BLUE FREEWRITE

inside the eye                                                                        

a primeval ligature of well-muscled sky

against the unseen void

enter a smoky tunnel

and when you get to the root of it,

how we associate life,

and pooled water with all that blue.

all root and nerve,

the crack between worlds

where rogue planets coalesce,

burn an afterimage on the retina

leaving the optic nerve hungry

for more mirror images.

no to mention the blind spot

or the mind playing tricks.

tracings of veins,

shadows against the back wall of the eye

dendritic highways

ghost image and counter image

that feeling of not alone

as if someone else in an empty room

the almost as if seen

what constitutes reality

scripted or unscripted?

foreshadow and aftershadow

rods and cones

intimate not greens and not reds

to which point do the bird’s thoughts retract?

descending into a smoky tunnel

background noise bricking up a pristine silence

At that time between day and night

when everything is crepscular in notion,

and the Cole Porter violin cresendo swells,

opens the doors between worlds,

is where the limnal and the real world collide,

where we dream, where we drift,

where you’re not sure where you’re going

or where you’ve been,

living both lives simultaneously.

Meanwhile, a petty dictator gets in the way of truth.

2/2004

Dressing to challenge freewrite

An old boyfriend, Lee always said that I dressed to challenge, but he was from Boston, and I was a child of California, that place where if you put the country on end, all the kooks would roll to—or so it is said. He was like a lone dog scolding the night. They were all round pegs from the carefully guarded squares of the eastern seaboard in search of a home, or a state of mind. But once they landed here, they tried to re-create the places they had fled from.

Perhaps I wear the clothing that challenges the norm, but I was caught up in the shine and flow of texture and color—whether it was campy old 40s blouses with lace inserts and rhinestone buttons material training under the arms by some well-dressed woman decades long gone. Or muflon jackets and black crepe dresses with embroidered green cherries and plastic hands for buttons.

I imagine someone dressed in gabardine suits, or Rosie the Riveter leftovers from the war effort. Women invincibly moving into the workforce sort of like Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set. Or Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. I even had a real Victorian blouse but it required constant mending. Fine lawn sewn by hand with tiny tucks and mysterious straps to tie to a bustle but my back was so long they were like little new bird wings on a wayward angel. 

Each day I slipped into another decade of costume, mixing and matching my clothing with wild delight. In those post-1970s days in Sonoma County we were an enclave unto ourselves. It was as if time had suddenly stopped or was ossified, and we were the retro hippies keeping alive the flame long after the rest of the nation had given up the Goodwill castoffs for chinos and Lacoste shirts.

I still love finding old clothes. I envision those Desk Set women still alive again in the clothing of the dead. Now I dress in the drab uniform of the masses. Uniform Jeans and T-shirt with a pullover sweater as if I were endorsing a blandness of mind, or was I cowping to the conformity of the masses? Monopoly uniforms. Don't think. Don't challenge.

What happened to me? I guess I got tired of being challenged, or I grew up somewhere along the way and left behind the clothing of my youth. And I also left behind something of myself as well. And now another man is wanting me to dress up, to don a costume of suburbia. Or worse, to dress as a woman as object— kept, or otherwise. But he doesn't want to actually keep me.

The suburban Victorian women of the 1870s and 1880s dressed to attract a man. They were extolling virginal purity. The flappers of the Roaring 20s were selling raw sex. I have no interest in skirts or nylons and shoes too uncomfortable to wear. Let him wear those goddamn stilettos with nylons and see how uncomfortable it is. Besides, he wears the skirts in this house. There's always kilt mending on my to-do sewing list. 

I was a child of the theatre, my mother was a wardrobe mistress, and my fondest memories were of dressing up in clouds of lace and yards of purple toile netting, while listening to the rustle of watered silk whispering secret assignations in deep closets.

1/30/2004 Writers' Group

Write Faster Than You Can Think, freewrite

Write faster than you can think. just push the pen across the page like a cloud with oars sailing across the sea of hope. The mishearing, the misrepresentation, often more interesting than the original. Poets' ears think different. We are all damseled about because that is the nature of things, to uncover an old poem, relics from the past, buried treasure in the attic of the subconscious. Freud would have a field day fixing the poets, and then what? Then what would we do? All this verbiage or is it garbage? I have little by way of mind left after 5 PM. They say that in Thailand, children are dying of the bird flu, sudden angels who just last week were chasing chickens across the yard. Imagine their excited squabbling, and the indignation of foul juxtaposed against the screams of children playing tag and touch the tail. And now I envision those children on thunderclouds rolling across the sky in hot pursuit of birds of the air—in those farther fields.

1/27/04  From my Writers' Group

Smile at your destiny freewrite

Smile? At a time like this, a laugh, maybe. You know sometimes you just gotta laugh. I mean what else is there to do? Who wants the truth when your destiny is trapped in some molasses bog, and you’re thinking maybe I should’ve taken those swimming lessons after all. Nothing like 20-20 hindsight. I always say there’s room for a little bit of depression a la cart. Will that be all ma’am? says the proverbial waiter. Wait! What do you mean by all? I’m not finished yet, even if destiny is on holiday, sipping maitais and rum coolers with tiny umbrellas, poolside. Smell of burnt sugar wafts through the air. How often do we think of the sugar trade? All of that sparkling white purity coming from such a squalid place and time where the bones of slavery built an empire and this being Martin Luther King’s birthday. To dream and perhaps you shall see. Hey, if you could see my destiny drowning in dark pools, give a shout would you? The bell has rung and it’s out again without a hall pass. Why yes, I would like another cup of tea, thank you very much. Yes, with sugar please, one scant spoonful. Yes. That sugar was for the hummingbirds, she said ,testily. With a Cheshire cat smile she explained how the cat ran up the blinds after the hummingbirds. Maybe if I flutter my wings I can get some sugar for my tea, or will I have to run up the blinds too? If it was destiny, should I smile at my destiny? But destiny is at the dentist's, getting its teeth fixed, thanks to them pearly whites. But the dentist’s bill is too high. Think I’ll pass. Pack up your troubles in an old tin can and smile smile smile. 

1/16/2004 Writers’ Group

INSIDE THE EYE OF NIGHT

INSIDE THE EYE OF NIGHT

inside the eye of night 
a primeval ligature of well-muscled sky 
against the unseen void
enter a smoky tunnel
and when you get to the root of it,
how we associate life, 
and pooled water with all that blue.

all root and nerve,
the crack between worlds
where rogue planets coalesce,
burn an afterimage on the retina
leaving the optic nerve hungry 
for more mirror images.
no to mention the blind spot
or the mind playing tricks.

tracings of veins, 
shadows against the back wall of the eye
dendritic highways
ghost image and counter image
that feeling of not alone
as if someone else in an empty room
the almost as if seen
what constitutes reality
scripted or unscripted?
foreshadow and aftershadow
rods and cones
intimate not greens and not reds

to which point do the bird’s thoughts retract?

descending into a smoky tunnel
background noise bricking up a pristine silence

At that time between day and night 
when everything is crepscular in notion, 
and the Cole Porter violin cresendo swells,
opens the doors between worlds, 
is where the limnal and the real world collide, 
where we dream, where we drift, 
where you’re not sure where you’re going 
or where you’ve been, 
living both lives simultaneously.
Meanwhile, a petty dictator gets in the way of truth.

2/2004

Cyclamens silk (art)

These cyclamens were for a SSU art exhibit, It took me a few tries to get it right. I always work from real flowers, so imagine my surprise when a snail crawled out of the pot.

Habotai silk, metallic gutta, salt, and dye; 9.5" silk hoops. 

I was asked to make a square for a quilt for Neil's ashram gardener who was retiring. This was the first cyclamen I drew. Habotai silk, metallic gutta, salt, and dye; 8x8".

see also

Lilies, silk (art)

Lilies, 2 silk (art)

Nasturtiums silk (art)

Facebook photo album: Mo's silk painting (photos, art)

Celtic beasties on silk (art)

Celtic beasties on silk 2 (art)

Dancing to Clifton Chenier at the Cotati Cabaret

Some 25 years ago I was dancing with Clifton Chenier’s son Julian, who was a long way from the bayou. Bon ton roulet, he said, let the good times roll. And we danced a hot Cajun style under the harvest moon during the break. We all stood in constellations under the oak trees, admiring the spin that only a cold, clear night can put on the stars, and the beauty stained the retina for a moment, we forgot ourselves and gazed rapturously at those pinpricks of light. But in the shadows, a drunk leaving the parking lot, blinded us with his headlights, and we were thrown into the small cages of self walled against the night. Unfortunately the drunk was also taking another car with him, doggie bumper style, and then I realized it was my poor VW bug being dragged through the gravel like a recalcitrant donkey. I ran down the parking lot after the drunk, screaming, but he kept driving with my car in tow. Just as I got up to him, he disengaged and took off down the road. I was screaming like a banshee, and Julian was holding me back, saying it’s cool, it’s OK, let it roll. Let it roll right off your back. Come on back inside and dance dance Cajun style with me—and with that he climbed up the stage steps and played a lick on his guitar. Soon we were all dancing dancing in a sea of kelp arms, reaching for the disco ball, myriad stars dancing on our bare shoulders, dancing, dancing, dancing. 

11/21/2003 Writers’ Group

JFK freewrite what’s sex got to do with it?

The writing prompt: what was the best sex you’ve ever had. The best what? Seriously? Fuck. That’s not something I’d want to share with the group. It’s been so long, I barely remember having a sex life. It’s like a rock, inert, and inanimate. I did dream that I was with JFK and we were standing in a plaza. It was like a holiday, but the fall air was nipping at the resolution of our discontented youth. 

And then I was thinking in Navajo, blessing the sky, the Earth, and all my relations. What gave me the inspiration, I will never know. Maybe it was the wind or the past regrets that edged into dreamtime. Always we wake up before the climax ending, awakening to that feeling of discontent. Come on, surely you don’t have to pick dead presidents to have sex with. After all I was only 10 years old.

In a few days, I’ll be 51, and tomorrow is that famous anniversary we baby boomers all can remember so clearly, as if etched in stone, or frosted like Victorian bathroom windows. When I was four, I figured out how to turn the latch in the bathroom, and I remember looking up at the skylight, so impossibly high up, no way out, and someone was talking to me through the door. They said turn the key. An impossibility of time caged in a white room and the specks in the sky were an afterthought for birds.

Like my nursery school teacher, she was French, and she was always asking us to reach to the sky in French. I guess she didn’t ever speak to us in English. I just remember the gurgle of the basement pipes on the ceiling and we were reaching for them as if we were tiny gorillas, reaching for the stars. I was already doubting the sanity of grown-ups and I was only four. I knew little enough about the stars. Only the fog rising from the street vents whirling around my ankles, so dreamlike.

That landscape we inhabit in dreamtime, in suspended animation. Sting writes about eight hours of Tantric sex equals dinner and a movie and a whole lot of begging. So why was I so promiscuous in my dreams? Because the last night I dreamed, I married a man I never saw before. Here I was, a bigamist in sleep, while Neil cavorts, like a narwhal under ice, stewing in his own private hell, where there is no room for sex. No time for movies, no time for dinner, let alone, begging for sex. I’ll certainly never beg for it. Life is so much less complicated without it.

And so I spend my nights alone, dreaming of phantom lovers and the past. What does it mean when ex-lovers jockey for position in my dreams? My nights are populated with all the faces of the past, and in dreams it is always better because you can heal the rough edges and smooth over the places where the the dite of angels are suspended in time, so that you forget the parts where you know it wasn’t the best sex you ever had. But memory is a two-timing slut always sleeping with the enemy. I can’t get over the idea of sleeping with Jack, but he was good, very good—or at least Marilyn thought so. Or was that a myth?

The best? Perhaps Galway Kinnell was the best but dare I mention that in public? Surely it was at least among the top 10 but then Kitty was another one. Actually, that was just too fucking much, skewering me like a shish kebab, just like Edwin Drummond. Ironically my first boyfriend was probably the best sex experience I’ve ever had—only I didn’t know it at the time, because I was so young and inexperienced.

11/21/2003 Writers’ Group

On infomercials and insomnia freewrite

On the TV, a late night panacea offers infomercials on everything imaginable. You’d think they would play movies to lull us back to sleep, but no, it’s how to roast a chicken with a bottle up its ass. the poor thing looks like a conductor with wings outstretched, post rigor-mortis. 

Or perhaps you need a knife so sharp that it will cut through the bottle. The chicken is spinning around like a Venus of Willendorf taking ballet lessons in the oven. No matter that our ovens aren’t tall enough to host a chicken with a bottle up its ass. No matter, they’ll sell you a tall chicken oven to boot. 

Then there’s the ab guy—it’s too much of a shock to see his naked torso on 70 channels in the middle of the night, so I keep looking for the chicken on a bottle and then it becomes a meme, weaving together disparate commercials. Nads, I know it sounds obscene, but it’s a hair remover with a personal groomer, tiny sheep clippers for Lilliputian sheep—or women’s mustaches. 

I am so enthralled by all this bizarre celluloid snakeoil I hardly notice that the dawn has slipped in unnoticed, except now all the yoga ladies are strutting their stuff on sea cliffs, or by the poolside. It’s hard to distinguish them from the real estate tycoons.

Onto motivation with Tony Robbins, I’m mesmerized by his large mouth. I can’t look away. All those teeth. How does he manage them all, not like the Wife of Bath with her gap-tooth smile. A hefty come on for all the world to see. Each time she smiled, men revolved around her like the sun or satellites, for that promise of her smile, she, who buried four husbands and was still game. But I’ll be dragging my ass forward all this day long.

11/7/2003 Writers’ Group

Harmonic Convergence freewrite

All this unexpressed rage, I’ve had too much of that lightly, so I’ll write in red ink. The vein is trying for blue, the color of blood returning home. Bluebloods. It’s true that blood is blue. The lonely wail of a train returning to the yard, like stock to the slaughter house. I am dwelling on the past these days, an artifact of the fall, merging towards winter, nothing to do with rage.

So I’ll switch ink, nothing to do with mood, or mechanics. Vito runs out of ink at the same time, must have something to do with the harmonic convergence, all those planets and ballpoint pens lining up to make the star of David before the eclipse. 

Last harmonic convergence, I remember was anything but harmonic. We were in Oaxaca, San Cristobál de las Casas, and I was being plagued by monstros in my sleep, the dead wanting voice and shape, my mouthpiece. All of them crowding into my dreams, what was I to do? I kept waking up, screaming and telling John they what they looked like. 

One he recognized as Kayla. Only I didn’t know Kayla so I described her. And she was saying goodbye to John. And then Dave Evans appeared, too. They were all crowding in, taking turns. I was a mouthpiece. I kept screaming to make them stop, to make them go away, but then something unbearably dark emerged, like unexpressed rage loosened in my dreams.

There was a being so malevolent I didn’t dare go back to sleep. It was a devourer, pre-Columbian, neither god nor goddess. Something larger, wanting voice, wanting mouthpiece. I said it had black blood in its veins. And so we crawled onto the roof, John and I locking arms, linked back to back, waiting for the dawn. Venus, beading on the horizon, dawn slicing up the sky like a mango. Thin boundaries, walking the dark hours before the dawn promising a deliverance that never comes after hours of harrowing experiences. 

(It turned out that both Kayla and Dave Evans had both died while we were in Oaxaca. Weirdly, no one knew where we were staying, yet John got a call from Alta or Jan that Kayla had died.)

11/7/2003 Writers’ Group

Stage notes for LA LLORONA, a performance I did for Oakland Readers Family Night

LA LLORONA                                                                                   

Welcome/bienvenudos. Me llamo Maureen, o Marina o Maria pequeña.  

BEGIN with HOOK: This is a tale, a very old tale...about a girl, a beautiful girl, who...

Sientate mis hijos. Come closer. Donde esta mis hijos? Closer so that I may see you. Venga aca! Sientate.

This evening we are going to visit Mictlan/ the Otherworld para Todos Santos. Cuantos personas comprenden Engleis? How many people understand Spanish? Bilingual? 

Bueno, yo hablo solemente en Russo. (To make them laugh).

I’m going to tell you a real Californio ghost story. 

This evening we are going to invoke el duende/the goblin wind with a story that’s at least 500 years old. Cantadora, cuentista, curandera, seanachie...huehuetatlolli (words of the elders), tlapuetzali (story) historia para todos santos. a real temblón, a shiver story.

Listen well to all the parts because after, we’re going to act out the play for the audience. Insert historical info about halloween/Aztecs /oral tradition whenever possible.

Storytelling with Gay Ducey

I got to work with famed storyteller Gay Ducey at the Rockridge Library in Oakland. We learned a lot of techniques that I added to my existing repertoire. I gave my handbook back to the library, but not my binder chock full of notes and handouts. What to do with it? Not sure when to post this as it has no date.

IN PRAISE OF THE GRAPE

in vino veritas/ in praise of the grape
  —An occasional poem for the Coppola Niebaum Cafe, 10/8/2003

It was on one of those achingly clear days in Fall, like today,
when the coastal ridges bezel the sky into lapis lazuli.
Because the harvest is in from the fields,
long nights of roulette with the weather are done.
Indian Summer has again sweetalked the grape into honey,
and coastal fog suckled up the river canyons at night
has teased that hot, sweet passion of sun and stone
into a diaphanous gown of noble rot and bloom
so that we may freely dance under the Hunter’s Moon.

Kirkegaard said the spirit of occasion recorded in the mind
is an indelible distillation of watery particles of memory—
like the generosity of wine shipped round the Horn.

On the long journey from vineyard dust to the delta of tongue,
we toast that struggle towards civilization: we raise our glasses
to the murals of Las Caux, to the pharaoh’s last offering,
we celebrate the miracle of water into wine, where, under a Tuscan sun,
Caesar’s Gaulish legions drowned solace at the bottom of amphorae,
where Cortez and Columbus decreed wine to grace the New World,
and an army of padres marched north to the tabula rasa of golden Califia
with their precious cuttings for the sacrament of the altar chalice,
where a Hungarian Count Haraszthy, slipped the first zinfandel
into the sweet Mayacama soil, opening her bounteous vein...
We toast the past with this fine wine, older than recorded history,
yet as young as the next harvest, into the poetics of the dream

Where we hold to the party line: In Vino Veritas,
because there will always be poetry, to be sure,
and not only fine conversation steeped in wine,
where we swirl the stem to observe the other
between veiled sheets of glycerin
cascading into a slow waterfall of desire.
And there will be eloquent speeches—
not to be made, except in vino,
and no truth to be uttered here,
excepting that which is in vino—
where wine is a defense of truth,
and truth, a defense of wine.

 10/8/2003

• "In Praise of the Grape" at Francis Ford Coppola's

"In Praise of the Grape" at Francis Ford Coppola's cafe, Oct 10 (MIA p2)

Hi All,

This is just to say that there will be a poetry reading/bash, "In Praise of the Grape" at Carmen and Francis Ford Coppola's cafe @ 619-something* on Kearney St. across from City Lights Bookstore in Northbeach at the confluence of Columbus, and Jack Kerouac Lane, on Friday, Oct 10th, from 3 to 5:30 PM-ish.

According to poetry event organizer, Herman Berlandt, grandfather of the poetry-film genre, who founded the National Poetry Association nearly 30 years ago in SF, and in 2002, the International Poetry Museum, —Francis Ford Coppola himself will attend the annual baccanalia*-as he has done so in the past.

I am at present combing thru my work for something appropriate to read as I'm a featured reader...it's been literally years since I attended the last vintage grape stomping event, but it was, um, intoxicating, as vaguely recall.. truth be known...

When the ancient Romans were having a party, they'd shout IN VINO VERITAS. Come down and praise the harvest by raising a poem and a glass or two of vino with us and maybe you'll find some truth or your future ex-muse at the bottom of it.

Maureen Hurley (he did not attend, but his uncle Carmen who was tending bar, was a gem. He kept my glass more than half full.)

PS: For more information on the International Poetry Museum, or "Mother Earth Journal" (I was co-editor for years), call Herman Berlandt, (415) 868-8865. Uniting the World Press, PO Box 886, Bolinas, CA, 94924  or email him at: info@intemationalpoetrymuseum.org http://www.nationalpoetry.org/npa/mother.html

PPS: *If you absolutely need the address, email me back and when I get it, l'll send it to you...otherwise, just stagger into every bar and cafe near City Lights until you find it... -MH 

IN VINO VERITAS (THE BANQUET) -Kierkegaard

It was on one of the last days in July, at ten o'clock in the evening, when the participants in that banquet assembled together. Date and year I have forgotten;... The "spirit of the occasion" and whatever impressions are recorded in one's mind under that heading, concerns only one's recollections; and just as generous wine gains in flavor by passing the Equator, because of the evaporation of its watery particles, likewise does recollection gain by getting rid of the watery particles of memory; and yet recollection becomes as little a mere figment of the imagination by this process as does the generous wine...

...The motto of the Party had been given by him as: In Vino Veritas, because there was to be speaking, to be sure, and not only conversation; but the speeches were not to be made except in vino, and no truth was to be uttered there excepting that which is in vino--when the wine is a defense of the truth and the truth a defense of the wine.

IN VINO VERITAS Reflections on a Glass of Wine  —James B. Sanders

The silver-haired gentleman gazed at his glass of rare old Chambertin so hard and long that the young American gustatory finally asked, "What do you see?"

Continuing to swirl and stare at the brick-red liquid, the venerable wine sage replied, "When I look at a wine of this one's quality, charm and provenance, I get a glimpse of the best of man and his struggle through civilization…

Missing the last page

The Bacchantes -Euripides, 410 B.C.E

O hallowed haunts in Crete, that saw Zeus born, where Corybantes with crested helms devised for me in their grotto the rounded timbrel of ox-hide, mingling Bacchic minstrelsy with the shrill sweet accents of the Phrygian flute, a gift bestowed by them on mother Rhea, to add its crash of music to the Bacchantes' shouts of joy; but frantic satyrs won it from the mother-goddess for their own, and added it to their dances in festivals, which gladden the heart of Dionysus, each third recurrent year.

Oh! happy that votary, when from the hurrying revel-rout he sinks to earth, in his holy robe of fawnskin, chasing the goat to drink its blood, a banquet sweet of flesh uncooked, as he hastes to Phrygia's or to Libya's hills; while in the van the Broman god exults with cries of Evoe. With milk and wine and streams of luscious honey flows the earth, and Syrian incense smokes.

While the Bacchant holding in his hand a blazing torch of pine uplifted on his wand waves it, as he speeds along, rousing wandering votaries, and as he waves it cries aloud with wanton tresses tossing in the breeze; and thus to crown the revelry, he raises loud his voice, "On, on, ye Bacchanals, pride of Tmolus with its rills of gold I to the sound of the booming drum, chanting in joyous strains the praises of your joyous god with Phrygian accents lifted high, what time the holy lute with sweet complaining note invites you to your hallowed sport, according well with feet that hurry wildly to the hills; like a colt that gambols at its mother's side in the pasture, with gladsome heart each Bacchante bounds along.

10/8/03

My occasional poem for the occasion

• IN PRAISE OF THE GRAPE

With a Weary Heart...

With a weary heart, and though fighting a malaise of the soul, I  try to stay proactive during these tough times. The Battle ain't over yet...the fat lady is singing something about democracy and rights. Only sometimes it's hard to hear the words for all the fanfare.  

We must continue to stay proactive— especially as we approach the 2nd anniversary of 9/11 —and especially in lieu of last night's presidential address where Bush has asked for yet another 87 BILLION dollars for war aid in Iraq. (So who's keeping all the oil profits...by this point, it should be a self-sustaining war...fed by Iraqui oil profits...).

For the first time in 25 years, thanks to current federal and state govt. spending patterns, I have no employment in the schools (zip, zilch, nada), and Bush's request for a further 87 BILLION dollars is hitting me hard in the viscera. 

I wake up nights sweating bullets. Last night, I watched the full moon cross the face of Mars and I thought long and hard on the god of war. For a moment I envisioned the night sky as a vast game of chess. The moon's checkmate.

Perhaps the Harvest Moon will cleanse the battlefield of the sky. Meanwhile, there's work to be done.

As Dylan Thomas admonished, do not go gentle into that dark night. We must rage, rage against the dying of the light. (and against those new nukes as well...) But do light a candle this week at one of the myriad vigils planned worldwide, hold it up to the moon so she can see the way. 

Happy Solstice. 

ENDGAME (after Sesshu Foster)

ENDGAME                                                            

      ...found a body republic...  —Sesshu Foster        

Finding my lost writing notes to taste,

garden snails sampled the corners of the page,

but dog-eared paper thwarts any attempts

to tame an unruly kingdom of paper.

         I think in mnemonics: Kings played chess...

What phylum of mollusc covets a taste for fingered corners

where I’d penned a temporary pledge of allegiance

to Sesshu Foster’s republic of the body?

They paid particular attention to the “p” in “pledge,”

rimming the place where I had crossed out “body” for “sex.”

But left untouched the place where I wrote:

“by which it stands, indivisible from nature.”

Maybe it’s a taste for ledges or lead, not Latinate structure,

or pickled fingerprints that attracted them.

As if in answer, they chewed on an article speculating

on chromatic emotions and cephalopod sentience,

shunning the newspaper headlines ablaze with war headlines

to calligraph another kingdom across a rugged terrain of laundry.

         while the mind toys with: ...on fine grain sand

                  We used to sprinkle salt on them,

                  & listened to the hiss and sizzle of green flame,

                  indifferent to their agony.                           

What class of sentence, what order of word

tempted snail cognoscenti to gather at the garden gate

beneath a full moon or street lamp?

What family of noun or genus of verb feeds them

as they pledge allegiance to the continuation of their species

beneath a moonlit republic of mollusk self?

9/16/03

Heart-root

Heart-root. Surrender or defeat? Sounds like a battle cry. Infantry means foot soldiers underfoot, on their feet marching, marching towards defeat or victory. I'm lost amid Caesar's batillions.

All these war words on our minds. AWAD's selection is bellicose which means warlike. Nothing to do with full bellies though I'm getting one. Not enough marching since the last time I wrote in this in this journal. A freak accident with a  truck hitting my cousins house and my new-to-me car, wrenched my spine. I've been flattered by it. A silly accident, injured by my own car slamming into the house.

Yesterday I helped Neil prepare his room for open house, I covered a wall with collages from under the sea, and outer space, to the inner workings of the mind. It's all one thing. 

During during our writers' group meditation, I could feel the energy trying to climb up my spine and and immerse itself past the injury, but the cat yowled and we giggled. The energy retreated and then surged past the blockage and I was thinking about Windex. The cure-all in my Big Fat Greek Wedding. Wendex cures everything. Maybe I should spray Windex on my spine, or on my feet. Never surrender to defeat. 

This is ridiculous, I can't deepen. I can't write something pithy. Maybe I need to spray some Windex on my pen. Or on my mind. Making collages yesterday to heal the date, indelible on the brain, 9/11, like Kennedy's death over and over. I was at JFK high school. Art, my first language, is what I used to heal myself. We all need some Windex for the soul so that we may heal, so that I may see again with a clear vision, nothing between my thoughts and the air. 

Last night I dreamed I was on the hill of my childhood and the harvest moon passed in front of Mars.

9/12/2003

Writers' Group

Letter to the Enright House, County Kerry, Ireland

To the Enright House

Martin Enright, Irish Agent

Dromlought, Lisselton

County Kerry, Ireland

Sirs:

Enclosed are several poems for consideration in your publication of Irish-American poetry:

Like So Many Board Feet

In Mary Bianchi's Garden

Lighting the Electric Fire

Condemned Flesh

Chickory II

Comida del Muerte

Dispelling Darkness

Manna

However, I find the 25-line framework a bit limiting—so what I’m sending is not necessarily indicative  of my larger body of work. I am interested in where you got my name for your publication venture, because once I wanted to do a poetry exchange with Ireland, but was unable to find funding for it. But my contacts did put me in touch with Seamus Heaney (whom I've met several times), I've also met Paul Muldoon—he was staying in Berleley, CA for a while.. Are you familiar with the work of a San Francisco  Latino poet, Francisco Alarcon? He  just returned from a reading tour of Ireland; his poetry was translated into Irish. New Rivers Press of Minneapolis, Minn., is also doing an Irish-American anthology. You may want to contact them. 

I am interested in finding out more information on your book-length manuscript competition. I will be in Holland until the end of October. You may reach me at R. Hogerbeetsstraat 97 -III, 1052 VV Amsterdam; otherwise, please send information to the above address after October 25.

Sincerely yours,

Maureen Hurley

P.S. Most of my Irish connections (Walsh & Sullivan) are from the West—in Kerry (Tralee), Cork (Bantry)— and some in Dublin ( Reilly & Duffy), Fighoragh (sic) & Longkesh. My father’s side of the family left Ireland during the late 19th c.; my maternal grandparents left in 1910 - 1919. As far as I can deduce I’m 100% (Black) Irish by all four bedposts(there was talk of the  invasionof the Spanish Armada in Bantry). I was raised by my maternal Corkonian grandmother, and so learned history/culture  according to the  Irish alongside the Anglo-Saxon (American)versions of history. Her Irish sensibilities certainly are  a prima source in my writing.

BIO

Maureen Hurley lives near the Russian River, where she is California Poets in the Schools Area Coordinator for Sonoma and Napa Counties in California. She's recipient of several artist in residency awards from national, state, local, and private agencies including seven California Arts Council grants. She has led workshops in public schools, a mental institution, and universities in California, the Bahamas, and in the USSR. She is director of Poetry Across Frontiers, a program that exchanges student poetry and art with sister city, Cherkassy, in the Ukraine. Hurley is a visual artist and photo-journalist as well as a poet. Her poems and photographs have appeared in Apostrofe!, ROTOR, Phantom Cherkassy Krai (Ukraine); The Louisville Review, Shaman’s Drum, Sing Heavenly Muse, Looking for Home, Chaminade Literary Review, Caribbean Writer, Gulf Stream, Poetry SF, First Leaves, Napa Poetry Review, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Poetry Flash, California Quarterly (CQ), Blue Window. Electrum, Sculpture Gardens Review, American Poetry Review, Mexico City News, & Oakland Museum Magazine. Her poetry has been translated and published in Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian. She has work forthcoming in Tin Ear and Maverick. Student poetry and art anthologies produced and edited by Maureen Hurley include: Poem for a Russian Child, The Gift of Dreams, A Night Full of Doves, The Power of the Reckless Sleeper, Still Writing on Rocks, Someone Inside Me, The Poem is the Person's Life, and  Seeds Deep in the Earth.

when?

filed 9/12/03

9/11/2003

Today San Francisco is 42° warmer than average. How do you beat the heat? Today, during the height of the heatwave, I thought I was having a stroke, staggering around the house.

I fell into and out of the shower wanting to run away from my body, the way Hemmingway's cats did at Key West, only they were too tired to move and slouched across every cool tiled surface they could find. All 61 of them.

But the house I live in has carpets and wooden floors. Only the bathroom has tiles and it's hard to compute from the bathroom floor as the laptop is down.

So I kept thinking, maybe I'm dying, maybe I'm really sick. Maybe I really did get West Nile virus in south Florida. it was reported that there was an outbreak. Great, I'll get encephalitis.

I have headaches and I can't sleep and Diana keeps talking about the guy with encephalitis, who had to carry his gonads in a wheelbarrow. Well, no worries there.

So, I don't have sleeping sickness, I know that's from tze-tze flies. When I was in fifth grade I thought about these things a lot, you know. I worried about things like malaria and lockjaw. I was forever stepping on nails in the corral. So I was always checking to see if my jaw was locked. I couldn't imagine what kind of key it needed.

I imagined one exotic disease or another slaying me. I was like a young pre-med student with psychosomatic symptoms for every known disease known to man and woman.

I loved reading all about strange viruses and protozoa, thinking I was going to be a veterinarian when I grew up. Feverishly I studied scientific arcana, trying to beat the heat from some imagined illness.

An editor sends me a picture of glaciers. You can't beat that, she says.

My skin is splotched grey-green and red. People with too much iron have to get bled. It's a Celtic trait. We still live within the Iron Age.

Meanwhile, police helicopters circle overhead, it's a a new 9/11 legacy. Nonstop, red white and blue lights flashing in the night. Some legacy.

Someone asks: if your soul were a flower what kind would it be?

The cat is eating my tongue.

The full moon is eclipsing Mars. I can't take the unseasonable heat. The earth is heating up. The glaciers are melting.

We are still in the war zone. We never left.

9/11/2000

Educating the Imagination

Maureen Hurley on Censorship
McCarthy in the Classroom?

Censorship has always been present in the classroom. As teachers and teaching writers, we are used to choosing which poems are appropriate for the end-of-the-year anthology, which story we will have a child revise for Parent Night. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s true. At its most harmless, censorship can operate to maintain equilibrium and respect. But since Columbine, and even more prevalently after the events of September 11th, censorshop and subtle forms of censure have begun to hinder educators in their efforts to teach creative writing.

One California teacher I spoke with expressed her concerns that school administrators (in conjunction with the courts) are gradually becoming the “thought police” of student writing. Write a scare story or a dark poem, and go to jail. The case of California student George “T.” is a compelling example. A San José Supreme Court appeal case this fall will test First Amendment rights when the court decides whether or not the 15-year-old student’s dark poetry constitutes a crime. The bizarre case of George “T.” is not an isolated one. Since Columbine, there has been a rising number if iuncidents in which school authorities and courts have arrested children for their art.

Homeland security and jingoism have only exacerbated the pressures on teachers. Since the war in Iraq began last winter, censorship has played out in myriad ways. One writing teacher in the Bay Area told how a colleage at his high scholl prohibited any student discussion that was critical of President Bush’s policies. The end result? A host of student poems containing retaliatory pro-war rhetoric. On a similar note, another teacher said her principal objected to the idea of student peace songs being a part of their annual spring concert, for fear that some parents might object.

While I have not encountered outright censorship in California schools, I noticed something more subtle occuring in my own writing residencies—in a word, self-censorship. For two year now, I have found myself walking on eggshells in order to assure school administrators that I am “safe.” But my students are scared of terrorism and war, and naturally their concerns emerge in their writing. And it is not merely fear they express, but pacifism. I have frequently been caught in the double bind of wanting to please school administrators on the one hand, and on the other— wanting to offer a safe haven for students to express themselves.

During the course of research for this article, I discovered that I was not alone. Several writing teachers expressed an almost palpable fear, an unspoken code for teachers not to mention the “unmentionable.” And while these fellow educators assured me that they were not being censored, their actions spoke louder than words. With the exception of one teacher who plans to retire this year, not one would allow their names to be used in this article, for fear of future repercussions from both their school administrators and from parents in the community.

Quake Notes 9/4/03

I felt the pre-quake coming from the northeast, I could hear it coming like an impossible train. Or maybe a hurricane. I knew right away it was an earthquake and I knew it was significant so the pre-rumble was a good warning, the earthquake came violently, with a bang.

I was worried that the apartments north of us would sway. They may have contributed to some of the pre-quake noise. It was rolling, like riding a barrel on a pond, I could feel the direction it came from. 

We took cover in doorways as things bent and swayed. And we counted the time it took to stop. Bright jars of Pepper Eggplant leapt from shelves and spun dizzily in the light  like startled large Hawaiian cockroaches.

I could tell it was a 4.0; at first it felt like a 3.5 but then by the end, I upgraded it to a 4 (chalk it up to experience). I could tell we were near the epicenter. There was a tiny afterquake. Less than a 2. What was weird was that we could feel it roll right through the house, like an underground beast going south. The actual quake was more  like an explosion, the pre-rollers like heavy trucks rolling down 580, which we live next to. The baby after-quake felt like shaking pudding. Chocolate.

7:45 PM.  Another jolt. Felt like it was about a 2 aftershock...like a very large horse nudging the house...again it came from the north. This 1926 cottage is wood framed. Balloon construction and stucco. Takes quakes well. We're on bedrock, right above Lake Merritt. I will expect more tremors. 

Much later, we'll find the cracks in the walls. Now we thank God it wasn't the Big One. Tonight I sleep with my jeans on, pockets loaded with keys, wallet and cell phone. Ready to go. For we sleep on the uneasy Hayward Fault. Stuck techtonic plates, a ticking timebomb.


9/4/03

GAME PLAN 1—after Sesshu Foster

GAME PLAN 1—after Sesshu Foster

The road goes on. Yes. Into a river. What was the game plan? To plunge in deep. To observe light rippling into shadow where the willow roots drink deep. Where the swallows dip down. Where the mare is tearing at the grass. The road not taken. Where we forded the river.

To the body's transgressions. To a life half lived. To a half life on the shell. To artillery. An explosion of doves. Is this the part where you duck & cover? Cheval de friese. Archaic names of war found in a field manual. Foundered. Labor long unto darkness. To the choices made. Was that the game plan?

The mare, she, pulled up short. Now I lay me... Remember to fund yourself. If only. Not regret. Observe leaves practicing flight, late afternoon. She came up short. Empty shore. Name the distinction between sea and sky. Her crooked legs failed her, Man o War blood in her veins. Her eye always on the horizon. Riding her into the wind. As if there was no end to it.

To fund the intellect the way of the psyche.

Is there a manual for that? To think we were once the wind. And now living in the present tense while sirens... Ordnance. The odor of pine, chaparral under the hot sun. Lughnasadh. End of summer. Before the fall. Hot flashes. Red mare, faster than verb. To be or not to question this life. We were in the race. But tortured dreams ran me down, tied me up in sheets. To ride like that.

Asylum from the mind, from the body.

To know flight. Call it God. Then, foundered horsepower.

Fear of mortality, fear of death. Fighting the prison of the mind. Clipped wings. I came up short. How many horses under the hood? To find a river, to fund a relationship, to found a life. To lose it. Then what?

Before the event horizon, at the race track, I looked up at her ancestor cast in bronze. We always used to yell at the slowest: Come on Seabiscuit! But a car was threading the road toward a determined republic of blood. Now I lay me down, down down... No, not in the middle of the road. Ashamed, we fought darkness. Gazing up between the oaks, I couldn't leave all that blue. No, not yet. In the middle of the road under all that cerulean sky. Let there be time to catalogue all the colors of the wind. To watch hawks tumbling down. No, not the siren. Not the needle aimed at her heart, too long for thought. Not that plunge into flesh. Deep. A whisper of wings into the dark.


8/2003

9/03

Letter to Michael Kettner, Catalyst

Dear Michael Kettner,

I noticed that you're selling a book I'm published in, under Abebooks.com. I'd completely forgotten about it...and AD Wynans...Migawd! How did you obtain a copy of the book? Would you like me to sign it to increase its value? Hahah. Um, what poem DO I have in it?

Maureen Hurley

CATALYST #17: 3nd ANNUAL EROTICA ISSUE
Bookseller: M. Kettner and Son, Booksellers
Contact: Michael Kettner
Address: M. Kettner and Son, Booksellers, 1501 NE 68th, Seattle, WA, U.S.A., 98115
E-mail: mkettnerbooks@juno.com
Phone #: 206-323-7268

Dear Maureen, 

How nice to hear from you again. Lest you have forgotten, i was the publisher of said CATALYST. Have taken a few years off writing to insure i have retirement income - to set up an on-line book biz specializing in poetry and sm. pr. stuff. Only have a few dozen of Catalyst 19 left, and since so popular, am selling them one by one on line;

Your contribution to #19 was a graphic, "self-portrait". thanks for offering to sign a copy. however with periodicals, there is little value enhancement with signatures unless multiple contributors do so or if signed by editor or famous person. in the case of erotica, the mere fact it is erotica, is usually enough. 

You did receive a copy or two of #19, did you not? don't remember you being on list of copies returned with no forwarding address. check out my list on ABE by clicking on booksellers. have over 1500 sm. pr. titles on line with at least as many to go. also have large list of general titles since it's hard to make a living on poetry alone. if you ever want to sell off part of your poetry collection, let me know. 

Take Care, M.

In a message dated 8/28/04 12:24:34 PM, mkettnerbooks@juno.com writes:
<< if you ever want to sell off part of your poetry collection, >>

Hi Michael,

I've been thinking about it for ages, the books just sitting in my cabin in Forestville, some rare ones at that. And correspondence. Robert Bly/ Calliope Press...I put on that event at SSU. Lotta work & little gratis from himself.

Lee Perron--do you know him? also got into the rare book business--along with John McBride...who, if I have the story right, was laif off after 25 years from Moe's Books on Telegraph--recession, a sign of the times. As our friend Ken Bullock said, hell of a time to try & sell books. How are you doing with it? Are you still publishing journals? I did look at my resume and Catalyst is indeed listed--way back in the 1980s.

Ach, the book signing, It was merely a ploy to say hi via cyberspace...your name rang a bell, and certainly, Seattle....I'm trying to put a face/event/place to your name as I'm certain that we met...in SF? Or Port Townsend? I'm excellent with faces, even after 20 years...when & where? Obviously you've got my drawing, it must be a self portrait...

Gawd it's been a right long while since that epic journey we took north from Mendocino: Sharon Doubiago, Leonard Cirino, Tobey Kaplan, myself and Moonlight the Alsatian shepherd, in a white station wagon named Roses. An anarchy of northern California poets crashed the Port Townsend Writers' Conference...Carol Jane Banks was having apoplexy right, left & center.

We were all sleeping on the beach, one full moon night, the tide came in and nearly swept us away. Leonard was floating around in his down bag like a cork. Bill Knott was living in a big Victorian on the bluff with Pamela Uschuk (sp)?, we spent a couple of nights on the porch. We later found some barracks that were open after that. CJ Bangs was trying to get us bounced out of the conference but we were like bad pennies. Meridel LeSueur took to us, said we stayed or else and that was that.

Meridel took Sharon under her wing, and that was the start of something, all right. I kept out of the way, feeling like a poetry impostor, and years later, Meridel was asking me why I stayed away so long, was I mad at her...by then it was too late for a prodigal daughter.

I remember Ray Carver, a long cool drink of, er...uisge beatha, chainsmoking and we were all singing Irish songs at some bar with Tess Gallagher... and Michael Daley. Empty Bowl. And Marina Albert...putting us up. All these names bubbling up. it was a spur of the moment event that irrevocably changed my life, somehow I always thought it would continue like that, mad confabs of poets...but then long distances of time and isolation set in.

After finally breaking it off w / John Oliver Simon, I wound up in the USSR doing a poetry & art exchange. It was there I began to translate the Soviet poets. I ran into Marina in Moscow, we were both living in Leningrad with crazy Soviet singers. We'd hoard our dimes and meet at the Seagull Cafe on Nyevsky Prospect, we'd pay an outrageous sum (a week's wages for some) for lattes, worth every penny. 

One time we met Mendelstahm's publisher, it was Glasnost and there was hope. He brought his samizdat publications out of hiding and we held a piece of history. For that one publication he could've been killed. In Moscow, I saw Akhmatova's frail sister feeding pigeons in the snow. But I had to let go of Russia in order to survive. I came back to the States.

I did get to Poetry International in Rotterdam a couple of times, and was in on the Breytenbach translation project...with the likes of Holub, Heaney, Dove...I was onto something, in that I loved the process of translation, then I was nearly killed in 1997, a car accident, and with the shock and healing and all that, poetry sort of left me. I still write, but not with the fervor of the past. Dabbling in prose too, but what's a dyslexic to do with linear thought? After the accident I went back to school and got a MA/MFA at SFSU, w/ a side of Celtic studies at UC Berkekey. Did some playwriting too. But I blather on...

Maureen

Hey Maureen, 

no, 12 years of publishing was enough for me. still writing. on-line is the way to go with book biz these days. more one has on line, the more you make. been learning on-line biz from a couple of the masters here in seattle. left Kathleen after 23 years a couple revolutions about the sun ago. tough at first but had to be done. 

quit job of 16 years and decided to set myself up so i'd never have to work for someone again. just write and sell books. if your poetry collection is anything like mine, i'm very interested if you truly want to sell. i'm just getting past initial years of set-up and debt management it takes to get going and could probably work something out as autumn progresses. 

glad to hear you've recovered. the writing impulse is fragile. been observing it in others for years, studying, if you will, how to maintain it and have it thrive. not easy to do, especially as one ages and life's vicissitudes work on one. have to get ready for work (at Horizon Books). talk to you again soon. -M. P.S. No, we have never met. You were in town once but we didn't hook-up, if i remember correctly.

Take Care, M.

Letter to Lynn Woolsey on Head Start

Dear Representative Woolsey:

There's an old adage: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Head Start, a highly successful educational program which, in the 1970s, has helped several members of my own family--my dyslexic cousins who would have otherwise become juvenile delinquents by failing school, as their mother did--is under threat of dismantlization by the Bush administration.

When I went to school, there was no such program available and the California education system failed me miserably: my dyslexia went undiagnosed for 30 years. I had to wait until junior college to discover that indeed I wasn't stupid as the California educational system had allowed me to believe. I received an education by sheer determination alone.

I just completed my MA and my MFA: English/Creative Writing at SFSU, something I could have accomplished in my 20's instead of waiting until I was nearly 50, had there been a Head Start program available when I was in school. Head Start catches some of these problems with early childhood screening programs, with nutrition programs and tutoring programs.

How can our nation claim to offer equal opportunity (let alone, justice or happiness) for all when we are failing to give all of our poorest kids the basic skills necessary to better themselves--programs that Head Start offers, which has a track record of success in helping kids mired in poverty, our most vulnerable citizens, to succeed:

* Children who participate in Head Start are more likely to graduate from high school;
* Kids who graduate from Head Start commit far fewer juvenile crimes;
* Because children in Head Start require less special education in school and don't break the law as frequently later in life, Head Start saves between two and four federal tax dollars for every dollar invested in the program.

It is patently obvious that Head Start offers much more than just an ounce of prevention to our most vulnerable citizens... Why in the world is the Bush Administration proposing to dismantle Head Start and replace it with inconsistent and untested state programs? This makes no sense and is directly at odds with the values that our country stands for.

It's shameful enough that our government is giving huge tax breaks to millionaires but failing to provide our poorest kids with the basics, such as Head Start. If anything, Head Start should be fully funded by the federal government with an additional $2 billion/year (that's less than one half of one percent of the Pentagon budget!).

I realize that "ain't" is no longer king's English, and we're no longer the colonies, but a nation--however, if we allow Bush to dismantle federal funding, and replace it with unregulated state funding/ administration, a significant portion of our children won't even be able to spell "ain't," let alone read it, or know why it's no longer in current usage.

Forget about the subtleties of dangling participles and the delights of other grammatical errors. Ain't that a shame. (Although judging by some of Bush's linguistic gems, he also might have benefitted by attending a Head Start program himself, but I digress...) if I may borrow a phrase uttered by Bush, Sr.: "Read my lips": this proposal is a recipe for unmitigated educational disaster.

As you may recall, I work in the Bay Area schools as an artist in residence (CPITS/YABA), teaching poetry (you've attended many of my events: especailly the sister city-USSR exchanges), let me say that it's already pretty grim in many of our schools.

As it is, California's educational system funding is already at the rock "bottomth" percentile in state funding, do you seriously think that a state-administered Head Start program would stand a chance of surviving current budget cuts?

Look at what is happening to our California Arts Council. Rather than dismantle the highly successful Head Start program, please fight to continue the program and expand its funding to cover all eligible children. An ounce of prevention goes a long way indeed.

Sincerely,
Maureen Hurley

My America anthology reading, BlackBox, Oakland (photo)

My America, BlueBarnHouse Press, anthology reading, BlackBox, Oakland, CA.