RRWG reading at Copperfield’s Maureen Hurley & Jane Hirshfield, photo

Boschka Layton’s bio for the Russian River Writers’ Guild

WHY DO TREES DREAM? and other questions

WHY DO TREES DREAM? and other questions

Why do trees dream always of sunrise?
Why does the fog creep behind the frees and slumber there?
And where does the horizon stop and the ocean begin?
Why does the breath of mice stir in the dreams of elephants?
Why are pencils yellow as the sun and as round as the moon?
Where does the breath of elephants live?
When does the sun sleep?
And what is the matter with the moon?
Where do most changes occur?
What can be said about the color red?
What does the shape of a human heaft represent?

6/82

Guerneville School

in class writing after Neruda's Questions

DIVIDED REALM

DIVIDED REALM

Divided in sleep,

we slip in and under

the watery realm

where I am tossed

from shore to shore

by the river

of your night journey.

The horizon of your dreams

merge into mine

and the eye of dawn

rising soft

as a pillow of fog

offers some chance of rest.

 6/82

NIGHTHAWK

Crack, the sound of the house muttering 

as the nighthawk flies overhead, 

crying kiree, kiree in the moonlight. 

Shadows of the great oak shelter me 

as I lay half asleep. Beside me, comes a sound, 

the sound of gentle slumber. 

While I think of his strong, young body, 

feeling his hips upon mine, and his firm back, tight ass, 

my fantasy unfolds and reveals romantic tendencies. 

I visualize nibbling upon his cock and his surprise. 

Meeting someone is exciting but as you get to know them 

the excitement fades, takes some new characteristics. 

After seven years, there’s not much surprising about either of us. 

We have known each other that long. 

So my fantasies provide me with new inspiration, 

but tonight my thoughts were interrupted by the nighthawk’s cry.

No date, not even a clue but by the tone, it sounds like it was written in 81 or 82. More likely 82.,On the other hand, seven years suggested it was written about Bob Hamilton, whom I was with for nearly 7 years.

I’m going with June 1, 1982. But it could easily be June 1983.

GRANOLA MAN

Roll over Sonoma granola man. This bed only carries one. 

Take your aging frisbee and press it between the leaves of a book. 

I don’t want no nacho eating macho cowboy sitting on my couch. 

Take your four-wheel-drive bronco out of my kitchen. 

And tank up somewhere else.

I don’t want a new age mechanic who gets to his garage by noon. 

Take your blackened hands and monkeywrench 

and tighten someone else’s bolts. 

I don’t want a new age man. 

I don’t want a ménage à trois. 

I prefer even numbers. 

Give me a rock ‘n’ roll man and a boogie woogie night. 

Don’t give me a poet. The next thing you’ll know 

we’ll all be splattered in the public domain. 

Take your typewriter keys and pound them out on someone else’s flesh.

? Gotta be spring but when? 1980-82

No date, no clue other than it’s written on the back of a press release for Jim Kohn, who I think was a classmate at Sonoma State in Expressive Arts. He was director of Ali Akbar College of Music in Fairfax. I wonder if he hit up on me and I got annoyed. I do remember the frisbee. It was red. So that places it at Sonoma State. Since during 1979 and 80 I wrote in my big journal, and this is on a loose piece of paper, I am guessing that it was written in 1981 or 82. And the tone is closest to what I was writing in June 1982.

AT THE 10,000' HUT

AT THE 10,000' HUT

The glacier rose up like a tongue
lolling out of the frigid mouth of the north.
I climbed over an ice wall
to trudge to the summit.
Ptarmigans, in half-summer plumage
chuckled in the undergrowth
of huckleberry and mountain heather.
The sun warmed us as our feet
crunched over rotten snow.

From the Olympics,
a sudden summer storm growled in,
threatening snow.
Dressed only in summer gear,
we were foolishly alone on the mountain.

The first sign of hypothermia
is the rhythmic rotation of frozen fingers
and your numb cheeks no longer sting.
Earlobes feel warm,
and your skin turns from red to blue.
The white patches of creamfat
like small islands adrift on your skin
are the first signs of frostbite.

Then, the overwhelming need to sleep,
euphoric warmth, and dreams—
a jumbled series of memories
out of proper sequence, take you in farther.
Soon, you reconstruct your memories
to fit the shapes of snowdrifts,
and you float into that warm tide of snow.

A thunderbolt cracked,
stirring the thick air and our senses.
Ptarmigans dove for cover
as snowflakes settled on their mottled backs.
We turned and ran down the mountain,
each gigantic stride brought us closer to home. 

At lower elevations, the snow turned to hail,
then to rain, whipping our legs,
as we descended to Paradise Lodge
nested on the slopes of Rainier
2,000 ft. below the hut, to safety.

6/82

slight revision

2/2017

ACROSTIC More than I can say

ACROSTIC  More than I can say

More than I can say
A letter drifts slowly
Upward like a
Red kite loosened on a string
Except that I'm supposed to write about about me.
Every time I begin, I get distracted by
Nouns, verbs, the shape of letters...

But letters strung sideways are
Another way of viewing the world.
Better start writing about me.
Absolutely distractable, loves the color

Violet—putple, and sunsets before a storm.
Intuitive, irresponsible, irrepressible
Open-eyed, both
Lazy-eyed, and slothfully
Ambitious at the same time.

Hurtling along at 9,000 miles per hour
Until something stops me
Right dead in my tracks
Like a train hitting a brick wall.
Everything crashes.
Yet out of the chaos, curiosity persists.

6/82

in class poem?

acrostic

added 2/2017

PARALLEL UNIVERSE

PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Give me an 0 as round as the eyes 

of snow monkeys sitting in hot pools 

on the island of Hokaido.

E's a hungry Pacman 

attacking the letters in front of them 

eating up all the other vowels in sight 

And U's are. the twin horns of the water buffalo
balancing the red Egyptian sun between them.

A U for Isis and Osirus.

Pyramids of A's buffeted by desert sands 

standing in memory of Custer 

And A's framing the camp 

as the Indians ride north to hunt.

I, the megalithic monsters of Carnac
with 900 stone teeth projecting skyward

I want W's. Double U's to hold up the moon,
the earth's axis, temples of the sun
I want W's swinging from cloud to cloud
Like monkeys in the temples of India
A place where Custer can take his last stand
Where Reagan can see his last redwood tree
Where Einstein can safely bend the universe
Where nuclear bombs can sleep for an eternity
among the bits of floating debris of deep space.

6/82

in class poem after Rimbaud

Guerneville School?

added 2/2017

POCKET GOPHERS OF SPACE

POCKET GOPHERS OF SPACE

Drifting, drifting on a memory,
The pocket gophers of space
are devouring the Milky WAy.
They are holding galaxies
between their teeth
as the scissors of time snip
snip at the purse strings
of the past, The pillow of
infinity bursts forth
and new galaxies are born
to the.volcanos of history.
Drifting, drifting on a memory,

6/82? 

Moon fragment with Galway Kinnell

To type the ambiguous is to launch into something new. Where in the outer stretches of boredom, does creativity lie? To talk about nothing is nothing—how it is a “no thing” thing. It balloons like flaccid cock, dangles from the lamp stem. La Luna esta brilla en El Mundo. There is no moon. It’s a cat eye. Venus in the sky is casting shadows before the sun arises. Galway said Jupiter and Saturn were so close together that long shadows were cast on the New Mexican desert last summer. And I spent years watching these planets, follow the stars across the night sky. They conjunct in darkness.

(No date, but I wrote a poem to Leonard on  4/12/82 So, close enough. I was a mess after taking care of Leonard, and Galway was reading at Sonoma State for me. If it wasn’t for Galway, I don’t think I would’ve gotten through that week.)

THE ADDICTION OF SIGHT

THE ADDICTION OF SIGHT

         … What appears before the eye is simple illusion.

              – from Double Sonnets from the Subconscious

                                  —Leonard Cirino

            for Leonard and those who have ridden the black mare

What separates the word desert 

from something sweet 

is the twin presence of slithering S curves 

of snake tracks in the sand. 

The letter S has no consciousness of desert sand 

or, of dessert peach.

One singular S stands alone. 

The second S changes meaning

gives plurality, gives possession 

and ownership to words.

Snakes go blind during summer molt shedding 

even the skin over their eyes.

In their hot blindness they strike anything warm 

with an accuracy surer than sight.

In the twin mirrored lakes of horses, 

verdant green blades stab at the sky.

Cows easily slip into the past.

Their prehensile tongues covet only grass, 

not the thrones of one eyed kings.

Cows carry the mark of Cain in their eyes.

Sheep pressed their lips to the earth, 

always trying to get closer to the source, 

and they forget how to move on.

They graze until there is no grass left 

and the cattle starve.

Horses tear at the tops of grasses, 

their eyes always on the next bunch. 

In the boneless desert behind the eyes,

we all carry the carrion crows within.

In the fallow fields where the grass is greener, 

the convex lens covering the eye, carries light 

to the arid folds of the brain.

The eye is the cistern in the arid boneless plain.

Yes, the same sheep graces in the same pastures

and need no eyes to find the turf.

Maybe it's the size and shape of cows 

on that always leads them onward.

Or maybe it's the cloven hooves of the goat 

and the sheep that carries the shape of death 

in its eye, bringing us still closer to the earth.

Still, it is a privilege to see the milk-blue eyes of babies, 

unfocused, half blind, closed, asleep at the breast.

As they gain age, the focus sharpens, 

clarity leaps forward, images fall into place, 

and the foraging begins.

King Lear said, "a man may see 

how the world goes with no lies."

Do we truly learn wisdom with our eyes?

What appears before the eye is simple delusion.

Reduced to the level of beasts, Gloucester, 

blinded by the pelican daughters of Lear, said,

"I have no way, and therefore want new eyes."

No, we can't return to that first sight.

There are no thrones left for one-eyed kings 

and beggars will never ride in the dry desert kingdom 

of the blind with the surefootedness of second sight.

5/1982

Revised 8/82, 10/82

Leonard’s revision of my poem

REFUGE OF WILD BIRDS

REFUGE OF WILD BIRDS

Like hearts of wild birds
riding the storm
or panthers defending sectors
of the universe
we seek shelter
before the visions of stars.

5/82

Letter from Leonard Cirino

Dear Maureen,        April 12, 1982

Ah the rain I wish it would end but that's not the forecast. I traded some work hauling manure for some strawberry and lettuce starts so there will be something ready by June. This is the poem that is an "answer to your one about my eye. Read it and tell me what you think. Please have someone let me know for sure about May 10 at the reading date because I always make plans ahead so 1 can't change them. I have a whole lot of new work since december at Garbo's so 1 won't be repeating any poems if anyone asks they will all be rather new or at least never read in Sonoma before. These damn typewriter keys keep getting and hitting in the wrong order so I hope you can make sense of this letter. All is well except for my truck which still is without transmission and no transportation. Costs me less money as I am very poor these days—no job at all—I quit dishwashing because of the ten-mile one-way trip and the minimum wage. Are you going to Pt Townsend this summer? I might go if I could  take my dog and find a ride. Hint Hint. Must close now and write other letters hope to see you next month or sooner if you want to visit. Get Simone and you up here sometime soon.
       love,

                      Leonard

Leonard Cirino, LeePerron, Karla Andersdatter reading

No date but probably 5/82

THE LETTER S

THE LETTER S

What separates the word desert

from something sweet 

is the slithering S-curve 

of snake tracks in the sand
Leonard writing rebuttals in the green grass 

reflected on convex lenses covering the eye.

Eyes – the addiction of sight 

in the twin lakes of horses and cows 

verdant green mirrored blades of grass 

stabbing the blue sky.

The letter S has no forgiveness, 

no consciousness of desert sands 

or a dessert peach 

But one S, singular – 

the second S changes the meaning, 

gives plurality, 

gives possession and ownership 

to the concept previously implied 

in the word preceding it.

Snakes go blind during summer molt, 

shedding even the skin over their eyes, 

in their hot blindness they strike out anything warm.

Cows easily slip into the past 

their prehensile gray tongues covert only grass
the cloven hooves of cows, camels, goats, deer, sheep, 

ungulates who ruminate – chew their cud.

Sheep pressed closer to the earth, 

they're always trying to get closer to the source, 

and they forget to move

Horses, have you ever watched 

how they tear the tops of grasses,

there is always on the next clump of grass, 

their fluid joints making popping sounds

as they shift towards the next elusive hummock of grass.

Eyes are mirrors, all of us carry death within us.
It is it is a privilege to see the milk-blue eyes of babies, 

unfocused, half blind, as they gain age, 

the focus sharpens, the clarity sharpens, 

images fall into place and the foraging begins.

4/15/1982
also a prose poem, there's also a poem version....somewhere.

added 9/2016

ICARUS FALLING

Imagining myself at the Musée des Beaux Arts looking at Breugel's painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, while listening to Paul Winters' composition of Icarus in Flight. And yes, Auden, and WCW enter into it.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus Breugel

The Phoenix, suffering

turns away from disaster, and weeps.
I think of Bruegel. Old and new children,
aged, waiting for birth, martyrdom, and danger.

They've gone to the dogs, it's all torture, of course.
On the untidy spit where Minos and the Minotaur jousled.
Al, the the labyrinth, you say. Yes, and feathers.
Don't forget the sailor or the plowman.
A boy falls from the sky
because I sailed calmly by.
Cause and effect.

The mind, the palm at the edge of space.
Such gold feathers, the phoenix sings
and rises from the edge of space,
his shining feathers and ashes,
and 500 years of human feelings
are too much for the bird to absorb.
The foreign songs, the bird sings,
the fire feathered bird sings
until his heart bursts,
and his feathers dangle down
in the wind and tangle in the branches.

In Crete, both the great Goddess
and the youth sacrifice to the sun
while the phoenix rises from the ashes.
He sings once every 500 years
and the wind in the branches of the palm trees
whispering secrets of distant oasis.

I think: maybe Palm Springs or 49 Palms
Dedalus gathers the feathers of the phoenix
to give his son the power of flight.
There's a sailing ship in the bay,
but the plowman turns away.
The shepherd turns away.
Such a tiny splash that was never heard,
such thin ankles, such a slender boy,
and Icharus falling, falling, fall-
ing in slo-mo forever trapped
in the pool of his father's eyes
as he reaches into the void.

4/82
added, rev. 9/17

EQUINOX, AFTER THE WEDDING

EQUINOX, AFTER THE WEDDING

All night long tiny tipsy men
tiptoe past my fridge.
As they walk by
they ask me
"Are you ready yet?"
"No," I tell them.
There must be eight of them
crowded into my kitchen by now
celebrating the equinox.
My cabin is populated by dwarves
stacking up like plates,
they are breaking the crockery
with their clumsy bodies.
Determined to stop this nonsense,
I roll out of bed
holding my hangover in both hands
and vow never to drink again.

Spring Equinox 1982
added 2/2017

The white wool of sleep

The white wool of sleep

The white wool of sleep
is knitted with the purple pollen

of opium poppies 

The ringing sound you hear
emanating from clouds
is made by someone
drinking the detail out of the sky
with their eyes
as lovers look deep
into one another's eyes

and all is voided.

3/22/82? 81?

sounds like an in class poem

added/2/2017

The Paper: Slugocide-for salt-free world (farce)

I don’t have a tearsheet for this paste-up column, I guess it appeared  March 13, 1982 date. Or it probably was an April Fools’ Day column.

By Haureen Murley

"According to latest reports, the renowned cephalopodic organization, Greensleasz introduced a bill to congress banning harmful substances to mollusks.

Greensleasz, located in the former Evolution Institute on Roblar Road in Petaluma is noted for its unceasing efforts to attempt to desalinize both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Their goal by the year 2000 is to make the waters safe for vacationing slugs and other land mollusks of importance: Currently, they are unable to bathe, during the summer months without bodily threat to self personal health. They maintain that their constitutional rights are seasoned by this problem.

The organization is currently lobbying congress to ban all sodium chlorides, better known as common table salts, from the face of the earth on the grounds that it is an illegal weapon, and when used in the wrong hands, is capable of molluskan genocide.

Spokeslugson for Greensleasz, Alfurred E ‘Zippy” Slugstein, who received the Mobile Piece Prize in 1981 for his brilliant research on saline solutions and disorders in Slugastronauts, stated in a slugscusive PAPER interview, “the time has come for all responsible citizens to band together and demand a safe, salt-Slack squeeze free world for our children to inherit.”

Slugstein sees the Dead Sea, King Neptune, The Salt Box at the Bottom of the Sea (see Grimm's Fairy Tales), Death Valley, the Salton Sea, and a tiny Austrian village of Salzburg in the Tyrolian Alps to be involved in a conspiracy with the intent to commit mass genocide on the already persecuted land mollusks of the world.

According to eminent Forestville chemist. Pat ‘Tootslug’ Bond, sodium chloride (NACl) forms square crystal, conducts electricity and kills mollosks by robbing them of  their entire supply of body water. Says Bond, “We use it in science for dehydration purposes.” Her laboratory is currently under Investigation by the  SPCA slug squad for possible mollusktation of Slugs. 

Slugstein reminded The Paper of land mollusks’ origins in the fertile crescent, their unpopular history, and their plight into Egypt when the Dead Sea was used as a purgebath by Martians from Outer Space (see Pat Bond’s brilliant report on the origins of land slugs in The Paper, March ’82, trying to eradicate slugs nesting on the lower wings of their space saucers. 

Millions and millions of land mollusks (they prefer the term Land Mollusk to slug which they feel is derogatory and connotes racial prejudice) who perished when they were forced to commit mass sluggocide after the Martians poured sodium chloride on them. They fled into the Dead Sea which was once a freshwater lake and turned it into a briny bath. 

The Dead Sea was reputed to have bubbled over with an unusual froth for over two centuries after the massacre according to one of the survivors, Littlest BigHorn who is appropriately named because he lost most of his eye stalks during that battle.

MacArthur Littlest BigHorn, author of the controversial treatise on the turbulent history of the Land Mollusk League, Burying my Pseudopod in the Dead Sea, a seminal book responsible for the renewed militant slug, I mean the Land Mollusk Consciousness raising phenomenon during the last 20 decades. 

When asked how he felt about Slugstein‘s proposal on the Dick Crabbit television show, Littlest BigHorn was unavailable for comment. However, it is rumored he did utter something about forked-tongued scientist under his breath.

Religious organizations all over the world including Shamnesty International and the Pope have verbally endorsed Slugstein‘s bill. Pope John O’Reilliozski said, “this atrocity is the worst thing that has happened to the world since the Irish potato defamation league invaded Poland.’

Local religious leader, jazz aficionado and award-winning paper columnist, the Reverend Bob Jones, who recently returned from a pilgrimage to South Sonoma, stated that the slugs (sic) of South Sonoma are uniting and overthrowing the unjust Saltinistas government and locking SALT leaders in atomic vaults. Jones supports Slugstein’s proposed bill.

Slugstein’s concluding statement was, “my toughest opponent trying to keep this bill from passing are SoNoMore slugs.” The anti-land mollusk group is purportedly backed by mafia pesto interests, in particular, the French Escargot Berets, who are noted for their unusual and unnatural hatred of mollusks and amphibians in general. 

These interest groups are reported to have an annual income from “billions and billions’ of dollars’ worth of business selling illicit illegal salts on the black market to communist countries who are desalivating the oceans, according to noted economist Carl Saga. Slugstein has no future interest other than living beyond March 13, the proposed date for SLUGFEST.

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

THE BOAT PEOPLE

THE BOAT PEOPLE

Perched on a net, a lone cat

gazes down into the water, 

His attention caught by a fish. 

His sungold eyes darken 

As he yawns and pulls his tail in close.

Mothers prepare fish in charcoal braziers
While thre fishermen cast out their nets.

The murky river is pierced by their lanterns. 

Attracted by the light, schools of fish 

surface into the nets.

Boats on the Nai kong Delta float 

like memories of shadow after rain.

Women spend entire lives 

gazing into the tumid depths of the river

And their children are conceived

in the incunabula, the boat-cradle.

Babies learn to walk on the decks of boats 

never knowing the feel of dirt 

or grass beneath their feet.

Only in death do they learn the feel of river bottoms —
How the contour of river banks hems them in.
Only then do they learn to furrow the fine silt
through their fingers and toes.
In the distance, sumi-ink hills bleed into the water
hunker down, like cats at dusk.

3/10/82

minor revision

added 2/2017
i think it was in class writing

THE FOREST WITHOUT ROOTS

THE FOREST WITHOUT ROOTS

she is carved from the single root of a gnarled oak

that grew in rocky soil before she was born

its strength is it weakness

there is no room for it to sprout new growth

through the dense heartwood

locked inside an age of trees

she will stay until they rot

fall, and become buried in the mud

whole forests have turned to stone

as silica meets silica

a recognition in the desert air

sand pummels her face, obliterating it,

polishing it smooth like her body

there are no longer any features

just the suggestion of a woman

it seems she sometimes screams out

but the sand has washed away her mouth

the sand scours her mind like an ocean

all that's left is a fine powder

she stays locked within her own memory

can she hear the leaves of summer rustle in the breeze?

she remembers the winter when the rains came

and the mantle of mud covered her like a lover

but that memory passed as spring dried the pliant mud

trapping her under its adobe layer

the grass grows over her shielding her from the sun

Its roots devour the mulch until there's nothing left

but the death of the grass is hers as well

the throbbing wind scatters the grass, the crumbs of earth

until she is again naked and waiting for the hunter

insects rest in her secret places

she is mother to all those who must crawl and hide

they, in turn, devour her

when the rains come she begins to rot

as the cancer spreads,

the whole life of the tree is threatened

there are many trees in the forest

but the forest is without roots

another winter will soon see the fall

and an age of trees will end

ca 1982? could be 1980.

Early draft of CREAMERY CREEK

Early draft of  CREAMERY CREEK

My uncle caught a pregnant salmon with a pitchfork, 

roe escaped through the gashes 

and floated downstream where the name of the creek changes, 

but the creek still remains the same. 

Creamery Creek, Papermill, Lagunitas, 

fed by the Arroyo, Carson, and Crystal Springs. 

Inkwell, Shafter’s, and China House.
I rode bareback, plunging through pools 

on the floating island of red fur against the deep green water. 

Silver salmon spawn in cowshit at White House Bend. 

This creek is an artery that cuts through the valley 

and follows the veins up my arms to the heart. 

I slip off the back of the horse, grab her tail 

and I’m towed toward the opposite shore.

2/1982

Looking for old work to post in the blog, I was not expecting to find this, in a journal of poems I had transcribed for Napa Poetry Conference, that I had planned to work on, so dates were rarely added.

MARINE HOLLY

MARINE HOLLY
—for Greg Nett

We swim home to where the curve of thigh
dips into the dark throat of love.
Tongues twist like sleek dolphins.
Syllables slip from our lips
and you spill like a sailor at flood tide.
Already I am missing you, dear stranger
set adrift on the surging sea
with your blue eyes already anchored

on a far distant shore.

2/82
added 10/16

Poet sketches, Marin Poetry Center, 1982, James Broughton, Nanos Valadritis, Charles Entrekin, Luke Breit, Mike Tuggle, unknown,

 

To Joan Hotchkiss

Creamery Creek travels to the San Geronimo Valley, 

becomes Lagunitas, then Papermill Creek. 

Where it enters Tomales Bay, 

silver, salmon, spawn in cow shit 

at White House Bend. 

This creek, an artery through the valley 

follows the veins of my arms 

to the heart of things.
Pumping liquid through the valley, 

overturned stones.
My uncle caught a pregnant salmon with a pitchfork. 

Their roe floated through the gash 

down the stream where the name changes, 

but not the creek: 

Creamery, Papermill, Lagunitas. 

Fed by tributaries: Arroyo, Carson, Crystal Springs.

Silt feeds orchids,, azaleas, and huckleberries.

Myself, bareback. My horse plunging through pools, 

her back, a floating carpet of red fur 

against the sparkling water.
I grabbed hold of her tail 

and am towed to the opposite shore

2/6/82
This becomes 

• CREAMERY CREEK

.

RRWG Erotic poetry reading, Garbo’s

GHAZAL

Like marriage, it’s murder with finesse. 

An auto dismantling yard. 

Last night’s storm blew in a fish. 

I never thought of that place between my legs, 

a place where men try to crawl back into.

A warm inlet, an indentation along the creek 

where the salmon come to spawn.

A friend once told me he couldn’t wait, 

so they coupled in the rain, shoulder 

to shoulder with the dead, 

as the townfolk of Cape Cod passed by. 

Ghost shrimp pack the mudflats in Home Bay, 

and crawl out during the full moon. 

At the Hesemeyer’s garage at dawn, 

a row of glazed chickens patiently 

wait for their bronze legs 

to be glued on, so they can be shipped to market. 

Fog lifts momentarily, and the Palisades poke through. 

As we hobble up the slope, I am reminded of home. 

The guttural snore of trucks 

over Mount St. Helena shatters the silence. 

January, 1982 added 2020

Napa workshop with Michael, or Philip Dow? 

Write a ghazal, five separate couplets to make a complete poem.

Letter to the Editor, Helen Ingersoll CPITS at Analy HS

PINNACLES

Pinnacles shrouded in mist-filled trees, 

A lonely call echoes off cliffs, 

leaves suckling on fog. 

I no longer dream of sun and sky, 

water floats through the trees 

and I can taste darkness on my tongue.

1/11/1982

Backroads freewrite

Mirrored relief of backroads running at right angles to the sun. Flat sky, storm on the horizon. Twin white lines (a vanishing point) of filament telegraphing into the distance. Intersecting, muted squares and diagonals of wavering green, an endless expense of prairie burning up the road, flattening the sky, taking me with it.

1/11/1982

Interview with Katharine Harer, Statewide Coodinator, CPITS

SONOMA COUNTY STUMP 

January 7-14, 1982 
Artists cannot deal with the simple business side of life including filling out forms, earning a living, and relating normally to people around them, Fact or fiction? How many people buy the myth?

Poet Katharine Harer,  Sebastopol resident and native of the Bay Area, is the Statewide Coordinator for California Poets-in-the-Schools, and she very much disproves the myth that all artists are incapable of surviving in the 20th century.

In an interview, she debunks the myth entirely. She began teaching in Poets-in-the-Schools in 1978 and rapidly moved forward into the position of Office Administrator; in 1981, she was nominated the Statewide Coordinator for the entire program.

CPITS had its beginnings at San Francisco State University in 1964 and was spawned out of a writing program called the Pegasus

California Poets-in-the-Schools (CPITS) is a statewide community-based Artists-in-Schools (AIS) program jointly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and is the only AIS program in the country which is fully administered by practicing poets. 

CPITS is the largest writers-in-schools program in the US and, as of last year, there were 130 poets teaching in the program in 220 schools in 21 regions of the state. Poets work directly with 19, 000 kids, kindergarten through 12th grade, in workshops lasting anywhere from 5 days to the whole school year. 

CPITS had its beginnings at San Francisco State University in 1964 and was spawned out of a writing program called the Pegasus Project. Similar to the Youth-in-Arts program in Marin County, CPITS brought established published poets into the schools to give readings at assemblies and special events. In 1971 the poets started going into the classrooms to actually teach children their craft. The results were astounding.

There was almost a 100% positive response: everyone wrote poems, and everyone could see the value of one another's poetic vision. Not only that, kids began to do better in other school activities. An enhanced reading and writing enrichment program, Poets-in-the-Schools has consistantly proven itself to be an important part of the school curriculum.

CPITS is especially active in Sonoma County, which has been dubbed a "hot-bed of activity, " due to Area Coordinator Lee Perron and the incredible energies of the local poets.

When asked what it's like to work for CPITS, Katharine Harer said, "I love my job because I not only believe in the program (bringing poetry to the kids) but the people I work for are creative and exciting. We are making it possible for poets to work at what they believe in, to do what they love to do.

Poets don't have to starve, bes, pump as or bus dishes…There’s a crazy kind of dignity that comes from walking into a school and having everyone know who you are— “Oh, you're the poet!'—and want you in their school. "

Maureen Hurley: In a recent article I wrote, Education: Back to Basics, Art as the 4th R" with Lee Perron (see Dec. 3-10, 1981 of the Stump), two of the themes I was concerned with were one's role as an artist, and the role of being a coordinator. How do artists function in the 20th century, and how does an artist deal with the myth of being incompetent and "flakey?"

Katharine Harer: I think a lot of poets in the program are disproving that. There’s such a bad reputation about artists, which is also part of the positive, romantic reputation of being an artist. aura that surrounds an artist, especially a poet, is that you can't deal with the world, that you re too cosmic, that you’re too involved in your neuroses. You’re too out of it. You can't do  paperwork, etc. It’s a myth. Last year poets raised a total of $225,000. That's money raised in the communities which includes private foundation grants and community money—that's an incredible statement about what we're able to do.

MH: Yes, how those flakes are hustling..

KH: That's right! I'm not saying there's something intrinsically great about being able to handle paper-work, but how do you live without being aware of some of those realities?

MH: A lot of poets today wind up in university situations but jobs there are limited. I think CPITS allows poets to continue being poets and still survive financially, which is a challenge, isn't it?

KH: It's a challenge to say you're not a technician in the schools, a mechanic who goes in to turn the right levers and the right screws. You're a poet. Hopefully  you're publishing and sharing your work in the community.

MH: How do you deal with people who are technicians? I mean, there are great poets who can't teach and great teachers who are not artists.

KH: By encouraging them to continue to write and publish their work. I think a lot of us forget as we deal with all kinds of administrative and functional aspects of the CPITS program that we can never forget we're poets.

The Sonoma County group is very active. You put on readings for the communities. I think it's essential to keep reading the poems, and sharing the work.

MH: I've always felt that being a poet is a full time occupation, and being a poet-teacher in CPITS is also a full time occupation. You we’re saying earlier, it’s a challenge to stay a poet, with the two together. We're working double time as compared to most people, and we've got to somehow intertwine the two…

KH: yes, but somehow the one really spirals the other. Once I was a cocktail waitress and I thought I was going to write great cocktail waitress poems from this experience and it didn't happen. I think it's because I was so exhausted spiritually, because the job didn't give me much energy. A part of me feels that it's important—it's dignifying to work, and that was real work. I was in the union and working my ass off. Whereas when I teach, I'm so excited about poetry that I want to write. I want to be in the process of writing. In a way, we're working morè, but it's a self stimulating cycle.

MH: What about being with the kids and watching the creative process unfold?

KH: Part of the strength and dynamism of what we do in the classroom is not what gets down on a piece of pap-er, but our presence as a poet. I'm a poet. This is what I do. I get up in the morning and write poetry. Wanna see my notebook? I want to show them the process. It's messy. There are doodles and crossouts in it. If we can extend that to other textures and possibilities, like bringing in paintings, music, drama, mime, it enriches their sense of what expression is all about. I think that poets. are in the schools because kids need to be guided toward that poetic part of themselves just like adults do.

Adults are more rigid. They've been pushing words on paper for so long that they're really stuck on structures. What we're trying to do is to open the structures up. So, when kids write, because they're newer to language, they can open up much faster.

MH: That's what I really get a buzz from. Seeing them opening up the structure and seeing my own writing change so dramatically. When I'm writing in the workshops, that brings the whole process back home for me.

KH: You go back to your own work and realize you're stuck on structure too. I wanted to talk about why poetry is such an important medium for the expression of language with kids. Why poetry? Why not essays? Why not stories or sentences? There's a real interesting difference between a sentence and what we call in poetry, the line.

In poetry the line can be any length. It can be one word or one syllable. Or it can be twenty words strung together. The difference has to do with syntax, punctuation, length, and visibility. It's all those open structures that poetry offers compared to the closed structure of the sentence. When we're teaching poetry in the classroom, we're not only teaching competence or familiarity or excitement with language, which, of course, is essential, but we're also teaching a way of thinking, a way of thought which is right brain—non-linear circular thought. A process of opening up your mind to accept all kinds of possibilities. You're teaching a process of thought, and all those processes affect the way kids would approach any task in school.

Think of physics—all the things they discovered by mind leaping. That's what poetry is, leaps. What we're trying to do is to help the student learn the process of discovery. In poetry there are no right answers. In the process of writing, we discover we are independent thinkers.

For more information on Poets-in-the-Schools, contact Area Coordinator for Lake, Napa and Sonoma Counties, Lee Perron, 9312 Champs, Forestville, or call (707) 887-7850.

Fragment- horses

Dust curls around the horses’ hooves in small puffs, reminding me of wood fires. A horse snorts, oiled leather groans. Water tumbles over stones like a child’s laughter. The horses pull at the sparse dry grasses, keeping an eye out for the next tuft. A rib, bleached pale by the succession of suns, records a passage of time. A woodpecker breaks the arid silence with a gentle knocking. In the distance, thundering grasses.

An empty can rattles across Main Street. The dog, half-buried in the trash, doesn’t hear me coming. I slip in and hide between the wall and doorway. The brick leaves a ragged imprint in my hand.

11/82? Added 2020

LOOK HOW HE STANDS THERE

LOOK HOW HE STANDS THERE

Look how he stands there, my friend
looking the world like James Joyce
In his vest, Joyce-dapper.
Joyce would never appear in the streets of Dublin.
dressed in a red corduroy vest 

with nine buttonholes
and three buttons, two at the breast
one stomach
all snug on his bare frame.
It must be the glasses and the hungry stance
that frames them both together in my eye.
Two incongruous writers who would never meet.
My friend goes to London 

to write poems to animals in cages.

no date 1982?

added 2/2017

on the same page as Best Revenge
I think it was an in-class poem, if so, then Guerneville School
corde du roi 

THE BEST REVENGE

THE BEST REVENGE

   The best revenge of all is living well

      —Spanish proverb

What I've discovered
is that reality is stranger than fiction.
Real life is fiction.
Truth is a stranger to fiction
when we write truthfully
from the heart.
To write about truth

is the best revenge of all.

no date 1982?

added 2/2017
I think this was in class writing, if so, then Guerneville School, June

LOOK HOW HE STANDS THERE

Look how he stands there, my friend
looking the world like James Joyce
In his vest, Joyce-dapper.
Joyce would never appear in the streets of Dublin.
dressed in a red corduroy vest 

with nine buttonholes
and three buttons, two at the breast
one stomach
all snug on his bare frame.
It must be the glasses and the hungry stance
that frames them both together in my eye.
Two incongruous writers who would never meet.
My friend goes to London 

to write poems to animals in cages.

no date 1982?

added 2/2017

FENUCCIO, II

FENUCCIO, II

(enroute to a CPITS poetry meeting)

1. I awoke this morning thinking of my mother 's 
black cat, Cantinflas who loved to swim in the tub.

On Mission & 18th, we pass a Doggie Diner,

Another Doggie points a forlorn nose up Army & Mission,

What luck, seeing two Doggie Diners in one day.

When she moved, the cat ran away.  No bathtub. In the '5Os,

everyone complained about the tacky Doggie Diners.

Today, artists are dying to save them.

We pass the abandoned Hamm's Brewery.
I don't have the nerve to tell my poet friends
my mother lives in one of those steel vats. 

She's a beatnik mother to addicts
and punkrockers who steal her blind.

I don't tell them she never had time to mother me. 
Or that there are no windows in the vats. Soul windows.

She can't see how the mountains slant toward the sky,

how resting clouds form right angles after rain.

The wet street glistens like fungus on rotten logs.

The pavement in the middle of each lane 
is dry from the heat of cars, a rainy conundrum.

My traveling companions drone on about Rajneesh,

& the woman who was raped while the movie was filmed,

everyone asking her how she felt. They wanted her 
experience as if it was something holy and profound.

2. Fennel is one of California's toughest invaders.

Along cement cracks and in abandoned lots

its feathery jeweled plumes glisten after rain.

I sit outside Carol Lee Sanchez's home in Bernal Heights, 
and watch a snail maneuver along a broken curbstone, 
where the phrase: THE STAR SPANGLE  is etched. 

When the snail reaches the granite precipice

where the missing "D" should be, he stops 
and waves his eyestalks in wild circles.

From the lot, I pluck white chrysanthemums 
for my birth month, soon I will be 30.

I pluck rosemary from an abandoned garden plot,
and fennel plumes, the sharp odor of petrichor 
and Ouzo assaults my senses, scours the air.

As we write, a Japanese poet says
 my feet hurt because of my heart.

I mutter under my breath, I'm so tired 
of living and no one hears me. Typical. 
Does every suicide want a rebuttal? 

Then, my mother has many coming.

 I'm sick of hearing the poets drone on about 
their spiritual gurus, Krishnamurti and Rajneesh, 
and I hate the color orange.

3. Shards of amber glass collect pools of water.

Only dogs are brave enough to walk barefoot in the city.

From rooftops, pigeons flap their wings like white sheets.

Do they have genetic memory of their ancestral home

the Italian sea cliffs? Fenuccio, Italian for fennel;

Fenuccio's on Broadway; transvestitsm; liquorice; anise;

underneath it all, it's all the same thing.

The soft earth slips under my feet.

I need to take off my shoes for grounding.

Sitting on curbstone overlooking a sea of houses,

I uncurl my feet like a snail from its shell.

These girders anchor my breasts to this continent.

1/82
10/23/15

Folklore fragments from my grandmother on the Sullivans

Folklore fragments from my grandmother, Jennie Walsh Reilly, collected in Forest Knolls, 1982

Death Superstition

The pictures fell off the wall and the glass broke. (Death.) All the boys— I’m getting superstitious. Ricky is already gone. There is still David, Kevin, and Guy. All those wars.

Before the English came, keening rituals
The voices moved up the hill. The women were crying when grandfather died. All week long it went on. We got used to it. All around his bed the birds singing, singing for Old Donough Sullivan Beare, he was the last of the clan.

The Sullivan Babe, keening ritual
I was facing the window, looking out, and I heard the voice of a woman crying, that was the banshee, it means fairywoman. The voice traveled from one row of trees to the next, and all along, down the houses, the Sullivan babe had died. It was the Rh factor, I think. I don’t know how many they had lost. It was an ongoing grief with no end in sight.

Sullivan Men, bog men and bog butter, and why you need to wash linen.
The Sullivan men were all so tall, square shoulder and handsome, my niece was married in England and the Sullivans standing beside her were all related. The isolated peninsula across the bay was known as the bear place. The boys looked for the cave where the bear skeleton was. Only the Bantry Sullivans are O Sullivan Bear. There was once a real bear. The skeleton is in the Irish museum that belonged to an earlier era. A huge skeleton of a man was found with it—when I was growing up. He was nearly 8 feet tall, you see, the bog preserved him. They used a special type of basket, a firkin and wrapped him up in linen. Linen absorbs the moisture. A firkin of butter was so many pounds worth – they took it into town. They used to sink the butter into the bogs for years. Flax grows on wet ground. That’s why you have to wash your linen tablecloths, to keep them alive.

Early childhood memories, teaching notes, Westside school

From my CPITS teaching notes. don’t know if I was teaching the workshop or Lee Perron was, but my boyfriend Edwin Drummond was there, which leads me to believe it was me teaching. Or perhaps, Lee and I were co-teaching. Personification, early childhood memory.

The first thing I remember was crawling in the grass. I opened up my hand and there was a leaf. A —student from Westside school fifth grade.

I was walking down a circular staircase, lost my balance, and fell. I remember my head hitting the stairs and my vision blurring as my head struck each step. I didn’t have any word for pain so I didn’t feel it. I remember seeing the walls in the sky bounce around. —Maureen Hurley.

I was chasing my brother down a long, circular stairway case on Cape Cod. We came around the corner, and I saw my father on the landing, putting trash into a wastebasket. There was a lightbulb on over his head. My father looked up at me, and smiled. —Lee Perron

 I was two years old. I was at the ocean and a shiny glistening star was floating in the water. I went to pick it up. The water was deep, and I walked up to my chest and brought it to my mother. She screamed. It was a jellyfish. —Edwin Drummond

I was standing on a stonewall. I was waving goodbye to my sisters as she was going to school. Suddenly, I’m crying, my mother picks me up, takes me inside and takes off my shoe, four wasps crawl out. —No name. The teacher?

SURVEYOR’S MARK

This one beside me, 

this straight road 

is a surveyor’s mark, 

a line-up, a painting

held by invisible threads. 

It is straightforward, 

no hidden surprises, 

it’s level, above board, 

predictable, though odd. 

Neither a prime, nor a composite 

nor a compound number, 

its slender surface,

a vanishing point

perspective.

At the end is a period, 

the beginning, or the end.

1982 no date.

From a Lynn Watson workshop, I was training her.

WHAT THE SCHOLIAST SAID:

Zara Altair said write a poem without naming it. Use juxtaposition. Write about how a chrysanthemum in bloom is like art or ants on fire.

WHAT THE SCHOLIAST SAID:

Regard the chrysanthemum
stalks, flat on the ground, 

flowers, twisting the tips 

past the roof shadow.

The spent bud

a honeycomb, 

a hornet’s nest, 

significance once as a pattern, 

but a theory of progress? 

A constant explosion 

of shapes, 

quiet, fringed, yellow, 

burning, and the bush, 

utterly consumed

No date 1982

random fragments culled from scraps of paper, 1982-84

Dennis Banks and Abby Hoffman 

are the only real heroes left.

Do you remember when you realized 

you were going to die?

The oppressor and the oppressed

Their women pass time
pressing strawberries between their thighs
The oppressor is always "they"
They have nothing better to do 

than to watch their wives sitting at home 

squashing strawberries between their thighs. 

No strawberry sunday at the fountain

We're all shiksas looking for home

Nuptial

I bet you're so perfect 

you don't even get junk mail.

Primal

As Richard plays the piano late at night
Coastal fog drips from pine trees 

a morose foghorn sounds in the distance
Do we respond to those notes 

the sounds we heard as children
What makes us respond to music?
Certain chords touching off the coastal fog 

dripping off Presidio Pines 

and the forlorn cutting the fog 

1984

When his hand grazes on my body 

reality and memory cease 

and all there is is the moment.
What I want to tell the fish 

rolling in my bed at night 

is that none of us can crawl back 

to that place called home 

no matter what coast we seek.

And the robins sings of smashed mates 

the feathered triumph of my VW 

mercilessly breaking the bondage of robins 

April 1984

I am as innocent as I can afford to be – Howard Hart

I wish bad poems were more like clay pots 

slumped at the wheel
Instead they're fired with air bubbles 

trapped within the clay wall 

and they explode in the kiln 

or break with ease leaving us 

to piece them back together, 

our hands sticky with glue. 

No date I'm guessing 1984

The sand shifting of time
This marriage of poetry and art
The infant weaving the woman's hourglass
The band bird is the color of white horses
I cover my eyes and speak
I cover my ears to see
I cover my mouth to love
My breast is laid bare 

this clothing gathers them in.

I have been running for more than a year 

in the act of running the rabbit legs lengthen

the ears elongate the ratio between ear and hind foot 

measures the distance of fear.

Billowing loose from my shoulders 

the hair at the nape of my neck

gives me chills, like the dead come to visit.

All words are suspect
prepubescent poetic intention 

covering the eye, the ear
Aural intentions of the throat
The ancient sea voice whispering in my ear
Reminding me the shape of time 

is woman shaped. 

And I have hands to turn the glass 

on its side 

looking really looking into another's eyes 

for the first time. 

And as I gather up  my infant body 

covering the exposed flesh along the belly 

where the outgrown clothes pull apart 

revealing the darkness underneath 

in fetal defiance my knees are raised to my chin 

as I survey that mouth I want to kiss again and again

Our bodies never forget the touch of old lovers


After the honeymoon

I come away from the conference feeling both old – 

the wasted time floundering on mnemonic chores 

and doing that the last stages of my infancy

growing pains anchoring the honeymoon 

is this another poem about about writing 

how I bend over while driving to retrieve my hat 

and the feathers licking my fingers greedily 

as the car swerved into oncoming traffic
We are alive for such a short time 

and the unfinished poems remind us 

of the sand sifting through the hourglass 

in the shape of a woman's body
Yet another year passes. 

that odor of tar weed and skunk, 

the aging yellow edges of blank paper, 

wanting to slip off the cliff 

a feeling that lasts longer than the flight of poetry.

7/82  Napa Poetry Conference


Coyotes

Five coyotes emerge out of darkness, 

with strange square jaws with herbivore's teeth. 

The coyote spoke to me but I couldn't understand—

it was a coyote dream. What did the coyote say?

added 9/2016

revised a bit as they don't make a lot of sense.