RRWG reading at the Burbank Activity Center with John Oliver Simon & Maureen Hurley

First Draft of Bob Kaufman poem, Mantle

               April 18, 1925 to Jan 12, 1986

Bobby, this whole week 

I've been looking for you 

stumbling down Telegraph, 

darkened streets and alleyways
Every bent head, every ragged step 

it drags sleep across 

the shadows of pushers
Your dark face in the darkness 

The news travels slowly 

in the time it took God to make the earth, 

you died and there's Jack on stage 

reading a poem to you,

dead all this week.

Jan 12, or 17? 1986
first journal entry is 2/3/86, but it was originally written on a napkin at Cafe Triest


see Bob Kaufman poem
MANTLE

INTENT ON THE NEWS

INTENT ON THE NEWS

Intent on their newspapers
they read with furrowed brows.
The white man is reading a lingerie catalog.
The black man is reading about ML King.
The same brow ridge repetitions.
What forests we did we climb out of?
This jungle of desire.


Jan 12, or 17? 1986
CAC workshops, SF

RRWG reading at the Burbank Activity Center, John Oliver Simon, Maureen Hurley

ANY GIVEN MAGIC (Carolyn Lau workshop)

ANY GIVEN MAGIC

Living in present time

This lump of earth 

makes fine red marks 

on the cave walls.

This one makes the colors 

of spring pine pollen.

This burned wood works best 

if it is burned slowly.

These marks here represent teeth.

This is for the sun.

See how it follows the arc of the moon?

And that northstar 

brightens every fourth day. 

This window overlooks utter blackness

Stars, such infinite wanderers, 

yet fixed in their orbits.

You can see the blur of distant novae 

there in the center of the night sky 

No, it's not your eyes 

blurring in the coldness.

I have taken photos of the moon 

under the eclipse.

It sheds its skin like a molting snake.

Sometimes it's red, sometimes blue.

Did you know that the rainbow 

lives in snakes' eyes?

Color that bison in more 

now, add black. 

Given magic

This cold eats our bowlines, 

this hearth fire, a place to sleep

This afterglow, 

this dying ember of the earth. 

1/16/1986

From Carolyn Lau's dance poetry workshop 

CAC workshop, I worked with Luisa Tish

imagine yourself being in two worlds, the past and the present, or the present at the future, at the same time. Use rhythm, music, imagination, plan to sing one line in the class.

CALLIOPE HORSE

CALLIOPE HORSE

What small hands
have pulled at that bit
what balancing children
have leaned forward
to catch the brass ring
and what jaunty tune played
on the calliope of the mind?

O horse of joined wood
painted with a lion's tail,
who holds the bit without reins
between wooden teeth
while I hold him firm
between my runaway
thighs?

1/10/1986
Oakland Museum
added, rev. 3/18

3 Freewrites

My revolution is a synonym of arguing
but my youthful virgin eyes turn with the sun
and the karma of mutineers and thieves
hailing us, lonely for the cultural palaces,
laden with pretensions and validations
of villas and money and mantillas.
Soon there will be a Taj Mahals in every yurt
and on the killing fields, only the Russians
laden with raiments of politics,
will slice open the heart of the country
under an ancient earth.

 1/9/1986

No school today again.
Herefords wary of our methods
meander away from us.
They say his mother was worried
because the wilderness father saw
goshawks dipping from the ladle of the sky.
Who arrested the sun for idolizing itself?
The black bear awakens from slumber.
I think: heart and health, hailing stipends
in the motherland, firmly folded
in monosyllabic words
dripping day after day.

1/9/1986


FAN PALM

Enclose your yards with words,
close your mind to syllables,
count the vowels moaning
in the deepest throat of the night.

Independent drugs on Thursdays
will provide nothing as usual.
it is necessary to offset the cost.
There is no end to this relief.

Memories slip under the cogs
and movie star voices trespass
through thin hotel walls
to enter the surreal stirrup
of sound in the ear canal.

But the instant ocean of sand at our feet
continues its cease and surcease.
The fan palm outside the window stands vigil,
keeps rhythm to the sound of rain.

1/9/1986
added, rev. 3/18

AT NACHITA'S HOSPIDAJE, and FIRST RAIN

 AT NACHITA'S HOSPIDAJE

Towering mountains, sleepy clouds.
In Nachita's hospidaje, against the coral walls
is a cobalt bench where John sits
playing Schuman on the recorder.

The wild birds stop to listen
to this strange kindred singing
in their sultry desert after rain
in Nachita's courtyard. 

Palm trees under the stars
beat a staccato in the breeze,
tarpon asleep in the river, shadows
rise and fall to the beat of the fronds.

This is Mulegé in winter. A small backwater.
The slow green edges of palm fronds
slice color into the water, it blushes,
and the lagoon talks back to the sky.

At sunset, the dark triangle of a man
immersed in a book, hunkers down on a peak
overlooking Nachita's courtyard.
Pale yellow lines in the muddy streets
open like a musical score sheet.

The first rain notes in this desert are soft.
A woman tells her small son to be good
or the owls of the highway
will eat him during the night

She says, this is the first of three rains
that comes each winter. Mark it well.
The earth is drunk, on a trinity of rain,
and soon the ocotillos will catch fire.

1/8/1986


FIRST RAIN

Like seasonal birds
the feathered fingers of the lagoons
fan out and caress the orchards and crops
and what's left of the summer grasses.

The gray green rumble of vines
on the forest floor awaken, and twig
fingers yank strands of my hair
for bird souvenirs.

In and out of the circles, we move
like planets, the heave and cry of cycles
quailing at the headman, these stars
have drenched the sky with their tears.

The night brings apparitions
veiled against the darkness.
The comet emerges from behind the sun
with its tail between its legs
like there was no tomorrow.

Some code on the board, archaic numbers.
But the rivers were here first,
long before there were mountains.
What of the ancient riverbeds,
now a cobbled field?

1/9/1986
added, rev. 3/18

Three Transliterations from Rilke's Vorgetful

SHADOWS
      —after RIlke

Shadows carry us through the hard times
when the sky falls, and the moon fills
with green leaves like quaking cottonwoods.
With this verdant light comes hope,
clusters of sunlight fill the sky.
Sunlight so bright that it shatters the darkness
into mirrored shards and light surpasses stars
chasing them through eons of space and time;
time which cannot be brought back to itself.
Ah, to catch the world in the palm of the hand.
Shadows dissolve, and the souls of gods
reincarnate in the glistening rivers
which once stood for time indefinite.

1/8/1986

TRANSLITERATIONS
     —from Rilke's Vorgetful

I've been waiting in a frenzy
but underneath the slick exterior
I am the dying wind
falling under the spell of the music of love
while wandering the knotted trails
along the cliffs of the Dingle Peninsula
under the suchness of night
that magic was afoot.
The crenulated turrets teething the wind
are keening, and the red deer stands
frozen in time, the forest slips into the night
and the sun no longer shines.
The well is silent in the storm
and the tall egrets look out to sea like sailors.
One bright glance might let them fall behind,
and the wives without the strength of gazelles
will always gaze into those green trees.

1/8/1986


THE GRIEF OF GREEN LEAVES

When clusters of sunlight
shatter the darkness into fifths
the shadows of the moon
carries us through the hard times.
The moon fills up with green leaves
and time cannot be brought back to itself.
Shadows dissolve and the gods
have reincarnated in the ageless rivers.
With the light comes hope.

1/8/1986
MWS Mrs. Milia's class
added, rev. slightly 3/18
fake translations

EATING PAINT

On the white mountain of sheets
with the washing machine chugging
women's voices filled the air
and all that reference to she
the soothing sounds of ocean
and I learned it was a name for me
as if I wasn't there
I thought myself invisible
all that sssshhhh like
sleep in the afternoon
I could hear the white paint on my face
giving away secrets
Me, eater of white paint
in search of the small glass vial
of ice cream so magical
it never needed the polar north
of iceboxes to keep it firm,
and the burning white coat
coating my tongue
Baba baba baby in the laundry pile
eater of paint
making a metaphor of white
the handwriting of the x
not quite formed
the shape of writing
marking the spot
to sculpt writing from the white field
and later, small dark stains on sheets
once the flame of full blown roses
in midday sun
bringing death into the house
my grandfather going to the hospital
carrying a suitcase
who wouldn't let me come with him
and I wondered about the need for suitcases
in the world to come
There is something so still, so timeless
about midwinter light
a tangible quality that almost hangs in the air
like the sharp scent of bay or sage
and the slow shaping of all this white
toward the lucid scrawl of writing

86/87?
draft

The weight of this poem... (collaborative poem with JOS)

The weight of this poem in air
floats away & away from the world
to settle in the outfields of the
unicorn whose syllables are
like steel teeth ready to
nibble on the cookie of your ear
in front of some sweet
flower or sunrise or factory
or even on this mountain where
nothing is real except
the air, and even the air
is heavier than this poem.

Maureen Hurley & John Oliver Simon

no idea as to date, but probably late 1985. Or 86.
I'll never know—unless I find the original in a journal.
so I'm adding it to 1/1/86, as 1986 has so few poems.

added 11/16

WHO, INDEED; ON RITUAL COURTSHIP OF POETS; FRAGMENTS OF THE MOON; three short poems

WHO, INDEED

Who is this beast breathing beside me

Like some long forgotten ancestor

Coming for recognition in the night

To give me new colors for dreams

That continue to shake me from the cradle

Where breathing came from

Beneath the skin of the ocean

1986

ON RITUAL COURTSHIP OF POETS

Returning from the mountains

I find poems taped to my fridge,

Words left to do their work

like an invocation

or a long, slow seduction

in case climbing the mountains

wasn't enough.

1986

1989 Poetry USA

FRAGMENTS OF THE MOON

Who will ask the gypsys how to line the edge of the moon

Who sobs for untold fortunes and greased lightning

to increase the weight of the sky

where dreams crackle like fresh dollar bills

The river is silvered with the coinage of fish

Wait cloud, a winter rooster wants to dance in the sun  

1986

don't know when

Herb Kohl: poetry is wonderful

Herb Kohl: poetry is wonderful

in that we speak different languages

in the heart, the body,
the soul of the people.

1986

FRAGMENTS OF THE MOON

FRAGMENTS OF THE MOON

Who will ask the gypsys how

to line the edge of the moon

with silver borrowed from the dead?

Who sobs for untold fortunes

and greased lightning to increase

the weight of the sky

where dreams crackle

like fresh dollar bills?

The river is silvered

with the coinage of fish.

1986

Fish postcard, "Love from the Tropic of Cancer," watercolor, collage on morillaboard

Love from the Tropic of Cancer, 1986

The Dean of Humanities at Sonoma State University, William Babula, bought this piece. I was pretty chuffed, and also sad to see it go. This is a hand-colored black and white xerox, as I didn't have a photo of it. It came out of my journey to Cabo San Lucas with John Oliver Simon in 1985. I had originally made it for him (I made him another one) but I also needed a piece to enter the art show (due at the beginning of January, hence the post date.)

I also made a series of morillaboard fish boxes into a mobile that turned and swam in the slightest breeze.

This project eventually morphed into my large silk poem posters. But it all began here. With this piece.

FWIW, I am posting my art in January (art hearts) or December (all the rest of my art) as there usually isn't a firm date associated with any of it. It's easier for me to find my art that way. If I was traveling, and the art was in my poetry journal, then I have a solid date, and have embedded the art in the journal entry.

Poets, musicans lend voices for ‘Nica Noel’

Poets, musicans lend voices for ‘Nica Noel’

A score of Sonoma County poets and musicians will lend their voices to help send local people to work in the Nicaraguan harvest. The event will begin at 7 p.m. tonight (Friday) at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, 550 Mendocino Ave., across from the Unemployment Office in downtown Santa Rosa. A $5 contribution includes, refreshments and one free glass of wine or apple juice. Music will be provided by the Sonoma County Peace Chorus, Michael Gillotti and Steve "Piano Doctor" Pryputniewicz. Poets include Lisa Christensen, Elizabeth Herron, Maureen Hurley, Robert Jones, Johnathan London, Suzanne Maxson, John Oliver Simon and Eve Simpson. Also featured will be a display of Central American posters. Co-sponsored by People for Peace in Central America and the Russian River Writers' Guild, the evening will benefit the Nicaraguan Harvest Brigades Scholarship Fund which enables local citizens to participate in three-week work tours to pick coffee in Nicaragua. Over 1,000 U.S. citizens and thousands from other nations have joined the volunteer program over the last two years. About a dozen Sonoma Countly residents have been a part of this program. This is the first year that a scholarship fund for needy volunteers has been established. People who wish to contribute to the fund can receive a tax deduction for a contribution of $5O or more, made out to 1.F.C.0. and sent to Brigades, 540 Pacific Ave., Santa Rosa, CA 95404. For more information on the 'Nica Noel' poetry reading, the brigades program or the scholarship fund, call Eric at 823-8154 or 526-7220

Dream Journal, animal dreams, my mother's cancer, 12/13-16/1985

I am no longer writing down the dreams, they come in a series, hard and fast— nightly, and always the animals. Someone senselessly killed all the foxes. And I found dry desiccated corpses in various stages of death strewn in the grass what a horrid waste of fox fur, I thought, and collected the dried foxes in hopes that someone would know how to skin them though they were no longer fresh. That it would be a total waste if something could be salvage from all those poor shriveled bodies.

12/13/1985


I was leaning out of my grandmother's bedroom window. It overhung a cliff taller than I remembered. A gray weathered scaffolding surrounded it. At the next story level, a ground squirrel had several small sections of corn on cactus and was hauling it into his burrow below the window.

I wanted to know what the special adaptations this creature had to have to be able to gnaw on cactus and not get thorned. I asked my mom who was combing her hair by the mirror and she gave some non-plausible explanation which meant it wasn't important. And she hauled her her half exposed body back in the window.

Below the ground squirrel, a gray and white creature, like a cross between a guinea pig and a collie, was borrowing a pale gray brick red and gray partridge hawk. I thought: a new species?

I climbed out my grandmother's window. My mother keeps dragging me back in because she thinks I'm getting excited over nothing. She said her pap smear came back positive and there was a lump—it could be scar tissue or anything or yet another confirmation she said she said.

12/14/1985


We were in an old whole hotel boardinghouse, I don't remember most of the dream, but something was troubling the pale woman with a long dark hair. And she said the halls were entirely paved in apple jade tiles—including the circular stairway.

I was sewing something. The black and silver shears with the nonsymmetrical handles were in my hands. It was a time to run. I don't remember what the reason was. My running steps resounded in the green spiral staircase as I headed down down down. Tthere was a shower at the bottom, no door. And the following footsteps got closer and closer. I held the scissors up. I couldn't remember if I was going to kill myself, or the intruder.

The intruder said (me): I followed the pale woman down the stairs knowing she meant to harm herself. I was afraid I was going to be too late and redoubled my speed. She seemed to go faster and faster down those dizzying green stairs. I had trouble getting traction. And the tiles were slippery. When I got to the lower landing, there was no door, only an open shower stall, and a pale frightened woman holding those scissors up ready to strike herself or me.

I wasn't sure which. She said:: how did you know about this? And I said earlier in the day I was looking out over the pond from the veranda and everyone was picnicking on the grass and only you were missing.

From somewhere deep, a muffled explosion shook the house. Small clouds of silk roiled from the underwater mine entrance in the reservoir. The other entrances in the basement house so I know you had to be connected with it

12/15/1985

RESPITE, 3 takes on a salmon sky

This salmon and turquoise band
brushed against the sky
holds the crack
between the edge of night
and silhouetted mountains
open a little while longer.
Light bulbs aren't enough
to bring back the day.
Twilight like a second childhood
the most immortal time
between night and day.

December 1985

The time before nightfall
the turquoise and salmon sky
holds open a crack between
the feathered edge of night
and the silhouette of mountains
keeping darkness in check
like a second childhood.

12/12/1985

The turquoise and salmon
of the sky at dusk
wedged a open crack
between the jeweled edge of night
and the silhouetted mountains
like a second childhood
for a short time it comes to remind us
that the light will return again.

Where one can gaze on the light
and remember how the sun looks
just like the way the old experience
a second childhood so foolishly.

12/12/1985
an attempt to resurrect a lost poem


beyond the silent valley
a river and green ocean of grass
a cornfield where no one stands

TENGO DINERO

These silver fish in my pocket
sing for their supper
sing for flies and oranges
under a full moon.
At Cabo San Lucas,
the wind through the arch
is like the sighing of empty vaults.
The fishing banks are open for commerce.
"Silver sinkers from old dimes
make the best lures,"
an old Indian said.
The mines are empty.
The mines are empty.
Let's lift the moratorium.
We need silver to seed the clouds;
to line the sow's ear.
The gypsy's fortune speaks in tongues
when the fish won't bite.

12/5/1985

1989 Poetry SF Quarterly, Honorable Mention, spring issue, 

1987 Sculpture Gardens Review

         Marin Poetry Review

1986-88 Falling to Sea Level

TENGO DINERO

Aquellos peces de plata en mi bolsillo
cantan para comer
cantan para moscas y naranjas
bajo de la luna llena.
En Cabo San Lucas,
el viento por el arco
susurra como bovedas vacias.
Los bancos de las pescas
se abren para negocios.
"Los plomos de plata
de las viejas monedas
de diez centavos
son los mejores cebos,"
decia el indio viejo.
Las minas estan vacias.
Las minas estan vacias.
Levantemos el moratorio.
Necesitamos la plata para sembrar
las nubes;
para forrar la oreja la cerda.
La suerte del gitano habla en lenguas
cuando no muerden los peces.

tr. John Oliver Simon y Juvenal Acosta
needs correction accents
1985

Dream Journal

We were waiting for the wedding. Next day after traveling many miles. The house was on the ocean and the backyard was a tidal lagoon where one could snorkel—like the lagoon at the Kona Hotel in Hawaii, at the royal summer palace.

But this place was more like an apartment duplex. Batlike creatures and frigatebirds with human faces circled in the thick air near the ceilings. One had to be careful of their bite.

I found John dressed in black, floating up right near the ceiling, asleep. He hadn't turned into a bat yet, but he was the most powerful. and perhaps the most dangerous. It was merely a matter of time. His eyes were pale blue because he was asleep.

I'm not even sure if it was John but it was a recognizable likeness. Always the death mask. The waves buffeted the sides of the house and the timbers shook. Saltspray drifted in the open windows and it was as if the house were breathing on its own, a living entity,

12/9/1985

Prewrite for TENGO DINERO

This becomes fodder for the poem for Tengo Dinero


Oh say can you see
green sheep grazing
on newly minted grass?
On the banks of rivers
silvered with the coinage of fish

Who can ask the gypsies
how to line the edges of the moon?
Who sobs for untold fortunes
and greased lightning
to increase the weight of the moon
and the sky where dreams crackle
and rustle like freshly minted bills
hot off the press

and spread thin across the night.

4/21/ 1986
added 2/17

date is wrong.

Benefit reading Nicaraguan Harvest Brigade, Santa Rosa, Mo Hurley reading/photo

Baja journal: Writing in arrears, spider dream 12/5/85

it is ironic that I begin to do most of my writing in arrears. In retrospect, while traveling, it was difficult to take it all in. I did a few watercolors, but not enough, and no poems came. I am gathering new material I keep telling myself. John writes many poems that captured the moment. And I have nothing more to add. So I write very little in my own notebooks.

However, we did do several collaborations in English and in Spanish in his notebooks. Sometimes I dictated to him in my simple Spanish. All in present tense of course. I will need to get copies of them and put them into my own journal at one point.

Rereading my notes from Thanksgiving Day I realize I've come full circle from the disillusionment of Tijuana to the tropical ease of La Páz and Cabo San Lucas. It took a long time to process the Third World shock. Nothing can prepare you for it. My second day in La Páz restored my equilibrium.

We stayed at the Hotel La Perla, right on the waterfront on the malecón, facing west over the harbor. Hotel la Perla is a Mexican middle-class hotel and there were very few gringos staying there, El Arco took that crowd in, at considerably more pesos per day. The Hotel La Perla was about nine dollars US, per night.

It is hard to remember not to drink the water here, especially when they bring you ice drinks on a hot day. Brushing the teeth with tapwater is one of those automatic responses, like opening your mouth in the shower both are no-nos. I began to brush my teeth with a hot top tapwater at Hotel La Perla, and to drink some things with ice. Even a lettuce leaf or two.

Everything was suspect and I became rabid for the taste of fruit, anything fresh. Mexican fare begin to tax on my system. I thought if I saw another huevos for breakfast that I'd absolutely die.

I reread all those poems you wrote me: odes to orchards, satellite discs, drunks in a one-hearse town. You wrote enough poetry to paper a wall, and, there's more to come. The last man to write me poetry got bitter and vindictive when I said no to him, and after that I never could read his poems. I've been saving them for old-age.

When romance becomes a dim habit, I can burrow through the mountains of paper and old love letters and say yes I was loved. Yes I was wanted once. Men found me desirable.

Your stack of poems keeps growing—some of them good, and it doesn't seem like we're looking for it to end. Last night you told me that in the last 40 nights we've only spent eight of them apart. And here we are living in separate houses trying to live together at the same time. You say you want us to live together and I say that we already are

DREAM JOURNAL

One night I dream of entering my front door but across the opening, spiders have done their work. This web cloying thick and sticky— only the web of a black widow spider is like that. Soon there are hundreds of shiny black bodies dancing on the snowy white web, like cloth draped over me. I am killing spiders right and left. And I can't get rid of the web. Their bodies are shiny and tough, and they make such a cracking sound as I squash them but there's too many of them and no matter how fast I swat them. Some will survive and it's only a matter of time before one bites.

12/5/1985

Baja Journal, San Diego to Oakland, air 12/5/1985

San Diego to Oakland

Flying north at 26,000 feet one can see the slipstream of boats as if the ocean were sky. The afternoon sun's reflection races across the ocean, and the dark webbing of calm water weaves a net of waves, broken in concentric rooms by Santa Catalina Island.

A sudden reflection of light leaps the boundaries of the ocean to strike the land and finds arroyos flooded by rain, silver threads of rivers, swimming pools, lagoons, and it makes a grid of light and shadow. Even the cars and windows join in.

The captain of the airplane announces that the space shuttle just passed directly over us.

We enter a cloudbank a weather front...
A sundog of light
like a satellite follows us
the sun's reflection refracts
making a small silver patch of light
against the dull gray clouds
following us like a small satellite


We return home, keeping well to the edge of this continent. We are shaking granite sand from the last mountain and the last beach of where California disappears into the sea for the last time. We feel as if we are weightless, as if gravity also left the ends of the earth, and the sea continues to cradle us. After so long at sea, we must learn how to walk again.

Date I don't know it's after December 5, 1985


AT 26,000 FEET

Flying at 26,000 feet
80 miles to the right of us
the space shuttle passes overhead
as the reflection of the sun
races across the ocean,
a silver needle making a grid of light
across swimming pools and cars
As we enter a cloudbank
a sundog of light follows us.
The sun's reflection refracts
making small silver patches of light
against the dull gray clouds
following us like a small satellite.

12/5/1985

Baja Journal, dreams of terror, 11/4 1985

Yellow light, fear of the light, no images. Two nights ago, I dreamt that John was floating on a red bed of light surrounded by purple and blue tendrils of darkness.

Each time the fear, the terror resurfacing in primal colors. He asks me for an image. And I say the red turned sideways like paper, it was two-dimensional, and then it disappeared with the image of John on it. Such terror. Whose death?

What is this thing in the night that comes bathed in pure light and wants to consume me? What is this thing that comes in the night, and what does it mean? The colors, not painted on paper but air bathed in light, all colors of the spectrum.

John asks me of the details of my birth, coming out of the swaddling sheets of darkness, into the world of pain and light.

I remember odd things: when the doctor hovered over me, how enormous his green eyes were behind his glasses as he looked down my throat. The silver mirror of light on his forehead, held by a band, he said breathe, and the darkness that followed. I woke up in a hospital ward, black-and-white with ceramic tiles. The white tiles yellowed and riddled with age, reminded me of teeth. The tiles ones with stripes of green, reflected on the wall.

The hospital beds folded like pieces of white bread. And my gown was backless and my ass exposed and my throat hurt. I failed to see any connection between  exposed ass and sore throat. I felt violated. The world had no logic. I was four. What were tonsils?

The black toilet seat was like a strange horseshoe open-armed to let me fall through to the swirling water beneath where darkness lived, gurgling in those depths.

I remember falling down the circular flight of stairs at my grandmother's house, the horizon of darkness and light shifting into jagged carousels as my head thudded and jarred on each step, to turning my world topsy-turvy. I was four. What did I know?

I remember looking at a three-story building, a long squat brown horizontal band of compressed windows. I had to give it height when I understood that it occupied space. From a bug's eyeview, buildings must be seen tilting our way, out of the horizon of sight.

When my new eyeteeth were uncovered from my palate, I slipped into darkness and the cinnamon odor of ether, my head pulled backwards into an orbit, into something like water but less tangible. Constellations of stars I'd never before seen, surrounded me and, like glittering eyes, the stars shone from the their dark bed of deepest midnight blue.

The roaring in my ears was like the ocean waves breaking on the rocks.

When I snorkel, I am in love with the blueness beyond the shallow sea floor and the rocks. We entered a small fringe of ocean and the fish were like wild bouquets of the sea drifting and floating amid the rocks. It is a privilege to look out across the blueness of the sea from below the silvery liquid mantle that separates air from sky, and sky from sea.

The blueness is so compelling, urging me to go deeper into the harbor, and into the bay, and down into the depths of the fathomless sea. I am Ophelia, I know the dangers of sharks, and the urge to go out, is so strong that I seek the rocks and the safety of the littoral zone like a frightened fish. The part of me that wants to abandon itself and slip fully into the blueness of itself. This is what the last thing a drowning man sees before the darkness robs color from the eye.

John's eyes are the color of the sea, bits of sky broken off, and I am afraid of that blueness and of those dark pools. The pool of the eye is like a black hole in space, as we enter the drowning sea.

The parrots' orange eyes have the same dark pools where we could drown if we looked into them too long. The darkness taking us into their limpid pools, not opaque with age, because age brings knowledge and this the sadistic tendency of nature.

A young rabbit runs towards the safety of the cat, a familiar shape that says mother, and the cat  nuzzled it and licked it lovingly before giving it the final blow. In this way, they young rabbit iscovered that all things were not its mother.

The innocence of the young, how nature, and the world shaped it, how the pools of eyes continually restore their liquid depths through love, pain, humanity – the journey of life.

In this, I begin to understand why the Indians, or the Indios have placed blue beads on the rearview mirrors of their cars to ward off the evil eye. They come to touch my turquoise necklace, to celebrate luck.

The dark holes of the eye, is the sadistic tendency of nature, the desire to hurt without malice, without cause.

I am reminded of the Irish saying: Love is a drowning in floodwaters.


I had 10/4/85 in my journal, but that cannot be the right date. I'm guessing that it's 12/4/85? It could also not be part of my Baja journal sequence, I found poems out of sequence in it.
added 2/18

Baja Journal, Snorkeling in the Sea of Cortez at Cabo San Lucas, 12/4-5/1985

Sea of Cortez at Cabo San Lucas

At Playa del Amor, a beach that goes through the peninsula on the west, the Pacific scoops huge crescents of coarse granite sand on the beach. Light passes through the curl of a wave, an indescribable turquoise.

On the Sea of Cortez side of Cabo, the calm water is a little greener, more aquamarine. And we snorkel amid the rocks and drift over the great depths, following the fish. This was John's third dive, the first one at Mulegé wasn't spectacular, but he learned the basic principles. I was a cautious teacher, as John was not a confident swimmer, whereas I was like a dolphin. We didn't go out past the edge of the reef, as it was very shallow and murky do this due to the suspended coral bloom so there were no colorful fish to tantalize the eye.

On our second dive at the wreck of the tuna boat in the harbor, John was still far too nervous to go out more than a few feet, so I explored the boat alone. The rocks and submerged islands offered a wealth of fish and he was hooked on snorkeling.

The fish were the wildflowers of the sea, blooming from rock to rock, capricious flores. The dive at Playa del Amor was like less spectacular in terms of fish, through the fish that were present, were much larger. I was too tired to go out around the point and I had no flippers so I didn't get a chance to see that if there was any better snorkeling. Later, there many divers were in the area.

I think the tuna boat wreck in the harbor had much better diving. Our last day at Cabo, we went back to the tuna wreck and John explored the rocks and the boat. Not as many fish at the boat as compared to yesterday.

I caught the tail of a porcupine puffer fish between my toes after a short chase, and gently tugged on him to make him inflate. He was a slow swimmer and was not used to being molested. Because of his thorny body, I'm sure few creatures find him appetizing.

By comparison, Caribbean pufferfish have iridescent peacock blue eyes. This one had brownish eyes. The little blimp eyed me remorsefully!

I point out a yellow and white and black angelfish, not a Moorish idol, and colorful groupers, and rust-brown gobies with those ridiculous eyes on the tops of their heads, clinging to the sides of the boat like limpets. They watched us pass baleful stares, their little fins like hands, on the rocks.

We are surrounded by many types of butterfly fish, one needlenosed yellow and black one. And schools of surgeonfish. Blues and yellows, striped schools of silvery cowfish along th esandy bottom. I point out grunts, boxfish, neons, tetras, wrasse, pipefish, trumpetfish, parrotfish, a unicornfish and barbed bass.

A pair of pale blue fish, like jacks or mackerels with long dorsal fins, looking very much like angelfish cruise me. A surprisingly orange fish, similar to a butterfly fish, but larger, with its fins outlined in neon blue, carefully checks me out. A garibaldi of sorts?

A school of tiny neon blue and black fish like a cloud of dust motes. A colorful male boxfish sculls with his drab black-and-white mate. They have transparent fins that look like twirling shawls of flamenco dancers, to propel themselves forward, which makes them look a little like hovering gnats, or helicopters.

Schools of pale green coronet fish or pipefish hover at the surface and trumpetfish with blue plaid coats and spatula mouths rest on the bottom. Both species have long mouths and thin bodies, with eyes an somewhere forward of the middle, and they're funny looking like cartoons. The pipefish with its slender narrow mouth and teeth, is like a beak of a hummingbird.

And there are as many varieties of fish in the sea as there are birds in the air
Try and describe the differences between an ostrich, a kiwi, a parrot, a swallow, a hummingbird or a penguin to someone who is blind. This is what it was like to describe the fish of the sea to someone who has never before snorkeled, to see them in books, or in aquariums is not enough. John is amazed. He had no idea such richness lay beneath the skin of the sea.

People tend not to see the creatures, and even dismiss them when they're in a man-made environment. When you're swimming among the fish, as guests in their world, you gain a whole new perspective of them.

It seems I can never get enough of seeing them. I no sooner memorize shapes and colors of one species, and another equally interesting one comes along and I've totally forgotten what markings and what fish I was memorizing the details of. Multiply this by 20 to 30 species and the results is chaos, pure chaos, a glut of color and shape and form.

There are very few books with decent pictures of tropical fish—most are downright lousy.
I'd like to see a delux coffee-table book of tropical fish in natural clusters because the different species cohabitate together in riotous color.

Most photos are taken with flash which changes the colors of the fish. And many fish also change colors at night too. Or when they're frightened. Or according to mood. Like the poor dorado, or dolphinfish that flashed all the colors of the rainbow and the northern lights as he was strung up by the tail on the dock hoist for the obligatory big game photo.

12/4-5/198?
Cabo San Lucas, Baja

Baja Journal, Sea of Cortez at Playa del Amor, 12/2/1985

The launch circled the sea stacks by the arch at cabo San Lucas, where California plunges into the sea one last time. At Playa del Amor, a wave mounted and crested at the arch and the sun slipped off to the west. We rounded an outer sea stack, admired the frigatebirds, on the ledge, a napping seal rearranged himself and scratched his side, so human. And stopped to watch us pass. The Pacific Ocean was an ethereal blue within blueness, as if lit from within, and it rose up and down the face of the cliff like an enormous breathing beast. One could hear the soft exhaling of the sea. Feel its beating heart.

12/2/1985
Cabo San Lucas
added, rev. 2/18

Baja Journal, Land's End, Cabo San Lucas, 12/4/1985

Approaching Land's End. We rounded the cape where large granite mountains, the last spine of the Sierras, fall off into the Sea of Cortez, it took my breath away. We were greeted by the Pacific where the mountain, sea and ocean meet one final time. So sublime, one could almost touch the intangible. It truly was a holy place. It was like the gates of heaven, or the garden of the Hesperides, in evening light.

The Greek stories came alive, it was as if we were between Scylla and Charybdis, the devil and the deep blue sea, but this wasn't the right continent, nor the right ocean. The mainland of Mexico across the sea of Cortez, more than 100 miles and the mainland wasn't even visible. No place for Jason to set sail.

If one were an ocean voyager, the end of this peninsula would seem like an island. The Spaniards named the island Califia, after a warrior goddess. I gazed into the water from the side of the boat, though we were in shadows, and  was dusk, the sea seemed lit from underneath and the intensity of blue of blueness was electric.

At the top of the cliff, frigatebirds wheeled and nested. Slim cantilevered wings and scissored-tails silhouetted against the appled sky. With a wingspan of 8 feet, they were like that out of the albatross that circled with them, but the albatross with light undersides had less articulate sculpturing of wings, but were no less impressive.

One male frigatebird nesting on the top of the cliff had his red pouch inflated, and that splash of red against the ochre-stained granite cliff, was a minute flash of color. There was continual motion in the sky as the birds wheeled and cried cried, the pelicans, once considered enormous to my way of thinking, seems suddenly so small by comparison.

12/2/1985? 
Cabo San Lucas, Baja

AT TODOS SANTOS

AT TODOS SANTOS

A frazzled white-haired woman

with a scrawny black kitten

flattened against her red coat 

boards the crowded bus.

She speaks only English,

and the driver lets her aboard

for the 500 pesos she offers,

though it isn't enough to cover her fare.

Her red lacquered nails match her jacket

and on her right arm, she wears a cast,

someone once cared about her.

There's nowhere to sit, she's so old.

Then a young Mexican boy stands up,

smiles, and offers her his red stool.

Abuela, please sit, he said.

December 2, 1985

rev. slightly 18 Nov 2015
Baja, Mexico

EUPHORIA

EUPHORIA

Tired, I exclaimed to John,
Look, an echinoderm forest,

pointing to the blooming yucca trees

when I meant euphorbia.

December 2, 1985
Baja, Mexico

On the Outskirts of Cabo San Lucas

On the outskirts of Cabo San Lucas,  

a bare yard fenced with branches and barbwire,
guards a souped-up yellow race car, a mustang.
Someone's prized possession, an anomaly in the desert.

An attempt at beauty, three newly planted fan palms,
raggedly applaud the wind. Chickens patrol the yard.

A cinderblock home, barely large enough 

to hold the car, how many people live inside? 

Not like the nightmare houses on the outskirts
of Tijuana, made of cardboard, plastic and paper  

amid piles of concrete rubble and rebar.

December 1, 1985
rev. 11/17/15
Baja, Mexico



I tell John

I want to live in a house 

made of woven sticks 

open to the wind and sky.