LEAVING BOZEMAN

We flew out over Red Lodge,
I recognized it from the air.
Glacier Peak, rimed in a cloud cap,
is lit by the rising moon.
The river, an ice lake, like purblind eyes.
the distant lights of Bozeman disappear.
Massive Yellowstone Lake, also frozen.
Another lake, huge mountains and deep snow.
As we approach Salt Lake, I can see ski runs.
Maybe it’s Idaho. I’m a astounded by the variations
in geography of the Rockies.
Long northeasterly ridges in the coal bearing regions.
Rock creek, visible from the air.
A granite peak, snow sculpted and feminine,
the orderly uplift near Yellowstone Park,
The toothed splay, the fractures and block faulting
giving way to the north south ranges.
It’s as if time itself is frozen.

BILLINGS AT SUNSET

Circling the rimrock of Billings at sunset
under a full moon, silvered graffiti of lakes, 

an ice jam builds in the narrows,
myriad tongues form multiple channels
white against the numerous dark islands.

We head towards Bear Tooth and the Pryor mountains.
Houses define the edge of space like fireflies.

The end of a residency, Laurel, Montana, teaching journal

The end of a residency, Laurel, Montana
21 February, 1997.

The end of a residency, my host family, Sharon and Bob Nose brought me to the airport. The two weeks flew by fast—we had an assembly Friday and I was interviewed by the Laurel newspaper. The reporter was very sympathetic, also dyslexic, so I wasn’t worried about trying to convince her of the value of poetry. I hope I don’t regret it.

I’ve had an action-packed two weeks! The kids were revising their poems all day long, and they were shouting their poems in the hallways and hamming it up. Many students read at my reading at Writer’s Voices , at Barnes & Noble in Billings—they were pros. Most of the kids froze up, and read traditionally, but I could see all the coaching had paid off. They were trying to remember all my instructions. Look up, get audience attention, enunciate, volume modulation, tone, pace, etc.

We were supposed to have two kids per class read, that’s 20 kids – it was more like 45 kids. Hannah was last, reciting the poem to her mother called She. It brought tears to my eyes. It brought down the house. The fifth graders mobbed the reporter, telling her what poetry is. I also had to prepare three packets of poems for the Montana Arts Council, the school, and a selection for the newspaper. It was a surprise to see Lee Evans, a friend from Napa, she’s going to college in Missoula to study with Bill Knott, and the Richard Hugo school of poetry.

I had a wonderful time teaching, but I’m also looking forward to going home. I didn’t get to Little Big Horn, or Greasy Grass, but I could see the sweetgrass in the distance, shining like an inland sea. Nor did I get a chance to ski but now I have poetry family in this part of the world. Teaching in another place irrevocably changes you.

• Montana Journal, returning home
• Montana Journal: Helena
• Montana Journal: flying over Mount Diablo enroute 

Getting the goose

One year spring came early, and Bob Kappell found a confused Canada goose on the perimeter of the playground chasing the students. Since he had a farm, he took the goose home in the truck. Well, the goose noticed the fence posts were whizzing by, and he wasn’t having to work his wings, and so he began to flap them in the truck cab. A goose’s wingspan is enormous. Bob had to pin him down in order to drive home. The goose wasn’t too happy about that and hissed at Bob all the way home. He let the goose go with his other geese, it took off, but the weather had warmed up, leaving wasn’t so much an urgency for the snowbird. A few days later in the local paper, there was an ad for a missing goose. Please help Freddy come home. Still missing, but was last seen on 9th Street two weeks ago. Please call Mrs. Irma Richardson. Someone photocopied the ad, placing it on the teachers room fridge, with a note saying, Leave it to Kappell to get someone’s goose.

Whispering corn

When she was a girl, Helena‘s brother always carried her on his back to the cornfield before dinner. He’d pick the ears of corn and hand them to her. Then years later, he had a stroke. He went to answer the phone, and found that he had lost his speech. He found those ears of corn whispering, some 50 years later, whispering the words she never said, and he could only mutely acknowledge her, nodding his head, as her poem whispered in his ear.

THE TRUTH OF ICE

The snow is falling like slow rice

from a wedding of sky and ground,
midwinter where variations of white
ride the Montana landscape
with inescapable rhythms.
The hard leaf hangs like a death sentence
when fall promised the salvation of darkness
that would find the oak and maple wanting.
The last of the summer wishes
are encased in ice like jewels

for my feet to find one morning early
as I step from the warmth of the van 

into the truth of ice.

Laurel, Montana. 11 February, 1997

Flying over the Sierra Nevada Range

The dark thoughts of the Feather River, hampered by a dam, turn white rimed at the edges. We climb the Sierras, fresh snow that teaches the rocks to be beautiful. Tahoe, the crown jewel, is flowing over its banks. It peeks out from under a cloud bank like a mirage, the beauty of the Sierras is hidden from the eye of God. Paralleling Interstate 80, the old pony express trail can be seen from 30,000 feet.

All those Nevada sinkholes filled with water for the first time in memory. A Seals and Croft song, Even the desert will bloom, comes to mind. Ancient shorelines from a crazy paisley pattern. What lake beds that have become as desolate as the Aral Sea, are reminded of the continuity of their ancient shores, yet this is but a drop in the bucket, for there was once a much larger bodies of water even than this watershed becoming visible in the desert.

The creek is most economical in the mountains, it heads south, interrupted by a small zigzag, but when it hits the plains, it oxbows back and forth on itself, so severely, Siamese-twinned islands appear. But the creek goes nowhere, it dries up in the desert, and sinks down into the water table to become part of of the underground stream. No water in this desert will ever reach the ocean in my lifetime. Evaporation will only take it further east to the Great Salt Lake.

The great flood

Though spring has struck in the Bay Area with acacia and narcissus clogging the senses, I am flying back into winter on the other side of the Rockies. We fly over Alameda, Carquinez Straits, the upper bay is latte-colored from the floods. Standing water turns fields into giant mirrors for the sky’s vanity. The river channels are like worm castings, the broad expanse of water redefining the Peripheral Canal’s low shoulders— it’s like a sinewy lake, miles wide. I never expected to see the vestiges of the flood from the air, and so long after the fact. Brachial lungs of silt fanned out across green fields where burst levees gave up the burden, and guilt flooded the fields with remorse for a time when the rivers were unfettered by man.

Unequal pay

At the Oakland Airport, a man complains to a group how he’s losing $25 a day coming from Montana to teach an art class in San Francisco, while I am losing at least that much an hour to fly to Montana in order to teach kids art.

TWO HAIKU

WOLF MOON

The dog-eared tomcat 

is stealing cat food again.

He yowls at the moon.

AFTER THE FLOOD 

All the poor drowned bees. 

Hives on low ground washed out to sea.
Who will pollinate the orchids come spring?

Sleeping with the Enemy

LOST or abandoned thoughts often re-emerged like ghosts in a country not my own. Sleepless nights even the cats deserted me because my tossing and turning like a crazed narwhal reminded them of the bilious sea. Water is not their favorite subject, unless fish are involved.

(Actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time her story reached me, it was phiss versus fhuck. As if piss were preferable to fucking. Tell me why society wasn’t ready for that Anglo-Saxon word.

My first opera: Tallulah was in a peacock-sequined gown, brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, her sotto voice carried across the marble lobby into the streets where the homeless peered in from the pages of a Dostoyevsky novel, City Hall’s verdigree breast thrust in the mouth of the hungry sky. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)

Nocturnal epistolic documents produced by an obsessive urge to write, or an unwillingness to let go. Images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind. Self-indulgence is fine, as long as it goes no farther than the page, but writing demands an audience, that’s the other half of the Faustian pact. The monks had it right: indulgences. 

When death came to visit, language abandoned me, I practiced stillness. Called ambivalence. After the silence that followed the deaths of my parents and uncles, and when the raven sat on my shoulder, the words themselves abandoned me and fell silent: this prose, my indulgence—not poems, but practice in the marginalia of what may become a poem if one is lucky. Josip Brodsky said time loves language. A writer is caught up by the centrifugal nature of language [where] ambivalence and open-endedness as the essence of endeavor.

My lover from the Ukraine wrote: we dissidents are called white ravens—varonas. Our letters rarely reached their destination. The KGB (or NKVD—they changed the acronym every decade or so, but not their technique, their headquarters, the Lubiyanka, cold solemn stone fortress in the krasnaya heart of Moscow); they intercepted love letters complicated by poetry between the sheets.

We wrote in triplicate, mailing a copy, sending the others via “couriers.” I received mail postmarked from the cities of the free world, and calls from homesick Russian friends of friends wanting any contact, no matter how tenuous. 

The system was good because of the many delegations of people led by William Mandel, Armand Hammer and Henry Daiken opening up the East. They allowed me to communicate with my lover—who eventually emigrated to New York and shared afternoon coffees with Brodsky—who, in turn, gave his Nobel Prize money away to émigré Russians, including Oleg Atbashian.

Strange offerings I received—antique peasant dresses, marriage proposals, coral & amber necklaces, USSR army watches and pins—the Russians sent things of value to the West to raise valuta to buy an airline ticket, or to pay for delivering packets and letters.

Once I flew back from St. Petersburg smuggling out letters, lacy silver spoons and tea cup holders, and more US currency than I arrived with: I was afraid to get caught red-handed, so to speak. A counter-counter-revolutionary of sorts, I said No when they wanted me to take an old icon. Mary’s beatific almond-eyed face with rosebud lips anointed in gold was a bridging of East and West.

I chased elusive dreams to distant countries because they were forbidden, I slept with the enemy because in school I learned of a mythical Russia, troikas in the snow. In love with horses, I couldn’t let go of the image, I didn’t know it was tied to the frozen canals of Holland —Hans Brinker’s mythical silver skates.

I lived a winter in St. Petersburg with the pop singer, (Valeriy) Valera Stupachenko of the Leningrad Rok Opera (Singing Guitars) who performed Andrei Vosnesenski's   (J)Yunona and Avos/Juno & Avos at Fort Ross. Small patches of ice-free water beneath the bridges relentlessly patrolled by ducks who knew: to let go of the open pond was to let death in.

Oleg said he was jealous of my happiness. When he saw me with Valera, suddenly it was all very real. But he wouldn't leave his wife, like the way Valera couldn't leave his God. Or throw away his dead wife's clothes. Ghosts of Lady Haversham shrines in and out of the closet. Who could compete with that?

Valeriy Stupachenko

Friends are everything in Russia; without them survival is impossible. I am haunted by fragments of memory: On the Field of Mars I stood overlooking the converted palaces, children sledding down the steps, and really, it was no different than in Amsterdam. Tzar Peter modeled St. Petersburg after a city that inhabits my writing. Czaar Peterstraat and the birth of the Russian Navy; Amsterdam, his window to the west. 

I was sentenced to spend time looking out those same windows, letting go of the myths, only to reinvent them in the poem. I perversely learned history through the back door, a traveler in search of the elusive mystery. Why do we write, and for whom?

© 1997, revised 2000 what month was this written?

Postcard from Adrian Mitchell

CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM POLAND

CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM POLAND

                      Love is a drowning in flood waters

                        —Irish anon., 9th C. 

                                           to Richard Benesivitch

1. A friend I thought afraid of commitment,

writes he married the girl next door

twice: a civil wedding and a church one,

as if the first one didn’t quite take—

Soviet-style bureaucracy still applies.

He sends photos of a post-industrial Walbrzych

where happiness is possible because the mines have closed.

Richard’s letter smells of cheap tobacco and coal smoke.

Lonesome for California, he sits at a Hard Rock cafe in Wroclaw.

Sends translations and poems in an adopted tongue—

his Polish is improving; confesses Lithuanian is his first love.

From the look of his letter, I’d say he’s losing his English.

Tak! I thought of Czeslaw Milosz’s lament:

I did not choose California, it was given to me. . .

Never again will I kneel in my small country, by a river,

So that what is stone in me could be dissolved. . .

I write here in desolation.

2. Another friend searches for ancestors in winter;

only the City of Light offered refuge

from the darkness of Prague and Krakow.

She writes about growing up hunkie,

the silent steel mills of Pittsburgh

where her barrelchested father first worked,

then later, as a mechanic in the hangars,

but he never flew the blue distance of sky to homeland.

Before his stroke, we spoke a rough English

peppered with Polish and Ukrainian.

Now it’s too late to translate secrets trapped in his eyes.

A slagheap of words slide down the slopes of despair.

3. We never finish poems, they abandon us.

Or is it the other way around?

New Year’s rain fell in biblical proportions

as if the sky knelt down by the river, opened a vein.

My blood thinned after my father’s death one Christmas,

within a year my mother, then my uncle followed. . .

I just went down, down, down.

Little in the way of poetry surfaced,

I became stone, no coming up for air

as if grief were a river to drown in.

I learned to crawl,

suffered a purgatorial floundering

in the baptismal font called California.

Zgoda, zgoda—peace flooding the roads.

The beginnings of a poem roils and fights for breath,

a steelhead flexing on a thin line, escapes

so that what is stone in me may be absolved. . .

1/23/97 Moon in Leo

SUPER BOWL SUNDAY

The terrible beauty of the storm clouds 

reflected in the river with the promise of more rain this evening. 

Vines emerging from the water like drowned snakes.

Valentine: 4 hearts, pastel (art) no date)

Maybe I should put all the valentines together so I can figure out when I made them.

The Blowhole, at Little River, Mendocino (drawing)

Facebook works in mysterious ways, a drawing I had done, found in a drawing pad, when, where? Then Judith Gips posted a photo of The Blowhole, at Little River, Mendocino. Bingo I remember the season and possible candidate for the year... Spring, 1997. Neil and I were visiting Eola Bates. Pen & ink, 4x6" I remember thinking how awkward it was drawing in plein air with a dip fountain pen and India ink.

Shoe drawings, stabillo, 1995-96

Edwin Drummond, Strand magazine query (no date given)

STRAND

The universe is one poem, on-going, tending to infinity and ultimate openess, as our truer poems and science do. In an oceanic maze of mazes, a seamless matrix whose caul is language, poems, at their best, return us to discover - and recover -the process of life streaming within, and all around, in which we too swim, until de-solving within the.one continuum of all being as single drops of, mainly, what we call water.

With the kind and generous support of A.DOFE, Inc, 'A non profit, public benefit corporation supporting contemporary art and the people who make it', there is a new thread in the World Wide Web: STRAND; a monthly gathering of poems addressing 'the society in wilderness, the wilderness in society.'

Anyone who has gathered poems out of the suck and surge of nature and nurture is invited to meet, through their poems, each month in the pages of STRAND. Whether fresh from the coast or the street, in the office, in love, on the rocks... STRAND welcomes poems that have it up to Here - and then some: superfresh air. At least on paper.

In time, perhaps such poems, together, could become a new branch of the Great Green Belt of Living Poetry circling the Earth, an ecologos, an archipelago of language under pressure in the wild. Whether on the mountain face or in the computor's, looking for a ledge in the sirened night, gazing into a microscope at the Gordian knot of a strand of DNA (Do Not Amputate), waiting at the bank, on the moors with binoculars for the curlew to speak its name, or cheek to cheek on the bus... poems make oxygen. People breathe more easily, opening their hearts in their mouths.

The hummingbird imagination has to check out everything, from the black holes of rifle barrels and eyes, from ants to dictators; flower nostrils, fears, ears of grass; from words to chains, forgetting nothing, not even nothing, street trash huddled in a corner by. the driving wind, clutching its small cup of honey. Small, daring, darting, with a sharp nib for the hard arse of authority on the one hand, receptive as the monthly bed of roses a woman makes on the other, a clutch of poems for all seasons, STRAND declares open season on having any agenda other than going against the flow of what's expected.

We will be both a window in the city and its ledge outside. The poem as nest. With a small quiet bang - like the cracking up of earthworms tossing their soil caps off after rain, that have returned to fields where the chemical warfare has been ended - each new universe of discourse, each truly new poem, can not only startle us: land minds to roof gardens, thought for food, water for a dry art, or heart, it can sustain us when everything else runs out.

My name is Edwin Drummond. The author of A Dream of White Horses, reflections of a life on the rocks, (1987, Baton Wicks(UK), my earliest stories appeared in the Sierra Club publication, Ascent: (1969, 71, 73 & 1989). My current work in progress is The Stone Butterfly, (Jonathon Cape/Random House), a story of suicide and the divine. Writing poems has been my daily bread for forty years. Currently the recipient of an A.Dofe Working Artist Award, I have also received a Keats Prize and a National Poetry Award. Which I trust no one will hold against me.

This first airing of Strand includes two poems of Alison Deming, a Whitman Award winning poet. They show in some way I believe that promise of new life that Strand aims to plant in the middle ground.

Each month ten, short sharp poems will be chosen. Every sixth month, space will be devoted to a longer one or two.

People of every age, from the earliest to the latest, are invited to contribute; from anywhere; child, woman, man. Although in English only for the time being, we will always consider a translation, accompanied by its native tongue original.

Every trimester STRAND will be published as a small magazine, containing those poems■that have been published on the WWW over the preceding months. On occasion there will be a review or essay. Each year there will be an award for the single most vital poem, as judged by the readership.

Such is the map. Now let's see where the river takes us.

—Edwin Drummond

Journal, Loch Ness Monster

12/22 Met Neil O'Neill at Brazilian artist Zoravia Bettoil’s Solstice party in San Francisco. No idea if he’s interested in me but we have a raucous time together. He made a fuss over my princess dress, sneaking surreptitious glances down the front. I snort, “Are you admiring my pearls?” Someone was taking a photo of me. He came over and put his foot on my chair, draped my arm over his thigh, under his kilt, holding onto my wrist. My face was flaming. He’s gregarious, charming, works the room with an ease I have to admire. I’m suspicious of making a conclusion that he likes me, but he seems to be as drawn to me as I am to him. He’s nice-looking, a bit short, has a paunch (like Waldo). I gave him a photo from Thanksgiving. He exclaimed “I’ve got to lose 20 pounds! I’ll use it as a dart board.” Self-effacing, self conscious, genuinely sweet. I made the mistake of reaching for his kilt button he held up for me to read. He slapped my hand, I’d fallen for the age-old gag, lifting a man’s kilts. I was so embarrassed. He said something about pulling the knife from its sheath, how cold it was to slide back in, and how the sporran hid a baby Loch Ness monster. I fairly shrieked with laughter. He observed, “Note the terror, combined with interest.” If he wasn’t so attentive to so many people, I’d say he’s definitely interested in me. “Hard to say,” Verona opines.

RRWG reading, Higher Grounds

Poem for Sarah published in Voices Israel

Poem for Sarah

 

Letter to a bad tenant

Justine Onta, for you,
I cleaned my house,
and put new sheets on the bed,
I took care of all the details
to ensure your pleasant stay.
In return, you were to complete small tasks,
pick up the mail, post the bills, water the plants.

I even sent you a reminder cards,

and called you long distance.

I let you stay into August

through Labor Day, for nominal rent.

I arrived home to a dirty house and shower, 

filthy sheets—stained with candle wax, 

oil slicks and random bleach stains. 

All my plants, dead, my neighbors

tried to keep them alive when they realized 

my plants were dying.

If only you had told them,

they would’ve gladly done it for you.

For this favor, to you and your aunt Mimi

who assured me of your trustworthiness,

and responsibility, you ruined my credit rating,

penalties and late charges, more than the bill.

To add insult to injury, 

your one rent check bounced, with more penalties

you never paid the second month's rent check. 

The cable was cut off, the phone bill in arrears.

Contrary to your claims, I know you stayed 

at my house the entire time because you made 

many long-distance phone calls 

for which you never paid.

I would've gladly given you 

the last three weeks rent free

because you are a student.

Instead, your stay cost me money,

and my friendship with your aunt.

You left me bereft, out-of-pocket.

I accepted you in good faith 

and was treated with disrespect.

You also left your blue scarf and shampoo.

I will hold them hostage until you settle up.

No answer was the loud reply.

Dec. 1, 1996

Scrying for a man on my birthday

11/24/1996 My birthday. Full moon in Gemini. Carmel. Geraldine Gaur’s Italian friend, Eda, tells me to hold up my gold ring up to the full moon to wish for the love of my life. I hold my amethyst ring of Italian gold up to the moon. There is magic afoot! I can feel it! In the moonlight he is so tangible, I can almost taste him. He’s nearby. I can feel it in my bones. Who is he? If only I could “See” better! 

I carefully reiterate up my wish list remembering to focus on all the necessary details (reviewing all the knowledge gained from my long list of past relationships): a man who can match me intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, psychically, physically, sexually, who is also secure and creative in his own right, who has already done time in the straight business world (as an after thought I add: retirement in place and all that), who is now ready to grow, expanding his art form. He will be a Gemini, this I know without knowing. 

I make a few (wise?) addendums: a European man (as usual) a man from my own background for a change. Maybe this time an Irish-Catholic who speaks English! (I’ve always avoided them like the plague, but it’s time to come home to my roots.) It’s just too hard to not have a language in common. Been there, done that.

This time I want a deep friendship well established before we become lovers. This time I want to do it right. No more mistakes. No jumping into bed (slut that I am!) before we really know each other, for when sex begins, a part of me shuts down, I want this man to be my twin flame on all levels. I am ready for marriage, a life partnership, and I desire the resolution and fortitude— whatever it takes to make the vows “ ’til death do us part” both joyous and holy. I’ve done the suffering. I am ready for joy and willing to let it into my life. I’d like a child as well, but the man is central to my being. Whoever he is.

Carmel, full moon in Gemini

Dream Journal, Neil O'Neill

10/95 An unknown man comforts me, he comes back again and again in my dreams. I don’t know who he is. A short, stocky, older man with thick white hair, distinctive dark eyebrows, he keeps coming back in my dreams. Who is he? What does he want?

2/27/96 I’m in a long run-down building in a room with that same man I keep seeing in my dreams. He is someone I love—I'm seeing him agaon after a long absence. Who is he? The many rooms include classrooms, workspaces. At one point, we’re teaching teenagers theatre games—it’s out of control. The biggest issue? Establishing authority. In another room I fall asleep. He often comes in and watches me sleep. He loves me but we seem to have trouble connecting, or even being in the same room. Something keeps separating us. Many cream-white rooms. Breakfast together again, buttering the toast. Who is he?

6/13 Recap: I met three men in a dream: I haven’t yet met them in real life, don’t know who they are, but they are very important, for I dream of many adventures with them all night long. (They turned out to be Chilean poet Waldo Rojas, Neil O’Neill, and Paul Evans—all of Irish ancestry). In one dream, I was making love to Waldo, then to Neil (but not to Paul), understanding that I’d soon meet them all in the real world, for it wasn’t just a dream. It was the future.

6/21/96 Summer Solstice: After making love to Waldo in Rotterdam, I dreamed of the unknown man making love to me again—confusing me, for he looked a little like Waldo (body type) but he wasn’t him. Who was he? And why did he come to me again and again? There were a couple of Scotsmen I’d met (poet Adrian Mitchell & photographer Dave Hansen) with white hair and faces similar to his, but they weren’t him—wrong body type, personality, aura, though the accent was right. I kept wondering where (and who) on earth he was. I had to be content to wait.

I saw Paul Evans that first night in Rotterdam (June 14), through a glass wall, he was reading—just like in the dream, but it was weeks later that I met him at the Winston Cafe in Amsterdam. We clicked (instant recognition of the other), and hung out together. On 6/21 I didn’t yet know the other man was Paul. I waited for the signal. It came in July as I was housesitting in a flat I’d never been in before, Paul came to dinner, stood in the doorway, afternoon sun, talking of his sisters and mother—I knew what he was going to do and say next, having dreamt this meeting and flat before.

(I wrote: I find my voice, small phrases tucked beneath your tongue and as the solstice approaches, the urgency of our Celtic blood desires conjugation. The origin of language embedded in the languid vocabulary of thighs… Celtic law requires lovers to sleep together three times before marriage…the dream lover and I must be man and wife by now…). I didn’t yet know who Neil was, but he kept coming back to haunt me. I was getting used to meeting him in my dreams. I kept thinking how highly unlikely it would be, for I wasn’t attracted to his body type. Besides, at this point, he was a figment of my imagination… (He was first identifiable in October of 95—there may be earlier entries, I’m too fatigued to trace them.)

9/16 Full moon. Dreams of that man again (I’m at Walker Creek—near the site of the accident.)

9/28 Wild dreams of driving along roads so narrow they resemble dykes or bicycle paths. I’m in the back seat with a man I don’t know. (A man and woman in front. They switch places. She drives.) The car slips off the road at a right angle, and down a grassy knoll. It is as if the car had turned itself around. I crawl out, feel the cut grass with my hands. We’re in a maze, hard to see the way out. No one’s in charge, certainly not the driver. The countryside is pleasant. We’re caught in a maze, can’t see, we need help but we’re in a strange country, far from home.)

10/3-4 More dreams of that unknown lover. He’s at my house in Forestville, then we’re going through Forest Knolls. I’m pointing out the sights, showing him my childhood.. Who is he? This constant dream companion. What does he want?

11/1 I awoke from a dream singing a song of the dead for the dead. I told my unknown friend and he began to sing Imagine for Lennon. We were in a crowded room, a party. I joined in but it was too high. People stopped to listen, not knowing the reason why we sang that song, or for whom.

11/20 Reoccurring dreams of moving into, and fixing up someone’s house. White rooms. Whose? I’m alone most of the time, but I feel his presence.

Note bene—What's weird about these dream journal entries is that I didn't even meet Neil until Thanksgiving.

IN THE MIRROR

In the mirror, fish weave
in and out of light,
The gut-wrenching cry
of the war goddess,
the ancestor of kelp. A forest of death.
The Morrigan with the head of a crow
had a taste for men's eyes,
and my eyes become round stones
clacking on the shoreline.

What I remember
is my mother's hatred of her name.
I remember what she said,
the birthing pangs,
a generational inheritance,
this blood.
A cursory glance in the mirror,
my first gathering of words
on the lips: mama ma ma.

To see in the edge of the beveled mirror,
a nose or an eye strayed from symmetry,
or the long tang and surcease of the sea,
or renegade Picassos, mouths and breasts
migrating against ordinary reality.
The slow breathing of the long distance runner
asleep in the dream hills.
That's what poetry is.

Melish, the honeyed sweetness
of an ancestral language on the tongue.

As I drive down the road, I parse my face.
On the tip of the tongue
to see what mask it wears
all that remembrance
of blue verging on violet.
Why do I write? Because the mirrors
are infinitely larger than the fields.

Forgiveness, the color of mourning.
I need to see the mirror inside the mirror.
The accusing candle fingers of buckeyes
not just to touch its icy surface
but to taste the odor of other words,
and other worlds.
Flowers pointing up the dry creekbed
ask not what poetry can do for you,
they are lighting the solstice with their hue...

November 1996
National Poetry Week
North Beach Pasta Pomodoro

Watching the Eclipse with a Black Sparrow, 9/26/1996 (journal entry)

John Martin & Najet at a reading I produced for Black Sparrow, Borders Books, Santa Rosa

I went to see my old friend, Lee Perron at Litton Station Road in Healdsburg to watch the lunar eclipse. Black Sparrow publisher John Martin and his new wife from Morocco came late, halfway through the eclipse. Najet looked as if she had stepped out of the painting, The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau. Only this time, the lion slept at her feet. Najet’s English had improved dramatical ly since the last time I saw her, and we can converse, as I speak no French or Arabic.

As we sat watching the earth's shadow slide across the moon's surface, I told my friends about my experiences at Poetry International, and I asked Najet if she knew Egyptian activist poet, Zein El’Abidin Fouad on a fluke, and she exclaimed, yes! I told her about a poem he had read in Arabic that gave me goosebumps, and the one word I recognized over and over again, that sounded something like sh-hilim. Dream.

I was stunned when she began to recite his poem from memory, apparently in the Arabic world, it’s a very famous poem. I could pick out the Arabic word for dream again and again. Her voice, as she incanted the poem, raised the hairs on my arms, and we were transfixed under the moonlight, mesmerized by the Arabic cadences.

She said the word was chulm, it was also a word for woman, and that women very much like this poet—for it was a poem for women. Not men. She said Zein was famously known as a woman’s poet, and champion for human rights. Especially for the disenfranchised who had no voice. Zein, whose epithet was “the singing bomb,” created a street play of poems with the untouchable women who gleaned Cairo’s garbage. For that, he had to flee for his life. In Egypt he has a price on his head. Yasir Arafat saved his life.

She talked about how in Morocco during the full moonlit nights, or during eclipses, how everyone gathered outside to have dinner and watch the celestial show. Like tonight. I was in the presence of an ancient, ageless memory, a time capsule of culture. Najet was John’s sleek black sparrow dreaming in the moonlight, dreaming of Morocco.

I was transported to North Africa, seeing the moonlight on the dunes, and I could almost smell the strange smoky odor of burning cattle dung, crushed mint, and the cry of the villagers, the drone of village dogs, a distant memory in the kingdom of imagination. That curious sensation of recognition and déjà vu.

And earlier, as John and I leaned on his car to steady the binoculars, I recalled that I had a dream fragment, staring at an orange moon like this, and there were others gathered in the moonlight, they were speaking in language, I did not understand. I couldn't see them very well. In that moment, I realized it was John and his lovely new wife in the dream.

Perhaps it was John and Lee in the dream as well. We seem to have a strange and wonderful connection. Call it kismet. I don't even know how long ago the dream was, or where it was set, or even who was in it. Did I write it down? I usually wrote down my dreams. What I do remember was the moonlight glowing orange, and our game of moon tag. And the stories.

Then I begin to wonder if the reason why I was so profoundly affected by Zein’s poem was because I'd already met them in the secret story in a dream, such as this night. And then, when the poem unfolded for the third time, I was merely returning to the mortal plane of reality, for I had already experienced it within the dreamscape.

When Zein had read that poem, I was riveted to my seat, listening with every pore of my body to the Arabic. I was transfixed. Time, telescoping, backwards and forwards at a furious rate, leaving me breathless. 

I would never have told Najet about the story or the dream, but out of the blue, she had asked if I'd heard him read the poem in Arabic. So she's part of the dream landscape, too. I watched her transformed under the moonlight as she recited the poem. I was bearing witness to something both holy and profound.

Perhaps John was also seeing a new side of her too, it was like a surprise gift. He’d begun to think he knew her and then she surprised him with this poem beneath the full eclipse moon. In that male-dominated world of putting people in their place, the bonds between women are forged in something ancient and tribal, we had an intimacy and rapport that men seek, but can never find. For a moment they were jealous.

Was it because she and I had sat huddled together in lawn chairs beneath my down sleeping bag? I felt it again when she hugged me goodbye, the aha factor, the deep connection of the woman’s world of the harem, perhaps. Not sexual, but deeply connected. Of course, I am curious about her. It's not often one gets to meet a Moroccan woman on such familial, or intimate circumstances. 

But that night, under the blood-red moon, we were sisters. She didn’t know that Lee and I were once a couple, but Lee and John are best friends, and I am included in this extended family by proximity. I wonder if John knows about our past. Men do talk. I am sure he does.

John’s smoker’s cough is much worse now, I am worried about him, his heart is not good, and his voice, his lovely voice, is hoarse. He says his eyesight is also bad, but  he tells me, that for $60 you can go to UC Med Center and be tested for 50 different ailments. 

He and I joke about the moment when we knew our eyes were failing us. Unable to read a map at night, unable to help ourselves if we were lost in the streets of Amsterdam. We giggle. Lee is somewhere else in his own world. And we laugh some more, saying we couldn't even read our own star maps in order to to help ourselves.

Maybe the landscape of the dream unravels, unavailable to us during our conscious moments, and we let go of the other feeling of defeat and helplessness. Rights of passage. I gaze upon a middle-age man at 43 going on 44, a man who once meant the world to me, and now I am too clearly moving towards middle-age, and my eyes are lazy dogs.

John told us us the moon looks like a side profile of a sheik. I shrieked, look there's John Martin in the moon! and we all laughed. He told us a convoluted story about being stuck in Rotterdam between trips when he was working on freighter ships, I assumed this was during his vagabond days, staying in some funky hotel or fleabag flat that hadn't yet been bombed in World War II. 

He said there was an alley that had a library of sorts. John said that he found a copy of the Mein Kampf with a Berkeley public library card stuck inside, dated 1932, that was 25 years overdue he brought it back to the Bay Area, and returned it to the Berkeley Public Library with a note. Wow.

Rotterdam was, of course, destroyed by the Nazis, and very little old architecture still exists. The fact that the book survived so long is amazing. Even more amazing, the book was from Berkeley, there's a communist republic of memory simultaneously developing the bomb and giving birth to red diaper babies.

What American communist sympathizer was visiting Rotterdam in 1932? Most likely a man. And why, for Rotterdam was merely a huge industrial port, with no artistic aspirations, not like Amsterdam. No Chet Baker falling over and over again from that second store window in the Hotel Prins Hendrix in the Red Light District.

Letters to Frances Galloway

Frances Galloway/JLvan Schaik Publishers, S. Africa 9/25/96

Frances, I've an essay on Breyten Breytenbach & tr. (indepth w/ pix.) focus on ethics/general tr. issues & process. I just returned from A'dam—I still need to add quotes/examples on tr., or should I fax final draft ASAP? I think you'll like it.

Maureen Hurley

Frances, Did you ever receive my essay? I just got a card from Martin Mooij who received it. Said he was on his way to S. Africa. Ask him if he has any comments on my essay, or if it's ok.

I received replies from Miroslav Holub & Gert van Istendael—who offered two minor corrections: 

1. Fr Embassy in Belgium sponsored project. 

2. Breyten isn't a man w/o a country, but a French citizen. 

You may want to clarify. 

Maureen Hurley 2/5/97

Seven Sisters

Flies pester the duckweed while the river converses with both shores at the same time. An ex-lover on the opposite bank, and the creek divides our past. A narrow tongue reaches to the bay where, as a child, I thought surely the gods must inhabit this place.

His eyes pester me like the river flies and midges and gadflies. A lizard does late-summer push-ups on a tree stump. Spring is over, lizard. No time to mate. But hope springs eternal.

First day of fall, the water holds the promise of the seasons. When John Oliver Simon vacates the opposite beach, I climb down to a rock in the river, bubbles and duckweed strike the submerged rock like migrating islands.

There was a time when I caught fish barehanded in these same tributaries. In the backwaters and eddies, bent light and dark oscillations fragment the surface. Stone pool and moss, miniature vortices, like lost conversations.

Below the rock, the crawdads wait for the dead. Water skeeters jet against the current, streaming bubbles of air. Migratory birds pester the alders for hidden seeds. Midges circle the palpable air, loose spiderwebs luff and stray.

Last night, we sat up late discussing the names of plants. The ridge, Wildcat Ridge, a watershed between my past, my childhood, and my present state. Cattails like young trees, guard the umbrella plants. I tell Arthur Dawson, they are related to papyrus. As we write.

Our eyes connect to where I come from and where I live. Scorpio and Sagittarius wheeling and rising in the sky. I relearn the names of stars under a full moon readying for the eclipse, September 26, the last eclipse of the century. Fin de sicle, how do we know where we're going with our art? Did the Impressionists and postimpressionist have foreknowledge?

Later, seven women will swim nude in the reservoir above the creek. And we will admire each other's bodies in the sunlight, breasts floating like lily pads, nipples beckoning. Someone says I want to suck them all. And this water within us is also part of the cycle. Who is peeing in the pond?

We are the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, who don't want to rush back to the daily grind, not yet. Ruth Gendler dries off. She is meeting a friend for Yom Kippur, but the water draws her back again in one last time. A baptism of sorts.

AN UNREASONABLE CONVERSATION IN TWO VOICES

Voice 1: Sometimes the sky reminds me
of the buckeye's leaf molt in summer,
when the sun burns like friendly fire.

It doesn't matter if logic
is a theory of structure,
or the color of a successful bombing.

No I won't, I mean I can't. It's too late.
It's not going to be all right
if Republican cross-dressers
take both sides of the argument.

Right brain, wrong brain,
like Army intelligence.
It's going to be all right, or all wrong,
depending upon which gutter.

Voice 2: It doesn't matter
if friendly fire burns
the leaves off trees,
or if our own smart bombs
can't tell whose side is whose.

Look all you gotta do is read a little song.
Say a little poem, speak a few reasonable words.
And all will be forgiven. Didacticism aside.

Relax, who's taking the right
angle approach?  Right angel?
Just tell the right brain to shut up,
turn it off. Turn it off, I say.
This isn't going to hurt at all, trust me.

Arm my intelligence?
I have seen the sky at sunset
seeking the sun as if all that fire
was a song for the eye's mind.
Right or left, it's you approach it.
Maybe reproach it.
Did the bomber feel remorse?
Now, there's an odd idea
of successful bombing.

Why take both sides of the argument?
It's too late for Kuwait.
If I was a duodong, the sea's betrayal of sky,
burning. Which side are you on?

Name rank and serial number
says God, who side are you on anyway?
Carpet bombing in Iraq.
We keep coming back to a gulf of words.

Voice 1: What's left at the end
will survive us.
That's the structural approach.
To broach the subject with reproach.
Take two step poems
and call me in the morning.

Why say it's going to be all right?
It's never too late to send the dumb bombs
to training camp so they'll know
which side they're on.

Don't you know. Might is right
with God on our side.
Tulip patterns in the Koran
a whirlpool of fire flowers
blossoming in the Gulf.

9/21 or 22/1996

EMPIRE OF LIGHT

I am the empire of light,
the blue square on the mosaic wall,
looking for the shadow behind the door.
I am the sound of a book opening,
the silken rustle of the casket,
the open window, the spiraling leaf,
the shine on your car hood,
the dust on your window blind,
the voice of the nameless cow on the hill,
the invisible footprints in the stream,
the lemon flavored sunlight on winter grass,
the high note of the soprano sax,
the painter inside the tube of paint,
the canvas inside the painter.

21 Sept 1996

River of words watersheds

Riding through the watersheds, be quiet, let the river come to you. Use nature and preserve it as a resource. The culture we live in affects the poetry of rivers. East west. Field guides become textbooks. Forgotten languages. Discover your life place at the river's edge. River patterns in the Bay Area, 16 rivers speaking in tongues through the mouth to the bay, it is an unparalleled language. Water thieves: Peripheral Canal, Owens Lake, the Cadillac desert, Mono Lake. Water wars and designer water. What about the underground rivers and the archaic aquifers? Who will speak for them?

REDTAIL HAWK, & SAND (2 poems)

REDTAIL HAWK

I am the redtail hawk of imagination
From the blood of my prey
I learned the persistence of red at sunset.
The sun taught me the importance of thermal updrafts.
My wings learned to trust the density of air.
My eyes gained the inside of distances
Desire learned to move like the sea
Inside inside the stormy halo of my cry. 

21 Sept 1996 

Walker Creek

SAND

I am the despair of sand
always searching for a lost home.
The wind drives me to a frenzy
It drives me from the crest of mountains
to the depths of the sea. 

Once I counted the breath of stars 

from the top of Everest to the Dead Sea. 

Then I found myself falling 

from subterranean cliffs 

to the dark crevasses of the earth.
I have measured time in faithful increments 

for those who needed that kind of solace.
I have scoured the faces of mountains 

until they forgot how to be jagged 

until they forgot how to cut the air

until they forgot how to stand tall as the sky. 

21 Sept 1996 

Walker Creek

LIVING IN A FOREIGN TONGUE

Half the American public cannot read.

I am functionally illiterate in an alien culture. 

I buy food by pictures & make educated guesses. 

I memorize foreign words by sight 

and guess at the deeper meaning

by repetition and predictable sight reading,

sometimes to hilarious or tragic results.

Recombinant writing ideas

Recombinant writing ideas

Combine writing elements making connections with disparate objects to shake us out of our established writing patterns. We're forced to create connections between things. Tobey Kaplan has us create odd lists by reading several poems.

The secret trying to grasp
with everyone witness
larger blue lettering
it involves a historical surface, a patina.
Musées de Orsay
the opera of silence
generations
a sliver of self
something they should have done
deer with antlers of fire
digestion
minimal
Baroque light seed
Lucid Astronaut
Pangea

The electric sanctuary,
unfurling currents of whistles,
the elegant launch.
Something like gardens,
along with lemon trees, gardenias,
pigeon blood rubies,
skillful detectives radiating out
on plateglass windows.
Mercury vapor, buy and sell
light dressed in crêpe de Chine
reflecting prerogatives of violet,
metallic pearls, crocodile lame,
new perfumed bills in his wallet.

The road rises, we climb and roar like voyages
a precipice moon rising.
How does God authorize this sun
precipitating, as far as we know,
simplicity taught us how to be free.
Dogs, horses, birds simple tales,
they are not afraid of talking,
they always know how to give their own smiles.
They may hate music, there are three of them.
Sovereign elegance, social rules,
black hummingbirds covered with flowers & moss,
the last swarm finding a balance
among the simplicity of life
while holding a riding crop.

not afraid of talking

With everyone unfurling current currents of light,
something like gardens arises in brothel doorways.
Skillful detectives in front of plateglass windows
witness the surface pattern of light
dressed in crêpe de Chine, and metallic pearls.
The perfume of newly minted bills.
There are crocodiles among the lemon trees
and gardenias, something like gardens.

The road rises as if trying to grasp
the precipice of the moon rising,
an offer of silence in Terra Lingua.
It involves a sovereign elegance.
We climb and roar like star voyagers
trying to grasp the social rules of space,
finding no balance among the generations
of blood pigeons, deer with antlers of fire
witness the digestion of stars.
Black hummingbirds covered with flowers,
they're not afraid of talking.

The electric sanctuary enters the past or the future,
but not both at once.
While a sliver of self is trying to grasp the secret
something they should have done a long time ago.
Historical silence follows covered with moss.
How does God authorize the Sun?
It's all done with smoke and mirrors.
Welcome home astronaut, welcome home.

Journal fragments, Amsterdam, Brugge, Laon

Journal fragment: 19 Sept., 1996 (midnight insomnia)

Home, I am—and after a week of sunshine, I need dark glasses—unused as I am to so much concentrated light. The weather’s turning cold. Fingernail moon (and a total eclipse on the 26th—the last one of the millennium.)

Still suffering from acute jetlag & tunnel vision, disorientation by late afternoon is typical (6 PM is really 3 AM—and I wonder why I have no appetite for dinner!).

Driving is excruciating (asleep at the wheel is a reality). My cousin Dave’s having the same symptoms. We may have jumped into this culture/time zone but the bio-rhythms aren’t yet shifting. He said “I have to keep moving around, flapping my arms, just to keep awake at work.” I laughed at the idea of Dave flapping his wings in an airplane hangar with all those dismantled 747 planes.

At a lively Brazilian party in San Francisco, I made the mistake of sitting alone on the couch for a few minutes. My eyes may have been open, but that’s all. I couldn’t even speak, let alone understand the Brazilians’ Spanish (who speak with a Portuguese accent).

I drove Herman Berlandt & Verona home to Novato in Marin County, north of San Francisco, literally cross-eyed, thinking “I’ll never make it home” (an hour and a half’s drive) so I slept on their couch.

They say it takes a minimum of 1 day of suffering for each time zone. I remember how it took me weeks to recover from Russia. How long will I suffer this time? Someone said that in a Concorde jet, you travel so fast, you hypothetically arrive before you leave—earlier, that is, in New York than when one leaves Paris! Where’s Einstein when you need him?

In August, my cousin Dave Dinsmore came over to Amsterdam to visit me—he works for United Airlines—Dave, Charles McGeehan and his girlfriend Bertaijn and I went to France for a few days—

We took the coast route from Rotterdam to Zeeland islands—dunes marsh and grey sea—and the ferry at Vlissingen to Belgium. I saw the windmill and had that curious sensation of collapsed time, remembering our mad walk to the train station, wanting to visit Wim Hofman but we had so little time, having stopped overlong in Middleburg.

Dave was so amazed, we wound up staying overlong, and had to hurry to Brugge—which was even more amazing—we were so exhausted, we spent the night (in an inn) beneath the tower on the main square.

We got caught in horrible traffic in Lille—no road signs on the freeways, so we circled and circled the countryside for hours trying to avoid the toll roads and navigate our way east by following topographic clues and a certain slant of sunlight until dusk overtook us;

Lille, a real hellhole. Dunkirk ever to the west. The Battle of the Bulge was fought somewhere near here. You can still feel the ghostly reminder the blood-soaked fields at sunset when the light is right and the fog rises up like apparitions.

We wound up several times in a village where Reblais was born, Proust too. Closet hysteric Charles McGeehan forgot his passport (and his epilepsy pills) so we didn’t want to get caught up in a immigration control lines.

Dave and I, having no French money, didn’t want to take the toll roads. Asking a Frenchman directions in a village square was a farce worthy of a Monty Python comedy sketch. Only Bertaijn spoke French.

A 6-hour trip from Amsterdam to Laon took us nearly three days. Kafavy said the journey, not the destination, matters. On the way back, we stopped off in Antwerp; sat in the afternoon sun in front of that glorious Gothic cathedral quaffing strong Belgian beer. We earned the sight of spires piercing the blueness of sky.

Odd, Laon’s hill fortress Gothic cathedral has no spires, just stumps.

I was able to spend some time at a friend’s dilapidated country house in France, in a tiny hamlet of Rogny on the Abbey Road (founded by Irish monks in the Dark Ages) between Marle & Laon, in Picardy, Ainse.

Charles (Bert Schierbeek’s translator) McGeehan’s exwife/girlfriend, Bertaijn’s farmhouse needs so much work, I’d love to stay there next summer in exchange for working on it—it reminds me of my grandmother’s house where I grew up in Forest Knolls.

A certain angle of light, red roses splayed against a wall, farm machinery from another era strewn in every nook and cranny. Triggerpoints of memory.

Charles is an interesting character, a GI stationed in Germany in the late ’60s, on furlough, who never left Holland; he’d met a Dutch girl on a train: Bertaijn. Now he’s 60 years old, an expatriate, neither wholly Dutch nor American.

Bertaijn was Bert Schierbeek’s sister-in-law; we met at Bert’s funeral my first day in Holland in June. We were 500 strong, the coffin, a barge dressed in flowers and sheaves of poetry—including our own Mother Earth Journal. Bert used to spend time at Bertaijn’s farmhouse. My cousin Dave & I felt his presence there. . .


1 Dec. Sun. I’ve been reading up on my ancestors, the Celts—I discovered that Laon (where I was in France) was an Irish monastery until ca. 1500 to 1700 AD.

My favorite mystery scholar whom I know little about, a founder of many of the continental universities, was Johannes Scottus Eriugena (or John, the Irishman b. 810).

He taught 25 years at Laon and at the Paris Court School for Charles the Bald (when he wasn’t being accused of heresy—which was often—for his radical doctrine preached the concept of free will. Note: this was long before Luther was a gleam in his great-grandparents’ eyes).

Here’s a little story about Eriugena: An emperor (Charles the Bald?) made a playful pun on two similar sounding words in Latin: sottum and scottum, and asked John what’s the difference between a fool and a Scot (Irishman) to which John replied, “Only the table.” (In Latin, of course: Quid distat inter sottum et scottum?). The king must’ve been seated across from the Irishman. I bet he was flabbergasted by the answer—talk about turned tables!

But then it is said in our myths, satire was the first art form invented in Ireland. I found this gem in my friend Vinz’s flat: Adversus stultitiam pugnare nil est laboriusius nulla enim auctonate vinci fatetur nulla ratione suddetor. Which goes something like: nothing is more laborious than to fight against stupidity for it won’t bend to any authority and it won’t be convinced by any reason. He must have had some very challenging students at Laon University!

I’m in the process of applying for an Irish passport (my grandparents left before Ireland became a republic, so I’m the last generation allowed to apply for a passport.) My uncle John was in Dublin this summer and got his inside of two weeks.

The passport allows us to work in the European Community, an important consideration. I guess I’m tired of having to always struggle to find work each year, with no future, retirement, or security—nothing at all, for this is the life of an “independent contractor,” outside the system, so to speak.

This is life in America for the struggling artist. Brains and talent account for little in the land where the greenback dollar is God. I think I’d like to work at one of the American schools in Europe—Poetry, English & Art. I want a life where I can spend time in Europe, as I am always unhappy to return to the states, where I need to earn money.

My 2nd night home, I was invited to a Sebastopol Arts Council meeting for the promotion of poetry in west Sonoma County, and I felt so jaded. “Been there, done that. Got the shirt. . .” Guess I should be glad poetry is so “in” but it just makes me bad-tempered and ornery—especially when they dream big, and haven’t a clue as to what goes on in putting on reading series and workshops, wanting more volunteer labor to make it happen. . .and I’ve got that shirt too—in several sizes. (And it’s got bloody holes in it by now!).

It feels a bit like a mausoleum here, in this poetry mecca of the world (and in my cabin too). I know I’ll grow used to it soon enough. I saw a bizarre English movie, The Draughtsman’s Contract, by Peter Greenaway, the director of The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. At the end there were all these Dutch references—someone speaking Dutch which I could almost understand. It had the peculiar effect of making me homesick for the wrong country.

They say you always leave a part of yourself behind when you travel. Does that mean there’s less of me returning home each time I go away? (Hemingway said: Travel broadens the mind. Writing broadens the ass. I write standing up.)

Before I left Amsterdam, I got into a bicycle accident. As I was returning home to Oetgenstraat from Westerpark, some idiot took a curved wrought-iron flower trellis (the arch that goes over a gate) out of the back of his double-parked car on Prinsengracht (near Utrechtstraat), and swung it in front of me, cutting my right hand.

I tried to protect my face but smashed into a parked car, bruising my left wrist when I hit the back windshield. It was either smash into a parked car or fly into the canal—which to choose? The bike’s brakes were no good on wet cobblestone & brick.

I’ve been ignoring my wrist for the past 2 months—until it hurt so badly (I was smashing a clove of garlic with the flat of a knife; the little bones in my wrist made a crunching sound like potato crisps!).

I went to the doctor who put it into a splint to rest it—a bad sprain with injury to the ulnar nerve. I’m a slow typist wearing a wrist brace which looks (& is beginning to smell) like an old gym shoe, and as winter’s chill creeps in, my bones ache; injuries don’t heal quite as fast as they used to.

COLLAGE POEM

Make no bones about it,

said the dice player, as he

slammed down another cup. 

Blood is thicker than water. 

The last straw that breaks the camel's back 

is a big needle in a small haystack.

Too many irons in the fire? 

Well then, skip the ironing. 

I'll trust him no farther than I can fling him,

she said. 

An omlette run afowl, is a lot of broken eggs.

Keep your eyes on the stars,

and your feet on the ground, 

said Teddy Roosevelt. 

The moon comes up 15 minutes later 

than it did the day before, you can count on it. 

Only 4% of a light bulb's energy is light, 

all the rest is heat. 

Politicians shed no light whatsoever.

It's all hot air.

A Russian saying: he's looking for the horse 

he is riding, means he is absent-minded.

No computer can translate idioms. 

In Swedish: Who stole the cash box?

means how are you? Program that one in. 

There is no word for problem in Quechua. 

Dust devils are called mothers-in-law by the Navajos. 

To take a walk in the Malay, is to eat the wind. 

He went to see a man about a dog.

The Germans are called German 

because their ancient forefathers 

hollered and screamed in battle,

so the Gauls called them Germani 

from a Celtic word, meaning to shout. 

Julius Caesar was credited with Juvernia 

which became Hibernia, which is Ireland.

A 9th-century Irish saying:

love is a drowning in floodwaters. 

Terra Nullis: No man's land.

The Arabs said, One is the first number 

in a series of endless numbers. 

Rosebush, in the Warm Springs Pomo language

translates as the mean old lady who sticks you. 

Tell that to William Randolph Hearst. 

Rosebud. Citizen rose Kane with thorns.

A gray whale weighs a ton at birth. 

A blue whale's tongue weighs as much as an elephant.

Its heart, the size of a car, the aorta is big enough
for a child to crawl through.
The octopus hunts only at night. 

The blue of icebergs is not a reflection 

of water or sky but of old compressed ice 

where all air has been squeezed out.

One tear met another tear floating down the river. 

Said the first tear, I am the tear of the woman 

who lost her love. The other tear replied,

And I am the tear of the woman who got him.

An old Chinese saying proves 

that some things never change.

I have written only one masterpiece, 

said Ravel, it is called Bolero. 

Unfortunately it contains no music. 

Spider silk is so light that an ounce 

would stretch a thin strand 2000 miles. 

There are those who weave garments 

from the webs of spiders, that glisten like gold.

Scientist queried: why do snakes have forked tongues? 

An Italian naturalist said the forked tongues 

were used for picking the dirt out of their noses.  

The better to tell lies about the Garden of Eden.

Aristotle thought it gave snakes savory pleasure,

their gustatory sensation doubled. A good thing 

he didn't know about the opossums' double penis.

They say pleasure is plural and pain is singular. 

Nothing is more laborious 

than to fight against stupidity 

for it won't be any connected to reason. 

When we ask for advice 

we are looking for an accomplice. 

Paul Gauguin said, life, being what it is, 

one dreams of revenge. 

To compat the dust storms of the Gobi Desert 

the Chinese planted 300 million elm trees 

parallel to the Great Wall of China.

It is said that those who can't read,

sing the songs in the streets of South America

about the characters in A Hundred Years of Solitude.

You have to begin to lose your memory, 

if only in bits and pieces, if only 

to realize that memory is what makes our lives,

said Luis Buñuel.

Storm petrels trotting across the water 

were named after St. Peter, the Apostle 

who walked on water. Peter means rock.

Hummingbirds can fly upside down. 

What god were they named after?

Huitzilopochtli the god of war.
Warriors slain in battle
returned as hummingbirds.
Stone sink to the depths of the river.

rearranged & revised 11/17