Post Moderna writing

Three days after my Moderna booster shot I am finally ready to get out of bed. I slept the dreamless fugue of Lazarus during most of the first and second days, and I slept late today. I never sleep in. And every old injury awoke to remind me of its halcyon days, including my knee and back. My hands ached and every old injury joined in on the choral litany of pain. The night sweats were like an atmospheric river. I was drenched, couldn’t move my right arm, and the shot, a large angry welt. Getting out of bed required extreme balancing acts. I got dressed, navigating an errant foot through the leg of my knickers took finesse, like threading a needle, as I had pulled my lower back again, this time, the left side, while digging ditches for the coming storm, but I managed, and ventured downstairs for my morning coffee. Only by now it’s late afternoon. I will pay for that late cuppa tonight when I cannot sleep. But when one is in the throes of a boostershot altered state, all time bets are off. And so is time itself, for today is the solstice, the shortest day of the year. My first activity of domestic violence was to vacuum a portion of the carpet where I had spilled my morning oatmeal and perhaps a little brown sugar as well. But that act left me deaf and breathless, as did navigating the stairs, and making the coffee and all the myriad errands it entailed. So, before I even had a sip, I was done and spun for the day. Listening to Billy Collins read Christmas Sparrow I am moved back in time to when my grandmother said to let a bird into the house was to let death enter. In Irish tradition, a wild bird was a harbinger of death. That traitorous wren. Only in Billy‘s case, the cat did it. And it was a house sparrow. And today is the death of the old year. So, letting that small feathered poem in, and then letting it go again, was an act of releasing the old year, with a sliver of a chance for renewal. I am amazed by how short his poem is. There’s something about when a poet reads, how time suspends itself on a meat hook, in the hurt locker, where all manner of things are hidden, and yet are only alluded to in poetry. Ex tenebris lux. The dark and the light together as one thing. Is it because I had the vaccine, and because I knew I would have some downtime? I bought expensive desserts, tiramisu, and macarons for my coffee. Not macaroons but macarons, the French ones, as expensive as a box of See’s Candy. They are small meringue dreams that melt on the tongue like sweet clouds. I am having trouble remembering sequentially. So everything I do requires retraced steps and I am in and out of breath, piffing like a steam train, which only exacerbates the memory problem. Today is not a good day for multitasking. I can’t even remember what it was that I forgot to remember. I have to retrace my steps, making sure I don’t trip and reinjure my back, to find those orphaned trains of thought. They lazily float about the rooms like ghosts cobwebs. Today is a fresh pajama day. Time to shed my clothes and greet my pillow once more. At least the bedsheets are clean. It could be worse. 

12/21/21

On This Longest Day

Inside a CT scanner is like being in a space capsule. Col. Chris Hadfield, I thought of you as I held a perfect rigor mortis formation, toes pointed skyward, as if in prayer. The capsule spins within its own orbit, humming to the universe, a song of the electro-magnetic spectrum. I chanted X-ray, gamma-ray, all the way to man-in-the-moon marigold in the color spectrum, the color of enlightenment, noting the red laser beam cross etched across my chest. I'm dissected, scanned and disassembled within minutes, then put back together into wafer-thin slices. Hosanna in the highest. The secret inside passages of my body, from hip to toe is made visible by invisible light. And tangible on the CD the imagist hands me on this first day of summer.

A BAPTISM OF SORTS

The fog rolls in along San Pablo Bay,

right to where I'm heading,

obliterating Mt Diablo in a marine haze.

Freeway is jammed—glinting sinew of light

so I drive the long way home

obliquely through Golden Gate Fields parking lot,

& savor the last glimmer of sun on the bay,

I take photos of the marsh.

Watch an egret skim the shore.

As I make to leave,

a fat golden lab named Stella,

dripping wet from the bay,

takes a shine to me—

greets me like a long lost relative.

Her owner apologizes—says:

I don't know why, but my dog seems to like you.

She was whining to see you.

What was I, a dog in a past life, or what?

Maybe it's the neighbor's dog of my childhood

reincarnated several times over.

She does seem to know me. Gives me a lick.

The dog shakes a little more of the bay on me.

A baptism of sorts. Perhaps for the solstice.

A Genius of Poets

In Colin Will's blog, Sunny Dunny, I read that Seanus Heaney suffered a small stroke two years back. I was shocked to hear the news from afar but relieved to know that he's on the mend. I'd heard something about it via the grapevine, but it was all the more shocking to see it so formal in print.

Seamus comes to SF/Berkeley every few years and we catch up. Come to think of it, it's been quiet on the Seamus front for some time, now. UC Berkeley hosts a Celtic Colloquium around St. Patrick's Day on the odd years (UCLA on even years) so we usually see Seamus in the madness of March.

Long before he became affectionately known in the Irish poetry community as "Famous Seamus," I first met him back in the 1981. One sunny afternoon on "A Terrible Beauty," KPFA FM, radio host Padraigin McGillicuddy was broadcasting the poems (Field Work) of this marvelous Northern Irish poet, a visiting professor at Harvard, who was scheduled to read later that evening at UC Berkeley.

It must've been around St Patrick's Day as I was hungry for some good Irish music, and of course, Padraigin's acerbic wit. She was reading about feminism & St Patrick, so it was an incendiary show.

Other than Padraigin's show, I rarely listened to the radio as it was difficult getting reception so far out in the country, unless the planets were aligned and the wind blew just right. We were ringed by coastal mountains and tall redwoods. But Padraigin was a force of nature to be reckoned with. If she said, "You simply MUST go and hear this poet read," then so we did. Seamus's disembodied voice rang out like the bell of St Patrick and disturbed the air around it.

I jumped into my old blue VW bug and drove 75 miles to Highway 101 and crossed the Richmond Bridge over to Berkeley just to hear him read (I lived in a remote part of Sonoma County, near the Russian River). It was a life-changing event that solidified my dedication to poetry. I was fairly new to writing but then I'd jumped feet first into the deep waters and learned to swim in the process. Well, maybe flounder....

I was terrified my '69 VW bug wouldn't make it the distance, as it was already old and on its last legs. It had a delicate carburetor and intermittent electrical coil issues so driving at night was a risky affair. I spent far too many hours by the side of the road fiddling with wires and fuel line to get it going. It wasn't cheap to drive to Berkekey either, plus I had an unreasonable fear of cities, having grown up in the rural backwaters of the country with cows and sheep....

Back then, I had a sort of agoraphobia (a real fear of the crowded marketplace) in the truest sense of the word. I rarely, if ever, left the wilds of West Sonoma County to visit the metropoli of San Francisco or Berkeley (despite the catchy milk ad" cows in Berkeley?), unless there was a compelling reason. Seamus's poetry was reason enough for me to crawl out of the hills.

It was an amazing evening. As luck would have it, I sat next to his wife Mairi (in the only seat left in the auditorium—I later realized it was Seamus's seat—talk about being in the hot seat!) and Mairi and I hit it off like a house afire as she was a teacher, I'd given her a book of my students' poetry and art (I was a California Arts Council artist in residence at a Santa Rosa school).

And so began my long distance poetic friendship with Seamus. Somewhere in cold storage, I have a letter he wrote to me while he was at Harvard, in praise of my long(winded) lines and sense of place in my poems—I will have to dig it out one day. Gawd only knows what drivel I sent him, one can only blush from afar, across time and distance.

* * *
We were at Poetry International in 1996, stuck in a sluggish elevator between floors with a crazy gaggle of giggling African poets, so Seamus pulled out a bottle and we were all drinking uisce beatha from a tiny bottle cap making all manner of toasts to the Summer Solstice and whatnot.

Keeping the whiskey flowing, Seamus discovered that his flask had, in fact, "developed a terrible leak" and that it was a at least a cardinal sin to to be ever putting the cap back on such a wee flask such as his until it was empty when we were in such good company.

So we lubricated our minds and invented toasts to many odd things. Geert van Istendael was soon proclaiming that ALL poets were Celts and so the African poets proclaimed themselves as being Black Irish and raised the bottle cap to the dim elevator light in giddy agreement.The best round was to toast a noun as we were all pretty much pure verb at that point and needed a good solid earthy noun to steady us down.

We coined a collective noun for a group of poets as a "Genius of Poets." Seamus and I shouted out in unison.

The elevator doors finally crept open and we stepped into the lobby, forever changed. A genius of poets blinded by the light.

Heal well, my friend. Heal well, the poet's spade isn't done excavating yet. Neil says, "Read the hand!"

Summer Solstice

6/22 Today we discovered that the nuns at Neil's parish, St. Aiden's, are Irish! So we're all getting along smashingly, Neil gave Sr. Breda a CD and now we're kissing cousins!

6/ 23 We'll be in Wales sometime next week...there's an ashram that Neil and David will go to and we'll be hanging out...somewhere near the village where The Prisoner was
filmed. Remember Patrick McGoohan...I am not a number....

So weird to see the sun up at 10 PM, eh?

We hiked into Elderslie to the Wallace Monument, then across the rail tracks to the graveyard where Neil ran into a cousin Anna (her mother, his auntie Kathy just died)...Anna and Neil hadn't seen each other in decades!!

Then we went to Paisley and after circling the abbey we explored the town...I kept insisting that I wanted to get to the top of the hill...fabulous buildings! and all the streets were named Oak something...don't tell me it wasn't a druidic site!...we could see Ben Lomond, the Campsies, etc.

It was crystal clear...but the best part was when I pet a dog and the woman who owned it took a shine to us and let us into the secret garden that she's restored, behind the Thomas Coates memorial church...a very secret garden...many alleys and closes...and it's not on the tourist path. The observatory is up there too...looking back, it's
a rounded hill leveled at the top...if there were archaeological ruins, they're long buried under massive stone edifices.

Anyway, bits and snatches of the past emerge despite progress..

Candlelight freewrite

A slender finger of light dances in the breeze, Shiva’s nail scratching the darkness. A cat lies in the sun, sharpens, her claws, stretches, yawns, her become jewels in the night. Phosphor fire. Either fear or science will make an excuse for her eyes. Retinal mirror scrying the soul. 

Have you ever looked at house windows and seen them as eyes following you as you walk down and unfamiliar street at night? What thoughts arise? But look, a light in the window, harkening back to centuries before. Someone placed a candle in the window, so that the dearly departed could find their way back home. 

Candlelight in each window, the flickering pupil, sentient, ever watching. The hurricane lamp from the turret for sailors coming in from the sea. Bonfires on the hill. Markers of time. Names for surcease, for that dark moment when lights no longer drink in the darkness. 

That solstice when the sun sleeps, when we light the candles, and the moths circling the fire, confuse them for the stars. The odor of wings like burning hair, angel hair, when the rain comes when we’re weaned from the electric grid, freed from the tyranny of Edison’s light dream, the candle becomes a ritual for dinner, reduced to romantic interludes or for religious reasons. 

Or birthdays, marking the passage of time, or the big bang. Dangerous candles, soaring light tapers for the church, split an atom, a sesame seed of blue light, a seed pearl at the center of everything. Imagine a flashlight as a placeholder in its stead. Imagine the inventor of the candle. What did he use for wicks dipped in tallow and honey. 

12/10/2004 Writers’ Group

With a Weary Heart...

With a weary heart, and though fighting a malaise of the soul, I  try to stay proactive during these tough times. The Battle ain't over yet...the fat lady is singing something about democracy and rights. Only sometimes it's hard to hear the words for all the fanfare.  

We must continue to stay proactive— especially as we approach the 2nd anniversary of 9/11 —and especially in lieu of last night's presidential address where Bush has asked for yet another 87 BILLION dollars for war aid in Iraq. (So who's keeping all the oil profits...by this point, it should be a self-sustaining war...fed by Iraqui oil profits...).

For the first time in 25 years, thanks to current federal and state govt. spending patterns, I have no employment in the schools (zip, zilch, nada), and Bush's request for a further 87 BILLION dollars is hitting me hard in the viscera. 

I wake up nights sweating bullets. Last night, I watched the full moon cross the face of Mars and I thought long and hard on the god of war. For a moment I envisioned the night sky as a vast game of chess. The moon's checkmate.

Perhaps the Harvest Moon will cleanse the battlefield of the sky. Meanwhile, there's work to be done.

As Dylan Thomas admonished, do not go gentle into that dark night. We must rage, rage against the dying of the light. (and against those new nukes as well...) But do light a candle this week at one of the myriad vigils planned worldwide, hold it up to the moon so she can see the way. 

Happy Solstice. 

Preparing for the Summer Solstice

Father’s Day and Verona's birthday, the actress as Lady MacBeth, cannot distinguish between stagelight and perfumed sky; she weeps for the death of her 60 years. The day burns lust-red. We raise champagne glasses and read poetry to the sky. The guest proves this on film for posterity.

A young Peruvian offers an armload of long-stemmed red roses to the actress. I pin a rose to his lapel and come to understand that brief moment of bronzed youth is disguised as a name. We compare ages. Sing the old songs to keep from falling off the earth, recreating the words that dreamed us into being. Verona blows out the candles. We run naked into the sea at sunset.

Floating in the chill depths below the Mesa, we look back at the North American plate. Mt. Tamalpais, place of my conception. Nothing came between my mother and father: this is why I exist. The moon slides over the water. Bioluminescence scribes itself upon the waves. Our tongues answer the ocean.

The suicides of Bolinas: literary invention proscribing reality. A woman boasts she was the last one to speak to Brautigan. I think of Lew going off into the forest. No heroes, words failed them. Sick to death of the intertextual “I”, I vowed not to write about love, and so, became mute; but the poetic Left has sacrificed the author. We need a new altar for the new millennium.

Afraid of the nunneries, I was a deliberately bad child. I collected an insurance of venial sins—white lies—to keep back that abiding fear of God’s prison gate. I thought “zounds” came from the slurring of “God’s wounds.” As did “swoon.” Wounded, we’ve lost the group art of oral tradition. Blame St. Augustine, the first man to read without moving his lips.

The slow sibilance of speech went underground, the death of the spoken word. The monastery scriptoriums fell silent. The esophagus interred in the sarcophagus; subterranean words devoured the silvered sleep of bones. My father died silent in winter, alone on his birthday. A stranger by choice, his heart failed him. Word of his death restores something of my father to me.

We bring in summer, talk about ancestors. The names we carry into the future. Pegasus wheels across the sky. Orion no longer hunts. The Bear dances. A name spoken, a gift crusades into the west. I want a dragon constellation for the dragonslayer. A name place where eagles come to land. Like a cloistered lady-in-waiting, I swoon from the scent of kisses. Orpheus’s tongue in our ears. Other than ourselves, we have little to offer; no talismans or silk scarves. The enduring song of the storm approaches.

At the end of the millennium, protocol demands we exchange sexual pedigrees. The dread acronym: subtext and context. I weep for the extinction of spontaneity. Dress code: who’s got the raincoat? No longer embarrassed, I come prepared for any storm, though months may pass without sign of precipitation. Except it could be any century.

Wounded, we heal a little of ourselves on this raft, ride the transitory night to completion. We don’t take issue with futures, take no prisoners. Only small translucent sacks flung in the midden heap for some future archaeologist to contemplate. Donning my habit, I celebrate the longest day, my vows clearly written—protean words spilling onto the page.


1999, revised 2000

Journal entry, 6/29/91, Oleg calls from Indio, California

 6/29/91 Oleg calls from on the road, Indio California. I tell him he’s in the San Andreas Fault bed. The Salton Sea, the Sea of Cortez. He asks if the San Bernardino Mountains are the Rockies. He has no idea. No, I say the Sierras, simplifying geography a bit. I tell him how the peninsula of Point Reyes came from there along the fault, though it was probably from the Tehachapes, or at least that’s what geologist say. But most of those same granite outcroppings extend all the way to Cabo San Lucas. At Point Reyes I saw the same kind of rock as I did in Cabo. How I love the story of rocks.

Anyway, finally, I think I made a geologic impression on him after all this time. He’s never fully grasped the magnitude of the idea of how living along the fault line has shaped our culture and our coastline. He doesn’t think of the earth is moving because we can’t measure it with the naked eye.
When he called, he said he was in Forestville, he said he couldn’t leave me, then he amended it by saying he was in Indio. It was a joke maybe not in the best of taste, considering the circumstances. I had mixed reactions.

I was willing to go and pick him up, but I had a pang of dread, thinking of all I had to do before I left for Hawaii at 5 AM on Monday morning. Both of us were trying to pack at the same time. It wasn’t working. So I said squelched my needs in order to meet his needs. I still haven’t physically packed though I did all my bills and chores.

I couldn’t pack with him in the house. He was ending a way of life, while I was merely preparing for a short respite from the interruptions of the past nine months.

Having Oleg in my tiny house was definitely a pattern breaker. So, my life was turned upside down. Rather than face the emptiness of his not being here, I opted to get out of the house. A complete change of scene. Hawaii. The eclipse will take my mind off the past year’s events, and hopefully it will launch me into the next stage of my life, whatever that is.

And so, his call was welcome, though I fought down the guilty beasts rising within myself. Why don’t I like to answer the phone? Fear of responsibility, and of what is to come. I hated it when he called, asking me of my plans and is pathetic hangdog voice. I’d love to make over his telephone voice too, because I knew I always had to come and get him wherever he was. Beck and call. I was always responsible like a mother to a child, and I hated it. I loved it when he was self-reliant, which wasn’t often, but it seems we fight too hard to get there. My secondary emotions, resentment and anger included all the primary emotions.

I just re-learn the word sublime from the ground up. To pass from solid to gaseous state without going through ice to steam. Turner’s paintings are sublime landscapes, Wind, steam and fog. I too learned to pass from one state to another, bypassing logical progression, into the sublime state. Pavlovian emotions. How to stop the roller coaster heart now?

He forgot five rolled cigarettes In the Bugler can on top of the clock radio. Women are more sensitive to smell, than men—it’s biogenetic. We are born that way. It makes sense—food, danger, sex, all carrying odor with a message of one kind or another like the on/off binary code of computers. Pixels. Danger/no danger. I hated the smell of tobacco, rolled, unrolled, loose, burnt, etc. Nothing to do. My nose smells the minutest particles. I could smell him rolling cigarettes in the kitchen while I stood in the bedroom doorway 8 feet away. Sometimes it made me sneeze.

The past few months I’ve had to take allergy pills day and night to suppress my allergies as it was an unusually bad pollen season. His cigarettes, my down comforter, and pollen were too much for my immune system. I kept getting short term viruses with a duration of a few days to a week, the worst part is the low grade fevers and the night sweats. Of course it scares me, AIDS foremost on my mind. None of us can completely rest assured when it comes to our sexual past. I saw a gripping documentary Absolutely Positive, how HIV affects lives, both straight and gay. I guess the hardest part is to get to the no blame section as the I Ching says.

No, I never got to the no blame, or at least it was pretty rare. I did it times achieve that state, saying to him, no blame, but when you do A, B, or C, this is what happens within me…
How can we avoid this möbius loop? Issues of time being the most prevalent.

I took Oleg to meet my family after we went to Point Reyes. He said he wanted to. I didn’t suggest it, but I pointed out landmarks dear to me— my hill, Mount Barnabe, and the Olema Hill Road. We were on our way to Bolinas and Mount Tam for the solstice. As it turned out, we hiked to the other end of the point, Chimney Rock at 4:47 PM, or whenever the precise moment the solstice was, and missed it. I wasn’t aware that the solstice happened at a certain time, I was waiting for sunset to celebrate.

At the solstice I was alone, enclosed within the circle overlook, a wooden fence, very much like a wooden Stonehenge watching the sun set due west behind the lighthouse. I was alone on the edge of the continent, celebrating the sun, something far older than me within, and across the naked fields, a small black dot, man’s torso, Oleg always lagging far behind.

I had gotten tired of waiting for him and forged on ahead, alone, but this is the way I experience the openness of nature best. Alone, elemental. Surrounded by sea and sky, light, wind, earth. But he came into my circle. And we watched the waves crash below us, I pointed out Point Reyes, to the west, Drake’s Bay, and the scalloped cliffs to our right. I’m on an island in time, we were on another island, it seems like Scotland or Ireland. Nova Albion. I get it.

I wore a nylon jacket from the 20th century and there were boats in the harbor, but it was as if time itself didn’t exist. My determined pilgrimage, my mindlessly running to this place, only to have the uncanny sensation of having had a similar experience before, unnerved me. But my relationship with Oleg has been filled with déjà vu from the very beginning. He was supposed to stay this long, I guess.

I remembered another useless dream about schedules, etc., fragments of conversation, meaningless in the dream, but they still came true nearly two years after the fact. Because I write down what I remember of my dreams, I have a running fact sheet of images. The earthquake dream came true too. The rubber band dream with the red carnations defied logic. Oleg had rubber bands around his neck with me helping him to adjust them.

In another dream, we were on Highway 101 by Cotati, heading north to Santa Rosa. Instead, in real life, I took him to the San Francisco depot late at night, I had placed a red carnation in his food bag. And there were plenty of rubber bands around his luggage items, as it seems. In fact, he took all of my fat rubber bands, only Leaving two behind, just like in the dream. I have the elements of the dream right here. The order may be out of sync or it hasn’t happened yet.

And so we went to my grandmothers house, had dinner with Jane and my mom. So many cornflowers or bachelor buttons in bloom in the field below. Oleg said they grew among the rye in the Ukraine considered a weed, but to describe a beautiful girl was like cornflowers among the rye, all blonde hair and blue eyes. I realized my darkness, my hair and my eyes were the opposite of assumed beauty in the Ukraine, with its predominance of blue-eyed blondes.

Home, this land I love, and roses filled the path to the upper garden. We struggled in the tangle. I showed him plants. Huge bushes, rosemary and flowering peach that I had planted in the rocky, barren soil as a child. I season our food with sprigs of rosemary from the parent bush of my grandmother’s garden. I’ve made many progeny. Several here in Forestville as well as elsewhere. Rosemary the blue sea rose of my name and of remembrance. Roman cliffs, Italy, the sea.

We said goodbye to the sun setting in the northerly gap on Mt. Barnabe. Fitting that I should come home, appropriate accident. Later, my mother tells me that my uncle Bill has lung cancer. I am so angry knowing he was missing a half a lung from TB and yet he continued to smoke. I’m surprised it took this long to catch up. Jane, Oleg, and my mother continue to smoke as she tells me the details.

The open window and the air purifier is for my benefit, the asthma that comes from inhaling cigarette smoke, will not help their lungs. I flash angerly at Oleg. See why I want you to stop? I say it just brings more death. He continues to smoke. I pointed to my mother, saying how our family is riddled with cancer. She had breast cancer, an,uncle died of melanoma, and my aunt Toddy has skin cancer and breast cancer. My grandfather’s throat cancer from the cigars. In defiance, he draws another halo of smoke around his shoulders, the pleasure on his face is unmatched even by sex. Even with the knowledge of death, they enjoy their guilty addiction, subtle, thorough and lasting.

I want to mail those last five cigarettes to Oleg just to get them out of my house but I am aiding and and abetting by mailing them back to him, or am I? Grim reminders of death. I leave for Hawaii soon. When my uncle be alive when I return on 21 July? I talk of returning to my childhood home, living in a trailer in the garden. Oleg says it would be coming down in life to live this way, it would be regressing, that I’m better off staying in Forestville. Wow. I didn’t see that one coming. A middle class Soviet.

I never liked my uncle Bill, especially when he tried to sell our land right out from under us. My grandmother crying one summer evening as he laid down the news. Who was he, living in a tract home, to tell us what to do with our land? In a rage I attacked him verbally. I wasn’t even 12 years old and he never for gave me for my adult anger in a child’s body.

And I never forgave him for manipulating us, trying to break up our family. Put her in a nursing home, what happened to me and Guy? The enemy was a man all right, within the family. Eldest born son with the arrogance to match. Shades of the dream. The white cylindrical tubes, the glistening silver lines—what significance can I attach to the number four?

Sarcasm is the first form of humor. I think of the word sarcophagus. Phagos. The body devouring itself. Cancer. Give me another fag. I can hear my uncle asking, as he lies, so white and pale on the bed. I want to tell him, the Little League coach, that the bases are loaded this time, and who is left to steal home?

TALKING LEAVES

TALKING LEAVES
        Trabaja el mar en mi silencio.
             —Pablo Neruda

We watch the sky for clues.
Birds proclaim unchartered territories.
A certain slant of sunlight grows wings.
Keepers of the circle, we sit on a blanket,
listen to translations of wind in the sycamores;
palisades     summer grass      cicada song
and pass the drum. Someone hands me a piece of paper.
The source of my freedom is what I fear most.
Bluejays argue, scissor-sharp, which direction to fly.
Words fall from the mouths of bees,
deer hooves rattle—first breath or final inspiration?
It no longer matters what we believe in. It happens anyway.
Watermelon rind on the blanket—not the marriage blanket
where he undid me with promises under the stars of Chiapas
only to bury a child's eyes beneath the stones of Tikal.
From inside the drum of my heart I howled
under the solstice moon rising over Mt. St. Helena
and from deep canyons coyotes answered. What more do I want?
I wear trophies of where we've been:
Baja, Peru, the Galapagos. An equator of pain visible
to the naked eye takes on the green form of air above the pond.
I struggle for balance, drawn to obsession like fire to air,
and learn first-hand the meaning of words: betrayal, abandonment, she.
She stalks up the path; a pathetic fish skewered to her stick.
Taking my man wasn't enough, she had to kill the sunfish too;
not to eat it but to prove some senseless notion to herself—
because it was alive, an irridescent trophy. A bauble.
Its carnal colors bleed into the sky; drab corpse forgotten.
He will comfort her, call her a brave hunter.
They will build shining deceptions; whatever it takes.
Mirate, I hiss at her. Look at yourself.
The cardinal rule of the hunter: eat what you kill.
He devoured me clean down to gleaming bone.
The poets cloak me with feathers and shake the gourd;
they say the Tarot gave her Death mounted on a white horse.
I dream the medicine man uncovers a word on the photo—
heiau, and he asks me for silver coins to bury it with.
For the grandfathers, for your vision, he says.
On a yarrow stick, an "i," the letter of death
becomes a plumed serpent, Quetzocoatl.
He smudges me with wild tobacco smoke and sage,
kisses me, says, you will find what you seek.
I remember how it felt on the outside:
this circle becomes a source of acceptance.
I am the drum, I learn the drumsong.
We are standing on ceremonial ground.
A wobbly prayer lifts up, takes flight
across the valley. Heiau he way,
he noni noni ne he, heiau he way.
Oh!

9/18/89

THE CLOSE OF THE YEAR

THE CLOSE OF THE YEAR

Below us, the fog lake rises
on the slopes of Gilliam Ridge.
It wells up and boils over like milk
and flows down the sides in a slow dance,
bathing the trees with dew and moisture.
The peaks of the Cedars and  Red Slide
juts out of angular winter shadow
like pyramids catching the sun.

Below us, hikers climb out of the ravines
of Austin Creek Park
and a chainsaw buzzes.
a woodpecker calls to her mate,
and somewhere, far off, a lamb bleats for its mother.

Somewhere, to the south, near Point Reyes
a killer is stalking.
The sunshine is so warm.
we take off our woolen clothing.
Our bare skin and feet stroked by the glow
of winter sunlight.
Our eyes grow heavy with sleep.

The body of fog, like fur on dogshit, rolls towards us,
and three ravens slice across its surface
making their own kind of offering to the land.
The sun, in the southernmost acre of the sky,
needs no-blood, no bonfires
to bring it back from winter solstice.

I hear the ticking of the clock.
The ticking of the clock...
I repeat a line from one of my earlier poems.
I learn to settle down  like a cat among lines
of my own choosing.
They keep coming back to haunt me
like those nameless faces
of the murdered women of Point Reyes.

A roaring sound is heard.
Does the fog roar through trees as it passes through?

Winter Solstice
1980

One of the few poems of 1980 that I actually dated. There's also a reference to the Trailside Killer,  this is one version. I can't find a decent copy of the other version. Added 11/16 minor revisions & line breaks. There's also a prose version, probably a first draft for this poem, Winter Solstice, 1980.

TREE RINGS

Rings on trees signify the passing of years
The wide light-colored bands encode the wet years.
Dark dense wood—when the rains didn’t come.
I am looking down at my fingernails
and I see growth rings there too
Except the growth is measured in weeks, not years.
The rings on my nails are for grief.
Someone says it’s a protein deficiency,
or antibiotic intake? Pregnancy,
pregnancy lost. Loss of the heart, loss of love,
lapse of memory, loss of the poet, loss of fear,
ridicule, memory gain. Water. Drought.

6/21/1980
Solstice