Contrails in the Western Sky, book review by Gail King, Tracks in the Widest Orbit, JH Montrose, West Sonoma Co. Paper

I was probably the Sonoma State University liaison, I produced readings there for years. And since I worked for The Paper, that photo may be mine...

Tracks in the Widest Orbit, collected poems of JH Montrose

FEAST OR FAMINE

FEAST OR FAMINE
—After William Carlos Williams

This is just to say:

I usually know better than to open a man's

refrigerator no matter how good

the loving was the night before.

The newspaper was still readable—

not that news is important enough to eat—

the salmon on a plastic-keeled raft

had a knowing look as if a fishing rod

had snagged something other than dreams

during the night's repast.

Not that we kept each other

in hunger and health the whole night long.

However, for breakfast, I only eyed the avocado

which you were probably saving for tonight's dip.

Eggs tossed in a frail paper boat

on a heavy cabbage sea, and the mushrooms—

like puckered toes under an incandescent moon,

would have been good in an omlet.

Though my appetite is stirring,

there are always greener pastures farther south.

You see, my mind was on last night's dinner

which stood me up when we fell back into dreams

and the salmon swam freely home—

I'm still famished, no matter how many quarts

of kisses were stored on the shelf

during the famine years.

Cotati, 1984
rev. 4/89
1993 We Are Not Swans, with Cecelia Woloch
1985 Poets of the Vineyard, First Prize (another version)

RRWG memorial reading for JH Montrose, Charles Wattenberg, Donna Champion, Zara Altair, Paul Mariah, Bonnie Olsen, Maureen Hurley,

In Memoriam Boschka Layton, Valentine's Day, 1984 (drawing)

River poet, painter dies (Boschka Layton photo)

RRWG Erotic reading at the Burbank Activity Center with Donna Champion, Marianne Ware, Lee Perron, Pat Nolan, Gail King, Zara Altair, Bonnie Olsen, Maureen Hurley, Paul Mariah, Hunce Voelcker, Joe Pahls, Helen Dunn,

DEATH IN LEBANON

DEATH IN LEBANON        
—for J.H. Montrose, WWII fighter pilot 1923 - 1984                        
—With thanks to Mahmoud Darweesh.           

                  Child of Beiruit             
                  Barely ten years old             
                  Fleeing the bombings,             
                 Who can tell you of love           
                 As you delay your own flight           
                 To carry your younger brother?        
                                 —Jim Byrd  12/83 

1. The cedars of Lebanon are feathered
dust green against the deep sea cliffs.
The pungent odor of mhyrr and sea
lightens this winter landscape.

2. in Khalde, just south of the airport
a conference of birds flies at dawn.
In Khalde, despair falls from the wings
of planes, steel birds feeding on air.

3. In the central mountains a three week truce
is granted to Druse and Christian fighters.
In the central mountains
a call to prayer from the minaret
marks a certain passage of time.
This place, the land of the infidel.
Mountains bleed back into the sea.

4. This year, spring comes early to the desert
and blooms in the form of tattered clothing.
Spring comes in the form of a prayer wheel
that takes away the sins of the dead.
Bones reseed themselves and take root.
The sea is paying back the mountains.€

5.  Einstein said, "to prepare simultaneously
for war and peace is a non-sequitor."

6. A stillness in the air.
In Lebanon, the pause before dawn is sacrosant,
a call to prayer. The shores of the Red Sea
glitter with the feathers of doves.
A child said, "any step towards war is a wrong step."
Fish preen their young in the indigo sea.

7.  The village of Kabir Chimoun in the hills.
The village of Kabir Chimoun just after fire.
In the hills, after fire, what is the color of prayer, of death?

8. Bent in prayer over fields of rugs
wild tulips harbor an annual passion.
Everyone fights for their own square inch of troubled ground.
Stones break like laws inscribed in clay tablets.

9. The old man of the desert unrolls a tent of stars
and shakes clay dust form his stiffened limbs.
Birds confer to the east, towards the sun.
There are no targets for rebels here.

10. The road to Damascus is deserted.
The crusaders wore red crosses on white linen tunics.
War and religion intersect in the deserted shadows of a global highway.
In the distance a stacatto report announces the dawn.
This is how it begins: in the morning paper, with coffee.

Arabic: our numbers.
Arabic: the names of stars.
Arabic: fuel for planes.

The poet Darweesh said of Beirut,
"We've found nothing to compare with this but our blood."
What was said at the conference of the birds
is lost, buried in the streets of Beirut
where children play in the debris of war.
Lebanon, an oasis for the language of birds,
names of war, who can tell you of love
when the steps already take cannot be retraced?

2/2/84  US Invasion of Lebanon

Poet Jim Montrose dies

 

ARC/ Rural Arts Services symposium drawing

Charles Simic drawing

Obligatory Hug, Jan-feb, 1984, Luther Burbank Activity Center, Sebastopol (Mo, drawings)

MOUNTAIN FLOWERS

MOUNTAIN FLOWERS

Under azure skies and robins

roseated cyclamens

exude such exquisite warmth

that the sun is struck dumb

by comparison

1984

GAMBLING ODDS

GAMBLING ODDS

Seeing old lovers again

is like playing tic tac toe

with the moon.

Like with Jimmy the Greek

the odds are 100%

in the moon's favor.

1984 date? I think it's older

1983? Marin Poetry Review 

MOUTHS

MOUTHS

too much speaking

too much eating

kissing, shouting—

all in that simple line

drawn against

folded flesh.

1/ 1984

JADED PRINCESSES' TALE

JADED PRINCESSES' TALE

Oh, Lord
how many nights
shall I kiss a prince
and awaken
with a toad?


1984

INDIA

Footprints in the mud

begin in the Ganges

where ashes take wing

In the bazaar, women’s eyes flash,

bracelets and bicycles jangle

the clattering herd

races toward the sun

spokes intersecting with light

the clattering train

Pancot in the hills

84? 85?

Footprints in the snow

slipping backwards downhill

squeak of new snow

blue light reflecting in the forest

Dog’s tongue clacks

as he catches his breath

84??  written in Mimi Albert’s class

Short Poems 1984

And the robins sings of smashed mates
the feathered triumph of my VW
mercilessly breaking the bondage of robins

April 1984






DELUGE

Just as I was beginning to forget,
you arrived at my doorstep
and music burst from your eyes
even before I could hear the wings of Icarus
whisper danger from the sun.
Broken wheels in the desert are as useless
as the arms of a saguaro's embrace.
The yucca-pale dreams brought a deluge of rain
and I am drifting in the lake of your eye
once more.

 5/84



 GAMBLING ODDS

Seeing old lovers again
is like playing tic tac toe
with the moon.
Like with Jimmy the Greek
the odds are 100%
in the moon's favor.

1984?




JADED PRINCESSES' TALE

Oh, Lord
how many nights
shall I kiss a prince
and awaken
with a toad?

1984



MOUNTAIN FLOWERS

Under azure skies and robins
rosiated cyclamens
exude such exquisite warmth
that the sun is struck dumb
by comparison

1984




MOUTHS

too much speaking
too much eating
kissing, shouting—
all in that simple line
drawn against
folded flesh.

1/ 1984




NIGHT VISION

Caught in my headlights,
eyes of young bucks
not leaving the dead body
of their mother.

12/84




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.





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

Richard Salzman (drawing, 1983)

I was trying to get rid of the lined paper. Didn't succeed.

Photocopy of Richard Salzman drawing, 1983

Duane BigEagle (drawing ca 1983)

Not sure when this drawing was made. 83? 84? I'm surprised I didn't destroy it. He was such a dishonest shit at the end. Breaking up with me at a CPITS conference. I was humiliated. I had no idea he was playing the field. We'd been seeing each other for at least a year.

Four sketches (art)

four quick in-class contour line drawings (not sure of the year)

Oral history collected in Windsor, 1983

In the 1880s, 5 acres of prunes would support a family. In the days before refrigeration, they were a valuable crop. The Russians grew root vegetables in Sebastopol for Fort Ross. All those people in Alaska needed vitamins.

Villa Chanticleer was built by bootleggers. There were cars with false bottoms. Rum runners. Grappa was made north of Santa Rosa. My grandfather worked at night. He didn’t speak much about it. There was machine gun fire every Friday night. The Coast Guard. As kids we’d get red lights and run along the beach so the Coast Guard would come, with lights flashing.

People came out west for gold, and to work on the railroad. Everyone had a garden. And everyone was building something. We worked 18 hours a day in May. The barley crops grew in six weeks. There are 55 minorities in China. They were a landless people. It’s like El Salvador today.

It is strange to be a minority and one’s own country. In 1856 to 1858, the people refused to pay taxes, and all the land was foreclosed. Every country I’ve been in has a minority. If it’s not race, it’s color if it’s not color, it’s skin.

During the Civil War, Santa Rosa and Petaluma raised an army. Thats why there’s the Shiloh cemetery in Windsor—it was made during the Civil War. (There are McClellans buried there—as in the General George McClellan who was pro-Confederacy. Both sides of the equation were represented in Sonoma County—the pro-Union Yankee Petaluma Guard and Emmet Rifles in suppressed a secessionist skirmish in Healdsburg. The Battle of Washoe House, is perhaps, the most comical, if apocryphal Civil War story. The story goes, Petaluma raised a militia and marched north on Confederate Santa Rosa, but the day was hot, and they got no further than the roadhouse, where they drowned their fury in suds.)

My grandmother used to tell me of the General Slocum disaster of the 1860s. New York. It was a school outing. It was a paddlewheeler steamer. My mother couldn’t go because she was from the wrong church. (Lutherans from Little Germany. Few of the women and children survived. After the disaster, the community dissolved). That’s why I’m here. My father was a tailor from Paris. And here we were in Windsor picking prunes to survive.

Anonymous, Oral history collected in Windsor, 1983.

But I didn’t name my informant. He sounds like he could be Chinese, or more likely German. I was probably going to turn it into a poem and never did. I was also doing a lot of Elderhostel teaching in those days, and people would tell me stories so it could’ve come from a workshop. Parentheses are mine, to make some sense of the story. Added 2020

Poets of the Vineyard award, First Place, Free Verse (for what poem?)

Poets of the Vineyard award, First Place, Free Verse
(not sure for what poem, I've a note that it's for FEAST OR FAMINE, but I think that isn't right. They didn't list the poem on the certificate. I never thought to write the info on the back...)
Sonoma County Chapter, California Federation of Chaparral Poets
Winnie Fitzpatrick, President

TENDING THE GARDEN (Merry Christmas Boschka)

TENDING THE GARDEN

My grandmother sends her love

She says you should try more carrot juice
made fresh. 30 carats a day.

Sounds excessive to me
but then grandmothers usually are.

That's why we love them so.
Their wisdom, prairie flowers of thought.
The buffalo robe is spread
on the ample laps of grandmothers.

This robe is your robe, my robe, our laps part.
She wants to know
how the gooseberry bush is doing,
do you need another?

She tends the garden like a robe

The garden is spread before us
like a lamb of hope, of love.

You're the mother-friend I never had

You are the love of grandmothers,
of mothers, of daughters.
Merry Christmas Boschka,
I love you.

She tends to the garden
she tends the garden
she tends the garden.

12/25/1983?
added 11/16

RRWG reading at the Burbank Activity Center with Donna Champion, Marianne Ware, Lee Perron, Pat Nolan, Gail King, Zara Altair, Bonnie Olsen, Boschka Layton, Maureen Hurley,

Dream journal

Jim Byrd was steering for me as I read directions from the map. The wheels caught on the lip of the road, nearly plunging us off the edge. Laughing, we pulled into the train station. Near the depot, a group waited in the warm sun, shelter from the brisk winter wind.

An old couple stood in front of a bench. He stumbled, and fell face up, his cane pointed up accusingly at the sky. He said, help me. I can’t breathe, as he slipped away. I watched, frozen to the spot. My God, A man is dying in a crowd of strangers who don’t even notice his passing. I stood rooted to the spot, seconds pass in what seemed like an eternity.

Someone jumped out of the crowd as I cried for help. Ambulance! No time to ask questions. She administers mouth to mouth, but it is too late. What is it like to pressure lips against the lips of the dead? Is it like a dog licking your lips?

And ambulance siren cuts the distance in half.

On the banister, fastened by red sealing wax, snapshots of the old man. His wife says we only just returned from a pottery workshop. One photo shows him intently working at the potters wheel. The clay slop has murdered his clothes.

To have lived such a full life. Dying seems less threatening, is if anything could be anything other than dying, if one lives a life to its fullest.

Are my assumptions naïve? From the banister, I gather up a checkered cloth filled with reptiles— lizards, geckos and two napping mantled ground squirrels the size of cats.

One sleepy rodent yawns luxuriously like a cat, and stretches. His mouth closes down on my index finger, and I feel the gentle strength of a sense of his incisors. I am afraid he will draw blood. Slowly I remove my finger from his mouth. They curl up tightly together, and go to sleep.

The lizard to go wild. Bluebellies, alligators, geckos, iguanas—all dashing after each other in a mad frenzy Mr. snapping their jaws and maiming each other. I am startled and frightened by all of this. One iguana grinds his jaw sideways instead of laterally and the inside of his mouth is lavender, his skin is forest green and he snaps to kill, I am glad they run in the direction they do, and not towards me.

Boys Hot Springs 12/9/83 dream journal

The Paper’s holiday gift guide: sensual & sensible (photos)

 

 

The Paper, Trina Castleberry death (photos)

Not a front page photo credit I wanted. Trina was one of my young poetry students.

 

WESTERN MOTEL, 1957

—from an Edward Hopper painting

A green Ford hugs the driveway. 

Adobe walls collect warmth from the sun.
Inside, the waiting woman’s maroon dress

vibrates, sunlight divides the room into shadow,

and sand scatters across the vast dunes 

in random patterns.

1983

No idea when, in my Napa Poetry Conference journal. Probably written in class. added 2020

THE DAY KENNEDY DIED

Jack was the ultimate myth,
a movie star of politics.
Marilyn was too demure
with the older hero played by Reagan.
We headed for Nam willingly,
Some say, we were led by the stars.
We’d do anything for that smile, those eyes.
And what did Marilyn do besides smile?
Somewhere, someone sings
a song of three oranges.
Women wilted in the heat
because they opened up too soon.
What eyes reflect this desert thirst?

People keep talking of Kennedy 20 years later.
How they were afraid to go out into the streets.
How Kennedy’s eyes followed them home,
as if that link were responsible.
We travel from place to place.
Someone asks, where were you
the day Kennedy was shot?
I feel like I’m falling back into the 60s,
searching for a joint and a dry country.

I painted my binder black with shoe polish
the day Kennedy died. I was in the third grade.
Ginny, a dancer, cries as she describes the art of ballet.
Women on a pedestal, kept in the boudoir.
So, keep up on your toes ladies.
Uphold a 200-year-old tradition.
In the aerobics studio, women stomp to the music.
They don’t want the tradition.
Ginny weeps in the isolation that is Chico.
We huddle around the table,
more alone together, than together alone.
It drizzled the day Kennedy died.
An Air Force man from Oregon tells me
about cross country skiing at base camp.
We need to keep the Hamilton Air Force Base
in the military, he says, in case of attack.
As if a tidal flat surrounded by coastal hills
would ward off a nuclear blast.
Some 20 years later, I can still see Kennedy’s eyes
reflected green off the water, in the streets,
and people hesitate, afraid to return a smile.

11/22/1983
Chico

BLUE BOWL

A row of red trees, a cerulean bowl
rolled between upturned palms.
The weight of the bowl, like an ocean.

A man in a red jacket
ride his bike up main street
with a large blue parrot
clinging to his shoulder.
Blue feathers like tide pools
on a bright red sea.

The dark room wraps itself around you.
Your eyes, darkness falling from your face
as you breathe in the light.
Your eyes gather in the moths,
and irregular fluttering of hearts
fanning the flames,
burnt wings rekindled in your eyes.

11/21/83
One of the few poems I dated. From NPC journal
I think that last stanza become Mothlight

Waiting for what?

Sometimes I wake up mornings wondering why I’m still waiting and what is it I’m waiting for. I am afraid to look into the eyes of old people because I don’t want to see what is human in myself. Too many things make me cry. I avoid looking into the eyes of the world because I am reminded of what is human is in myself. My heart is a door, the red rimmed eye of the clock is pushing us ever onward.

1983, no date November? Next poem is 11/21.

Letter from Dave Brubeck NEED TEAR SHEET & PIX

Dave wrote another letter to The Paper praising my article and photos.

Dave’s letter to the editor, The Paper, December, 1983

Little John Chrisley. NEED TO ADD PIX & STORY

Little John Chrisley was an up-and-coming blues harmonica player, a child prodigy who played with all the greats, and then he disappeared. I did a story on him at the Sonoma County fair. For the West Sonoma County paper. Need tear sheet and pix

Whatever Happened to Little John Chrisley? 1/20/1998 metro publishing

MORE FRAGMENTS: OROVILLE 1983

OROVILLE 1983

Waiters silent mouth cowboy songs
a silent croon, unintelligible, forgettable.
One of the good old boys
butters his toast up the local law,
the biggest, and the only game in town.

11/1983
added 9/2016

WINTER DOLMEN Only have Napa workshoped copies, not final v.

WINTER DOLMEN
 
I.  The old horse trails have merged back into the brush
becoming interlaced with the newer deer trails—
a netting thrown over the steep hillside.

The humanness of my scent 
will divert the night's deer 
and they will weave another path around my trespass.

The ground is bathed in red leaves.
At the Rock, I sit and watch bluejays dive
over rounded shapes of live oaks.
As they follow the shape of the tree down in their dive
breasting the top of the tree,
they sculpt the air along its side.

At the switchbacks,my mare would stop to catch her breath,
her soft nostril flaring, her softer eye blinking.
Sometimes I rode her down from the top of the hill
sometimes I ran on ahead of her.

At the switchbacks, her strong front legs would lock, pivot and turn
as the momentum of her hind end swung around
widening each turn. Sometimes, in my dreams I see her 
roaming free in the hills.
Now all that's left are subtle ridges hidden in the brush.
The foot finds a surer path even as the undergrowth 
beats back the body.

II.  From the steep height of the Rock, 
I take mental notes. Measurements without numbers, 
angles without degree or scale
and compare it with the sheer cliffs of Yosemite.
As a teenager, I hung out over the edge 
of El Capitán without safety ropes. 
This rock juts out with the same purpose. 
My legs dangle down into lush green space. 
Below my feet, civilization falls back 
revealing toy houses, woodpiles and cars 
scattered in the folds of the hills,
looking off into this vastness, the word becomes smaller.
 
III.  I always wanted to be a red-tailed hawk
because I understood how the curve of its beak matched
the symmetry of its talons.
When I fed the injured one yellowed chicken necks
the hawk's beckoning eye approved of the shape 
of its cousin's puckered neck.
After the meal, the hawk sharpened its talons
waiting to carve my cheek to fall away like softened butter.
I turn the other cheek too late.
 
IV.  The deer cross the burned clearing,
their coats the same shade as the burned grass stubble.
In the charred landscape, the movement of white legs
pinpointed against the grass
are like reverse shadows cast by a negative.
In the tall grass their legs cast no shadow.
Their backs dark against the gold.

 On the slopes of Mt. Barnabe, 

crocheted to the flanks and gullies, 

trees leave gold meadows encircled like jewels. 

The trees hid the Indian graveyard. 

My grandfather knew where it was hidden 

but refused to tell anyone, saying, 

they needed their place of the dead, too. 

I spent years in those wooded folds
searching for stone altars and moss covered ribs.
Under the soft bleached bones I thought I'd find
dark garnets winkling slowly in the mottled light.
Instead, great rib bones of Herefords pushed up through the rocks
along the dry creekbeds. Tufts of hair, sinew and gristle--
dried clean, hard like amber.

I'm still trying to follow the old paths.
My feet remember smoother paths but the newer trails
are clogged with the detritus of fallen trees.
The god I believe in allows me to measure
the free fall of a bluejay's dive, the height of a hill,
the color of grass.

Paths, like river packed with log-jams during spring thaw.
Living on the edge of this winter dolmen
is like the crisp wind blowing off fallen snow.
The years are the true movers of paths.

10/28/83
(an earlier draft–the final version was corrupted, no final hard copy. See below.)

RRWG reading at Coffee & Co., emcee Maureen Hurley

THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE BLUES: Interview with Bo Diddley, Mark Naftalin, Little John Chrisly, Sonoma County Blues Festival

Double tap to read the rest of the article. I tried every configuration, this is the only one that worked. I will transcribe it later.

Richard Salzman drawing, piano, from Obligatory Hug

Obligatory Hug, Oct. 1983, Russian River Writers' Guild, drawing