RRWG presents a CPITS reading

BUDDHA MOON

BUDDHA MOON

When Neil Armstrong first walked across the face
of the moon twenty years ago did she tremble?
When the astronaut came back from space he was a changed man.
Nothing mattered any more. After all, he'd seen the earth unveiled,
turned a little crazy, and it was like looking into the face of the gorgon.
He saw what we've done to her in the name of civilization,
making the first imprint in thick lunar dust.

In Guatemala, I held a Mayan smoking mirror in my hand,
a piece of fallen star, but you'd already planted another seed.
Did the moon shudder, the way you expect me to nowó
like Chac-mool, who ripped the heart from an unborn sonó
only to wonder why the smell of death greets us in the chaparral?
I am a vessel empty of light. I should have known better
than to trust the sun. When you walk across me,
Luna cries in a language you'll never understand.

Newton said, for every action there is a reaction.
We cannot reconstruct the past to fit our poetic needs,
nor to  ease guilt. Footprints remain after 20 years,
as if it were yesterday, or, only moments before.
Perhaps we should never have crawled out of the broth.
I want to tell the gobies and mudskippers there's been a mistake.
Go back into the ocean, your mother. We can't live on land,
nor breathe the air. In the Galápagos, evolutionary myths
crawled out of the precambrian mind of the sea.
Our lives pass before us in geometric exponentials.
Long after we've gone, life will continue;
another blastopore, in all its variations, germinating.
The goddess is made of basalt like the sea floor.

Off the coast of Japan, two rocks got married
with golden ropes, but the waves threaten to take one back.
They fortifed the islet with steel girders and concrete,
trying to halt another kind of progress.
You understand the bondage part, but not love itself.
The gods of dailiness have swept us bare.
Fallen off from ritual, who are we then?
Danger chose to walk in the form of a pigmentary default,
likening your eyes to the sky. You've found the cliff
to throw me from, and still not satisfied,
you want to barter exquisite corpses for forgiveness.
Your father is dead—his blue eyes beneath the Sea of Cortez—
tell him everything. Perhaps the sea will take you back.
No questions asked. But then, you already saw to that,
shuffling the tarot cards with a dealer's ease
from the bottom of the deck.

5/22/89

WOAD

—for my neighbor of 20 years, George Howell, 
one of the original Dharma Bums (really)

and his Romilar--swigging partner in crime,
Richard Bebe, a good lawyer who 

committed suicide after heart surgery

Wearing a sheepish grin, my neighbor
George who restores antique rugs
heads for the trash bin the back way.
Noting this, I ask, What's in the bucket, shit?
He says, Close. My friend Bebe's wife,
she quit dyeing a while back
and gave me this bucket of indigo
that Ricard had made for me.
If you know anything about indigo—
it's made with piss, fermented camel piss
and the temperature has to be exactly 83 degrees
for the best color, so I waited for the right day—
I sure as hell wasn't going to heat it on the stove—
and I'm out there dipping my wool into the dye
and waiting for it to turn blue…and waiting…
See, indigo is colorless. Only after the wool's
exposed to air for an hour does it turn blue.
Well, I waited for hours and hours.
The wool turned brown, a horrible brown, at that.
It was just a bucket of piss— all that wasted wool.
I guess Bebe had the last laugh on me after all.

revised ever so slightly 2014

WILDCAT BEACH, BELTAINE 5/5/89

Wildcat Beach, Beltaine Silk & dye.

WILDCAT BEACH, BELTAINE

                                — for my students Nat & Erik

At Wildcat Beach I fill pockets with wax opals,

agates and moonstones—pieces of the fallen moon.

Five vultures wheel in a bright sky vibrating

against ruddy cliffs. The ocean eats the strand,

the night eats the sun. We lose track of time.

I point out equus, horsetail fern, ancestor of trees

when the dinosaurs were young. I despair:

so little time to teach the children about life cycles.

I yell at those who want to quit right in the middle of the road—

Five miles is forever. I feel like an ogre yelling at them.

Coddling won't do. No, that’s not it. I was never coddled.

So I tousle their heads, repack packs, clean skinned knees,

offer advice, feed them chocolate—these children I never had—

I am mother without being mother, father without having had one.

It's always a longer walk back, no matter what they say.

I am teacher. I am poet incanting words into true air.

We make a medicine wheel, divide into the four elements,

and writie poetry to the cardinal directions.

One crow commuting up the beach nods to me in flight.

On this side of the San Andreas Fault,

I come to understand the rest is illusion:

Those old generals who set the Gulf ablaze with oil

their dreams are cursed by flames of blue eels

writhing in shallow pools. Fire over water.

I dreamed Easter Island was a mathematical equation of the mind.

Two boys and I sit on the bluffs talking of neutron stars

and the desire for a simple life filled with ritual.

We watch a bonfire blaze on the opposite shore.

Nat says everything has a spirit—even that lupine bush.

They restore my faith, like the white deer who browse

beneath the stars. Recognizing an absence of ritual

in our lives, we seek something unbidden in the moonlight,

in the water and in the ancient eyes of fish.

5/5/89

Unitarian Fellowship hosts non-sectarian poetry reading

Unitarian Fellowship hosts non-sectarian poetry reading

"A Pageant of Poetry" will be held on Saturday, May 20, from 7-10 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 3641 Stony Point Road in Santa Rosa. Sonoma County poets will be featured reading from their latest works. Admission to the event and parking arc free. Sonoma County Poets-in-the-Schools Maureen Hurley and Lynn Watson head the list of readers, which also includes local poets Doug Powell, Lin Max and storyteller Bill Wetmore. Representatives from the Russian River Writers Guild, the Sonoma State University English Department, the Sweet Life Cafe Poetry Scries, Poets in the Vineyards and the Kclmer’s ’’Brewhouse Crew” will also be contributing to the event. This is a non-sectarian event. The public is invited to a tend. Pageant organizers Barry Woelfel is a member of the U.U. Fellowship and a graduate of the SSU English Department. For more information or to volunteer to help, call Woelfel at 578-3446.

MOONSTONES

MOONSTONES

   —to my poetry students

Last night, the same crow 

was commuting up the beach 

headed north, towards wisdom, towards light. 

The idea of a waterfall at the end 

of the mind made sense. 

Lupine and mustard cloak the hillsides.

We sit in a circle, divided by the four directions. 

The sun breaks through the fog like laughter, 

a cacophany of birds. Someone smiles. 

The rocks rise like an island of thought  

shipping the darkness out to sea 

while a student takes small pieces of light—

silver oxide and shadow. 

Mirrors of ourselves on film, in the water. 

The wind fluxes the pond, knitting small ripples,  

something to wear for the day's dance.

So much water in the ocean,

in the air, in us. The sea is our mother. 

I wanted moonstones and found none. 

And then at my feet, the purest white ones I'd ever seen. 

Katie asks why they're called that. I don't know 

Maybe it's because the moon would like to visit us 

right here on this beach, t

his island commuting north to Alaska.

Where the moon feels at home, 

 where tundra flowers dance in summer breezes

where, in winter, mice tunnel under the mystery of snow, 

and darkness takes its own time being born into light.

5/5//89

Wildcat Beach, Beltaine

I accompanied Mark West school teacher, Gerry Crawford, on their annual 5th grade outdoor ed class. The poetry was flowing through me at such a rate, I could barely write it all down.

see later version

WILDCAT BEACH, BELTAINE 5/5/89

Letters to Wm Poole
(somewhere on The San Andreas Fault) May 1989

some line break chances 

ascii hell in progress

KEEPING THE DEAD IN THEIR PLACE

KEEPING THE DEAD IN THEIR PLACE


Have the dead taken Hollywood by storm?
In the Pink Section I read Night of the Living Dead
boosts Nielsen Ratings and Joyce's The Dead
is now playing at the Clay Theatre.
The city of Colma is bursting with landed celebrities:
Emperor Norton, Lefty O'Doul, Ishi, Wyatt Erp, John Doe.
The funeral parlor where we put Mary Bianchi to rest
is now the Petaluma Police station.
Have the cops taken to arresting the dead
for petty crimes against life?
Loitering in the park after curfew without a parade permit,
or driving without a vehicle while under the influence of death?
The police have trouble keeping them behind bars.
They have no fingerprints, no ID, no known address.
What of the half-dead, the brain-dead, the undead,
those dead as a door knob, or those sleeping like the dead?
The one in the White House was secretly dead
for years but he had a good make-up artist.
Soon, they will be wanting voting rights
and you know what that leads to.
Ma Bell foresees a unique eleventh-hour monopoly
on long-distance surcharges to the dead.
The IRS is interested in repossessing hell bank notes
but doesn't stand a ghost of a chance.
American Express and Club Med are working out
the details of an earlybird pre-payment plan
so those who beat the rap can have their R & R
on some island hideaway. DOA Anon has sprung up
across the country. All these perks—
too late for poor old Mary Bianchi
who was a gardener right to the very end.


5/4/89

1990 Green Fuse  or 1989?

This is what happened when I read the Sunday paper...

Cazadero Academy 3rd annual benefit reading, date?

 

WHO BUT I

WHO BUT I

(for the burden of my names)

1.  Baba—I was the firstborn to be placed on my grandmother's lap, 

fitfully thrusting my feet into the air, attempting flight without wings, 

naming myself again and again: ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba.

In the last sheaf sits the baba. I was born at the end of harvest, 

the burden of my name between fall and winter, 

I was born on my grandfather's birthday —

Some say I was the travailing great queen mother — both young and old,

male and female, the hag wrach the old woman, 

the corn mother Cailleach, and her husband.

I was born the corn maiden and her lover, giving birth before conception

to keep away the famine-fear in the field. Gort a bhaile.

At school, kids teased me calling me black sheep and Ali Baba.

I was the black sheep of the nursery rhyme, singing, singing,

pulling the prodigal wool over my own eyes

when they came searching for me in the darkness of sleep.

Somehow we all survived childhood. Out of the frying pan. . . 

I sang my A B C's . . . and drew an Aurochs for the sacred cave. 

The letter A: magic loosened from sleep undoes me.

The enlightened thief comes to steal our hope. Anguis in herba.

I hang eagle feathers over my bed to chase away the nightmares.

My friend blames the mirrors in my house, and wants to shroud them.

I had to climb down the throat of darkness to order reestablish light.

Avanti, avanti, maleficium defence. . . Honi soit qui mal y pence.

I burned the scrivened alphabet of your excuses in ritual fires.

COLD WAR

COLD WAR

What if it's 1950, we weren't born yet.

There isn't a Berlin Wall.

Kennedy hasn't been shot.

The American Dream is in full slumber.

What if Rudy Valens's plane hadn't yet crashed,

no Big Bopper, no monuments to James Dean,

or Kerouac toilet papering the road.

What if we'd been around then,

going up in smoke, drag stripping

dangerous curves through the redwoods.

Perhaps our parents were thinking of marriage,

or at least sex, in the back seat of a Ford.

What if we were our parents

watching Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy

for the first time around, no reruns.

Everything in black and white.

The Sunday Barbecue.

Cocktails with the neighbors.

The American Dream hasn’t woken up.

No Fifth Amendment. No AIDS.

Homelessness is a third-world concept.

Howl hasn’t been written. No Suburbacide.

No Kaddish of words for the walls we build.

Instead, we liken kisses to radar missiles

and split atoms, confusing fission with fusion.

It took a Chernobyl to thaw the Cold War.

What if we invented memory

because things seem more real in print.

Especially when they aren't true.

Stigmatas nailed down on paper.

What if this were a thalidomide poem

borne without words?

4/29/89

POEM TO A LOVER'S LOVER

Listen, I already know what it's like
to be on the other side.
That was me in the gray dress
orbiting behind the revenge of the camera,
because my man chose a blonde
his daughter's age to replace me
at what was supposed to be our reading.
I know what it's like to be betrayed.
What can I say? Who wants a poem
from the "other woman" that says:
For eons poetry has fed on the betrayal of love
and is fond of the victim's point of view.
That there are no casual spectators.
That we all err on the side of love.
Perhaps it's fitting we remain
disembodied voices over the phone lines,
though I already know who you are.
If not me, then who will accept your calls
late at night? Because I am not
the other woman—

Poetry is.

4/28/89

Hope, help for homeless Cuzco kids, Press Democrat, photo

ONLY GAME IN TOWN

          —for Bruce Isaacson, whether he likes it or not.

In the name of poetry sometimes
we go out of our way to invent trouble:
why we stole a few kisses against
the polite company of wolves,
how the answering machine found us out;
she assumed the worst;
our poems shattered against cold glass—
separating air from air, light from light—
She calls again to rant about bad poets
writing bad poems about who they've fucked.
I can say nothing to soothe her,
to convince her it's a mistake—
this tale only exists on the page.
But I asked the I Ching anyway
who would rub ochre on your chest
and watch the sky unfold blue secrets.

The oracle said, The marriage of thunder & wind
takes place according to immutable laws;
ground water is an invisible army filling the empty places.
It said, Those who run off are permitted to escape.

Like stealth planes flying over occupied space,
we avoided radar detection only to deliver ourselves
into enemy hands. Silos tracking missiles.
I am not another soldier of the Red Army swelling
in the slippery ranks of Stalin's bottomless heart.
We come to understand completion is reached
by systole, diastole: what endures
is merely poetic fodder.

I dreamed my horse labored for breath
as I walked the isolated beach
calling your name to the empty wind;
my dead grandmother came to take me home—
there was nothing left to eat but spoils.
Who sings in the night—wolves, or the wind
tying gordian knots? Escaping us both,
you've gone into exile, a half a year and a world away.
Late at night, the phone rings. No one the line—
your old lover and I keep in touch.

4/23/89

L' APRES-MIDI

L' APRES-MIDI

     —For Bruce Isaacson

in homage to Robert Sund & Georgia O'Keefe

You have found me out,
slipped in clean as a knife,
your poems lucid as a white room
in late afternoon where
I want to stand before you
pre-architectural. Slip off these words
into something more comfortable,
reveal the inner curve of femur,
the hollow of pelvis framed
against the purity of desert sky
& feel your breath sing against my ribs.

Where my breasts flowered
your disembodied hands harvest
brilliance arcing on blank pages.
We burn against the night's silence
lost, looking for home.
I taste your words on my tongue,
dreaming them as if they were alive,
incandescent as flanks of white horses
in the rain—your poems shed light,
nuzzle breathless in my ear.
It's not so much the words themselves
but the way they touch
the muddy river where, for a moment,
our tongues found truth hidden in the roots.

There is a curve of eyebrow,
an alluvial valley that speaks
of such tenderness, we turn stones,
& turn them again. What does it matter
if the sun will die, your kisses like stars.
The physics of writing consumes us.
Not ambivalence. Not the other sin.
It cannot hide serpentine from the river—
the brightness from within—a burning moth
circling the pale fire of your eyes.

You tell me : too many loves in our past
& slip into the Paris night, well armed,
calling it by the clear light of poetry
because love also requires such brutal attention.
Can one name the instant when the heart
of the untamable beast ignites or dies?
Afraid of what it might be,
in the naked room, what are we then?

4/18/89

Maureen Hurley, Joe Pahls to read at the RRWG, Burbank Activity Center, Sebastopol

UKRAINIAN CALENDAR FOUND POEM

UKRAINIAN CALENDAR FOUND POEM

January      Sichen Windy days
February      Lutil         Severe weather
March      Berizen       The first birch trees bud
April              Kviten         Flowers begin to blossom
May             Traven         Grass begins to grow
June            Cherven Red flowers blooming
July             Lipen         The shade of a lime tree in summer
August     Serpen         A sickle for the harvest
September  Veresen Last yellow bush of the year to flower
October     Zovten         Amber trees
November   Listopad Falling leaves
December   Gruden Large snowflakes of winter
(Repeat for at least 75 years, call it a life.)

4/1989

Deborah Padrick's Sensuous Silk, The Paper, Apr 13, 1989

YET ANOTHER POETRY READING

YET ANOTHER POETRY READING

                     Sex is like a glass of water.
                        ——Alexandra Kollantai
                          —for Bruce Isaacson

You know it happens each time I read poems
about sex & death in the afternoon.
One poet or another wants to follow me down
the smooth truncated saplings of bar stools,
& small infields of hallways & closets—
Call me on the carpet saying, You need a good man.
It's been 6 months & at the erotic poetry ball
the last barbarian in black leather
& studs sweet-talking me in Spanish
tangles up the night in my blue silk dress,
saying, I know you. Verdad?
We neck a bottle of chardonnay & steam up the sunroof.
Not quite unrequited lust in the cab of a pick-up.
Who's keeping score? You get to second base,
I steal third but home is an illusion.
Where does Einstein sleep? We confess
our tongues collude at the speed of recovery. Besos del mar. 
When you let down my hair, tuberoses, primordial
star-scented edens fall beneath your knee
giving up their bounty all at once——both acrid & bitter.
There is a fine line of distinction between perfume,
the sweet smell of decay & desire deep in the jungle.
Statistics change with each cycle;
we continue to make love in the mirror
of each other's eyes but I've prepared for this by eating
Russian chocolate in late afternoon.
My girlfriend's pissed, waiting out in the cold
for us to stop all this sexual innuendo
so we can go home saying, You straight women are all alike.
Men come first. Says you're trouble with a capital “T.”
She's right. I want to ride you across wheat fields
of midsummer Russian steppes,
Tchaikovsky's violin concerto
plying more than sum totals of notes or words.
You want to follow me. Down the road, headlights
never abandon us though we travel at a snail's pace—
breaking speed limits tho not the speed of light.
If sex is death, let me die a little in your arms again
because death is dressed in violets, the color of mourning
but I've said this somewhere before in a poem
to another man. Where does consumation begin
or conception or addiction? If it weren't so late
in the season we could listen to the rain on my roof
but the tiny dog-faced violets know the direction of dawn
without knowing the concept of east or death or spring
training. In the ball courts of Chichen Itza,
the gods wait for the climactic ending; both teams
lose their heads but I lose your address.
Poets are cheap. We will do anything for a good line.
More than once I've caught our names coupling in print.
It's beginning to look suspicious
& we're always the last to know.
Tomorrow we will wake up pretending it was a dream
but our words unzip the secrets of the universe
& we come down so hard
even the Milky Way screams, Galactos.
If you look closely, you can still see the old moon
on the sidelines coaching the new moon to steal home,
saying, Slide, slide. The bases are loaded.
It's an easy victory.

4/9/89

Letter to David Best

An issue of Creative Discourse arrived in the mail reeking of oil paints. I marveled at technology—an arts magazine smelling like an artist’s studio!

I've always had an intimate association with paint. When I was very young, I ate some of my mother's white oil paints. Making my first metaphor, I assumed, because it was white, and looked like ice cream—though it was in a small glass tube and not in the freezer—ergo: it must be ice cream. Pavlov rang a bell.

Van Gogh had a certain fondness for cadmium yellow, and his habit of indulging in eating paint was partially responsible for his madness.

My mother who was also mad, didn't have to eat paint, but that’s another story. Her studio was, appropriately, at the Project Artaud in San Francisco. Artaud was another madman. However, when an arts magazine carries the odor of an artist's studio, the mind has a way of unwrapping itself from linear time.

Since I no longer have a studio, having forsaken brush for pen, this made me nostalgic for our old painting studios at the College of Marin, and the basement of Darwin Hall Science building at Sonoma State University. Fledgling artists worked in scientist's basements.

Einstein, who prized creativity over knowledge, would have loved this admixture of art and science. But the ventilation in Darwin Hall was non-existent, and one way or another, we were all stoned out of our minds. Eveything is relative. Einstein, couldn't add simple equations, nor remembered to wear socks. What Einstein and I have in common is an inability to add.

After I collected my degrees in painting, I became disillusioned with the gallery-pimping art world, and took up the horizontal process of writing around.

I remember a childhood visit to my mother in the City, I wandered next door to the San Francisco Art Institute and watched a man painting in the courtyard under the Spanish tiled arches.

Not a brilliant conversationalist at the age of eight, in a child's drooling of absorbed preoccupation, I finally slurped, “I paint too.” When he asked what I used, I said, “Oil on newsprint.” His surprise turned to disbelief when I elaborated that I didn't like canvas. I liked watching the linseed oil make ghostly halos on the unpainted surface.

He resumed his painting without saying another word, his lips making a thin line of concentration and denial. The courtyard was filled with the pungent smell of turpentine, and the soft scratching of a brush across canvas orchestrated its own kind of silence. I remember how cerulean the unadulterated sky was, and a crow with blue-black feathers sat watching us with an indifferent gaze.

A Xeroxed drawing of a deer with oil paint fell out of the magazine: Number 214. Signed, Best. David Best. A name crawled out of my reptilian memory.

It was 1970, David was making odd altars of clay and baubles in the ceramics lab. Overnight, glue-sniffing artists crawled out from under Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul refuse bins and Dipsea dumpsters—glass and junk, old bureaus, chairs, spheres and cars were transformed into glittering altars.

Someone lined the toilet bowl at the Sausalito Art Center with pennies. We polluted our lungs with verdigree fumes.

One afternoon, a life-size bejeweled horse showed up on the San Geronimo Valley Golf course with a real Lady Godiva on its back. Her red velvet cloak, a gaping wound on the putting green. Golfers and commuters either ignored the apparition, or nearly drove off the roads in disbelief; some making hasty mental notes to stock up on more of that good dope.

Artist Dickens Bascom's beaded Ford Falcon with its fins covered with scales made from the soles of tennis shoes, actually worked. It had to, the sight of it was like the siren call of a red flag in front of the bull for the local cops who were always pulling him over for vehicle safety inspections.

After a while, they’d hit the lights just to keep in practice, or to see the latest additions. Once, in front of the Fairfax Hardware store, I tried to use the typewriter glued to the back of his Ford Falcon but that was before I became a writer. There were no words. Just blank paper for the accolade.

David also decopaged an entire vintage ’50s Cadillac. The hood ornament was the stuffed head and horns of a water buffalo with red eyes.

I like to think of that Cadillac as an homage to water and 20th century of abandoned technology. A Las Pulgas water temple on wheels. The sides of that gas-hog were of faceted glass and on the mink-lined back seat, plastic ketchup bottles, stuffed toys, and toasters were chauffeured about in style.

This was during the great Marin County water drought, which rode hot on the heels of the gas shortage. I remember old Mr. Buck smoking stogies on trail rides up at the Meadow Club. When his wife died, she left a few Standard Oil stocks in a trust fund for artists—who’d have forseen the gas shortage would make Mrs. Buck so posthumously wealthy?

We became experts at siphoning gas, and rustled county water with a double-ended hose that connected the county pipes to ours; at night we ran water uphill to fill our tanks. An artist, inspired by David's eclectic stable of cars, covered an entire Oldsmobile with chia plants, but he couldn't drive the delicate, undulating carpet very fast. At night, the deer came down to graze on it.

An old gas station with the flying red horse in Mill Valley became the temple of The Unknown Museum. The jeweled mannequin with antlers greeted the visitor. A wall of old T.V.'s, overgrown with nasturtiums and electrical cords dangling like roots.

A weathered Fiat filled with rubber Disney toys. A mandala made of bullets, pencils and toy cars. Bureau altars with fur-lined drawers as elegies for Vietnam and Reganomics. A decomposed teddy bear was caught napping in the baby carriage by a leafy green spear of dandelion blooming from his navel.

What survived of the Unknown Museum are merely frozen images on film. The trashman cometh and he taketh away. Recycled technology. One man's garbage. Out of the rubbish heap, a phoenix circles the place of birth. Glittering birds.

Every seven years our cells regenerate. My cells have resurrected themselves five-times-seven. Memory is locked within the skin.

There was a meat company that wanted to boost sales. Expecting a Pavlovian response from customers and increased sales, they ran bacon-scented ads of ham, but all the neighborhood dogs ran off with the newspapers.

Some things are hard to forget. A taste for paint. A drawing of a deer against green pigment. A cloudless blue sky reflected in a mirrored Cadillac with chrome mag rims.

© Maureen Hurley 2007 Reprinted from Creative Discourse, Petaluma, Ca 1989

THE MIND IS A SIEVE

THE MIND IS A SIEVE

The mind is a sieve—rain falling
water seeks its own level
& dammed during the spring flood
it loosens debris from riverbanks
only to clog the mouth with ideas.
Someone must sort the flotsam
from the jetsam before we can speak
of things important—why pulsars implode
and why black holes are hungry for more light.
Each seeks an opposite. Light seeking dark,
dark seeking depth. The blue eyes of oceans,
the first memory of sky loosened 
from a field of chickory or was it 
the other way around? But will your green eyes 
seeking my riverbeds suffer drought. 
Already my lips seeks the small hands
of rain to quench the thirst from the fire.

4/89

AMBER TRAIL

AMBER TRAIL

On this bed, dreams gather, collect and fold

like a blastophore. Brainstem, backbone.

Jade rivers. Chalcedony birds. There are old

secrets I tell no one, I am the Whore of Babylon

dreaming of birds, the inside cat snoozes

in the rocking chair, whiskers and claws

twitching. Nervous chalcedony bursts into flight,

and amethyst shatters the night.

The carnelian on my skin glistens,

it's akin to coolness of wet kisses,

my nipples surrounded by fleshy stones

but the thought of stone chills my bones.

You give me amber from the Baltic sea,

show me pictures of a woman, another oddysey

but I've heard this story before. Fossil resin.

I rub the amulet until electricity glows from within.

In the dark I imagine the room to glimmer

like Merlin's cave but he's his own prisoner.

The amber necklace melts and bees gather

to dance the way back to the chamber.

What jasper will nest in my belly

and along the wild shores of my body?

Trapped in obsidian, Osiris's eye eases

the night watching us from the reeds.

In the last ancient dream of rivers,

who tricks sunlight to solidify into amber?

As it tries to escape back into air

bees mistaken it for nectar.

On the floor, stones gather in eddies

like flotsam around each point.

Quartz vessels transport patterns

and secret prisms toward the light.

3/27/89

3/27/1989

COMIDA DEL MUERTE

COMIDA DEL MUERTE

At the outpost on the edge of civilization

there they were, black and wheeling

against bright storm clouds,

a vortex of condors cantilevered and herring-boned

at right angles to the sky.

A thermal updraft juxtaposes bird against bird,

until feathers weave the wind into funnels.

Seeking new heights, they spiral

in apocalyptic formation and make quenas

with their wings; group mind gives shape to the wind.

Caught between two worlds, a Quechua woman

palms intis from gringos who steal

small pieces of her with cameras

and in return, she gives thanks to the sun.

A bone of light falls on a hammer and sickle,

graffiti on the limestone of Puku Pukara,

the kremlin of the first Inca.

In the cordilleras, Sendero Luminosos

blaze shining paths with AK-47's.

Too much history, too much past.

We sing Que Condor Pasa?

and descend into the rings of Cusco.

When solitary creatures congregate

in all the skies of the world,

one begins to understand the uplift of continents,

but not the extinction of a species.

If my arms were feathered,

it would be easier to take

what is coming.

3/26/89

Maureen Hurley, John Oliver Simon, Jorge Lujan to read at, Copperfield’s Bookstore, Petaluma