on the hills embroidered with deer trails. In the scars of old edifices, and in a field, a compass of native willows covers the bowl, the lowest place were water collects, not quite a stream, but groundwater. I realized suddenly, all those trees were one organism. One willow that lost its branches and fell making new life again and again and again. And I wondered, how long that grove of willows had stood there? Very much like the Panto alders of Colorado, maybe they are not clonal bodies, of course they’re clonal. The branches fall off, maybe they’re not joined at the hip or root, but they are all one organism. I repeat it many times over like a stutter, Water willow, water willow yellow willow pussy willow pussy willow, say it say it again say it. Laugh, say it again.

I have some questions for the geologists:

I have some questions for the geologists: I absolutely cannot remember the eras of the geologic calendar. I got the seasonal epochs down, PMC, but those little leapy subfloor eras trip me every time. Is the glass of geologic time filled with Pliny the Elder? Or was it Pliny the Younger? What happens when it’s half filled; is it not-only-but-also half empty? I never remember who observed what. What about PtheE’s little blue rowboatie in the Bay of Naples, giving him a ringside seat, when Vesuvius erupted in 79AD? Did Pliny, who identified and named hops, Lupus salictarius, aka Humulus lupulus, drink and dream a little wolfdream before he died of ash / smoke inhalation? Not to mention those clinkers falling from the sky. Did you know that the alcoholic content of Pliny the Elder XX Imperial IPA- is 8% ABV. His nephew Pliny the Younger is XXX-rated and clocks in at 10.5%. Would that help me  to remember?

Harmonic Convergences

After Robert Hass’ Story About a Body

How we define Eros, the breast becomes the talisman, she said. I gave them back when I was done with them, she said. Mother Earth was there to greet her when that too failed. She was cleansed by fire, she became ash and bone, and carried on with the harmonics of the universe. I have outlived my mother by five years, I am ready to give back my breasts, but it may be too late, as I watch my left breast turn its eye ever inward. Things are what they seem, angry wasps inside my breast seek an escape from the confines of the body.

4/1/22 NaPoWriMo

(I’ve been haunted by this image ever since Bob tried it out on us during a workshop at a Napa Poetry Conference in the early 1980s. I never knew the title.)

On this day, Virginia Woolf

On this day in 1882, Virginia Woolf was born. Circling the drain of depression some 59 years later, at the end of March, she slipped sacred stones in her coat pockets—much in the way the Egyptians once hid scarab amulets in the back of the throat and under the heart as protection for the next life. After completing her manuscript, Between the Acts, she gathered cobblestones along the shore, or was it from the road that lined the village of Rodmell? She said, “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.” And as she walked, a tributary of words whispering dark secrets followed her along a towpath to the river’s edge. She waded into the River Ouse near Lewes, and slipped in, letting the current drag her down. The words were chasing her. Ouse as in muck, or as in shorebirds? As in the Celtic word for water, uisce, which gives us the word whiskey, or as in oss, Norse for mouth? There are several River Ouses in Britain, this one is in Sussex, a place she once described as “an inland sea.” The Water River, call it the stream of consciousness. The river opened its mouth to drink her in and kept her down like Ophelia, or Undine for three weeks like an errant kelpie before it gave her back to the air. The River Ouse is filled with birds, flightless water ouzels singing over the rocks, and ripples, and the river is feathering its way toward the air.

Not Protea but Silverswords

Jerry Downs posted a photo of protea, and something I remembered that twinned it to another equally rare plant, arose unbidden. When I descended into the aeolian slopes of the cinder crater of Haleakalā, Maui, on the Sliding Sands Trail, I thought of South African protea, not having a namebank for the tall cones of silverswords that greeted me. The ahinahina (grey-grey) that evolved from ancestral California tarweed, greeted me with rosettes of tiny red suns. I later found out they only grow on Maui's tallest summit — and nowhere else in the world. In an extreme high desert, they live up to a hundred years, their final act, to flower once, then die, scattering their seeds to the vagaries of the wind. I imagined that Haleakalā had roped all the days of the the sun and anchored it to these silverswords, but each night they cut the bonds so that the sun rose again in the east. Not Protea, but with similar extreme survival skills.

SILVER LINING photos

 

As I approached the old stock pond to take a photo of a gaudy wooden decoy duck surrounded by visiting canvasbacks, mallards, and mudhens, I was startled by a stacatto of splashing—it was too much for the ducks who burst into flight. Was someone skimming handfuls of rocks from the levee? No one there. Ghosts? Then I realized those stepping stones lining the shore were dozens of pond turtles—a bale of pond turtles had launched themselves into the murky depths of the water. Though I was far away, I was a threat. In years past, I might’ve considered myself lucky to see a turtle or two, and here were dozens of turtles sunning themselves along the embankment. I thought of the story of Turtle Island. Were they always there in such great numbers and I didn’t know how to see them? Sometimes the oblique glance from the corner of the eye sees far more than what’s right in front of you. I suddenly felt rich, as if I had found a cache of unexpected change hidden in a hole in my pocket.

• NOTE: THIS POST ALONG WITH 12 OTHER POSTS WAS ERRONEOUSLY REMOVED BY BLOGGER FOR VIOLATING COMMUNITY STANDARDS ON 5/14/21. It was reinstated as a draft the next day. I am still pissed off.

Red Tide

When I was young, during deep summer, when the red tide came in, we used to drive out to Blackie’s Pasture near Strawberry Point, and head towards Tiburon, following the shoreline to catch the rare bioluminescent lightshow, where the small waves lapped in, ethereally lit from within. And a decade later, after the bars closed, we’d drive out to Goat Rock, under full moonlight, to scribe our names and lost fragments of poems that would never otherwise be written, our deep confessions in the sand. The ocean as our witness. Our writing glowed with an unearthly light produced by the dinoflagellates trapped on the shore, waiting for the next wave to take them back home.

4/17/20

Corona dream

Last night I dreamed a tightly curled succulent, the size of a baseball, opened up its knife-like leaves into a crown, a corona. It sprung into action when I approached, instilling both beauty and fear. It was tracking me, almost sentient. There was no escaping it. It followed me everywhere. I dreamed I was infected, and woke up in a sweat. And of course, I panicked. We once had a sepia-tone lithograph Arkle, a famous Irish racehorse on the living room wall, and I decided colorize it, to make it look more lifelike by lightly tracing around the outside of the horse with a red pencil, the kind teachers used to correct homework. The addition of red line really made the horse’s flared nostrils seem alive. You could almost hear him breathing. I also embellished a photo of my grandmother’s long-dead brother. She was not happy. See, in the old Irish tales, animals from the Otherworld always had red auras, red-ringed ears, and noses. They lived forever. Decades later, when I scanned the family photos, that embellished photo of my great uncle, was the sole survivor, and I had to remove the traces of my childhood art. Penance. Fortunately it was a sepia-tone, more forgiving to work with. Survivors say the color of their dreams changed—so vivid, that there were no boundaries between waking and dreaming. It was as if they had entered another realm. Lately, I’ve taken to coloring soft red lines around my dreams in order to keep them alive.

Disguise dream

Last night’s dreams led me to the past. I was cast in a role from the late 1800s. I searched my closet for appropriate clothing and decked myself out in layers of long dresses, a facsimile, for sure, but I had no appropriate shoes. Modern flats would give me away. It was important that I was incognito. My life depended on it. But pulling off the disguise was proving a difficult task as I had given away nearly all my clothing and shoes when I fled my ex-boyfriend’s house last year. I found some old Reeboks but they were mismated shoes, singles—one red, and one black. How on earth did that happen? I loved my red pair, and wore them to death until this century—but the black ones were from the 1970s. Egad. Time collapsing. I awoke, wondering how I would adapt. How I would be able to pull off the disguise. How I could fool the audience. Then I remembered the black paint. Forget about the Velcro straps. I could disguise that, easily enough. Problem solved. Then I remembered it was April Fool’s Day. What kind of joke was that? And who was pulling the strings?

Pumping gas in a time of coronavirus

The gas pump handle was something I didn’t even think about when I topped up at Costco on Wednesday evening. I was trying to be responsible by keeping my tank full in case of emergencies—something I had learned during the October wildfire evacuations. I was so careful not to touch the card reader, or the buttons or the gas grade selection button. I can’t remember if I used my alcohol gel before I recorded my mileage. Social distancing is hard enough. All this constant monitoring of unconscious gestures takes some getting used to. And as if to make up for lost time, I’ve been thinking about that gas pump handle a lot these past few days. Imagining all kinds of symptoms. The only thing I can hope for was that the Costco gas pump attendant was wiping down the pump handles periodically—but I doubt it even crossed his mind. Faced with the unforgiving math of epidemics, we are living in such extraordinary times. The entire world is having a time out at the same time. We will not emerge unscathed, nor will we re-emerge as who we were. The past has irrevocably shut its doors behind us. O brave new world, indeed.