Oahu, Hawaii Journal, 8/5/84

In the hotel I am meeting no one but the shopkeepers and I swap tales of homeland and of journey. Traveling alone, feeling safe, no need for more of the same.

At the zoo fence, a watercolor artist  and I discussed left-handedness and right brain theories. We are defining the role of discipline and art.

I came here to write. So far it's all been rubbish. But I'm collecting so much data I feel viscerally ill after each day. I keep losing my camera, my keys, my wallet, camera bag, and I am nonplussed. I'm not losing them, I keep misplacing them and then can't remember where I've put them.

Polynesian paralysis has taken ahold, slowly it comes when you sleep, and it stealthily slips in like an errant lover into your waiting arms.

Small kids clamber over and say hi hi hi. We smile, the best of friends. Kathy's nephew Mike and I putter around Hanamua Bay on a raft, we're sharing a snorkel. It's if they were all my children and we are all friends. I discovered how easy it is to be 10 years old again.

I think of Jim, and Lee, my fat stomach. I notice my tits rest on my rib cage for the first time. Still there's a hole somewhere dark and soft, for a man, for a family. I push the feeling aside, once again I push it deep into the valley where there is no measuring of time, there is no future, and I stroll across the parking lot saying to myself I'm here. I'm right here.

Is this the way it is because I am an artist? Is this a myth? Can one have both? Have I already slipped imperceptibly into another life? There were so many could have been's. Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda.

I left Jim at the airport, saying, Don't worry I don't want a relationship either. Three weeks ago, I was convinced I was still in love—but then there are those who stretch holes in my heart, ripping them a little wider

I discovered for the 87th time I once again confused. I can't tell if these periodic storms of love are real, or is the confusion that is real? We can't ask others to love us no more than we can ask our hearts to love someone who wants us to love them in return and we can't. The more experience love, the less I know of love, life, and what I want.

Lee, Jim it's all the same rock wall story. We're like picky fish on a piece of fruit on the edges of love, and then declare the center to be rotten, to be pithy, a void. The shifting sands whisper will it never stop?

For women, there is a different kind of time then with men. A different way of viewing love, and acceptance if somewhat a fatalistic stance. With men, it's a non-declaration. But we see it in their eyes. Are they cut off from their emotions? Is logic the only language? Left brain dominant.

How is it that we see, when they don't? We spend years arguing over how they won't love us. They make us a point of it, and continue on until one suspect that yes is no, and no is yes. Yes dear, I don't love you but tell me again anyway.

8/5/1984

The objective eye

Some bridge is always being built across the chasm. With these safety webs, comes love, and compassion, but it makes me mistrusts the lip of the gorge.

In this process of understanding, and renewal of love, I step back a bit further back from the edge. Deep inside, the objective eye takes note.

8/5 

WALKING MEDITATION, WAIKIKI, 2 poems, drawing,

WALKING MEDITATION, WAIKIKI

After snorkeling all day
at Hanamua Bay
I spend the next 24 hours
in a rigid Mo'ai stance.
All that fire raging
on the backs of my thighs
and no way to put it out.
The sun's revenge.
I cannot sit on the bus,
how will I ride the plane:
I recline my way across the waters.
What I'd give for an easy chair
lined with icepacks.

8/4/84


HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

Waikīkī is a perpetual Mardi Gras
the party never stops
tourists of every tongue
get down to the basics.

8/4/84

It is difficult to ride the bus, drive a car, eat a meal, ride a plane, or even write when you can't sit down. Lee asks, "Your ass?" Yes. It's 48 hours later, and I still can't sit, even slathered with so much Solarcane, it's given me the chills. After spending time either prone on my stomach, or standing so long, that my ankles have swelled, and my feet throb.

8/5/84

Postcard to Donna from Waikikii

CLOUDS OVER MOLOKAI

CLOUDS OVER MOLOKAI, II

Clouds tower over Molokai 

flat tongue of Molokai rolls from the feet of Maui, 

where reefs break, boats and whitecaps of Pacific lint.

If you look the wrong direction all there is, is endless ocean.

August/84?  No idea

added 9/15/2016

CLOUDS OVER MOLOKAI, 1

flat tongue of Molokai 

rolls from the feet of Maui 

white boats and whitecaps 

Pacific lint. If you look 

in the wrong direction 

all there is is endless ocean 

where reefs break.

I found this in a 1983 journal, but I also found a poem written in 1984. So I am not sure of the date.

Letter to Jim Byrd: Mid-Ocean, Enroute to Oahu (Hawaii journal) 7/31/84

Mid-ocean, somewhere,  July 31, 1984

Jailbyrd –

The only problem with initiating a conversation about the ends of relationships on the steps of BART and then leaving, is that all that gets left unsaid, rolls around in my head as if in dreams, unresolved. I guess if I hadn't said anything it wouldn't have made any difference – I still would've known what Zara said… Leave me hanging here.

Well, there's land out there— Must be getting close. Mauna Kea. Through the clouds, the low flat tongues of Molokai's shore.

Much later: tthe water is so warm, I had forgotten the sheer joy of it all. I spent last night at Kaiser Emergency Center, three fucking hours for a self-diagnosed yeast infection from the antibiotics. (And they will leave me with a gift in return: pinkeye.)

Welcome to Hawaii. I'd forgotten about the slow pace here. Fun, hokey tourist stuff. In spite of  9 million tourists, Waikiki is still manages to be friendly. Sure, they want the tourist dollars, but it's not just the shaka-buck shakedown. Actually, I like it. Sort of like television serials becoming reality— everyone relates to Tom Selleck and Hawaii 5-O.

Waikiki is like Disneyland, or LA shrunk into a dream. That dumb stuff on Fantasy Island seems to be be for reals here, and I can't believe that businesses are run this way. I suspect California was laid-back like this not too long ago. The ones who hustle don't have Polynesian paralysis. Can you imagine New Yorkers struck with Polynesian paralysis? Businesses still functioning?

The reason for all this trivia is that I am an involuntary prisoner, shut in for the day. I'm surviving on one orientation breakfast. You know, buy this, buy that, etc. I'm in a room crammed with first-time haoles and not so haole visitors. So my mind's very trivial. No, relaxed. Very difficult to think. Heavy. Pacalolo means I no can remembah, with an H. So much for intellect.

Continental breakfast means one donut, Styrofoam coffee, and Hawaiian punch. Not Kona coffee. It's too bad I have to sit through this, but it's the only time I can find out who I made my reservations with. She-it.

Somehow I don't think I'm ever going to get out of here, much less finish what I started to write about in the beginning of this letter. I am practicing writing meditation to withstand the deluge. Wish I could leave. Hanamua Bay is waiting, and all those fish. Trouble with drinking coffee and being the captive is that you go crazy faster.

Oh God I'm losing it. Bananas, mangoes, and coconuts, give me some strength. Mahalo.

Real life, like a loose tooth with a mercenary bench for the tooth fairy, they shake it out of you. National pastime is to spend money. I'm part of a Third World group, practically the only white person in the room and I feel more and more uncomfortable with them— they are the polyester class. All these honky bitches.

Did you know they take photos of you at the airport while you're getting lei'd? Five hours of sardine mentality on World Airways and a quick lei, everyone looks worse than wash-and-wear. For eight dollars you can have Kodak moment permanently reminding you of how you don't want to look.

Everyone buys a photo of themselves. Something I find astounding. Something for a washed up unemployed photographer to look forward to?

You should see this hot Chinese number I'm looking at in red heels and very short white jumpsuit. The man she's with seems to have two women. Or is it three?

Like I said, being in the city is a trip – too much visual stimuli. I'm beginning to reel from voyeur mentality. I can't seem to stop creating fictitious backgrounds for everyone. Just let me out of here… 

The bus is coming. Help! I'm being held captive in someone else's material dream. Sometimes I get a little flipped out being alone in a strange surroundings. Not here, not today, the observer behind the camera sans camera. Taking imaginary photos.

This seething, wriggling mass of humanity, I'm part of, astounds me. Being related to all that imperfect flesh. Earlier, on the crowded bus, a man was standing, he dripped sweat from his forearms onto the seat of the passengers below him, who recoiled in horror at that liquid. Having nowhere to wipe off his fellow passenger's sweat, he fastidiously avoided looking at it.

The standing passenger lifted his shirt to cool off, showing the twisted, melted flesh. Pahoehoe lava, seared pockets of flesh. Scar tissue cannot sweat having no sweat glands. The only places that this man could sweat was from his forearms and his belly. What napalm melted his flesh? We are all veterans carrying the war damaged flesh from one place or another.

The reason why I travel is because memory jogs, and random action becomes significant when patterns are created. Our bus arrives. Aloha!

On the bus, a middle-aged woman named Gladys asks: how does this look? Smart with biwah pearls. The reality of it is locked away in tablecloth mentality. A dapper gentleman in an Indonesian wedding shirt, white linen pants, white shoes with holes punched out, smiles at me with gold teeth, his pigeon blood ruby ring, worth a lot of blood.

She leans on me, cowlike, obliviously her cheap perfume fighting against the odor of her plumaria lei.

Something happens here, an imagined reality. For a moment I know longer know what it is I am writing, nor to whom I write, or why.

This letter, if it is one, has taken hold of its own reality, is consuming its own history, its fictitious past.

If that odious woman plants her green and gold heels on my bare foot one more time, I'm going to bite her ass off, but then there would be no comprehension for the dead.

It is so crowded, and hot, I cross my legs with a fellow passenger as her fat presses against my inner thigh. Violation of space. I am very touchy about personal space. They are German, it is difficult to be rude to foreigners.

I am a bitch. I bite my tongue. I carefully fold the tips of my fingernails over my fingers, testing their tensile strength into the palm of my hand—where is the breaking point? It is different for each of us.

How many of us eat before we are truly hungry to sate some trivial god of greed? And I still haven’t sent what I mean set out to say in this letter. It’s a case of the avoidance syndrome for the both of us.

July 31, 1984

• Hawaii Journal, August 5 -12, 1984
• Kamapua'a and Pele on Kilauea

The sound of crickets or frogs

The sound of crickets or frogs,
the croak comes out of a bag
filled with dried vertebrae
Each croak demands one neckbone
for its passage.

7.84
Napa

Invisible Boundaries 1984 NO eFile! Type!

this is definitely NOT the same poem as my Soviet poem by the same name in 1989!
INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES

Desolation Wilderness, no efile bad copy

WAYFARER

     The boat lay fixed, resting on the rope,
     the deep bosomed ship, fast at anchor. 

                                      —from Beowulf

How many years has it been since
Ebbe rescue the drydocked Egyptian dhow
from the battering ram and burning?
I remember the story about how he had to wait
for the full winter moon and king tides
to float it up the shallow channels of Bolinas Creek.
Its carvel-built sides furrowed the bay mud,
as it sailed under stars.

In the darkness of winter, his wife
Angela, sat sewing the sails by hand,
the painted sun blazed on the walls
of the loft as the heavy fog
tongued the windows and doors.

Ebbe hammered his poetry into that boat.
And each year it was not quite ready,
needing more revision and finishing
before the spray of the sea
could baptize that sailing sun.
And his girl-child needed tending-to
on solid ground.

Soon she will be old enough to sail —
she's the steadfast anchor
that keeps her father surely shored.
In his arms, her slight weight
is a more solid metal than iron.

7/9/1984

LETTER FROM BILL BERKSON

LETTER FROM BILL BERKSON

Today I got a letter from Bill Berkson.
He says, it's been a while. Too long.
Not much has changed—
He says, Ebbe is still around,
and Will you come to visit soon?

How that time has come and gone,
vanished beneath night's cover,
just as if it never had been.
The wanderer said,
The story never changes much,
only the times are different.

7/9/84

Obligatory Hug, July, 1984, Luther Burbank Activity Center, Sebastopol (poem)

Obligatory Hug, July, 1984, Russian River Writers' Guild, Whirlybird aka Maureen Hurley

TO ALL THE PHOENICIANS LOST AT SEA

TO ALL THE PHOENICIANS LOST AT SEA

        "The worst day of violence

          since the Muslim revolt in February."

        – San Francisco Chronicle, 6/121984

June 11, 1984

The dead lay on bloodsoaked stretchers
in corporate doorways

Doctors shouted for more beds

There was no space left
in the hospital morgue

Witnesses said women –
some in nightgowns and slippers,
rushed out to bring
their children home
from school
and two men wept
in a Beirut parking lot.

Poets write of Central America

I can't talk about El Salvador

I have no Nicaraguan poems

My Central America is Beirut.

6/11/1984

Press Democrat: Rainbow Rally for Jesse Jackson, Maureen Hurley reads

Obligatory Hug, June, 1984, Russian River Writers' Guild, Maureen Hurley

LETTER TO “CRAPPA”

For Roger Kent 1906-1982

Who are we, and where are we going?

—Gauguin

We called you Crappa with a “C”

& you roared with laughter

until your milky eyes watered & your lungs failed.

You said, A toothless son couldn't get it right,

& like a typo, the name Crappa stuck.

While the oxygen tank stood guard by your bedside,

you returned the war trophies:

the New Guinean stone axes to the Bishop Museum,

& the yosegaki banner of heavy raw silk,

with its faded orange sun, to Japan.

Beneath the signatures, rust stains,

or was it old blood?

I wanted to ask: What village, whose son?

Someone translated: Given to ____

in the Great Pacific War fought to the end.

If you believe in it you win.

With the flag, you sent a snapshot of you on the beach:

a young man holding the enemy flag

& the Japanese prisoners all smiling

smiling for the unseen camera. Silent, posed.

Like a knife, the shutter severed a moment from time.

These tropics suck marrow from bone.

You told us about those boxes of freight

marked TYPEWRITERS—FRAGILE, DO NOT DROP.

Inside those boxes, whiskey.

The news nearly leaked out

when someone dropped a box & said, Damned heavy!

Why the hell you need all those typewriters for?

In our dreams we are always traveling towards paradise.

All those dead waiting in Iron Bottom Bay,*

their bones like coral—

All those names calligraphed on the sun,

& the islands: Guadalcanal, Tinian, Iwo Jima

needed witnesses.

But you never told us how it really was:

the ocean, the palm trees & the inevitable waiting.

Generations of fish have spawned in the iron reefs,

grinning skulls, & stained coral sand—

rusted war trophies no one will return.

As coral ages, it whitens like hair.

Like the sky must have done

that terrible second dawn.

Who will tell us the stories

when all the old men are gone?

When the Japanese sent a photo

of the family & flag reunited,

you tried to keep your hand

on top of the new flag from trembling.

The alizarin disc was brighter

than new blood without history,

the thin silk breathed & quivered,

waiting to make an escape.

Honolulu, HI

6/1984,
rev87 (was there a first draft in 82?)
rev. 8/95

AFTER CÚNLA

What is left of me?

Don't take the thighs of me,

Only take the bones of me. . .

Only bones, says Cúnla.

—from an Irish song

Spavin and shankle the moss

to the north sides of the oaks

so we won't get lost.

A bridge of light sways

beneath a canopy of trees.

a path, a lantern for Diogenes

blossoms beneath our feet.

Who is counting the bones

among these fallen years?

Who is counting the bones?

And the piny woods whisper

among the dead

and the dead are whispering

among the piny woods.

Can you not hear them?

They listen to the rhythm of your bones.

It keeps them still on this earth.

Beat the bodhrán slowly.

Knuckle bone, thigh.

Play the all songs

to show them the way home.

Can you not hear the bones of me?

Can you not feel the hands of me

as we crawl barefoot through the snow

towards Savannah?

Only bones, says Cúnla.

6/84

Trail of Tears

I tried to revise and expand this 11/92.

Magabark/ Medicine Bundle collaborative art show at the Falkirk Center

My poem was a version of In the San Geronimo Valley, Ann Faught of Woodacre was my collaborative artist. Bill Witherup curated the collaborative show. His artist was William T. Wiley. Carl Dern's poet was Susan Kennedy. Kathy Evans also had poems in the show at the Falkirk Center. Don't know the artist.

My poem  In the San Geronimo Valley, Ann Faught, visual artist.

I made art postcards as personal invitations to the show.

I also created a collaborative poem scroll.

Bill Witherup's medicine bundle, which was the genesis of the show.

Bill Wiley's piece based on Bill Witherup's poem

 

I didn't label slides, thinking I could read them. Carl Dern & ? poet

Tess Gallagher photo in the San Francisco Chronicle

It seems the San Francisco Chronicle was happy to pay Jim Paul for the article, but stiffed me for my photo not once but twice.

Letter from Marc Naftalin

 

Ken Larsen's MA Thesis, Art and the Bourgeoise, a dissertation presented on ribbons

Conceptual art piece, Ken Larsen's Thesis, Art and the Bourgeoisie, a hand-calligraphed dissertation presented on silk ribbons attached to a sunhat, and read aloud to his thesis advisor, Bruce Hackett in J St. Park, Sacramento, CA, in May, 1984. I got tired of Ken's procrastination, so I interviewed him, and distilled his dissertation down into a dozen threads. Bruce read the entire dissertation aloud. It took us several walks around the park to complete the process. Ken got his MA.

DELUGE

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.


5/1984

WITH THESE WORDS: REDEMPTION

WITH THESE WORDS: REDEMPTION

All right, it's over. With these words
I redeem the human body.
We rise to the surface like parasitic fish,
leap clear of the water and fall heavily back
 to shake loose from the depths
 the snot in our lungs.
Light, like faith healing these cancerous bodies,
 brings us forth into day.

In a school drill, we crouched under our desks,
shielding our eyes and necks with chubby arms.
We sat in rows on the playground to watch the flash
drain color from the sky
when they tested the bombs at Jackass Flats.

At the hospital, the black toilet seat
is split like the thighs of some hairy sex.
A nurse keeps me from falling down
the long, cool tubes where consciousness
is an escaped bubble trapped in the bends of a pipe.
The coriolis effect on water swirls it to the right.
The opposite is true south of the equator
but there are flaws in every system, including the weather.
Remember that durning nuclear winter.

The frozen wings of starched hospital gowns
 threaten to carry us off,
but the nurse brings in the choke chains
 and we tumble from air,
 tumble from water,
 tumble from grace.
 Virgil, Prospero, Icarus—
we're too close to the light.
 Return us to the waxed plain
 of checkered hospital floors
with beds arranged according to patterns
where an enormous game of chess is in progress
and the beds are the only pawns left playing.

8/84
Falkirk Center, San Rafael


Another old ascii riddled rescue piece. Date? I'm making them all 1/180. Hopefully I'll find my lost MSS binder. Otherwise there's no hard copy of most of my work for 2 decades. Yikes.

Miracle, I found two typed versions for lines.

POEM IN Eb FOR TCHAIKOVSKY

POEM IN Eb FOR TCHAIKOVSKY

Stillness in the air/not a rustling sound

—from "Moscow Nights"

1. On sleepless night

I resurrect well-dressed paper

and write poetry on blank checks,

old second notices & the backs of old poems

while thinking of the tropics: Tahiti.

The morning light filters through the curtain

of Bar Mitzva silk stolen

from the chest of a dead grandmother

and I am not an artist when I don't write—

all those children go unborn.

Words are strewn across the floor

burning holes in the carpet,

into my eyes.

I sometimes think I will sink

beneath the churning weight of ploughs

or feel beneath my feet

a braille concerto on paper—

2. We continue to breathe air

and smile at the sun

on the Baltic, on the Adriatic, the Pacific

a floral carpet of fish in Tahiti

a field of blue flowers in California

And today they ploughed the lupines under.

Light walks before the harnesses of ploughs

and is resurrected in the oceans and the sky.

Who can afford all this light

except the fish in coral lagoons?

The tropics call me home at night.

I am swimming in the indigo air of sleep

collecting flowers before the fall.

God knows, it's spring,

the mad wind blows hair into my eyes

as I ressurect lupines before the plough

to plant in the garden.

3. As I write this poem,

the creole shrimp becomes carbon.

Brilliant colored lobsters crawl from my clothes.

Wait! I am coming, I am coming...

as the wet sigh of banana leaves doles out sleep.

Sometimes I think of burning holes beneath my feet,

live coals. Words too hot, bursting their genetic code

on the roof of my mouth, in my eyes--

this troubled land of sleep.

When I awaken I am always dead

because I forget what the pattern looks like.

4. As I write this poem I think

I never meant to write long poems.

They're like leaves falling.

5. It's not the cat who sits on my negatives

and knocks piles of paper from each shelf

that keeps me awake.

It's not me throwing sleep across the room

to smash her accusing eyes

and then watch it drip lifeless down the wall.

It's not the reason why I wait for the wind

or go mad before the mistral

during the cruel months before April

or look for etherized sunsets.

Tchaikovsky is not a violin concerto

to stir the carpet of sleep.

The mad wind blows in Eb making us all a little restless.

Tchaikovsky is a noun, a name for Russian spring.

The cat on the bureau orchestrates the papers

in D Major for the months to come.

4/26/84
Forestville

I played Tchaikovsky's concerto over and over—I was mad for it. I couldn't get enough of its wildness. Something very disturbing about it. His madness. I read his letters. I had no idea that I would be going to the USSR five years later.

The revision is not that much different, I think I was afraid of the poem. I was pretty traumatized when the landlord's minion ploughed the lupines under. They never, ever came back.

UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS

AFTER NERUDA’S UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS 

If the sky bent over to paint robins’ eggs and breathed 

cerulean madness into the breasts of bluebirds, 

did it shun the fatted bluejays asleep in the laurels? 

When the wind blew through the Wife of Bath‘s teeth, 

and Malvolio cross gartered his stockings for his lady love, 

what dark secret love was offered to the moon? 

When the rhinoceri returned where did they all run to? 

Where did he hang his wrinkled skin 

when the sand in the hourglass ran out of time, 

and the door wouldn’t lock? 

Who took the measurements indicated in figure #1, 

when trilateral symmetry, like fish in a mirror, 

breathes fog on the slopes of Haleakala? 

Giraffes harbor entire continents on their backs. 

Trees once stretched in a continuous line from coast to coast. 

Now squirrels have nowhere left to leap, 

they are flattened casualties of the road, 

and PG&E continues to construct Diablo Canyon, 

Livermore, San Onofre, while the wildflowers sway 

like laborious guilt on the salt breeze. 

Where am I going, getting there by the wind 

filling my head with the secrets of trees? 

The door of my heart isn’t marked with a neon exit sign 

darkened by shadows of bounced checks and kites. 

If the moon were full of holes and made of green cheese, 

and money became obsolete, 

how will the chicken Cordon Bleu? 

Freud already tried to analyze the dark side 

of the moon and failed. Miserably. 

Look where that got him.

spring 1984

SLEEP

SLEEP

 —for Geoff Davis

Sleeping beneath the window,

the tongues of darkness

melted into morning mist;

as he tended a fire of smoke & fog.

I arose like a dancer,

the dog softly groaned,

the cat pushed the blackness

back from his bones.

Plucked by the feet of birds,

the barbed wire hummed like a harp.

In the canyon I overheard

the endless conversation of the Eel River,

but not the distant song

eroding the shore at our feet.

Longridge, CA

4/15/84
rev. 87, 2012

                 —For Geoff Davis

Sleeping beneath the window,

the tongues of darkness

melted into morning mist;

your smile, soft as dawn,

as you tended the fire

of smoke and fog.

I arose like a dancer,

the dog softly groaned,

the cat pushed the blackness

back from his bones.

Plucked by the feet of birds,

the barbed wire hummed.

In the canyon I overheard

the endless conversations

of the Eel River, but not

the distant song eroding

the shore at our feet.

Longridge, CA

spring 84

RRWG memorial reading for Boschka Layton, with Steve Petty, Michael Morey, Hunce Voelcker, Gerrye Payne, Mary Hoffman, Mary Ellen O’Banion, Laura del Fuego, Barbara Baer, Peggy Ellingson, Donna Champion, Zara Altair, Paul Mariah, Bonnie Olsen, Maureen Hurley, Jane Flood,

Obligatory Hug, Apr. 1984, Russian River Writers' Guild

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