NATIVE AMERICAN WOMAN SPEAK

NATIVE AMERICAN WOMAN SPEAKS:

     —for Gene Ruggles

Sitting

like Buddha, Mary

TallMountain was the guardian,

a black triangle on a vast white plain.

Both solid, and non-solid, her hair, a living bridge

uniting head to shoulder, composed entirely of triangles.

The mantra interspliced dream images of her name. She said life

is a mountain.   Sit tall, become the mountain.  You are always going

to climb your own highest summit. She demonstrated, by sitting

cross-legged, the importance of strong foundations.

Standing, she could've been taller,

but that wasn't the

lesson.

2/25/92
SF National Poetry Week

Looking Forward, Looking Back: Interview with Ann Woodhead 2/92

LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK:
20 years of Dancing at the Cinnabar Theatre
An Interview with Ann Woodhead  (The Paper)
—by Maureen Hurley   2/92


After a dancer worked with the class, a kindergarten student of mine dictated a poem: “If I were king of the universe, I’d dance for a living!” Dance, the most ephemeral and impractical of arts, takes a special kind of vision, or insanity, to choose as a viable profession. Addicted hoofers proclaim they have no choice but to dance—like Gene Kelly who shouts “Gotta dance!” in “Singin’ in the Rain.” It’s definitely not the medium for making big money (unless you’re lucky like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire), it’s usually expensive to stage, so it’s gotta be for love.

Avant-garde modern dancer/choreographer Ann Woodhead fits the bill to a ‘T,’ or should I say to a ‘2,’ since she uses arabic numerals as a structural basis for some of her floorwork. Woodhead’s choreography, which has received solid and artistic critical acclaim on both coasts, and in Europe, has been enthusiastically praised by audiences and critics alike, as sensuous, challenging, and exhilarating. She has been dubbed the “neo-classic” or “post-modern” avant-garde choreographer on the cutting-edge,“stretching the limits (and concepts) of dance” in America. However, staging dance performances is an expensive proposition: Woodhead, who estimates she loses about $2000 per piece, says she doesn’t do it for the money—“Dance is hopelessly impractical, I feel crazy if I don’t perform, but I feel ecstatic when I dance!”

The Sonoma County-based Ann Woodhead Dance Company’s latest production, “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” spans Woodhead’s illustrious 20-year career as a dancer/choreographer in residence at the Cinnabar Theatre in Petaluma. Woodhead, who estimates she has created over 125 dances at the Cinnabar Theatre since she first performed her euphorically sensuous trademark “Spinning Dance,” in the style of Isadora Duncan, where she literally spins out of her top, will include vingettes from several of her older pieces, as well as present a major new work entitled “Short Stories.”

Woodhead commented about the upcoming retrospective: “one piece is the same as it was in the ‘70s—a musical phrase.” When queried as to why she mines past performances for material, the now long-haired (her short punk orange hair was a familiar trademark), Sebastopol dancer exclaimed, “I no longer have a passion for discovering or inventing ‘new’ movement.”

When Woodhead works with dancers, she likes to work with a very tight structural idea, and utilizes a familiar structure, for example, the shape of a number 2, and then asks them to make their own movements through space within the given shape. “I’m facile at making movement, but I’m tired of it, I’m bored by teaching people steps. I teach people forms. Steps are too time-consuming, we don’t have that kind of time.”

This technique allows dancers to invest in the final product, rather than mirroring her every step. “But, when you lose the people, you lose the dance, it’s ephemeral.” Her modus operandi is to rely heavily upon intuitive approaches, and contact improvisation, drawing from the dancer’s own experiences, thus building a dance piece by the process of accumulation. This process-oriented format reminds me of Stanislavski’s inner-directed approach to acting.

“In Dance” Magazine described Woodhead as “articulate with just the right amount of feistiness, her non-conformity is elusive…. She creates complex, yet deceptively simple pieces that aim at the evocative, rather than the illustrative.”

“Nobody knows what we dancers are doing, dance is too esoteric.” Woodhead laments the general public’s lack of understanding of, and appreciation for modern dance, for which she blames MTV and video. “The odd idea that a dance should be a frontal, frantic 30-second bite of hyper energy—that’s not dance. As a culture, we know less about dance now than before the advent of TV.” She added, “TV has no depth of field, no depth of range, the scale is all wrong. TV trivializes dance.”

“It’s painful to realize the most wonderful dancers cannot bring in a full house. I keep thinking—if only I just did this better, they’d get it. I’ve had to let go of that.” But she is obsessed by the quest for absolute truth in dance movement. “Your body is honest, whether or not you are. I’m after the right movement for this moment, the truthful, authentic movement for the times. Forget about being original, try to be truthful.”

The 50-year-old choreographer compares her structural approach to dance more akin to musical scores and notation, than to language. “I think like a musician, versus a playwright or painter. I never try to tell a story. Language tends to get in the way of dance; poetry and dance often makes a bad mix.” Woodhead said she has only used a poem once to evoke a dance piece, “Copperhead” from a poem by West Marin poet Linda Gregg. She is intrigued by forms about time and space. “Space is very easy for me. I don’t know that much about time. Space is a musical concern. Dance is conscious movement through time and space.”

Originally a native of Santa Barbara, Woodhead studied piano and cello. Like Ginger Rogers, Woodhead excelled in social, or ballroom dancing, and the only other option, ballet, held no appeal. “It had no relationship to dance.” Then one day noted avant-garde choreographer and modern dancer Merce Cunningham taught a master class at Woodhead’s high school, “I was blown away, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

But it wasn’t until her mid ‘20s, at an age when most ballet dancers retire, Ann found her calling. “I realized I was a dancer.” Married at 16, she entered U.C. Riverside as a math major. Divorced and remarried at 22, with two babies by 23, Woodhead migrated north to San Francisco, and survived by writing textbook copy, and taking dance workshops whenever she could.

Woodhead admits her training as a dancer is unconventional. “I have no credentials, except those I’ve created—no, those I’ve forged,” she added. Woodhead discusses the powerful influence German Expressionism had on modern dance; she studied with many noted dance masters including Merce Cunningham and Anna Halperin. She acknowledges both Jennie Hunter as a mentor teacher, and Erick Hawkins (Martha Graham’s choreographer-husband) as the most technically influential. Woodhead debuted her first production in 1969.

When I asked her how she, a dancer, in need of a city to perform and survive, arrived in Sonoma County’s clement backwaters, she quipped, “How else—by following a man.” The relationship fizzled, she loved living in the country, but needed a means to survive, and a good performance space.

Sonoma State University offered Woodhead a job, and the Cinnabar Theatre, formerly an old church, provided the space—the rest is, as they say, ‘her story.’ In the summer of 1972, Woodhead performed her first piece (“Spinning Dance”), founded the very successful Mercury Moving Company in 1973, and in 1980 she formed the Ann Woodhead Dance Company “in order to pursue my choreographic interests more intensively.”

Dean of Performing Arts at Sonoma State University, Woodhead is unconventional, she holds no degrees in dance, but has a M.A. in psychology. Seventeen years of teaching has nourished her performance career (as well as paid the bills), it allows her to constantly move and experiment. Teaching spurs on her choreography. One of the trade-offs in teaching is giving away energy, and finding a balance between being teacher and artist (she sees 100-150 students, six classes, four days a week). “I can get creative on their dances, but I’m giving it away.”

If Woodhead was living in the midwest, or New York, she says her work wouldn’t be any different. Woodhead doesn’t feel she’s bound by regionalism. “My concerns are formal, location is not important. I see very little dance—though my tastes have broadened considerably. Avant-garde is nothing new.” But there’s some trouble living in paradise—and outside the mainstream of the dance world, largely an urban art form. A choreographer in a big city has more options, more funding, less work to publicize. Though even in the Big Apple, it’s hard times for dancers. At one point, Twyla Tharpe, tired of trying to secure funding, disbanded her internationally famous troupe.

Woodhead despises the system used for getting grants, in spite of the fact that she has been very successful at it. She received several grants and awards for her work, including two National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer fellowships, a Sonoma County Foundation fellowship, and a Sonoma County Arts Achievement Award. “Funders want five-minute video tapes; my dances take 20 minutes! I hate toadying for money, I feel defiled by it. Funding on the basis of quality is a joke, it’s about fashion, trendiness, who’s currently popular.” She thinks a lottery system would be a fairer approach, but she readily admits she’s not good at working within the system.

Woodhead cites other trade-offs of living in the country: a lack of public and corporate funders and presenters, little or no publicity, or press coverage, rare reviews, and a scattered, and small audience as major deterrent. “It’s not a very innovative to me for dance right now. It’s tough, it’s never been a gold mine. I’ve survived by teaching. I’m lucky, I do have an audience, I’m able to raise some money.” Her salary from SSU supplements her career as a dancer and choreographer. Expenses include dancer’s salaries (there are 8 in her troupe) , rent, musician, printing, photos, costumes often leave her in debt after the show closes.“There’s very little praise or financial reward for what we do.”

“It’s hard times for modern dance, there’s not enough serious dancers coming up through the ranks.” She added, for young people willing to take the artistic vow of poverty today, “living on the edge is harder to do, because being poor is so much scarier now than it was in the ‘70s.”

Woodhead continued, “aerobics has killed us.” Those who used to take dance classes for pleasure and exercise, forsook dance for the trendy fitness phase, but they’ve discovered their bodies can’t keep it up. Some are returning to the more ergonomically sound techniques of dance, and aerobics teachers are beginning to use dance in their exercise programs.

Woodhead briefly talked about the role of the older dancer. With the exception of superstars like Margo Fontaine, who is cosseted, Woodhead is a pioneer in the field of the aging of American dancers. “We modern dancers always have to make our own work. I ache every morning, my feet always hurt, mornings are hell, I’m literally too stiff to roll over. (Ibuprofin is a dancer’s best friend .) I succumbed to dance. I’m not young, I’m not skinny, but, hey, I’m still dancing.”

The red-headed dynamo claims she’s basically lazy—a paradigm if ever there was one. The secret to her success? 90 percent of the magic is just showing up at the studio every day, says she. “The rest is improvisation.”

“Dance the first art form, not even sound can happen without movement. Movement is the mother of arts, the source, it remains the most completely human of the arts.” She gets more praise as an actor without any “acting chops. Our literalness is what separates us from actors; acting is not real, it’s illusion, while dance is truth.




One of the joys of transcribing these print articles is that I can provide links, and articles that weren't available to me when I wrote this piece. I was dancing with Ann four days a week at Sonoma State during the late 1970s. We were required to watch videos of other dance companies. Thus began my training to write this piece which appeared in The Paper. I have no publication date  for this piece, just this file that said 2/92—but that was the date I last "saved" it onto a floppy disk, not its origin date. I think it's written during the late 1980s—I quoted a line from a kidpoem that came from Mark West School where I was teaching poetry in the mid-1980s. I think this piece was published in The Paper during Nick Valentine's reign as editor).   —MH

Links for further reading:

DANCE: THERESA DICKINSON AND ANN WOODHEAD (1983 NY Times)

Where Worlds Collide (1998 Sonoma County Independent aka The Paper)

Dance Dreams: Choreographer Ann Woodhead stages final piece (2001 North Bay Bohemian—aka The Paper)

GOLDFISH IN WINTER

GOLDFISH IN WINTER

In the other classroom

someone drops some marbles.

Next to the lazy slant of books

easing towards the horizon,

the calendar has its own agenda

in the rhythm of days.

Trapped behind glass, solarium plants:

impatiens and begonias smolder

against dreary winter clouds.

As my students write,

goldfish, like small birds,

rush up a dark ladder to the sky.

When we hauled branches

to the field for burning

their dark shapes scratched the sky

with random hope for a spring

that will never come.

2/21/92
Higham family school

WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

WHERE CREDIT IS DUE


At oblique angles to the rain,
the blinds divide the sky into sectors.
Below an American flag,
a single crutch on the carpet,
gloves, a knapsack, the hat, empty of thought.

The clock pushes time westward in increments of one.
We are all one people proclaims a poster.
A student gathers endless space in his eyes.
The alarm in my mind is made of small golden chains.
Filing cabinets achieve another kind of order.

Sometimes it seems there's too many hands on the world.
Whose job is it to make the sun rise?
Asleep in winter, the fan no longer severs
the air, offering it some chance of rest.
The rooster gives credit where credit is due.


2/92

POEM FOR SARAH

POEM FOR SARAH

While Sarah sits working her poem
into the metaphoric depths of elm trees,
she sheds words, more like a flurry
of buckeye leaves into the fire of summer.
Aestivating, pooling precious water
during the annual drought, the buckeye is tough,
knows when to conserve, how to pull back—
Innate structure cannot be taught.
I warn my students the verb “to be”
engulfs poems like a black hole.
A builder of hidden realms, the beetle
devours the inner thoughts of the elm.
Because only the thin cambium layer is alive,
& has no defences against the small engineer
boring into the dead heartwood,
the hefty elm, riddled with rot, will fall
during a storm several years hence.
Sarah's name sounds like wind
in the elm leaves of summer.
I want to tell her of Daphne's escape
from the hunter,
that I witnessed her mother's grief
for the baby sister who died in the fire,
& the streets of Russia are lined with trees.
Though she strives to be the towering elm,
sap coursing through her capillaries,
she is also the architectural beetle,
excavating into the very center of  self.
No drought or dryrot will weaken her
because she grows from the inside out,
shedding the unnecessary foliage,
gaining strength with each new line.

2/19/92

1996 Voices Israel
published in CPITS anthology NAME?

Journal entry, 2/9/92, SSU art exhibit

2/9/1992 last night, Svietla translated Valera’s letters at the Art from the Heart exhibit. I had three pieces in the show, two photographs and one oil pastel. All three sold and I met each of the new owners. They sold for around $30-$45 each. Patricia Finnegan, mother of one of my students, brought bought my sperm-cunt piece, the lava shadow. A friend of Janet Bankovitz bought my pastel, Hearttrash Hotel. It was a gloomy show, I didn’t like most of the art, but I did manage to get three T-shirts for my efforts. A stranger, a woman bought my volcano piece. I told her about the eclipse, and hiking out across the hot lava, my boots melting. I imagine the stories I tell them and then meeting them will color their perceptions when they hang the art on the wall. I imagine my art hanging in white halls, not well lit, the guests have arrived and the hostess takes their coats. They stop to admire the pieces on the wall. She stops in front of mine and tells the story… How many houses do my pieces of artwork hang in? The urge to get my art out into the public on a yearly basis, two or three pieces at a time, slowly adds up.

Survival Strategies for the New Year 1/27/1992

GETTING ALONG—shopping for the basics in an open market, Cherkassy, the Ukraine.


The Allegorical Model

by Maureen Hurley

Returning from Russia to the fast-paced English-speaking world of 10-second sound bites and blaring headliner, only to face a belt-tightening recession back home, I was shocked to find that the USSR had officially dissolved. Gorbachev was ousted, and the Byelo-Rus capital of Minsk, the new Soviet Commonwealth capital. In Russia, nothing as clearly defined—even in the minds of political leaders; the pluralistic model was in full operation.

I found myself thinking of Russia in allegorical terms: three blind men variously describing an elephant as a snake, a wall, and a tree trunk. They were all partially correct or they had limited perceptions, dependingon which model you used to define elephants.

The Soviet media weren't being deliberately mis-infrormational, but so much was in turmoil, it wasn't clear what the outcome would be. But if was clear that when Bush acknowledged our recession after the fact, that Soviet survival strategies might apply here as well.

I'd compare Russia to the scientific model of chaos where many ordered and predictable patterns make up the whole—like the constellations in the infinite cosmos. But the apparent order is based on illusion.

It is a logical habit to draw conclusions: we in the West differ from our Soviet neighbors; we gather subjective analysis, call it statistics, claiming to understand the bigger picture. But it's hard to see the picture. let alone the overview while blindly groping to comprehend a culture in the midst of major political and sociological upheval.

The Russian poet Yevgeni Yevteshenko wrote of Perestroika: "One of the few joys of life is being an eyewitness to history in the making." Well, we are witnessing multiple histories in the making.

In Marshall McLuhan's global village context, I muse at how much the West influences, and shapes the outcome of world events. In their quest to nail down a decisive historical moment demarking the end of Communism, the media keeps on replaying the same old symbols and touchstones until we've all become weary of the Velvet Revolution before it's over—or even begun—in this case.

Yes, it's true about the long lines in which the average Sovilet spends an estimated one-quarter of his life. I did some serious time in those lines. Paradoxically, Soviet store shelves are empty, but people's cupboards are full.

Every place I lived, food was stashed in nooks and cranies. Onions rolloed out of the storage closets. By my sleeping cot, hot tub-sized jar vats held whole tomatoes and eggplants gurgling in brine. There were so many bars of soap stashed under the the iron claw bathtub, I couldn't see its legs. In articipartion of a long siege, newspapers were stacked to the ceiling of the watercloset for our more literate heines.

At the State-run Universe Supermarket on Prospekt Chodozhnikov (Artist's Prospect), in Leningrad—I mean St. Petersburg—I had ample time to admire the symmetry of the rows and rows of apple-juice jars artfully to arranged fill the otherwise empty shelves, a la Warhol. The problem of shopping for food a exacerbated by the ration-coupons (talloni) needed to buy produktii (staples): sugar, flour, kasha, oil, butter, kielbasa, vodka, cigarettes, eggs. and meat.

Toilet paper, matches, soap, etc., are always in high demand, but is there a shortage because people chronically hoard the items or because them isn't enough to go around? Many items are in scarce supply because of their excellent barter value. If someone needs soap or toothpaste, they don't go to the store, they ask friends. Friends are everything in Russia.

Most Soviet workers earn less than 20 rubles a day; the average monthly salary runs from 300 to 1000 rubles. With 100 rubles to the dollar, one can live on U.S. pennies a day, but there's very little to buy in the stores. For those who harve plenty of rubles (or hard currency dollars), there's always food to be had. Valuta, or hard currency will buy imported food at the tourist stores.

But Russians, who are not allowed in the hard currency stores, boycott the bazaars and cooperatives, where staples can be bought for a steep price. Usually four an 100 times higher than in the artificially priced state-run goverment stores. Enterprising merchants, anticipating shortages, keep the prices so high that the food literally rots on the shelf before anyone can afford to buy it.

I've been to the USSR three times; it could easily be three separate countries, my experiences are so varied. Russia has to be visited again and again to be understood, and even then, she is elusive. A friend, poet Marina Ajaja, and I who were in the same cities at the same time, had stories so vastly different, it was hard to believe we were talking about the same place.

Travel allows us to don the persona of another existence, don another political-cultural system. Nothing, not even experience, prepares one for the culture shock upon returning home—it's always a rough transition, no matter how much I appreciate gourmet lettuce, designer cookies, chardonnay, toilet paper, or my own bed (not necessarily in that order). While I was in Russia, certainly the proverbial fat got trimmed from my diet, but I always ate everything in front of me, not knowing what my next meal would bring.

Seeing my own country through transplanted Soviet eyes, two things struck me: how naive and blundering Americans are, and the overabundance here—the excess. I literally screamed when I entered Safeway my first week back. Why was it all so screamingly red and yellow? An avalanche of food overwhelmed me, and the ambient noise split my skull right down the middle.

Having lost some Christmas gifts at the St. Petersbueg airport (posters coveted by a Finnair worker), I went to the Santa Rosa Mall on Christmas Eve to find my brother a warm shirt. Contrary to what the media reported, hardly a soul was doing last-minute shopping. I couldn't bring myself an buy anything. I was on a Soviet value system—a bargain $19 shirt was equivalent to a half-year's Russian wages.

Closing time at Macy's found me wandering aimlessly through the store touching things. Senesory, deprivarion does funny things to the psyche. All those months of seeing empty shelves, and a lack of the constant bombardment from the advertising world, left me temporarily immune to our biggest social disease, blatant consunerism. What I noticed was the amount of stress we willingly subjugate ourselves to on a daily basis in the from of advertising. Nothing is new, natural, or improved. Get over it.

I came home to a recession, the media informed me. This is news? I thought that was why we went to war in the Gulf, to boost the economy. I read that GM is to lay off 74,000 workers in the next four years: IBM to lay off 20,000, with another 20, 000 to fall beneath the axe next year. Retail jobs vanishing.

Something about President Bush buying his socks at K-Mart, the significance of which, escapes me. There's a mini baby boom. Desert Stork, a cranberry shortage in the Bay Area, and Sunnyvale city officials were offering Monopoly Money or Hell Bank Notes to the gods at the winter solstice bonfire. The country I left was pretty crazy, but we Americans were facing some pretty tough questions of mammoth proportions (mammoth is a Siberian word), like "Is there life after Communism?"

In the new Russian Commonwealth, when Yeltsin officially takes over on Jan 2, prices are expected to quadruple. The prices (and wages) have been held at an artificially low price for 40 years. If wages don't rise, many Soviets I know won't be able to eat. Since there are so few luxuries to be had, they can't trim their budgets there.

How are people here in America are cutting corners to survive these bad times? Some say they're getting by—by refinancing their homes, and buying only the bare necessities. Many North Coast residents who moved to the land 20 years ago are less hard hit by the current recession, but others, whose children have come of college age, find themselves commuting to Santa Rosa and beyond to bring home the bacon. For folks used to cutting corners, what's left to trim after rice and beans?

Others are mobilizing by organizing a series of self-help groups and public lectures to strategize and combat the recession. One group is offering women free seminars on financial planning strategies for the '90s.

Financial consultant Zara Altair of IDS/American Express, Santa Rosa, said the planning sessions have been well attended. "People overlook daily expenses, few know how much they spend on food, gas, lunches, movies, cafe mochas or the cleaning bill." She advocates prioritizing, systematically trimming daily expenditures (lunch at $4.50 a day adds up to $90 a month), and putting money aside for the future. Women typically control about $500,000 in their lifetimes.

Altair said economists work with allegorical models, using the best of possible worlds. There's a dichotomy of information when they say we're in a slow recovery pattern, for in reality we don't feel the impact—it's like blind men looking at the elephant. While U.S. rates have been dropping, European Community rates are rising. Either we've already hit bottom, or it's going to get worse.

"Financial planning is like winnowing the spending stream," explained Altair. "if you look at thinning out the schools of minnows, it's the opposite of the elephant allegory. Look at all these things that nibble away at your financial strength. You begin in take toward by examining everything you do, and that prepares you to make intelligent choices."

I thought the idea of financial planning was great, but wondered what advice would help the many West County folks, including myself who already live with the metaphorical belt tightened in the last notch?

But in the end, there's little comparison between American consumers coping with the recession, and our Soviet neighbors; materially we are much better off. They've been in an economic, downspin for many years—like 75 years. And we don't have to wait in ration lines at the state-run stores every night because we can't afford food at bazaars where a week's groceries cost more than a month's salary.

A neighbor, Pat Bond, commented that the recession in the United States serves to heighten people's insecurities—especially those of people already on the fringe. She said, "Letters to the editor read like a permanent full moon. The government isn't telling the truth; it encourages corruption." She said the Forestville Methodist church had swelled from 250 to 600 converts since the Gulf War. A retired scientist, she's one of the converts. "l want to believe that the world is friendly," she added.

Soviets, too, are flooding to the churches en masse; I've never seen so many baptism and marriages. But in spite of AA, that number of Soviets who find faith in the bottle also seem to have risen to an all-time high, judging "growing number of blind-drunks in the metros. Cologne and raw ethanol provide temporary respite from a living hell when there are no more vodka ration coupons to be had.

Unfotunately, we, like the Soviets, have fallen victim to the idea of inherant helplessness. One of their biggest failings is that of not knowing how, or when to take the initiative. They haven't discovered that democracy requires constant vigilance and hard work.

We in the West could set a better example, instead of mumbling about how we need to carpool, to recycle, to cut back on heating and the electric bill, the goodies and all the toys.

The kings of Siam once gave white elepharts to troublesome courtiers who in turn, suffered financial ruin trying to to support their royal beasts of burden.

Only five percent of the global population, we Americans consume the vast majority of the world's natural resources, and the upkeep of elephants (or SUVs) is depressingly expensive these days. Soviets routinely recycle waste, use car pools and public transportation.

Are we the role model for emerging nations like India and China who want to blindly emulate our worst habits, that of blatant disregard for the earth's limited natural resources? Maybe now's the time to put our lack of money where our mouth is, and perhaps the world will be a better place for elephants.

© 1992 Maureen Hurley
Page 4, The West Sonoma County Paper, January 27- February 5, 1992.

Teaching journal, 1/26/92 LBC, CAC, Dream Vessels

1/26/92 I finished our El Día de los Muertos class with Inga Laskowski yesterday. Some 14 kids returned on a Saturday, a three-day weekend, to take a hour-long workshop which was heartening, a miracle. I never had faith in the after school, or a weekend workshop idea, but I can see that it’s working. I also had a little faith in the organization of it as well, but it worked out fine.

We did more freewrite and a group poem as well as letter poems. The group was a little more scattered and didn’t achieve the quality I had hoped for from the letter poems, but the objective was to get some poetry,.,. Hopefully it all goes with the portraits. It’s very hard to get good work and only two sessions.

I read translations of the poems etc. to the class. Rocio Nunez writes of her mother’s death, of her drunken father, and her brutal sister-in-law. Her pain and fierce determination to survive is extraordinary. I will never leave school, she says. A heart wrenching and superb writer. She writes of Calaca, Lady Death, lovely images of birds, a real gift she has. This is why I teach.

Afterwords, Inga looked at my travel photos of Russia, Peru, Ecuador, I haven’t been able to look at my South American photos since John Oliver Simon and I broke up, which is a bit jarring. I wasn’t feeling well as I had some trouble sleeping and my eyes feel like sandpaper. I think I have a touch of that virus or a sinus infection.

Friday was a loss. I met with John Marquitos of John Reed School to discuss a California Arts Council Grant, it’s iffy and it’s due on February 7, with the Witter Bynner grant due on February 1. I’ll know more on Tuesday whether or not I have a CAC sponsor. I got a nibble at Monte Rio school if John Reed falls through, but it’s not exactly enough time to plan a residency at this point.

I sent out 20 letters the first week of January and only got four responses, all on schools I expected, With the exception of Alexander Valley School. Probably no poetry at John Reed this year, he wants me to do a mural but that will require some research and I’ll have to do a bid as well. This is the second mural job I’ve been offered. The first one only had a $500 budget so I can’t imagine doing a mural for that amount now. There’s a lot of logistics involved like coordinating the kids, researching their history, coming up with a design, etc. So much to do.

I reread my November to June 1990 journal from the beginning—it was filled with doubt about Oleg, I accidentally opened it to the same day as yesterday, one year earlier and it’s interesting to look back at the space of the year to see where I was. I certainly was sick a lot last winter, a clue that something was wrong.

Some interesting writing too, especially on the Gulf War, which was I want to type up. I think it will help with my Dream Vessels poems. The IRS is breathing hard down on my neck and I want to work on my Dream Vessels poems and send out some work and everything is to do, doo, due.

Dream journal, 1/25/92 USSR

1/25/92  I was reading my dream records and I was surprised to see that many of the elements came true, more or less. One year later, those dreams about Russia for example, most notably the changing blue and green sign I saw in Red Square. In the dream I’m with Oleg Atbashian, in real life it was with Valera Stupachenko. They put a an electronic bulletin board in the windows of GUM since I’ve last been to Red Square. I stood in front of it thinking I was in a déjà vu dream, not recalling the particulars of the dream. So, when I read about it, I was very surprised. I had a lot of déjà vu experiences when I was in Russia. The dreams usually occurred a year and advance, that’s why I don’t remember much about them. It’s almost as if I simultaneously lived an entire life out each day in the course of a year.

Maybe we are only on this earthly plane a year at a time and so we live alternate lives, continuously recycling the year down to the end. Other Russian images that were either too generic to pinpoint, or didn’t come true, with the exception of my helping an older woman, by offering my arm, she was recognizably Lydia from our business trip. Lots of dreams about getting ready to go to Russia, buying coats, sweaters, etc. Of course there’s always a group but there’s always a group involved in the USSR so that’s not exactly prophetic.

Maybe I need to pay attention to the strangers that I meet in dreams, because that’s the stronger indication of a déjà vu than anything else. Certainly I’ve met Valera before in dreams. That was well over a year in advance, Another theory shot, but it was the right time of year. I first remembered the Valera dream, was in 1989 before I went to Russia or I had even met Oleg, for that matter.

The images of people speaking in a language with lots of ZH sounds like Portuguese but not quite, it was obviously Russian, upon rereading. I recognize dream images. Even the icons were there except the dreamscape was like the coast of California instead of Russia. That threw me off. I could I couldn’t make headway with it. How was  I to know I would meet Valera at Fort Ross, of all places?

It’s hard to be objective but I’d like to more accurately see, so I can record the events. None of the actual images came through, with the exception of the I’m tired and want to sleep In church scene, a composite, the images were more metaphoric, than not. The problem is is I cannot remember much upon waking, then the dream is lost forever, unless I can record some imperfect meager scrap. Building, reconstructing the pieces is the actual déjà vu process, I guess reshuffling the images and the order of events, renaming the inarticulate descriptions, I can only record to the best of my ability. And that is colored by my linear consciousness. Call it dream pollution, but sometimes I’m able to capture an image in spite of it all. A tantalizing tidbit, enough to tease, but not enough to satisfy.

HARDEDGE LINES fragments

Besides these words,
what beast has escaped
to wrap me in mobius strips?
Einstein was right,
gravity bends light.

Feeling guilty
for switching lovers
we say the moon's in void.
Lunar dust and wind-chill factors.
Light askew in the heavens.

The blizzard of truth
loosened in this room
strikes only once like lightning
smoking pistoleros—
a column of hard stone,
honest and blue.

Though no longer in love with the idea of love,
I still crave chocolate in late afternoon.
Freudian slip. Freud was a cross-dresser.
What does he know of the incestuous relationships of poets?

When I said nothing happened,
she didn't want to believe me or to be made a fool of.
Then asks, is it serious, should she bow out?

I awoke saying Remember Safeway!
& of course, I couldn’t remember it.
Who is responsible for this anyway?

The Tonight show
will not be shown tonight
& we bid you good night.

At Nicasio Reservoir I stood naked in the moonlight
A black man with a fishing pole
wearing a Santa hat climbed the bank.
No fish. This is not the north pole in May.

I stand transfixed in this place like the orbit of stars.


some of these lines became short love poems

MATIN

MATIN
(a brief telephone conversation from the other side of the world)

Stricken by the binary division of male and female,
last night I burned translucent amber. Sacrifice.
In the air above our heads, an aurora borealis
alive with blue light, the rosiated sky timeless, & of no age.
Solar winds entered our crowns, our last chakra,
we tumbled like leaves across the autumn bed.
Our morning eyelids bathed in red corpuscles
dancing between membrane and cornea.
Reflections on stone, clearer than blood.
The time we didn't have, thick sacramental wine.

Someone said the art of compromise,
not conflict—is the basis of civilization.
Somewhere inside all of this, another story is waiting.
We come into this world innocent
only to be toughened by life's school—
What separates us from ourselves and from each other?
It makes me think this trouble goes deeper than culture.
Someone said, it's the men who suffer most of all—
We wonder why there's so much trouble in the world;
we can't even build a bridge to meet half-way.
We keep diminishing love,
as if love and pain were stillborn Siamese twins.
Guilty beasts rising up from within the self,
we felt bound to each other, and to time;
we became our own worst enemies.

I burned the precious resin more ancient than Man,
because to find a love that endures is rarer still.
In the fire surrounded by fire, on dawn's watered cusp,
your voice is distorted by phone lines—Sunspots.
Satellites, precocious star sounds, the cackle of deep space.
The path of the corona extends to the limits
of the solar system as solar wind.
Each ring of the bell, a matin of the heart,
a prayer wheel and flag for all our tresspasses.
As in the fairy tales, we'll mourn
the obligatory year and a day.
But I can't answer those bells yet—your voice,
as if from the dead, still argues from within.


1991  date? Who is it to? Oleg? Bruce?
rev. 5/92

House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad

House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad
by Madelon Sprengnether (Author) , C.W. Truesdale (Editor)

Amazon 2nd ed. listing, has my name, but no link

I had NO idea that it even went into a 2nd edition in 1997, and a 3rd printing!
Well, I guess have a first edition, then.

My story Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace, was picked up by Black Dog & Leventhal (Workman) in 2001. Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers  by Edward C. Goodman (Author). Alas, it was remaindered right after it came out, right before 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading at Barnes & Noble. I will publish more info on this in 2001 entry. 

Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace / Maureen Hurley p. 179

I do not have an electronic facsimile of my story. Only way to get it is to scan pages, but I've no OCR software. I may scan pages direct.  —MH, 2014

House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad

From Publishers Weekly:
The nearly 50 short pieces of travel writing that comprise this volume display such a wealth of perspectives and explore such a variety of locales that the book is a splendid adventure in its own right. In "Ramont Hall" Rhiannon Paine looks back to 1973 when, at the age of 25, armed with a broken umbrella, a "dilapidating Mini" and youthful enthusiasm, she set out to see England. Helen Degen Cohen, who, as an eight-year-old Jewish girl narrowly escaped being deported to a concentration camp, describes her "Return to Warsaw" to visit the Catholic woman who hid her during World War II. Patricia Hampl's "Italian Two-Part Invention" savors the romance of a damp Venetian winter; a visit to a monastery during one sunny Umbrian spring triggers a memory of the author's childhood. Melissa Sanders-Self's fictional "Nameless Things" follows the daily grind of a young American woman who serves drinks in a Tokyo club that caters to Japanese businessmen. Catherine Stearns's "Icarus in Africa" is a series of letters from a feisty woman who signs herself "Ma" and who, at 60, starts out to teach at a rural school in Zambia. Sprengnether wrote Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreamsone title and Truesdale is publisher of New Rivers.

Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Madeline Sprengnether

STELLA MARIS freewrite

STELLA MARIS

It's 5 am, Venus and Jupiter in conjunction with Jupiter,

someone says the star of Bethlehem

on the eastern horizon, new crescent moon

in the old moon's arms star of the sea.

I remember  sleepwalking to the front door

awakening to find a configuration like this

celestial bodies, the planets are aligning themselves

venus in the moon's halo appears to be holding the new moon

and holding the old moon in her arms

Venus Stella Maris I awoke naming the planet by its Latin name

where did that come from? I was baptized at the Star of the Sea

church. Some say it's really 1993 years since the birth of Christ

some priest or another got it all wrong way back when

the millennium is approaching at lightning speed

how many time since the year zero, or 3 ad

have Venus and Jupiter crossed paths

of course, everything's relative

it's what we see from here, this place.

that we designate as the most auspicious of signs

above me, Orion's belt suddenly i remember

a pictograph I'd seen somewhere

was it New Mexico, Hawaii

the small man dancing on the horizon

I recognized Orion. The names of stars

arabic and greek interpretations

thousands of years after the naming

what were the Hawaiian names

or the Indian names for the constellations?

The Pleiades directly overhead

the Celtic new year. The night sky takes on a significance

in my subconscious

I am recognizing a passage of time

our creators were more finely aattuned

to the movements of the stars

now we're lucky if we can even see them;

 the lights of the cities

a common denomonator for the madness

that sits within the absence of ritual

biological clock finely attuned to the measurements of seasons

the equinox another rare celestial event full moon equinox

and hunter's moon in one Paleolithic beginnings

haang from that orange orb

is it merely pollution that makes it orange?

I remember the August eclipse moon over Kiev

not knowing it was an eclipse

I watched the moon bleed in to the evening sky, 1989

In less than a week I'll be  traveling to Kiev again,

my 3rd trip to the USSR in as many years

this morning I'm off to Montana

listening to Tracy Chapman singing Mountains of Pain.

October 4/1991

Uh-oh a lot of ascii at the bottom—never a good sign

Making Things: Artist Raymond Barnhart 10/5/91

 Assemblages by Sebastopol Artist Raymond Barnhart

THE SUM OF ITS PARTS— Barnhart outside his Sebastopol work space with one of his "relief constructions," Consummation. "I want to please the work. I want it to please itself."
  

We asked the captain what course of action to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: "I think I shall praise it."   —Robert Hass, Praise

BY MAUREEN HURLEY

I recalled the twist on reality and an unexpected visit from poet Bob Hass' poem, Praise while viewing Sebastopol artist Raymond Barnhardt's latest exhibit, "Recent Constructions" at the California Museum of Art in Santa Rosa, California.

Because everyone's response to my queries about Raymond Barnhart and his work was the inevitable raised eyebrow, followed by an incredulous: "You mean you don't KNOW about Raymond Barnhart's illustrious career?" I gulped, and found that the best recourse was to praise it. Taking the beast by the horns—by asking Barnhart niggling details about his second career as an assemblage artist (painting was his first career) seemed sacreligiously inane and so unintelligent. Excuse me, your slip is showing...

And so, at a recent artist's lecture at the California Museum of Art (CMA), when the venerable artist himself was introduced by museum director Duane Jones as "Someone who needs no introduction," I thought, aww feck, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was right: "You can only ask questions and die." Luckily, the lecture was a quorum of questions ranging from "How do you name your art?" to "What kind of power tools do you use?" The questions were all answered by Barnhart, age 88, with such thoughtfulness, verve and wit, I was in love with love itself.

Artists know firsthand that one of the challenges in art and poetry is to create something that is profound, but with a sense of humor. One who can accomplish both—without lessening the impact of the statement—is a Master. Barnhart's elegant, formal masterful assemblages are intentionally playful, they delight the eye, they make you want to laugh. 

Conceptual artists make us look at ordinary things in a new way, they redefine our limited perameters of "definition." It comes down to rearranging concrete nouns into metaphor—Plato's nemesis. The metaphor of Picasso's bicycle seat and handlebars as a bull's skull. Man Ray's steam iron with nails, and Christo's running fence—all share that spirited kinship to challenge the senses and reality. How we see the world.

THE PERSONAL FILE OF ANNA AKHMATOVA (newspaper story)

In the film, Dr. Zhivago , at the funeral, Zhivago's brother says of the throngs of mourners filing past Zhivago's casket, those who love poetry love poets, and nobody loves poetry like the Russians.

But he could just as easily described the very real funeral scene of Anna Akhmatova—considered to be the high priestess of Russian poetry, and one of the great poets of the 20th century—in the documentary film, The Personal File of Anna Akhmatova , by Leningrad filmmaker Semyon Aranovich. 

In Zhivago , Anna's friend, Boris Pasternak captured a fragment of the darkness that must have descended upon Russia, as the material for the Iron Curtain was mined from the very psyche of her artists and intellectuals. The capital of culture, (and once the political capital of the USSR) St. Petersburg (Leningrad), with her mosaic of 101 islands wrested from the marsh, is said to be built on a foundation of human bones. 

In this dense, heavy, dark film, Aranovich effectively captures some of the real-life horror artists suffered while under the reign of Stalin. Akhmatova speaks, "The naked man on the naked earth. What a dangerous thing art is."

Russia has made great contributions to literary tradition: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Blok, Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, and of course, Akhmatova. 

Ironically, it was during my first visit to the USSR, in August of 1989, that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's work was allowed to be published for the first time, during that same epic month, Andrei Sakharov died, and the film, The Personal File of Anna Akhmatova, was broadcast on television. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Akhmatova were finally repatriated and reinstated—and filmmaker Aranovich as well. 

One of Stalin's first work camps bore this slogan, 'With an iron hand we shall lead humankind to happiness." On the green walls of Leningrad's Literature Club, I read a list: many of the world's greatest artists lived there, and during the Period of Stagnation, smuggled their work abroad.

Joseph Brodsky, who, as a young poet was befriended by Akhmatova, before he was forced to leave the Soviet Union for America, said "it depletes you by making you think of it all the time, and so you struggle with it, losing all your potential." 

In the film, one month before his own defection to the west, Solzhenitsyn tells Akhmatova "That's just what I thought— you are not silent, but write what cannot be published." 

And during the 1991 August putscht , I watched the film, only to hear the voice of Akhmatova utter, "August is always a frightening month for me. . . how many poems I did not write. . . I know beginnings and endings too. I did, probably, everything that could be done."

Born near Odessa in 1889, during the last days of the reign of the tsar, the spirited Anna Andrevna lived in the outskirts of St. Petersburg, in Tsarskoye Selo. At the age of seven, she knew her destiny, and changed her surname to Akhmatova, after the last prince of the Golden Horde. 

"When Papa found out about my poems he told me, Don't bring shame on my name. 'I can do without your name, I told him.' Only a crazy girl would choose a Tatar surname for a Russian pen-name!" she retorted.

She narrates: "The human soul is made in a strange way. Poems, even the greatest poems, never make the author happy." Though she suffered the full sting of Stalin's purges, Akhmatova's life itself was an act of courage: in 1946 she was silenced, expelled from the Writers' Union, and only partially rehabilitated after her death in 1966. 

"A writer with a frightened soul isn't qualified to be a writer," wrote her friend, Misha Zoschenko—who was banned at the same time. 

In 1912, her first book, Evening was published, and her son, Lev was born. "You are my son and my terror, . . .And I can no longer tell man from beast." she wrote. The second time her son was imprisoned for the crime of bearing his father's name—poet and counter-revolutionary Nikolai Gumilyov, executed in by the Bolsheviks in 1921—she suffered a heart attack that nearly killed her. 

No one is forgotten; nothing is forgotten— Akhmatova wrote of censorship, "I remember how the gods turned people / into things, not killing their consciousness." 

Akhmatova later committed nothing to paper: the poems, including her famous "Requiem" survived because friends memorized sections for her. 

"Requiem" is a chronicle of her wait in line outside the prison walls to see her son. An old woman asked," Can you describe this?" Akhmatova said, "Yes, I can." 

In Stalin's times, for many, the defiant act of poetry was the only way to stay conscious and sane. For this reason of bearing witness, the poet must never forget—for Akhmatova, to do so, was to commit a mortal sin. 

Later in the film, Anna says, "Solzhenitsyn gives us back our native languages and loves Russia with Blok called a "deadly insulted love." She refused to leave the Soviet Union, becoming "a forceful voice against oppression." Two years before her death, she was reinstated into the Writers' Union, Solzhenitsyn fled to the West to publish freely. 

Aranovich, who filmed archival footage of Akhmatova's funeral in  1966, risked arrest and was unable to show these images until now, under glasnost .

The story of the film itself, reads like the chronicle of Akhmatova's life: Aranovich was silenced when his footage of Akhmatova's funeral was confiscated by the KGB, the director demoted, and the footage remained missing for five years. 

According to the American translator of the script, poet Maryna Albert of Odessa Productions in Seattle, "Aranovich was told by someone to ask about the footage at the archives at Lenfilm Studios. He went with a bottle of vodka, and talked to the head archivist. They drank the bottle and Aranovich got another. Finally, the archivist says, 'I know what you're here for, your film, but you're not going to get it.' 

For almost 20 years they could not get ahold of the footage. Ironically, the only time it was shown was when the KGB wanted to know who was present at Akhmatova's funeral." 

Maryna Albert's own involvement in the film came about when she was in Russia in 1989, when she met a young musician who had just finished working on a film of Akhmatova. She saw the film, loved it, and met the director, Aranovich. 

In turn, she read him a poem she'd written at Akhmatova's graveside, translated by her friend, Leningrad writer and guitar -maker Yuri Dmitrievski. Aranovich liked the poem, and offered her the job of co-translating the Russian text of the film into English with Yuri. 

(Excellent translations of most of the poems and text of Anna Akhmatova are by Yuri Dmitrievski and Maryna Albert; three poems by Judith Hemschemeyer, from the recently released Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova , Zephyr Press 1990; two poems by Stanley Kunitz/Max Hayward from Poems of Akhmatova , Little, Brown & Company 1973.) 

The completion and subsequent airing of this important documentary film represents the banishment of repression not only for Aranovich. 

Yuri Dmitrievski who described Social Realism as "a monster nobody has actually seen with the naked eye," said "If you weren't killed, survival was agonizingly hard for anyone banished from the obedient herd. Consequently, there's scorn among Communists for anyone who is independent and, worst of all, creative."

Russian criticism of the film was that Aranovich objectified Akhmatova too much, placed her on a pedestal. She was more human, down to earth. Albert said the film, geared for Russian audiences, assumes those viewing the film are intimate with Russian history and literature. Not enough is explained for American audiences. 

"I tried to bring some clarity to the film, which is not always chronological." She was confronted with the added dilemma that the film had no separate sound track. Albert was able to make an American adaptation (2 and a half years in the making) funded by the Washington State Humanities Council, with only seven editorial cuts.

The 63-minute black and white film successfully weaves photographs and footage, often using pastiches, collage, overlays, and repetitive loops to achieve a visual poetic effect. Haunting, discordant music serves to enhance the nightmarish quality of some of the images—Stalin wiping his mustache over and over, or the wind riffling the pages of books.

The cult of Stalin juxtaposed against rows of animal skins, scored with Dmitrievski's percussive rendition of "Moscow Nights" and "Katushka" raises the hackles on one's neck. This is a dense film noir, requiring several viewings. Sometimes the subtitles go by so fast, there isn't adequate time to absorb them, and some of the text for the complete poems is almost too small to read. 

However, it's a film well worth seeing—especially as we in the west struggle to understand what Russia has already experienced, and what lies ahead.

Part of a growing Renaissance on the life of Akhmatova, the archival film will make its Bay WArea debut at the Mill Valley Film Festival in November, and it will be aired again in December at the Poetry Film Festival in San Francisco. 

An American companion film on Akhmatova—using much of Aranovich's original footage—"Fear and the Muse" will also air in November on KQED. And there is rumor of other documentary films on Akhmatova on the way.

Distributed by Oakland-based, non-profit national film distributor, The Video Project, The Personal File of Anna Akhmatova, is now part of their Glasnost Film Festival video series, the original 22 films which toured the US for over a year, have expanded to 33 titles. 

The Festival was brought to North American audiences in 1989 by the Citizen Exchange Council and the American-Soviet Film Initiative (Moscow).

The Video Project (originally the Educational Film & Video Project) was co-founded by Oscar nomination, I n the Nuclear Shadow: What Can the Children Tell Us? 1983, and Academy Award ( Women—For America, For the World , 1986) winning documentary filmmakers Vivienne Verdon-Roe and Ian Thiermann in 1983 to produce and distribute affordable alternative films and videos on issues crucial to our future on the planet. 

Verdon-Roe first saw the Soviet films at the Los Angeles premier of the Glasnost Film Festival. "I was quite unprepared for the emotional impact of these films. They are a vivid reflection of the changes sweeping the Soviet Union, a transformation that is now changing our world so dramatically. . . a society that is taking moral inventory of itself, trying to heal itself."

Over 150 films ranging from environmental to critical social issues such as the arms race, and Latin America—hard-hitting films rarely seen on television—are available for individual, or group rental or purchase at 5332 College Avenue, Suite 101, Oakland, CA 94618, or call (415)655-9050. Thiermann encourages grassroots groups to use the films to raise funds for their own efforts. Le Video in San Francisco and Video Droid in Mill Valley do stock some of their tapes as well.

I don't have a tear sheet for this, not edited version.

TROUBLE? NOT ME!

TROUBLE? NOT ME!

When my weekly horoscope said I'd fall in love with a stranger,
perhaps a Gemini, I laughed, thinking how easily I'd outfoxed my fate, 
and escaped Eros' sting. Besides, it was during the Russian coup,
I was living a cloistered life; I'd sworn off men—especially Soviets,
having put the last one (a Cancer) on a plane back to his wife.
Chocolate is a lot easier on the psyche and tastebuds.
Minerva cautioned the entire centarian tribe of archers,
Unlucky in love, are you the problem or the key to the solution?
Sagge, be careful what you ask for. I don't believe in starcasts,
but I forgot the gods are practical jokers. 
A chance meeting with a stranger on a pier,
minutes before my forecast was rendered null and void,
I fell in love with a Gemini man from an overthrown country 
half-way around the world, without even a language in common. 
I forgot to specify I wanted a sensitive, rich, agnostic American. 
Instead, I got a piously orthodox aging Russian singer.
Always in hot water, I know I'm trouble, I wonder what he asked for,
& how many other Sagges were parboiled that week?
Blame fate or the stars the ship was stranded a week in port.
It began innocently enough—the night I drove him back to the ship
at 70 mph, my unexplicable tears, the swimming freeway.
Alarmed, he wondered if we'd get there in one piece.
I stood on the pier shivering in a summer dress
& bundled against the fog, dismally in love with a stranger
about to set sail. The gods take no prisoners, we couldn't board ship—
US customs had shut it down. Trouble, all right.
He pointed to the dictionary, are you free?
Was he was referring to political ideological freedom
just after the coup—it seemed a natural enough question.
Panicking, I assumed he wanted to defect. 
Six others jumped ship in Seattle and nearly drowned.
He shook his head, No. I thought, O god, 
it's the larger question: do I have ties, am I single? 
But he just wanted to go shopping before returning home.
Relieved, I said yes to all three counts.
We spent the week exploring backroads and beaches,
singing under the stars, before his ship left for Vladivostok.
My girlfriends sighed, how romantic! It's certainly a challenge. 
At least he's not married like the last one.
While I was busy fanning the blaze with a frying pan,  
my ship came in all right. And sailed without me.
I wonder where fate will take me this time:
To St. Petersburg as a Russian wife peeling spotty potatoes?
Or will he come here, dependent as a babe; 
both of us broke and hating each other,
living like caged rats in my shoebox of a cabin?
I've never seen the fall come in like this before: thunder & rain 
after a day hot enough to cook eggs in plein-air.
Last night's full equinox moon pushed on the sky
like an impatient child in the birth canal,
with bags packed, nowhere in particular to go.                 


 9/25/91
rev. 5/92

INSOMNIA, l

INSOMNIA


Sleeping until noon & needing an excuse,
she blamed it on the java she scored—
20 pounds of dark French roast
vibrating in her fridge—
keeping her hardwired all night long.


9/18/91
rev. 8/92

89 to 92