SMALL VIEW, iii

SMALL VIEW, iii                                                                        

         —after Wislawa Szymborska                                            

1. Not content with things themselves,

we named small desires, translated them into stone.

The smithy’s forge transformed nameless dirt into iron,

stayed countless armies of sand into glass palaces.

At Zaandfort, we admired the slow hunger of glaciers

and the ceaseless appetite of the Rhine, carrying a payload

of what once was the secret heart of mountains.        

Midsummer: we stood on a dune above the North Sea,

talking of Caesar and philosophy, naming the intangible

sandwiched between schools of thought. Cogito ergo sum.

Things cannot stand for what they are,

without moniker or name as if we brought them into being

with our mad desire for definition. To think is to name.

At Descartes' huis we measured the ratio of shadow

to light and found it wanting within our own darkness.

Throwing stones at the shattered ego, an afterthought.

2. As Blake would say: to seek eternity in a grain of sand.

But then, he saw God in an apple tree when he was four

   and newly come to the naming of things.

How did he know God if there was not yet a name for it?

Was it verb or noun?

                           This naming: And God said...

sheds no more light than the man in the moon.

Yet we persist, we insist on this naming,

yet overlook the way warbled glass in the old house

imperfectly admits sunlight into a room.

Should we turn the windows upside down every 50 years?

Stand the rubric of time on its ear in order to see clearly?

3. We could name an aspect of time, call it slumped glass,

explain it with the poetics of physics: slow fluid

seeking gravity’s lips, admire rippled light cast onto skin,

a genesis of follicles and dappled shadows on the floorboards,

or imagine an ancestral memory of sea and sand and wind.

Appellation, cognomen, epithet.

We hammer and tong Latinate structure

into verb or into noun as it suits:

we designate it nom de guerre, nom de plume,

we call it pseudonym, or maybe nothing at all.

4/03; rev. 9/03 for Zimmerzine

DRAGOMAN

DRAGOMAN

what is faith writing me. spell it. fate. change it. furies. spare change for what future? what guide? what targumanu (from the Akkadian). I am remodeling my vocabularium to fit the need. what dreams are. Miranda’s island of cannibals. what brave new... we are busily writing into verb. into clay. what is writing me? writing it? the eye of fate? or the hand?

but the cat howling on the doorstep has faith that someone will come. starved for love. at the Richmond refineries: desert oil love. Vito interprets. the cat. only when I have people over. He doesn’t love me. is at war with a cat. what’s cat faith? pet, scratch, lap, fluff the kibble. oh, to sit in a window facing west, late afternoon. foghorn moans. cat tries every door, then all the screens. luck finds an open window. on the screen, he hangs a crucifixion of paw and fur. let you in from the night. let us in.

strange cat at the doorstep
politicking for love
foghorn moans in the distance


yellow hostages on legal paper, hold hostage the words. they can’t come unbidden. I was too busy pulling the energy up from my feet. out the head. a garden of tube worms beneath the Sea of Oman. call it meditation. call it visual blockage at the heart.. but not the head. a blue thread attached to the sky, dragonfly blue, mid-summer, make it Desolation Wilderness. what current man on what horizon? we are defined by. names of the past resurrected from memory. a blur of faces kissing my. but others came. call it faith. no time for coffins. handwriting on the wall.

Lent. who asks what did you give up? what holds the heart hostage? yellow paper & the black night of words leaking in. soldiers dying in what wheat field, what scarlet poppies dropping petals in the wind? in the name of. faith is a hostage, the sun in bondage from the night, from mortar shell. evil eye. all the blue of. and ramadan nights. the same river twice. I didn’t know I loved

yellow ribbons round sweet magnolias. the civil war. frankly...

Herodotus’ perfumed country. myrrh, frankincense. fires burn in front of the sandstorm, scattered they lay...the people lay in heaps ((2000 BC). what is caught between two rivers like a doe in the headlights, stepping over the slender shadows of her legs. like obverse sunbeams. we have crossed the Euphrates, we have crossed the Tigris. what will we have to do in order to bring ourselves home? what about them? what ransom on the skull of the world? I am clinging to the names of rivers, Hiddekal, al-Furat, Shatt al-Arab, Khazer, Diyala, the Zeb al-Khyber. . and the wadis.

Khyber Pass. skip the war bits & it’s a short read. get to the part where they go through the mountain. skip the war on prime time, on every channel, we’re all in bondage. we’re good at guilt. fast forward prisoners of lost trust. we look away from. don’t want to see. fruits of tradition: war and civilization. pause. winged bulls. the call of the muezzin. equinox, sandstorms have taken the sun hostage. firewells turn the sand into green glass. they found oil jugs of the crusaders.

clay tablets. abstract symbols opened the door to history. we learn the names of cities as old as civilization. where are the hanging gardens? a shift of fortune, the Euphrates banks. Solomon’s messenger bird. what about Mecca? 25,000 archaeological sites, less than 10% have been excavated. but the reign of war ended that legacy. Sargon’s bow unleashed the missile age. battalions seek heights, ziggurats. in a moonless city flashes of light the garden. you could hear the debris wheeze in the sky like lawnmower blades. we have taken Baghdad, but no matter how far we advance, we can’t seem to find the heart of the citadel. freedom is untidy. behind the seventh fiscal veil, odor of bitter chordite. professionals looting the treasures of Baghdad. as we learn new words. what dragomen interpret the new century. the looting has begun. yesterday was year zero for Iraq. they have burned the National Library. all the books. what does the handwriting on the wall say now?

4/16/03 

EASTER SUNDAY CAT

EASTER SUNDAY CAT

Faith, what a word. Can you spell that? 
Change the word to fate, or the furies. 
The cat meowing on the doorstep,
Now that's faith. He has faith 
that Vito will eventually come around 
to petting him, then letting him in.
He is starved for attention, 
he meows plaintively through our meditation.
It must drive Vito nuts.
This pen is giving me cramps, 
real writer's block, write faster than you can think. 
I think I'm I am surfing on everybody's meditation, 
I'm getting a free ride. Writing about a cat.
He's clearly not surfing on our vibes.
He's yodeling on the doorstep. 
hH's gregarious. Uncatlike. Like a dog.
Vito says it's only when I have people over. 
He doesn't love me. But what is cat love, faith? 
Faith that someone will pet you, offer you lap,
scratch the places you can't reach, 
then fluff your kibble, and change your water?
In that order?

To be a cat sitting in a western window
 in late afternoon, fur trapping sunlight. 
The cat tries every door again, hoping for entrance. 
He tries the shower window screen, 
his arms outstretched Christlike on the cross.
He yowls, why have you forsaken me?
Sometimes faith is like that. 
It's a matter of resurrection and redemption.
The knowledge that someone will come to the door, 
let you in for the night, Foghorns moan in the distance.
At the doorstep, a cat at the doorstep.
He wants in, he wants in, he wants in.

 4/11/2003
Writers' Group
Richmond, CA

Yellow ribbon Hostages

Yellow ribbon hostages. Stuck, I couldn't think of what to write on the paper. So I wrote the word yellow, but the paper is yellow, legal paper, held hostage the words. 

And the words won't come and didn't. My head is thick, my feet buzzing from meditation. I was too busy pulling the energy up my body, through my chakras, and out my head. Usual blockage at the heart, but I like the buzz out the top of my head. 

I think of a blue ribbon attached to the sky, dragonfly blue. The cat tries the shower window hanging onto the screen like a furry crucifixion. It's Lent. how appropriate. What did you give up? What holds the heart hostage? When disappointment erodes it like a hostage? The sun in bondage. All this yellow paper, the black night of words leaking in. 

The Civil War soldiers dying in what foreign field while loved ones restored their faith, tying yellow ribbons around sweet magnolia trees to bring them home. What soldiers in what wheat fields? 

As we learn the names of the cities, the oldest civilization cradling the past between the rivers. We have crossed the Euphrates. We have crossed the Tigris. What will we have to do in order to bring ourselves home? What ransom have we put on the world? I am clinging to the names of rivers, the Zeb, the little Zeb, the Khyber as in Khyber Pass. 

I loved that book. I skipped all the military strategy in order to get to the part where they go through the secret mountain passage. I skipped all the war parts in War and Peace too, making it a quick read. But this war is on prime time, every channel. 

We are wearing yellow ribbons on the inside. We have taken Baghdad, but no matter how far we advance, we can't seem to find the heart of the city. Prisoners keep track of the days by tacking imaginary yellow ribbons on imaginary trees. What holds the heart hostage?

4/11/2003 

SMALL VIEW, ii

SMALL VIEW, ii                                                          

Midsummer: we stood on a dune above the North Sea,

talking of Caesar and philosophy, naming the intangible

sandwiched between schools of thought. Cogito ergo sum.

At Zaandfort, we admired the slow hunger of glaciers on stone

and the ceaseless appetite of the Rhine, carrying a payload

of what once was the secret heart of mountains.

Not content with things themselves,

we named small desires, translated them into stone.

The smithy’s forge transformed nameless dirt into iron,

stayed countless armies of sand into glass palaces.

Things cannot stand for what they are,

without moniker as if we brought them into being

with our mad desire for definition. To think is to name.

At the house of Descartes we measured the ratio of shadow

to light and found it wanting within our own darkness.

Throwing stones at the shattered ego, an afterthought.

As Blake would say: to seek eternity in a grain of sand...

But then, he saw God in an apple tree when he was four

   and newly come to the naming of things.

How did he know it was God if there was not yet a name for it?

Was it verb or noun?

                           This naming: And God said...

sheds no more light than the man in the moon.

Yet we persist, we insist on this naming,

yet overlook the way warbled glass in the old house

imperfectly admits sunlight into a room.

Should we turn the windows upside down every 50 years?

Stand the rubric of time on its ear in order to see clearly?

We could name it an aspect of time, call it slumped glass,

explain it with the poetics of physics: slow fluid

seeking gravity’s kiss, admire rippled light cast onto skin,

a genesis of follicles and dappled shadows on the floorboards,

or imagine an ancestral memory of sea and sand and wind.

Appellation, cognomen, epithet.

We hammer and tong Latinate structure

into verb or into noun as it suits:

we designate it nom de guerre, nom de plume,

we call it pseudonym, or maybe nothing at all.

4/9/03

POSTCARD FROM IRAQ

4/5 Baghdad: Artillery hissed overhead

slammed into wheatfields,

spewing shrapnel into the air.

You could hear debris wheeze

whirling in the sky like lawnmower blades.

Indiscriminate death and the bitter smell 
of chordite filled the air.

Kurdish fighters stood amid a field of daisies

& poppies glowing scarlet as drops of blood.

The exodus began before dawn. 
Anything to escape the city.

Desperate, unsettled scenes: 
no electricity, no water, no fuel.

After a night spent in darkness,

they were bumper to bumper, many in tears.

In the desert, water is more precious than oil, 
than blood.

4/5/03

Standing stones, from the Celtic colloquium

Standing stones have a great thirst. They were giants once. Once every hundred years they go down to the river to drink, and if you have mistletoe and clover, you can steal their treasure. Stones know things. PStanding stones, from the Celtic colloquiumeople used to cut crosses into the stones to baptize the stones in order to make them Christian. But in Carnac, the people were turned into stone. Girls were turned into stone at midnight. Did you know the stones of Stonehenge were brought from Ireland, or Africa, or a parallel universe. They have medicinal virtues. Fertility. Rub a bare breast against the stone. Bathing at the base of the stones will give you domestic power. But stones can cause disease—like the wasting sickness of Cuchulain. On the stones is where the Otherworldly birds gather. In the Táin, Fergus talks to the stones, and the animals talk to him. The curative stones are associated with the Saints. The harmful stones are associated with the dead. The Giants stones are neutral. Stones know things, ignore them at your peril.

From a lecture by Anton Minard, Brittany, Celtic Colloquium 25 at UC Berkeley 4/3/03

SACRED VALLEY 2003 (GARBLED TEXT)

In Ollantetambo,
the sun reveals its secrets at dawn.
Winter solstice.
Delicate breasts on the rocks.
We crossed ancient bridges
that have stood testament for 600 years.
Pizarro was routed here. Say the names
Ollantetambo, Huaynapicchu, satellite cities
marking the 12 routes to the sacred city.
Temple terraces face due north
towards the temple of the sun.
At the temple of water
science and religion and power
are one thing and speak in rills.
At Ollantetambo there are
water mirrors everywhere
to remind the Southern Cross,
the Chakana, stairway to the threefold world,

to bring back the season.
The four directions were invoked 

at the pachamanca, the earth oven.

At Saxayhuaman, the ballcourt of the panther,
that mirrors the darkness of the Milky Way,
there are potato ovens everywhere.
At the altar of the intihuacana,
potatoes are the center of the world
the inti rey invoked the days
and the seasons to return
to the navel of the world.



2003 April 3

VICTOR JARRA SPEAKS:

VICTOR JARRA SPEAKS:     

I remember how doves circled the stadium walls

counterclockwise against the light.

Endless flight, white against clouds.

No, I was not aware. Yes. The sun at noon.

I remember the sound of dry husks breaking.

The body of a guitar, so like a woman we can never possess.

Walking the fields. The odor of bruised rosemary.

They have broken her. A fist slammed into a side of beef.

Splintered rain. And then, more rain. A pipe against flesh. Dull.

You ask how many angels on a pinhead? Las Trovistas.

Duerme, duerme negrito, Papa va en el campo....

No, I did not dream, ever. The doves, they... The midnight knock.

Me voy en el campo de los sueños. Me voy en el paiz del muerte.

A revolution. The simplest of weapons:

A voice, a guitar, a message makes a martyr.

My voice took flight, sought refuge in the past,

it flew into the future, it escaped these prison walls.

Ordinary things. I remember. Angelito, mi hijo.

The purity of doves settling on bright rivers of blood on stone.

Under torture, the rational mind confesses to circumstantial evidence.

When the Junta took my hands, they... Yes. The light. They flew, they...

Sometimes I could see my own face reflected in cesspools

in chrome, or in the dark secret layer beneath their polished boots.

So I could remember who I once was. Yes, September, 1973. Etched in stone.

Military time. Dancing the cueca. Pinochet and poor Allende.

Interrogation. The way they approached it like a call to prayer.

As if something holy and profound. And then, the cruel smile.

No. The answers weren’t enough. They are never enough.

That kind of silence before the thin scream that escapes the lips...

There are degrees of victimhood. It isn’t hard to humiliate or to be humiliated.

Benediction, yes. Tell me one thing that one man will not do to another.

Children of Pinochet, yes. Those who survived. No, they...

Evita on display like a beautiful wax doll.

But it was a deja vu of death mocking the living.

Repentence? No amount of revenge can satisfy our sad country.

In any regime, the poets are always the first to go.

The words of lambs before the slaughter.

No, I didn’t remember. Mis manos, mis pobres...

Hell is paved like the prison cell. Si. La música, el corazón.

There is so much I don’t remember. The deaad rise.

Can’t remember, my mind broken, like my hands, they...

But still I sang, I sang, my voice escaped El Estadio,

it fled to the sky when they took my hands,

but not my will. And still my voice could be heard

singing throughout the city long after I was gone.

Yes. Si, si. Even death could not take my voice.

Singing Santiago de Chile, mi tierra. Por la libertad.

Yes. I would raise the stumps of these arms to embrace them all.

For my songs are the children of memory.

4/2/03 rev. 5/12

TULIPS

TULIPS

     "In the first days, in the first nights...
     when earth separated from heaven,
     and the name of man was fixed...
     a tree was planted by the banks of the Euphrates...
     Inanna cared for the tree...
     'How long will it be until I have a shining throne.. a shining bed?'
     ...[but] a serpent who could not be charmed
     made his nest in the tree...and Inanna wept."
                  (From the Sumerian, 2000 BC).

In her front yard, a bulb—dormant since the Gulf War—

makes a surprise appearance, burning the retina.

A miracle of red worships the spring grass.

On the day war is declared, a carpet of tulips

blooms in the land between two rivers.

Equinox. We have crossed the Euphrates, Al Furat,

we are crossing the Tigris, the Hiddekil.

We advance upon a country where 1001 fibs nest in the huluppu tree

on the banks of the rivers where writing was born.

As we mortar the world tree in the land of two rivers,

we have lost our wrappings at the gates of the Great Below,

where Ereshkigal awaits Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, to steal her finery,

where fragments of the world's first literature, records of crops and conscripts,

etched on clay shards are buried beneath the dry wadis.

During the Gulf War, countless cuneiform tablets were lost

and now, after 4000 years in desert sands,

the Ur stones of our civilization are irrevocably lost,

casualties of war, as we advance on Baghdad.

What Gilgamesh will build a shining throne, from what tree?

3/26/03 rev

 *            *            *

Note Bene: this poem came from facts on TV: the sky roiling with smoke, burning palaces like an action movie with Bruce Willis, but the TV stations and the bridges over the Tigris are spared—for Iraq's new masters. What we don’t see: a mother breastfeeding her baby who witnessed seven of her family wounded by shrapnel. The peasant woman visiting her daughter who stepped out of the taxi looked down to see her blood tattooed on her limbs and chest. Her 5-year-old had climbed out of the taxi first. Two unnamed boys. More women: Isra who ran into her garden as the blitz began, and Najla who still tries to cover her head with a black scarf but can’t hide the purple wound of her legs. How should they pay for September 11? We photograph and cross-examine them: were they hit by their own shrapnel, or by ours?

More facts: For every 4 Iraqi soldiers wounded, we maim 21 civilians; mostly women and children. This is not reported on CNN. Instead, we learn how modern technology toys with war, about smart bombs that can target a truck beneath a bridge and leave it standing. We watch the Iraqis light oil fires in Baghdad to foil the cruise missiles: smoke screen against computer screen. And what of the taxi man who answers: "All Iraqi people want this war.” How do we reconcile the regime against the civilian poor? How is it better to be liberated & dead, than oppressed but alive? How do we reconcile? We learn that in Arabic, soummoud is “steadfastness,” the same name as the missiles that Iraq destroyed. President Bush says that winning this war is “far from over.” They are looting the museums, the national libraries have gone up in smoke for the sky to read.

In this land between two rivers, greenly visible from satellite images, this fertile crescent where the kings of Sumer fought the Elamites, the Akkads, the Chaldees. In this land of Sargon, the city-states of Ur/Uruk, in Nineveh/Nippur—the soul of Sumer, the land of Hammarabi’s laws, in the home of Abraham and the cradle of three religions: Judiasm, Christianity and Islam, where the Persians, Xenophon and Alexander died, in this land where the Mongol hoards and Suliman the Great, the Ottoman Turks, the British, all built vast empires by sacking Ctesiphon/ Baghdad.


3/26/03 rev

Letters to Diane Feinstein Gulf War

Dear Senator Feinstein,

This is to inform you that as a voting and politically active constituent of yours, I write today as a participant in Win Without War's Virtual March.  I am one of the true majority of Americans concerned that President Bush's rush to war is both dangerous and unfounded.

Our nation needs to support adequate and timely United Nations inspections. Going to war with Iraq will kill thousands of innocent civilians and soldiers, thus creating an atmosphere that breeds more terrorists, and diverts money from social welfare programs that can create and foster a safer and more just society.

We once used religion to justify the brutal crusades of the middle ages, killing thousands middle eastern Christians and Jews in the process of purging the infidel, because we were xenophobic toward anyone who looked different.

Now we embark on using the religion of politics and capitalism in order to justfy what will be historically viewed as genocide in the middle east.

A war with Iraq will only breed more terrorism in that half the population is under 14 years of age. The survivors will only remember our agression, not our justice. I come from a long line of those who remember; the civil war in Ireland continues nearly 1000 years after its inception. Lest we forget. Ourselves alone.

Please do everything within your power to support the inspections process by allowing the UN officials adequate time to do a thorough job and resist our nation's foolhardy rush toward war where no one will emerge a winner.

Maureen Hurley

3/20 letter

I find Bush's pre-emptive strike on Iraq an agressive war crime against humanity, like Napoleon in Spain & Moscow, The British in Ireland, or Caesar at the Rubicon. These unnecessary and unjust wars were the downfall of both emperors, and now, after an 800-year illegal occupation, the British can't get out of N. Ireland--it's become an economic hemmorage.

There is a lesson here: history does repeat itself. Though I do not condone Saddam Hussein, he is an evil leader, I am having trouble accepting that Bush's war tactics as being "just."

My credulity is strained to the limit by Bush's rhetorical palette. Does he take us all to be such fools to believe his skewed version of 'truth?"

And what of the Iraquis who believe in their ancient culture and right to govern their country as they see fit, will they willingly embrace our "so-called democracy" inaction--when we have blatantly disregarded the democratic process in our own country?

Napoleon erred, the Spanish never yielded their culture or religion. What makes Bush think he will have better luck in Iraq, where the median age is 14.

Ironically, Bush is a good teacher, training a nation of young men towards jihad in a manner never even imagined by Hussein. And I fear we will reap the fruits of this unjust war for years to come.


Maureen Hurley

Poetic Manifesto C, II rev

WHAT PASSES FOR POETIC MANIFESTO

When I approach the class assignment, to write a poetic manifesto—whether from a direct or oblique angle—I am bathed in waves of exhaustion: this becomes my default Poetics of Witness Manifesto in times of need. It begins at the highest point of the cheekline and extends downward toward the heart and belly and into the songline. I find myself seeking the fetal curl. I understand the classic definition, yet I am helpless to change it, other than to let it flow through me, the words, informis buried within the form. A grave of sorts with only the spade-tip of my pen by which to excavate.

How then, to make sense of MOAB—not a high desert place of fire-colored sandstone and acrid mesquite in Utah, but an acronym the Mother of All Bombs? A friend sends me an email that the Stocton Street Tunnel will function as a rallying point or shelter. I cannot believe, let alone comprehend, what I am reading this morning.

Earlier, I went back to that childhood playground I wrote about in a poem, at Lagunitas School, where we witnessed the bomb testing nearly 50 years ago. Only then, we were practicing for nuclear preparedness for another enemy.  Not against ourselves.

My cousin and I stroll around the school yard...I remember playing in the sandbox with the Daley twins...They were far from identical and why they always come to mind is a mystery. Perhaps it’s because Adrian—dressed in her favorite red cowboy skirt, gun holster & boots threw sand in my eyes, or shoved me down again for no real reason, other than I was there in line—she has become a symbol of aggression. Adair was the gentle one, always bearing witness. Little did we know that we would both become writers. You may know her pen name, a tag left over from a misplaced husband. I think of another Lara—from Dr. Zhivago. The bully who became a cop would be upset to read this but I can’t close the window of memory. Only disguise the names, but what’s the point? To bear witness is the issue at hand.

I walk past the building where the steer jumped through our 2nd grade classroom window. We all piled in, excited to be center-stage, and there was blood everywhere. Thick ropes of it. I’d never seen so much spilled blood on white tiles. Why a steer would jump through a window in the middle of the night is still a mystery. Unless he was chased. Or it was a rumor. Someone must have broke in to steal our treasures—but all that blood. How could he have survived? I thought of the steer’s heart my best friend’s father, Les Stone presented us with, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. The rosemary and sage my grandmother stuffed it with did little to disguise it—for I knew that animal by name.

A man is mowing the baseball field. I remember when the bases were loaded, the final inning, Lagunitas against Nicasio: Billy Joe hit a home run, sliding into home plate, the green grass stains on his white knees like crayon scribbles, a benediction of the field for Home Team. And the cheerleaders all going crazy: Linda Gregg and her twin, the one that was murdered.  Through them, murder had come to our peaceful little valley. Or was that the Barbano girl? It was a big story in Time magazine, I later learned. Why I remember Linda and not the other twin too is a mystery. They really were identical: like peas in a pod.  Not like Adrian and Adair. Different mirrors.

I stand in front of my old 5th grade room, and peer back into the past where one spring day, like today, our teacher was telling us about the millennium, and I imagined my life on a day, like today. I daydreamed forward in time to 2001, 2002, then 2003, but then I got stuck I couldn’t imagine myself past the age 50. And here we are. Today.

An odd thought came into my head, of terror, a darkness, of destruction. I chalked it up to childhood angst. I had an unusually susceptible imagination, incapable of erasing or suppressing negative images. And these images frightened me more that any scary movies. Thin boundaries. But as I walked this future shadowland, I knew it was significant, not just nightmarish daydreams. A signifier similar to my grandmother’s experiences of the dead who come knocking, and birds flying into the house. Clairvoyance, my mother said. Déjà vu. Precognition. But I was a firm disbeliever—because she was crazy, everything was suspect.

Only there are some things you see so clearly, you don’t want to remember them, or to bear witness, and the veil of sleep erases, or at least suppresses them. And unless you’re a Hamlet, you have no words for them, until they play out in real time...like reruns of Kennnedy shot over and over. And you are watching shadows flit across the retina. Mirror of time. The only way out is through...

On International Women’s Day, we gather at a friend’s place, once the old Forest Knolls Post Office—an impromptu gathering of women & babies and a few boyfriends from Mexico or Germany. We talk of war, of the upcoming peace march, the women writers arrested at the White House for loitering: I have friends and acquaintances among them: Alice Walker, Susan Griffin, Maxine Hong Kingston, women warriors, all. We are all on Code Pink Alert.

And as I serve the salmon, a shiver runs across the soul like that movement of mice almost seen at the corner of the eye, an acute feeling that I’d been here before, done that. Got the tee-shirt sort of thing. A woman is talking about an upcoming school fund-raiser, the progress of her children in the progressive Open Classroom. How they were so well socialized, they were articulate, but didn’t know how to study. How would they survive high school? And I’d heard this conversation before, been in this room with its white walls, though at the time, it would’ve been an impossibility as it was once the post office, federal property. What good is it to half-remember licking Lincoln stamps and sending away for dreams?

Then there are strange words in the news like behemoth, Massive Ordnance Air Blast, MOAB. Dead man walking on my soul again. Yesterday I fingered the video of “Fat Man, Little Boy, but a shudder ran through me...there are no degrees of separation between me and the bomb: I know Keb; Camp-2; the Manhattan Project first-hand. And now today, our government unveils the mother of all bombs and I can’t help but think: sacrilege. These mothers in this room, I am the only one childless, though my cousin’s child is my godson. All these roots, and I am no closer to writing a manifesto than when I started. Manifesto requires hard, strident words, like Bukowski, Ginsberg, or Whitman. And I have only these small, hidden words afraid of rebirth, afraid of the dark, afraid of the light. The heart glistening with blood.

3/12/03, rev.

ON INTERNATIONAL WOMENS' DAY

ON INTERNATIONAL WOMENS' DAY

I was having dinner at a friend's,

at the old Forest Knolls post office,

we were a gathering of women and children,

feasting on salmon and talking of resistance:

of marching & writer friends, Maxine, Susan,

women warriors handcuffed for loitering at the White House.

I'd just walked the Lagunitas School playground

where we lined up to witness the test bombs at Jackass Flats,

where we prepared for nuclear bombs by hiding under our desks.

It was as if no time at all had passed: I was in 5th grade

and we imagined the coming millennium.

But I couldn't get past the year 2003,

an unnameable terror had seized me

and I forsaw darkness and destruction....

I had a hard time leaving behind that nightmare...

Then at dinner, the floodgates of memory opened,

and here we are, the dogs of war slouching toward Bagdhad.

A friend sends me emails (amidst penile & breast enlargement spams

cleverly disguised as an exonumia of mortages & loans.

It says: “don't pay any more” but it opens into promises

of “superb fresh breasts” and “lust, sex & no commitment”)

and how shall we pay? With handcuffs? Jeb Bush hands out cigars

when the bomb test is declared a success—

MOAB, the “mother of all bombs” for the “mother of all battles.”

And angered by such blatant sacrilege, I fear the worst,...

Inexplicably, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness comes to mind:

I can’t make it out: “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” Then, “The horror. The horror.”

My friend writes about how the Stocton Street Tunnel

will serve as gathering site should the bombs begin to fall

or perhaps it will serve as a bomb shelter or a masoleum

when it comes

when it comes

when it comes...

She says: Oh, baby, it's going to be alright. I know this is scary and hard but we—and millions like us—know how to love, and we will know how to love, no matter what happens. Energy created cannot be destroyed. More life, to you, a chara, and to us all, more life, more life, more life...

3/11/03

WHAT AMERICA MEANS TO ME

WHAT AMERICA MEANS TO ME

Aside from the fact that I get knee jerks at the very thought of what America means to me, an old patriotic drill arose: Lagunitas School in the 1950s, I was in 3rd Grade, after the Pledge of Allegiance, we’re singing Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies. Only it’s more like speciousness these days... Coin of the realm. But even from the relative purity of childhood, I recall a taint: my grandmother muttering something about the damned Anglo-Saxons again. Too close to God Save the Queen. I explain it’s just the melody, not the same song—even the Irish stole songs from themselves and updated the words: but she’s off and running. Soon Cromwell will arise and you know where that leads to. Don’t say anything to upset the antichrist in the kitchen...

I always loved the part about the purple mountain’s majesties. We had a WPA mural at our school with exotic orange groves and grapes framed against purple mountains. Sometimes when the light was just right, the ridges framing the San Geronimo Valley really turned blue when the woodsmoke collected in the hollows, mid-winter. There was something about the queen in the song and purple was the color of royalty. “Murex shells were used to make purple,” my grandmother said, pointing to a tiny black spot at the tip of the shell. “It took hundreds of snails to dye Roman togas, that's why only royalty was allowed to wear it,” she said. And it remained so until the invention of the aniline coal dyes of the Industrial Revolution. Beginning of the end of an era.

Father John Connery wore royal purple when he was serving the mourning masses: the color of forgiveness. Sometimes it was white, or red, or green. Uaine, my grandmother said in Irish. Chemical green, as in illness, or the almighty dollar. Not glas, the color of fields and plants. The big-bosomed old women of our parish always wore black... Life for the immigrant woman was hard: babies, and work and more babies and more work. They even wore black in the garden as if they were in deep mourning there too. They greeted each other each in their own language: Portuguese, Italian-Swiss, Irish, Spanish... the church, our common denominator against the powerful ruling class, the WASPS. And so the life of the poverty-stricken immigrant living close to the land has shaped my view of what it means to be American...

I was never a blue-eyed blonde, nor did I live in a tract house, or even in a town. I wasn’t raised in a nuclear family, with a mother-cum-housemaker and a father as bread-winner. Things we stereotype as American, like apple pie and mom. My mom was a Beatnick, therefore crazy. My father was absent in the neck of a bottle. So my grandmother took over the business of raising me. I was never a daughter of the America Revolution...we were related to Myles the Slasher, of County Longford, not Miles Standish of Plymouth Rock. So it was suggested we were second-class citizens...like the pecking order in the barn yard...the chickens, the horses, the cats, they all had a pecking order.

We were the ones who quietly snuck up the feed bowl when the others had already taken the edge off their hunger, and maybe they wouldn’t notice us if we edged in slowly, folding ourselves into the crowd. Safety in numbers. We were the invisible made visible by our ethnicity, which we clung to, a safety line of identity. We took refuge in the church from state. Did we inherit this division? Did we take it on? Or did it come from the outside? Or was it something put upon us from America itself? Indivisible under God, with liberty and justice for ...whom? For the WASPS who didn't want to share their America? The ones heckling my grandmother, calling her all kinds of names on the trolley because she was pregnant with my mother? Irish Catholic bitch always in heat.

* * *

My 3rd grade students are humming the song as they paint purple mountains on the silk banners for Saturday’s Art Auction/Spaghetti Feed for the Alexander Valley grange. This is as close to America as I can get, community events at the granges. Like the Nicasio Druid’s Hall Palm Sunday Brunch where all the west county ranchers gather and trade stories. This is the heart of my America. I hum along as best as I can with my students who are all blessed with tin ears, it seems. We are covered in purple dye. A discordant crescendo of America, America, God shed his grace on thee...

The auctioneer’s lips are a blur and we give standing ovations to the overbidders, swilling some of the best wine in the country. I rub shoulders with the old Italian families, the Mexicans and yuppies. Nike, Reebok are represented here at the CEO level. I have taught all their children poetry. I try not to think of slave labor. That’s what built those companies, this valley, this wine on my lips. Sacrament. This is my blood...

These west county microcosms at the edge of the continent are where I have witnessed what it means to be an American as the next wave of immigrants, the grape pickers from Guanahuato who used to sleep under the Russian River bridge, now celebrate a son, a daughter or a nephew or niece graduating from college. A daughter I once taught poetry to in 3rd grade, Ayacel, is a continuum of my tribal roots—but she is from another country of origin. Mexican-America. In this valley we are forgiven under the benediction of commerce and grapes because it what we choose to do with our citizenship, we have come here to make a better community for our children. It is a dream we all hold in common.

* * *

Note Bene: I developed a curious form of amnesia when it came to doing this assignment. I would write down a phrase, then lose it. Then I completely forgot about doing the assignment. Talk about avoidance! In the background, I kept singing America, America and when my poetry students were learning to sing this song (albeit off-key), it became a mantra. But it wouldn’t come in poetic form.

What finally moved me to write was an email from Martin Mooij, of Poetry International, who has led numerous successful campaigns to free incarcerated poets, who said he was thinking of me, because I represented the Other America, not the America embarking upon a stupid war. I noticed how, in his Dutch English, how war is both verb and noun. Both a naming and an action. And that I am/was an American ambassador for something not quite tangible, that of witness, with only my language as my tool to represent me.

And that somehow, California, isolated for millennia from invading tribes, developed the most linguistically diverse map in the world, with some 400 separate languages evolving. Something from the Ohlone: 10,000 years of dancing on the brink of the world. We are west of the west, west of the heartland, the belly, the brains of America. We are the unacknowledged dream of the body, where it is sometimes possible to legislate an escape route from the nightmare. These words by which we breathe become spades to dig us out from under the belly of the grave.

03/3/03, rev 

SPEAK MEMORY, iii

SPEAK MEMORY, iii               

It began like this:under

the desk, eyes and neck covered

to keep  the soft skin  from melting

and I remember the drills and the testing

and how we all assembled on the playground

facing east and we witnessed how the sky paled.

I heard “Jackass Flats.”Where did all the blue go?

And the jump ropes all quit chanting Hot Pepper

the tether ball was a full moon in a white sky,

a sonic boom in our heads, a litany

sung for The Bay of Pigs

& the missiles

& the silos

& Castro

Cuba

communism

& Khruschschev

& the blockade of ships like silver cigars,

Sputnik wobbled across the Milky Way. Her mother died in a fire because she translated an enemy tongue. This is how we learned McCarthyism. Black lists. Red diapers. Will they send Babushka back? I imagine a chain-mail Iron Curtain. Was it like the Berlin Wall, only bigger? Memory spoke in the shape of a cloud, it became a curtain of fire and scorpions inhabited our dreams.     

 The captain shipped out to sea in darkness,

& the prayer plant folded its leaves like me.

I thought late night sounds were bombs

falling in Vietnam across the Pacific,

those planes overhead at midnight

and then, the utter stillness

jet streams  writing  the  sky

with no birds singing, crickets

all seething in the dry oat grasses.                        & there was a mysterious relative at Ground Zero

no address,  just a note saying: Hello, I’m fine.

from Los Alamos, Alamagordo, Stallion Gate,

from Oak Ridge, but we would wait a half-life

for the code names of The Manhattan Project:

We would have to wait until after the funeral

we would wait long after the dawning of Light.

& so now it begins, the waiting; only this time we’re slouching against the Darkness & the Light.

2/16/2003

© 2003 Maureen Hurley, published in My America. Brandon Mise,  Blue Barnhouse Press, Asheville, North Carolina. More on Blue Barnhouse blog.

DEEP NOVEMBER

DEEP NOVEMBER

Dark morning, deep November,

low clouds threatening rain.

We sat by the firebox, slurping tea from a spoon,

she twiddled her hair into long white snakes,

while arguing with the dead:

blaming Cromwell, deValera, the Anglosaxonsandjutes.

An unnamed thing stirred at the pit of the stomach.

Who were they, the long dead?

I scooted around on my back the way kids do,

my robe, a red stain on the gray floor.

The cats hunched up, wanting in. No, she told us.

A bird banged at the kitchen sill.

Too much effort to fly, the air, palpable.

Calm before the storm, my grandmother said.

That knocking is the dead wanting in.

Shivers up my spine, a ghost story in the daytime.

The rain sobbing, not God, but the rain and me

crying—for no earthly reason.

Dead man walking on your grave.

Come closer to the fire, child, she said.

The small sorrows of my seven years welled up and found a thirst.

The birds and the cats, the rain and me, all wanting in.

All t’ings come in t’rees, she warned,

she never could say the T-Haiches  right.

I wanted to undwind her hair snakes,

and laughed at her  loss of “H”es,

Tír na-nÓg, she said in Irish, Land of the ever-young.

And here we are, west of the west. Samhain.

Be careful, the door to the otherworld are still open—

She cautioned me: “H” was the letter of the Lord.

A silent ladder to the sky. The sound of breath. Inspiration.

I climbed the first leafy rung. Plucked an apple. The sky breathing.

A knocking at the door. An scéal? No news is good news.

But the gates were already open.

My drunken uncle burst through the door,

giggling hysterically, Did you hear? Kennedy was shot!

My grandmother’s small sob, played over and over,

her hands fluttering like flocks of useless birds.

A sacred letter had fallen from the sky.

2/12/03; rev. 5/11/03
SILENT HAICHES
LETTER TO COLM TÓIBÍN

Articulating a Moment of Personal Witness

When I left class last Wednesday, I was enamored with Brian’s Oz-like description of walking into the New Year with red glitter on the soles of his shoes... I was humming Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of My Shoes” except that I wrote down “souls” instead of “soles.” And as I began to take stock and catalogue moments of my personal witness—that Joycean Aha! moment when you know that everything you’ve ever done in your life has led up to and prepared you for that particular moment in time where you cannot go back to who you were because suddenly everything is irrevocably changed. I realized that I have an abundance of such moments—most of them in second- or third-world countries.

It is the act of witness that compels me to write. So the issue at hand was which moment? Should I describe witnessing the body of a lawyer for the Sendero Luminoso in the Chorillos Tunnel, Lima, the daily news covering his face, the garua drizzling on the windshield, Carlos Orellano speeding us off, saying “Don’t look!” Or the Sendero’s reciprocal attack blowing up the power plant and the US Embassy so we ate soupa criolla by candlelight Independence Eve; or having to bribe our way out of the Peten Itza jungle when things between the guerrillas and the Guatemalan Army were heating up—a friend’s sister, a nurse, missing in action; or being stuck at the Guatemala airport with no way home because the US invaded Tegusigalpa—shamelessly resorting to bribing ticket agents for the next flight out anywhere in Mexico; or winding up in the USSR at the exact right moment, I was interviewed at a reading (on the Beat Poets, no less, not knowing the socio-political significance THAT had on my audience) right when Jesse Helms began his NEA purges? The shame I felt as a US citizen... And I haven’t even mentioned the home front: 9/11 or AIDS. As I tried to narrow down a particular a moment, I began to feel like one of Tom Stoppard’s reporters in “Night and Day,” always after the big story. In fact, at the time, I was a penny-ante freelance photojournalist, I knew the thrill of the hunt, front page bylines in yet another newspaper...

How did I get into this sordid business anyway? I was in workshops with Carolyn Forché after she and her photojopurnalist friend, Harry had returned from the atrocities of El Salavdor. She told us that poetry in America wasn’t enough, she told us to go out and to bear witness. El Salvador was a little too real for me, but as my then boyfriend John Oliver Simon and I traveled in other safer periphery countries meeting with, and translating Latin American poets, the trouble came naturally to us. Right place right/wrong time, depending on the viewpoint.

DREAM THE WIND

When the echoes of thunder 

repeat the dream of the wind, 

why does the storm speak of wishes 

trapped deep in the metal 

of a starship exploding 

into pure light?

Brian Thorstenson's MFA Seminar

Imaginary Ancestors

I come from a place where real and imaginary ancestors dance under the rainbow arch. I was the one who dreamed of flowers under the full moon, the land where I arose from was like the light in my veins. More and more often I dream of a fictional place deep in the mind, more real than what is real. Like Robert Duncan, often I am called to a meadow where a cabin grows wings and stories, leaving me lonely for the laughter filled place where the living and the dead sit around the dinner table, leaning back on their chairs after the feast.