Poetic Manifesto II

What Passes for Poetic manifesto, Part the Second

When confronted with the idea of revisiting a Poetic Manifesto on the Poetry of Witness, I kept drawing a blank wilderness, but then, slowly, I came to realize that the abstraction of nouns are, at best, a vague idea. That language itself fails me. I am drawn back to an imagist quote: “not ideas, but things.” And I began to realize that the tangible comfort of concrete things is how I define my poetic world. I think in terms of things—like a Joseph Cornell assemblage box. I see in terms of visual metaphors: This is to this as that is to that, which is related to that other artifact...  A scientific observation: compare/contrast. This tactic is how I render my world into poetics, though it feels  a bit like trying to describe light to a blindman. Or as philosopher John Locke put it in 1690 in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” For, words being sounds, can produce in us no other simple ideas than of those very sounds; nor excite any in us, but by that voluntary connexion which is known to be between them and those simple ideas which common use has made them the signs of.

The visual world is my first language, words are but translations from an unnamable place where ideas come from. Unnamable signifiers. I say unnamable because I suspect that visual comparisons too are translation. A ready means of escape from a harsh world. The abstraction of words come from the stacking of things, like so many logs to build that cabin my grandmother who had eight screaming kids, always longed for—escape to a bee-loud glade.  Ergo, to witness is to observe, and to react to that witnessing requires the rendering of an image into the poetic mind where it takes on new characteristics and becomes a solitary act outside of the mirror of self.

I inherited my grandmother’s dream to escape from this world, to enter into another reality. Call it the Otherworld—a parallel that coexists alongside this world. I wanted to believe in its existence. Yeats’ dream, or the collective dreams of medieval Irish druii agus filidhe agus seanachie cum-monks in search of Tír na n-Óg, or God. After getting their mitts on the apocryphal gospel of St. James, they had a field day. Excluded from Babel, (an oversight, of course), they could freely render their own alternate universe to suit their needs, in order to belong to the Judeo-Christian world. Lacking in desert wilderness, they brought the idea of desert to Ireland and then transformed it. Diseart. The Emerald Isle never yet yielded a decent desert except for a dry pub on a blue moon), and so the hermit’s hut deep in the woods, a cell on Skellig Micheál, or a cabin on a lake isle on Inishfree, became their desert, a place for the idea of bearing witness, a symbol for the search of God in the wilderness. A signified place for God to exist, therefore ergo sum: I am.

In “Meditation at Lagunitas” Inverness poet Robert Hass, wrote: Each particular erases from the clarity of a general idea... and the more I try and define it, the more it gets erased. Or the lake waters, ruffled by an offshore wind, churn and muddy the idea until I’m left adrift on a small boat and the oars are commas separating things and worlds. A collision of rock and thought, the sea beckoning. Yeats was a young man when he wrote that most anthologized of poems, “Lake Isle of Inishfree”; he later wanted to take it back, calling it a fraud, but there it was, published for the world to see. An artifact. He wanted to control it, master it, but poetry isn’t like that. It has its own hidden agenda. As does the poetry of witness. It’s more like a Nantucket sleighride—you just hold on for dear life and come out into another world inhabited with the testimony of strange juxtapositions.

UC Berkeley professor emeritus, Julian Boyd, said that when English was codified in the 17th c.: the Siamese twins “will” and “shall” were severed from each other—as an Anglo bishop put it: the correct use of “will” and “shall” which separates men from beasts—was established. He was referring to that quare Hiberno-English usage of Will you be having a bit of coal on the fire now? versus the right proper: Shall I put more coals on the fire?  ...using language to  scientifically establish Anglo superiority over the Irish who were little better than “beasts of burden.” Language as a weapon. My grandmother said: Tír gan teanga, tír gan anim: a country without a tongue is a country without a soul—the Irish idea of revenge is to use the language of the enemy against him. Joyce, Beckett and Wilde—bearing hard witness on the properties of the English language come to mind.

English distinguishes between desire, belief and intention: most other languages don’t. Will = duty /oath/ promise/ belief; versus Shall = intention/prediction/desire. The ability to dream and manifestation/ implementation of will... I will live alone in a bee-loud glade... A performative speech act of free will is “to witness.” This process happens between the act of witness and the place where the origin of words forms a semiotics that we happen to call reality. What Aristotle called praxis: doing/action. The only sentences that matter are T/F; everything else is religion or poetry.

Philosopher Roland Barthes states that both the literal and figurative definitions give a text its multi-lingual nature. Metaphor makes a text plural, since with more synonyms and “forms of language,” the text is multiplied in both quantity and meaning. Ergo, metaphor requires translation. Charles Simic states in his notebooks that something before language exists, and that everything is translation. He maintains that poetry is not what gets lost in translation but the orphan of silence because:

I’m one of those who believes that there is something that preceded language. The usual view is that there is some kind of equivalence between thought and language; if you can’t verbalize it you can’t think it. I’ve always felt there is a stage that precedes verbalization, a complexity of experience  that consists of things not yet brought into consciousness, not yet existing as language but as some sort of inner pressure.  (Bruce Wiegel, ed. “Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry” Univ. of Michigan Press,1996; Bruce Bond; p157).

According to UC Berkeley Celtic Studies & Rhetoric professor Daniel Melia, that image/idea precedes thought/language is an age-old debate. That inner pressure is the natal ground of witness compelling us to act. Something pre-lingual behind the epiglottis and the tongue. The idea of separation and exile also enters into it, giving us the distance, the lens by which to observe/write. History tells us what happened; poetry tells us what ought to have happened, said Herodotus. Plato saw poetry as a mirror of history. He said, Fine ideas are the father of poetry, words are the mother of poetry: poetry takes after its mother.  But Plato banned poetry from his Republic because it upset the emotional equilibrium of the psyche and gave no truth of its own. Did Plato mean answer vs truth?

To witness is not just the seeking of truth, but it requires an act of translation. Equivalencies. Simic utilizes the visual cortex as a more accurate form of witness. Many of his poems are the laying down of multiple visual images juxtaposed to create a larger picture which we enter, with our differing portmanteaux of experience. The exact combination of cumulative events whether, real or dreamed, becomes a form of witness.

While Simic never imposes a moral obligation on poets to reveal truth in this authentic manner, he does say that poets seem to be able to make more sense of this age of uncertainty than other artists.... Bruce Weigel asks how Simic reconciles the larger forms of history...with ‘the more exclusive forms’ of art. (Ibid; Brian Avery, p.88).

And Simic refers us back like a möbius loop to the philosopher Martin Heidegger:

Already Hölderlin asked the question: ‘...and what are the poets good for in a destitute time?’ And Heidegger replies: ‘in the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the word must be experienced and endured....’ ...poetry says more about the psychic life  of any age that any other art. Poetry is the place where all the fundamental questions are asked about the human condition.... Our situation is impossible, and, therefore, ideal for philosopher and poets. (Ibid; Brian Avery, p.89).

Our situation is impossible, therefore ideal. Shipwrecked, we are adrift in a sea of ambiguity. This is our stance of witness. To create an integral order from the Charybdic void of  informis is to land on a desert island, to write “I am” in the sand of that undiscovered country. But John Locke bemoaned the lack specificity in words, how they ultimately fail and betray us. As the exiled Indian writer Salman Rushdie put it: A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.  But it is indeed a solitary monkish position. As the exiled Paistinian poet Mahmoud Darwish noted: You are my country...but I am a stranger, always a stranger:...stripped of identity...those who pass between fleeting words carry your names...above us, as above you are sky and air...

We are alone. We are alone to the point of drunkenness with our own aloneness, with the occasional rainbow visiting...The prisoner said to the interrogator. 'My heart is full of that which is of no concern to you. My heart is full of the aroma of sage. My heart is innocent, radiant brimming...in the remains of dawn I walk outside of my own being...’

5/7/03; rev 5/14

ON THE FIRST DAYS OF WAR —after Simic

ON THE FIRST DAYS OF WAR                                                       

First sweltering day of spring:

Cumulous scribbles place a child in a proverbial meadow

where he toys with cloud camels—he is flying,

sliding down the pale satin body of the sky

until the fist of evening robs him of his plaything.

Soldiers stand at attention in wheat fields

& scarlet poppies glow like drops of blood.

A sandstorm howls across the country

painting everything a hostage yellow.

Later, the green afterglow of SCUD missiles

         will slap that dirty whore of a sky silly.

A stillness descends like a shroud over the city without a moon.

Infinite whispers disturb sleep. Bridle a nightmare.

Artillery hisses overhead, spewing shrapnel into the night.

Debris wheezes and whirls in the sky like lawnmower blades

as indiscriminate death and bitter chordite fills the air.

In Baghdad, the memory of rain falls on deaf ears.

Calligraphy loosened from parchment firestorms the sky

with the widowmakers of lost history. Tears and spit to put it out.

A small scrap of paper with a prayer written on it—

a broken dove flutters beneath the boots of the invading army.

5/14/03

Mike Tuggle on By Request

I found some notes in my journal on Mike Tuggle, I was probably an MC and was introducing him to a reading because I asked him the usual, when and where he was born etc., 1938, Tulsa. And we got distracted. I asked him why he always closed his set with that By Request song, and where did he learn it from. Mike said he learned it from his Pa, in Oklahoma. He said, when I was little, my dad and mom didn’t have a radio, but they would sing songs in the car. And the last song he’d always sing was always By Request.  It was an absurd and scary song, the idea of Josephus, an academic was. It’s absurd and final and funny. Ending on cholera by request. It made me remember the song on the brevity of life. It made me think—is that all there is? He said his grandfather was part Choctaw, and Lula was half Cherokee. But my grandpa on the European side was an Indian hater, big ham of a man who invented the first Gott cooler, a large thermos and he sold his idea to Gott’s department for $100. He invented the double-ended wrench for fuselage on airplanes. JW Tuggle married Martha J Booth. JW looked a lot like me as a young man. Edwin Booth was an actor, and he did a great Hamlet. But it was Junius Brutus Booth, not a relative, who sang the folk song and passed it on.

• Folklore Parody song to tune of Auld Lang Syne
• Note, this is filed in 2001, but I didn’t finish it until 2014, but it made more sense to file it with the other folklore.

Victimless Crime

I'm the victim of a victimless crime. I would not repeat this year for anything. The negation of the self is the same as erasure, therefore no victim. We're so used to being victimized, we no longer count ourselves. Body count.

In a room of nine women and one man, in Spanish, we're the masculine neuter gender. Tyranny of language or, betrayal? Cilantro or persil? With a condiment request, the prisoner gives himself away, as we do daily.

Brian says writing is a monkish, solitary act, the intensity is so personal. This is what I've given up with this relationship – the personal, versus the social. This is where laundry, shopping, and cooking enter in a frilly maid's apron. We don't need to take the uniform off at bedtime, just hike up the skirt and you're ready for sex.

And how do we balance both worlds? For years I lived the writer's life, in my hut in the woods. I was prolific, but then I spent my talents on a man, an actor used to being watched. I, the writer, watching the actor, who has no lines. If he has no lines, his own, or otherwise, is he still the actor? Still, I watch. But the words don't come. I stay on task but I keep missing the appointments with my words.

Parsley or chervil? Cilantro or persil?

My grandmother said parsley goes seven times to the devil. Mary's parsley flags are tall enough to be trees, a mutant garden in the twilight zone. What a phantasm of witness is that?

Will versus shall. To do versus action. That straddling place between action, a verb, and inaction, a noun. To name it isn't enough. Passive witness versus active witness. A pronoun of ethics. Not just action, but right action. Knowing when to…

Someone reads a book on insect dreams, another on the Chicago school of architecture, while a third in a blue cape reads a manual couched in the rhetoric of children's stories.

I feel like Kafka's cockroach trapped in a nightmare of a room and I can't fit through the bleedin' door. The train sways from side to side as we test the thickness of the air under the bay, all that water bearing down on us like a birthmother.

Instructions concentrate on...  work with the I Ching, the book of changes. Everyone is looking for a metaphor by which to live. People making temporary sense of random acts of nature.

Then, the ego, afraid, said: There is no god. Afraid, it said there is a God, then it revolts, becomes a masterbuilder of elaborate ruses. There is either truth, or fact. All else is within the realm of religion, or poetry.

Linguistics at 4 AM. When I realize that the incomprehensible hunk of twisted metal on the front porch was once my car, that the explosion rocking the house like bombs being dropped—was my car. I became a victim of a victimless crime because I wasn't in the car. I was asleep on the couch where the truck hit.

The woman next to me taps her chest three times as if asking for forgiveness. How very Catholic of her. Mea maximum culprit. Classmates disembark, there goes my community.

On Bart we are all polite xenophobes needing a good excuse for eye contact, hence the proliferation of books on empty seats, which few are actually reading. She points to the signs of development, and I think, do I want this relationship now that we've made some sort of amends?

At night I replay the tapes: what needs to happen. Change, as I struggle between worlds—either witnessing it, or not.

Parsley or cilantro?

5/7/2003
added 9/17

What Passes for Poetry of Witness, Part the Second (draft)

What Passes for Poetry of Witness, Part the Second (draft)

When confronted with the idea of revisiting a Poetic Manifesto, the Poetry of Witness, I keep drawing a blank wilderness, but then, slowly, I come to realize that the abstraction of nouns are, at best, a vague idea. That language fails me. I am drawn back to an imagistic quote, “not ideas, but things.” And I come to realize that the tangible comfort of concrete things is what defines my poetic world. I think in things—like a Joseph Cornell box. The abstractions come from the stacking of things, like so many logs to build that cabin my grandmother who had eight screaming kids, always longed for in a bee-loud glade.

                 

I inherited her dream. Yeats’ dream, or collective dreams of medieval Irish monks in search of God, after getting their mitts on the apochryphal gospel of St. James. Lacking in desert wilderness, they brought the idea of desert to Ireland and then transformed it. The Emerald Isle never yet yielded a desert except for a dry pub on a blue moon), and so the hermit’s hut deep in the woods, or on a lake isle on Inishfree, became a desert, the idea of witness, a symbol for the search of God in the wilderness.

                 

Poet Robert Hass, in “Meditation at Lagunitas” wrote: Each particular erases from the clarity of a general idea... and the more I try and define it, the more gets erased. Or the lake waters, ruffled by an offshore wind, churn and muddy the idea until I’m left adrift on a small boat and the oars are commas separating things and worlds. A collision of rock and thought. Yeats was a young man when he wrote that most anthologized of poems, “Lake Isle of Inisfree”; he later wanted to take it back, calling it a fraud, but there it was, published for the world to see.

                 

UC Berkeley professor Julian Boyd said when English was codified in the 17th c. : the correct use of “will” and “shall” separates men from beasts was established. Will = duty /oath/ promise/ belief; Shall = intention/prediction/desire. The ability to dream and manifestation/ implementation of will... I will live alone in a bee-loud glade... A performative speech act of free will is to witness. This process happens between the act of witness in and the place where the origin of words form a semiotics that we happen to call reality. What Aristotle called praxis: doing/action. The only sentences that matter are T/F; everything else is religion or poetry. Roland Barthes states the literal and figurative give a text its multilingual nature. Metaphor makes a text plural, since with more synonyms and 'forms of language,' the text is multiplied in both quantity and meaning. Ergo, metaphor requires translation. Charles Simic states in his notebooks that something before language exists, and that everything is translation. He maintains that poetry is not what gets lost in translation but the orphan of silence because:

I’m one of those who believes that there is something that preceded language. The usual view is that there is some kind of equivalence between thought and language, that if you can’t verbalize it you can’t think it. I’ve always felt there is a stage that precedes verbalization, a complexity of experience  that consists of things not yet brought into consciousness, not yet existing as language but as some sort of inner pressure.  (Bruce Wiegel, ed. “Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry” Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996; Bruce Bond; p157).

According to UCB Celtic Studies and Rhetoric professor Daniel Melia, that image/idea precedes thought/language is an age-old debate. That inner pressure is the natal ground of witness that compels us to act. Something pre-lingual behind the epiglottal and the tongue. The idea of separation and exile also enters into it, giving us the distance, the lens by which to observe/write. To witness is an act of translation. Equivalencies. Simic utilizes the visual cortex as a more accurate form of witness. Many of his poems are the laying down of multiple visual images juxtaposed to create a larger picture. The exact combination of cumulative events whether, real or dreamed, becomes a form of witness.

While Simic  never imposes a moral obligation on poets to reveal truth in this authentic manner, he does say that poets seem to be able to make more sense of this age of uncertainty than other artists.... Bruce Weigel asks how Simic reconciles the larger forms of history...with ‘the more exclusive forms’ of art. (Ibid; Brian Avery, p.88).

And Simic refers us back to the philosopher Martin Heidegger:

Already Hölderlin asked the question: ‘...and what are the poets good for in a destitute time?’ And Heidegger replies: ‘in the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the word must be experienced and endured....’ ...poetry says more about the psychic life  of any age that any other art. Poetry is the place where all the fundamental questions are asked about the human condition.... Our situation is impossible, and, therefore, ideal for philosopher and poets. (Ibid; Brian Avery, p.89).

Our situation is impossible, therefore ideal. Cosmonauts of the word we are, adrift in a sea of ambiguity.

5/7/03

Brian Thorstenson's MFA class at San Francisco State

Brian Thorstenson's MFA class at San Francisco State. The syllabus for our class was: How do we think of ourselves as part of a global superpower in 2003, on the eve of war? We discussed many ways in to this conversation, including:

Becoming aware of a stance
Considering a location
Recognizing responsibility
Bouncing our ideas off of the others in the class
Seeing how other poets do it
Use of memory and distance, use of facts
Forgiveness vs. Anger
Writing for discovery vs. witnessing with intention
Writing to remember

(back row) Giancarlo Campagna, Robin Cunningham, Teague Soderman, Mary DeNardo,  Laura Walker, Sean Mclain Brown;
(middle row) Brian Thorstenson, Jesse Nissim, Gary Kong, FarNoosh Seifoddini;Sarah Cohen, Karen Macklin, Brandon Mise (BlueBarnHouse Press), and me.

RESCUE JOB

RESCUE JOB

Emerging from sheets of rain, the boy and I lift half-drowned ungrateful enemies who each stay in their corner in the bed of the truck. Luckily, the snakes and shrews haven’t yet heard the fable of the scorpion and the fox. There is the double aspect of the thing and its place: to make the invisible visible. However, all gods have their limits, even the rain gods.

The tide rises to bathe a full moon, dressed in clouds. He said the river will crest at midnight. The true poem emerges from the place of ultimate suffering, beginning and ending in water.

Only to go with the wrong wind at dawn and light breaking an egg over the world.

But we wade in too deep, and the water fills our boots. And when the scorpion gets to the other side of the river, he always stings the fox. That’s why the end begins with stinging words because it’s the nature of the beast. Only we can’t see the opposite shore because everything is river, river river.. Swept up by the coriolus effect, we’re swirling on a strange raft crowded with a flotsam of words.

5/03-9/03

RESCUE JOB, II is in the book My America, no title.

RESCUE OPERATION rev

Emerging from sheets of rain, three shrews violently shiver beneath an oak leaf umbrella. Garter snakes try to copulate with the yellow and red stripes of my rainboots and scorpions practice their crablike nature in the deeper water. To build an arc in the present tense, the boy and I lift half-drowned ungrateful enemies who each stay in their corner in the bed of the truck. Luckily, they haven’t yet heard the fable of the scorpion and the fox. Levi-Strauss believed in the double aspect of the thing and its place: to make the invisible visible. However, all gods have their limits. Is that why the truck bogs down in the mud? Even the birds are too wet to fly. The tide rises to bathe a full moon, dressed in clouds. Meanwhile, a Blackhawk rescue ’copter whips the laden skies, tests the pulse of air mattresses, windows, eardrums, the heart adrift. Someone said the river will crest at midnight. The poet said the true poem emerges from the place of ultimate suffering, beginning and ending in water. Only to go with the wrong wind at dawn and light breaking an egg over the world. But we wade in too deep, and the water fills our boots. Shrews prefer a solitary existence, and the snakes are the opportunists. And when the scorpion gets to the other side of the river, he always stings the fox. That’s why the end of the affair begins with stinging words because it’s the nature of the beast. Only we can’t see the opposite shore because everything is river, river river.. Swept up by the coriolus effect, we’re swirling on a strange raft crowded with a flotsam of words. 

RESCUE OPERATION

    from Simic prompts

Emerging from sheets of rain, a pod of shrews shiver beneath a leaf umbrella. Garter snakes try to copulate with the yellow stripes of my rainboots and I dream of scorpions practicing their crablike nature. To build an arc in the present tense, the boy and I lift half-drowned ungrateful enemies who each stay in their corner in the bed of the truck. Luckily, they haven’t yet heard the fable of the scorpion and the fox. Levi-Strauss believed in the double aspect of the thing and its place. To make the invisible visible. However, all gods have their limits. Is that why the truck bogs down in the mud? Even the birds are too wet to fly. The tide rises to bathe a full moon, dressed in clouds. Meanwhile, a Blackhawk rescue ’copter whips the laden sky, tests the pulse of air mattresses, windows, eardrums, the heart adrift. Someone said the river will crest at midnight. But we carefully measure half-lives, only to go with the wrong wind at dawn and light breaking like an egg over the world. The true poem emerges from the place of ultimate suffering, beginning and ending in water. Shrews prefer a solitary existence, and the snakes are the opportunists. And when the scorpion gets to the other side of the river, he stings the fox. That’s why the end of the affair always begins with poison words because it’s the nature of the beast. I get stuck in the coriolus effect, swirling on a raft crowded with strange words.

4/30/03

first draft

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

The Color of Forgivness

Lagunitas School in the 1950s: I was in 3rd Grade, after the Pledge of Allegiance, we were 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 explained to her, 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 not the 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 Beatnik, 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 American 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 barnyard—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 crept 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 the state.

Did we inherit this division? Did we take it on? Ethnic inferiority complex. 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 whom? 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 standingovationstotheoverbidders, 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 is 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.

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

Fidelity of the heart

Dogface violets, heart's ease in the lawn, small faces waiting for sunrise, turned toward the east, toward that softer danger, the sun, that eye, a merciless glare in some other desert, but in this lawn, the suburbs, stolen beauty trembles amid the green.

And the idea of home, or, being homeless, that irrational fear of losing the hearth when the heart itself is lost. Heart's ease—as if there were a remedy for that.

I cannot go back to who I was, and who I've become, is mysterious, but this stasis is no longer acceptable. Women absorbed language differently than men; men don't love as deeply as women…

Is it biochemical? Are we hard so hardwired? And no, I don't want to be self-indulgent, I don't want to indulge this pain and suffering but when a man threatens you with that final sentence...

My mind dwells on the salmon-colored steps, midafternoon, where the lemons glisten with inconstant suns, the sour aftertaste at the back of the throat, unbearable. 

And I know that I'm only barely maintaining a façade as civilization slips from my shoulders like a pashima shawl. Make that Rapunzel's hair falling down to the garden gate so the man can climb up to win her. 

It's all there, the pain and the suffering, only we don't see it because it's a fairytale where belief is suspended like the perpetually right pears or apples waiting for someone to pluck them and take a bite.

Then, the symbolism comes home. And these words are secret dewdrop after the rain. Or perhaps, unshed tears. Sooner or later everyone tells on themselves. And the cruelty of lovers towards their beloved knows no boundaries.

April showers: the old song, raindrops keep falling on my…
Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, in the flower of his career, celluloid history. And then it becomes instant replay at the movies – persistent showtunes tyrannize the mind, take no prisoners especially Babs. 

I don't care if half the drag queens want to be funny girls like Lady Chablis in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, because the rest of them all want to be Cher. The retirement show clichés keep falling from my head. 

Even the cat, hungry for lap, clichés herself to Diana's leg. Mine! Mine! That look of utter ownership. We once had a cat who, upset with the rain, went to each door and each window, hoping for a sea change. I can relate to that.

Meanwhile out in the yard, plants gathered at the rain into a pagan ritual of floribunda. Emma Thompson in Howard's End touching the blossoms, the lilac, the catulpa are magnificent candles of butterflied flowers. Lighting up the dreary day with the radiance impossible to define. Otherworldly and for an instant the catulpa was transformed into a vast candelabra glistening with April rain. 

Spring: new beginnings, death of old patterns, the letting go requires faith that spring will return. not pass me over, leaving me back in the winter, and an intermittent love is no love at all. Stormwatch: fingers of rain drumming on the untamed sea of the heart. 

A musical in C sharp.

4/25/2003

Writers' Group

EASTER EVE

EASTER EVE

Meanwhile, somewhere over the Rockies,
all that easily-earned green is beginning to disappear
as rain turns to snow at higher elevations.
Coastal spring recedes back into winter mountains.

Hell’s Gate. Helena. Lewis and Clark slept here.
What about Sakajawea? And the child nursing at her breast?
The dark thoughts of feathers hampered by rain.

If one listens with patience the old message still gets through.

As the plane descends, my mind won’t let go:
Though he still wears the angry colors of the tyrant’s robes,
he’s late in coming to that expansion of the soul.

The snow is falling like rice from a slow wedding sky.
Variations of white ride a landscape of inescapable rhythm.

The moon came up 50 minutes earlier than it did the night before.
The land of shining mountains: Montana. The Bitterroots, the Abskaroka.
What is truth? Beauty? If one knows how to listen.

When fall promised the salvation of darkness into the feather,
Chief of the Crows, Plenty Coups died at the age of 34.
On the bare tree, a hard leaf hangs on like a death sentence.
Red maple leaf encased in ice like a jewel for my foot to find
as I stepped from the heated van onto the truth of ice.

I’m not interested in the outcome where the loser gets the man.
I’m here to teach the children about poetry.

An Arab mathematician said: One is the first figure of endless numbers.
What about zero, null and void? and the negative nimbers?
If one listens with patience the old message still gets through.

After the stroke, Ram Dass sits in the darkening shadow of long evening.
The mind..., he says. The mind. Leaves rustle in the courtyard. The mind.
Silence. His eyes close, head tilted toward the stars, at a loss for words.

First gathering of words on the lips: ma ma ma ma
I am, I am: said the tang and surcease of the sea.
I exist, therefore I am. I yam what I yam. (Yogi Berra).
I stood there in front of his house, you know,
I just stood there looking at a closed door. Cogito ergo sum.

One tear met another floating down the river.
Said the first tear: I am the tear of the woman who lost her love.
Said the other: I am the tear of the woman who got him. (Chinese)
The wind nibbles at the corner of the eye.

The slow breathing of long distance rain on the hills.
That’s what poetry is. Simple, elegant: Occam’s Razor.

Tonal languages: ma = horse, ma = woman, ma = scold, ma = grass.
It’s all in how you say it and the context it is given.

Somewhere out there is the river. Yellow stone.
Little Bighorn. Greasy Grass. The Powder, the Little Powder.
53,000 miles of stream bed: each chooses one sea over the other.
The Great Divide. If a tear falls in each stream, then what?

Einstein discovered the flow of time is relative to the observer.
I carry a photo with me for when I need to restore what was lost.

I am the despair of the sand speaking in razor-sharp tongues.
The wind drives me from the crests of mountains to the depths of the sea.

Plenty Coups said education is your most powerful weapon.
With it, you are the white man’s equal.
Without it, you are his victim.
He saw it was time to change.

Time is relative to the observer.

The search for truth is hard, or it is easy. If one listens.
It is evident no one can master it fully or miss it wholly.
From all the facts assembled, there arises a certain grandeur. (Aristotle)

The sum of what is equal to the rate of decay.
Ancient Babylonians studied algebra, and they didn’t survive, see?
What is the half-life of a marriage?

There is a natural poetry in common names.
Read the names of the towns and cities, of the creeks and rivers.
Read them aloud. There is a pattern, a kind of folk-music in itself,
alive with a beauty that is sometimes smooth singing,
sometimes sharp as a trapper’s knife.

When she was a girl, Helena’s brother always carried her to the cornfields before dinner. He’d pick the ears of corn and then hand them to her. They were small suns resting in her arms. Fifty years later, he went to answer the phone and found he’d misplaced his speech inside the ear of the Trojan horse, alongside the weapons of the stroke. But those ears of corn whispered a poem in her ear, whispering the words she never said, and he could only mutely acknowledge her, nodding his head to her poem whispering in his ear. Cornlight.

Abskaroka: hides a tongue. Absa- large beaked bird.
Crow tongue: Shoshone: stinking water. Headwaters of the Missouri.
Ah-mah-tahro-shosh-sher: The stream that scolds all others.
Gros vendre, big muddy crow. Pick the eyes out of the fallen.
Missoula: issoul: horrible (Hell’s Gate) Annus horriblis.
Assinaboine: stone boilers. The loose-tongued music of the river.

At the Talking Tongue, the crookedest stream in Montana,
they named Sakajawea’s son, Baptiste.

Amor non tenet ordinem. Who is listening?
Love is a drowning in flood waters. (9th c. Irish).
Terra nullis. To walk, in Maylay, is to eat the wind.

When Plenty Coups died, the Crow decided no one could take his place
so they never again elected a chief. Where does that put us? With Carter?
On the bare tree, a hard leaf hangs on like a death sentence.

I inherited my mother’s hatred of her name. Not Helen. Maureen.
Why did she name me thus? Am I She of the sea? The Morríghan?
The great warrior queen stood raven-shouldered at the hero’s fall.
The Morríghan with the head of a crow and a taste for men’s eyes.
Her breasts were Trojan horses filled with shining cancer.

Fort Keogh: Captain Myles Keogh’s horse, Comanche, survived Little Bighorn.
They found him tearing the greasygrass—grass so rich, it would fatten a stone.
Garyowen, the marching song of the Cavalry.  Sean, south of...where?
A long way from home in any language, where are ye now?
The Morríghan found you here too.

William Blake was the son of an Irish hosier.
At the age of four, he saw God in an apple tree.

Timothy Leary turned his death into a media event, Ram Daas said:
We met as adventurers. People wanted wisdom from TIm. He was just playing his role.

What of Heremon, the King of Spain?

CuChulainn, Hound of Ulster, read the red hand.

Life, being what it is, one dreams of revenge. (Gauguin)

Epona , horse of strength and beauty; both male and female.
Rhiannon, The Morríghan, ancestor goddess.

Tir gan teanga, tir gan anim:  A land without a tongue, a land without soul.

Spring came early one year, third grade teacher Bob Kappel found a confused Canada goose on the playground chasing students. Since he had a farm he took the goose home in the truck.

OK, so it was the 6th century, BC.
Pleasure is plural, pain is singular.
To see eternity in a grain of sand.

Well, the goose noticed the fence posts whizzing by and he wasn’t having to work his wings, and so he began to flap them in the truck cab. Bob had to pin him down in order to drive.

The lack of symmetry, known as CP violation says particles and anti-particles decay differently. But CP violation doesn’t account for the antimatter paradox.

He let the goose go with his other geese, but it took off again. However, the weather had warmed so much, south wasn’t such an urgency for the snowbird.

The number of astronomical units in a light year (63,240)
is virtually the same as the number of inches in a mile (63,360).

In the local paper: a missing goose ad. “Please help Freddie come home. Still missing, was last seen on 9th Street two weeks ago. Please call Mrs. Ida Richardson 628-6311.” Well, someone photocopied the ad, put it on the teacher’s room fridge with a note: “Leave it Kappel to get someone’s goose!”

Beware of synchronicity. Therein lies the way to madness.

What is the problem? The speed of thought is claimed to be 150 mph. Few are caught speeding.

(Bob once put Elmer’s glue in Sharon’s hand lotion and soap in her hair spray. and as the day progressed, her hair got flatter and flatter... But he didn’t marry her.)

Sakharov proposed the laws of physics were out of balance
favoring the existence of matter over anti-matter for some reason.

Circling the rim rock of Billings at sunset, under a full moon.

Myriad tongues of the Clark Fork, multiple channels,
white against the dark numberless islands, saying goodbye in all languages.
Airborne over Montana. Granite Peak rimes in cloud cap, lit by the rising moon.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces
to realize that memory is what makes our lives. (Bunel)

I can trace the course of the river canyons by strings of lights that begin like a lone flame cresendoing into a candelabra as it tumbles down the mountains to the Central Valley, a bathtub ring of light reestablishing the ancient shoreline of the Precambrian sea, as if the earth glowed from within.

There is no word for problem in Quechua.

The geometric patterns of industry and suburb like ideograms of light for the moon to see. Industry’s strange calligraphy abutting the edges of the hills, a spillage of light up the canyons, privileged herringbone of parking lots. The staring eye of stadiums long after the game’s over.

Stray renegade light slices the night as we descend, Dantesque. We bow before Moloch on this eve of Easter, a basilisk about to walk on water, but terra firma replaces water at the last minute...blue eyes to ward off evil greets us, guide us home to the portal.

4/23/03

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