Teaching Conceptual Optics in the Classroom

Back in the 1990s, I saw several classes listed for kids at the Lawrence Hall of Science, and a school wanted a science unit for GATE (in Alexander Valley), so I created an arts based optics class combining several class write ups from the LHS...which was wildly popular... I taught it for years evey spring.

I never quite teach it the same way twice, I guess I'm teaching conceptual optics with a K as in Newton's Opticks. I have a certain, if vague fondness for Max Planck, Heisinger, and we can't forget Schrodinger's cat! I once held a letter Einstein wrote, after the Bonb, and I had a a 2nd cousin who worked on the Manhatttan Project—the math gene skipped me. And my grasp of physics is challenged but I can show how scientific questioning and hypotheses are related to artisitc inquiry.

It all started one day when I was throwing light around the room with prisms, and as we looked at the rainbows on the ceiling. a kindergartener asked me quite seriously, "Are you a magician?"

I often start with the EM scale and show kids where visual light lives on it. Such a narrow band. Then we explore and create a variety of optical illusions. Benhan rings, eye fatigue; we view an upside down world with magnifying glasses, we look at the retina as mirror (and that pesky flaw in the mirror, the optic nerve that forces the brain to create illusions like hotdog fingers), concave and convex (camera) lenses, we use fishing line sculpture for fiber optics, etc.

We make Dame Edna glasses, with one red and one green celluloid lens, color in geometric shapes, make contrasting color collages and look at them vibrate. Very 1960s acid trip kind of thing...the kids are all wandering around looking at the world with rose and green colored lenses, exclaiming, "Oh WOW!" it's a real scream. Sadly, I can no longer get celluloid, I'm eeking out my last few scraps (from Australia). Plasticwrap doesn't work. Can't see thru it.

We also do some really basic examination of eye structure, with partners, mirrors and flashlights...talk abiut how humans and other creatures see, and what colors we see vs. spiders & dogs. I show them how cyan, magenta and yellow dye can make every color. The main thing is that kids have fun while exploring a tiny portion of the optic realm.

We chase rainbows with prisms, CDs, crystals, Calistoga water bottles (the indentations throw rainbows) and bubbles. I've found that feather and snakeskin both have prismatic qualities. One final project is to throw sunlight at a right angle and create rainbows on a shadowed wall.

I think what got me interested in this originally was that when Newton's Opticks was published, it spawned a revolution in art and poetry...people had a new relationship to color and light. And I'm an artist and poet... I've a KQED SPARK grant at Cleveland ES during the day (painting on silk—see it's not paint, as in pigment but dye which stains the fiber—back to physics again). This is just extra. I'm still learning as I go.

A BROKEN HALLELUJAH FOR SEAN RITTER

A BROKEN HALLELUJAH FOR SEAN RITTER

Someone once said in order to tell the poetic truth
sometimes you had to stretch it a little to get to the deeper truth.
My beautiful and tragically flawed mother was a poetic soul
and when her sister Toddy couldn't have children
she got right down to the heart of things.
She was a woman way ahead of her time.
She created a small bundle of poetic truth and gave it to her sister.

When I was young, my mother often dragged me into churches,
not on Sunday, but in the middle of the week to pray to St. Jude.
Her only wrongdoing was sharing the genetic coil
that unwrapped in Sean the addiction and the burden of California's third strike
that led to this premature shedding of his own mortal coil.
Sean's middle name was Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

Sure Sean was a teenage terror, and a troubled young man.
His actions put strain on the family and occasionally the law.
But my mother loved Sean with a fierce mother love
that transcended and forgave his flaws.
For Sean also inherited her talents and good qualities.

Sean was a carpenter. After the Loma Prieta earthquake
he restored fallen landmark buildings of Santa Cruz,
and he built showcase homes for myriad families
though he could never build a home within his own soul.
When my mother died, Sean stepped up to the plate to share the burden.
He was there to sing praises to the crazy hallelujah that was his mother.

But from that tragically flawed miracle called Sean Jude Ritter
other miraculous lives were formed.
I give my mother thanks to Sean
for his brothers, Barney, Myles and for Katie.
And from that miracle, I give thanks for
my nieces Tiffany, and little Emma Rose,
for Brittany, brand new Sean Logan, and of course, for Taryn.

Before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Irish poet Seamus Heaney
once said to me that as a tribe, we are a genius of poets.
Genius runs in the family but the flip side of the coin,
is that the piper has been well paid for his time.

When my mother died, she had a tape of Leonard Cohen's songs,
it was set to the song Broken Hallelujah—which became the Shrek theme.
I kept on playing that song all through the night
and when I got the news of Sean, that song played through my head
wouldn't let me sleep, so I downloaded three versions of it
and when I peeled away the onionskin layers of language
I realized the music was telling me that Sean was a broken hallelujah
and that I should praise him.

We are all connected by the deeper truth of family
bonds that cannot be broken by death alone.
Sean was a broken hallelujah. I will remember his strengths.
I hope that he will find a great scaffolding project in the mansions of God
within the folds of giving up of the individual self to the greater self
and to that vast ocean of love.

10/27/07

Sean Jude Ritter was my half-brother, but, because my aunt thought that she couldn't have kids, my mother, who was in no condition to raise a child, gave him to her to raise, and so he was raised as a cousin.

Being his half-sister, I wrote this piece, expecting to read it at his memorial, but my cousins and nieces completely ignored me, and didn't even acknowledge that Sean was my half-brother. I was polite, as I realized it wasn't about me, but, their grief. No need to feel snubbed—we were all grieving. So, I let it be. I lost this writing and, while cleaning out old files, I only now found it Jan 2/2014. It's lain fallow long enough. Time to let it go.  

A POEM FOR MT. ST. HELENS 1980

 A POEM FOR MT. ST. HELENS 1980

Here, the dawn breaks 

like a dancer veiled in vermillion.

Here, it arrives in crimson clouds 

arranged against cerulean skies.
It swirls and leaps in fleeting colors 

until we are dizzied about

and all out of breath.

10/5/2007? no date

don't know if it was for Helens or Helena, but 1980 suggests Helens,

Interruption, freewrite

Interruption: not to interrupt as in bury but to erupt like a volcano. Pyroclastic chaos. The sunrises and sunsets these days are lurid fan dancers of flaming color. The volcanoes on the other side of the world, on the other side of the hemisphere, are belching forth and the sky is a flamethrower of passion. No tender pink peach and mango hues, but raging carmines and crimsons like women in sequined red dresses. All eyes are on the night sky. No rosy-fingered dawn but entranced firewalkers on the hot coals of morning. We hardly know how to keep contain all this beauty and so we haul out our cameras to capture fleeting glance at this immorality of color and  maybe even an immortal lady in the red. You interrupt my sleep and  haunt me with your vermilion veil stretched across an indigo night. I am at odds with all this color and I cannot just sit and watch. I want to paint the sky and auroras of color—whether Australialis or Borealis, I'm not choosy. 

10/5/2007?

A POEM FOR MT. ST. HELENS 1980

Here the dawn breaks 

like a dancer veiled in vermillion.

Here it arrives in crimson clouds 

arranged against cerulean skies.
It swirls and leaps in fleeting colors 

until we are dizzied and all out of breath.

10/5/2007?

Buena Vista Social Club on AmieStreet Music

“Talk about finding solid gold on Amie Street Music! The Cuban All Star Band aka the Buena Vista Social Club, has gotta be the motherlode of Cuban music. The all stars of Cuban BC Big Band (Before Castro) era had a huge American following in Hot & Hip Havana from the Prohobition to the 1950s.

have a listen here

On the track, "Chan Chan," the late, great godfather of the son-bolero style, Compay Segundo, performs his own world famous composition with lead singer, Eliades Ochoa. That unmistakable four-chord opening "son" is Buena Vista Social Club's calling card!

Some of you might recall Wim Wenders' amazing 1997 award-winning documentary entitled "The Buena Vista Social Club," that showcased Old Havana's golden age of big band music during the 1940s.

In those days there were fraternal social clubs for all kinds of interests: cigar clubs, literary clubs, music clubs. Think mens' clubs, like the Bohemian Club. There was one Afro-Cuban music club, the Buena Vista Social Club which was abolished, the music nearly lost forever when socialism "abolished" racism. But hey, it gave us a communist-sanctioned version of mambo called salsa.

These world-class Cuban musicians who invented the mambo, lost their livelihood under the throes of communism, the king of mambo Perez Prado fled to Mexico and Ibriham Ferrer, the veritable honey-voiced Nat King Cole of Cuba, was reduced to shining shoes on the streets of Havana for pocket money.

Kudus to Ry Cooder who was instrumental in resurrecting these neglected stars of the golden Cuban musical tradition that languished some 40 years. Cooder's three resulting CDs, by "Los Super abuelos" (super grandaddies) of Cuban music, The (Afro) & the Cuban Allstars, and The Buena Vista Social Club, took off like wildfire—almost entirely by word of mouth.

The most famous CD, the Grammy award-winning album, the Buena Vista Social Club (1997), recorded in six days in Havana's vintage RCA-EGREM studio, went on to sell over 6 million copies, worldwide. Not bad for word of mouth.

Cooder was later prosecuted and fined for breaking the US trade embargo Trading with the Enemy Act.

These old Havana musicians really are super abuelos. Imagine this: Compay Segundo (1907-2003), who invented a seven-stringed musical instrument similar to an Andean charango, called the armónico, came to world fame at the age of 93 and in 2003, he recorded his final album, "Las Flores de la Vida" at the tender age of 96.

Ry Cooder said of his passing:
"The last of the best,
the oracle,
the source,
the one who represents where it all flows from"
is gone from us.

Horsemen, pass by.

Arby's Dancing Chimps Ad is Offensive & Racist

When I saw the Arby's dancing chimp ad, at first it made me laugh. I thought, Oh, Riverdance, oh how funny. Michael Flatley and all that. But it also made me uncomfortable. So I began to explore the basis for my gut reaction: The pseudo-scientific theories of race eugenics and social Darwinism raised its ugly Medusine head.

A sampling of social Darwinism in action— a la Dr. Beddoe's "index of nigrescence"—reads like a string of redneck blason populaire jokes: ...The Irish are an inferior race, genetically prone to violence, incapable of higher mental feats associated with human intelligence. Teaching algebra to an Irishman is like teaching a cat to churn butter. Study of Irish DNA proves they are closer to a weasel or an ape than an Englishman...

However, in my objection to the Arby's jigging apes ad, I find I am in a very small company. Everyone seems to love the Arby's ad— they find it funny. Intellectually I understand that they see the ad as a current pop cultural icon (I should be flattered. Have we arrived yet?) What disturbs me is that people don't get that it is a reference back to a deeper cultural icon based on centuries of racism.

The missing stereotype that begs to be added to the Arby's ad is a minstrel chorus of whiteface jigging chimps.

Mouse Wars

Our neighbor Brooke is a real animal lover, she nurses stray and orphaned cats back to health, but her true passion is birds. One time I found her camouflaged in the hedge of my front garden, binoculars and tally sheet in hand, counting birds for a local birding club as there was a bird flu decimating the local population.

She's created a fabulous plant jungle around her house, an urban oasis in Oakland. She planted a birdbath and several bird feeders for her fine-feathered friends which drives Angelino Bernini, the resident black cat, crazy. Angelino may weigh in at 20 pounds, and though he's at least 12 years old—if not older—and missing a few teeth, he's still an avid birder. So his yard going days are curtailed. A tortured soul, he watches the birds from the window, with whiskers curled, at the ready, chatting a-a-a-ah, followed by a forlorn meow behind his Guantanamo prison of glass.

Brooke's bird-feeding urge started out small, with one small hummingbird feeder, followed by a rude platform on a post, then she put up a sleek plexi & chrome cylinder high-rise filled with millet and birdseed. She hung it from a branch, but the sunflower seeds jammed up the works.

So that sleek feeder was soon followed by a chalet style birdhouse feeder for the sunflower seed-eating birds. They came in such droves, it sounded like a Star Trek convention. The singing lemon tree quivered like an eager hound waiting for the word as they energetically hopped and chittered in its branches.

To keep up with the growing appetite of her feathered friends, she started buying sacks of birdseed and sunflower seeds in bulk. At this point, the husks and shells were creating such a thick mulch around the hydrangeas, it was attracting more than just the birds.

First to arrive were the red squirrels who loved the sunflower seeds meant for the grosbeaks, sparrows and finches. Every day they tussled with each other to get to the bird feeder. Word got out. Soon there were squirrel gang wars when the mothers would bring their young to the feeder.

Kate Wolf fragment

I go every year to the Kate Wolf Festival (except for this year).

I knew Kate from afar. She lived in Forest Knolls where I grew up. Kate Wolf spent a very short time in the San Geronimo Valley, I remember her sleeping in the back of her white Ford Falcon station wagon in Forest Knolls.  (Or was it a Rambler? More fitting a car for her.)

She, like so many other musicians landed in the Valley. But despite folk memory, Kate didn't live in Forest Knolls very long. She moved to Forest Knolls in the spring of 1982, but she left by September 1984, on the road. Gathering fame at last.

Then she moved to the Russian River, as did I, and I (cub reporter) took photos of her at the River Theater for a newspaper, The Paper...or was it the Sonoma County Stump?

I had a love-hate relationship with her music. I hated how she didn't have any energy when she performed. She was like a statue. She was flat. Not her notes. But there was no edge there. It made me feel lethargic, and a little depressed. I wanted to speed her up, to animate her. I chalked it up to depression. I wrote a less-than-flattering review of her performance at the Guerneville theater. It was before we found out about the leukemia.

She was living in Guerneville before she died. I wrote another story on her ca. 1985 when we were throwing benefits to help defray her huge hospital bills. The story is lost, in the flood. She died in December of 86. I have grainy photos of her somewhere. It was a long time ago.

When I went to the USSR in 1989, I taught the Soviets to sing her songs: Golden Rolling Hills of California....and the Redtail Hawk writes songs across the sky....

2007    rev (sort of) 2014. Still needs work. But it's a start.

SIMMER RITUAL

SIMMER RITUAL
—from Joe Milosch’s workshop

Nestled at the foot of the Palomar mountains
the thermal pools at Warner Springs Ranch
ripple with myriad prisms. Refracted light
bends our legs into sevens and elevens.
Palm leaves clatter in the desert breeze
like a film projector at the end of a reel
the audience waits while the spliced leader
flashes crosses and numeric bulls-eyes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... 
The Cupeños, Bing Crosby & the Duke
once soaked their weary bones here.
Joe asks us to write about a time when we were young.
I can't think of anything. I'm pushing 55, and I think
soon I'll be able to get into the movies cheap.
But the price of admission has more than tripled
since I was a kid. Yesterday I was the Baba, the baby.
Time is zooming by art the speed of regret.
I may have passed the half century mark,
but behind the long distance of these eyes,
behind this crepe thin skin, I am still young.
My hair is a raft of chestnut light
floating behind me like a horse's tail
and I'm remembering the ritual
of the first pool dip of the season.
Sometimes we'd sneak into the water
before the sun had done her job
as if to rush the coming of summer
and a glove of icy fear gripped our hearts.
We were left gasping for breath.
When I was young, I spent the entire season
swimming myself into aqua exhaustion
the healing plunge into a pool where pale bubbles 
rose up to challenge the endless sky.
A crimson leaf floats in the pool.
Stains the retina.
For a moment time had stopped.

Maureen Hurley 9/9/2007
Warner Springs Ranch

Poem published in Memories of Southern California: Poetic Recollections, Four Feathers Press, Don Campbell, Editor, 2022

UNTITLED

UNTITLED
—from Kim Shuck's workshop

Walk into the red morning
set your intentions of the day
What is the difference between prayer and poem?
I have been fighting that religion since I was six.
Things to be said, that should be said
transforming the noun of self into the verb of being.

Honor the tongue
drinking deep from the stream
drinking both hot and cold
drinking the ancient artesian water
drinking fire from the earth
to get to the heart of things.

Words from the Cherokee:
this woman's soul has come to rest
on the edges of your body
Let it linger there a while.

Poems have a specific time of morning
Four things that need to be said.
You breathe a poem, you don't recite it.
Simon's Mai Lai May Lai, letting it out
letting the breath out.

Small summit reaching the sky
reaching, reaching, reaching the blue
the blue granite, holes in the rock, mortar and pestle
winnowing, winnowing, winnowing, winnowing on granite
buckwheat and artimesia
granite reaching its stubby fingers to the sky
mountain mother milking the sky
cloud milk in deep blue (thin spring milk)
hangliding buzzards and sky hawks circle
ravens gossiping in the cottonwoods
buckwheat fingers accusing the sky
cabbage moths sucking nectar from tiny flowers
beneath the desert sun, a spittling pine,
cooling rain of tree sap on the skin
two dragonflies the color of blood, knot the air, red, red.
The crow and raven clans have come to an understanding
they each stay on their side of the creek.

Maureen Hurley 9/9/2007 Warner Springs Ranch

CPITS poems, Warner Springs

Poems from our annual CPITS gathering, at Warner Spring Ranch, a truly magical place replete with hot pools and native California Palms, nestled at the foot of Mt. Palomar.

ANCESTOR TONGUE
       —from Simon Ortíz's class

Conas tá tu. Mo anim Mairín
I am called Maureen, she of the sea,
Sometimes I am the Morrighan of the Battlefield
She who stood on the shoulders of CúChulainn
as he slumped tied to the Lía Fail
to the Stone of Destiny
as darkness descended
behind the corneas of his eyes.
She, who became the enemy
when he spurned her love—
she was steadfast in death.
I am not little Mary, the mother of God
as the Jesuits were wont to say.

To be the great three-fold goddess
the raven, forever associated with death
has me worried

because I was given the owl nametag
no raven, but still the same messenger.
Why it worries me is because of what follows.
Sometimes I dream of things no one should see
but the witness is an afterthought.

They say it's the Second Sight
a gift from my mother's family.
They say that in dreams begins responsibility.
but my mother's craziness chased me toward sanity
and I ran from that responsibility.

I'm supposed to be writing a poem
going deep inthe the verbness of am and is-be.
Instead, I'm skittering on the surface of fíos
of what I know, knowledge stacked like facts
cords of wood to hold us against the winter
instead of an airy dance
of water skeeters on a glassy pond.
I'm skittering on the brink 

of imagination into the precipice.

I have been the standing stone,
the Oghan writing on its edge
the raven, and the washer at the ford.
We wre uncertain of where we stand
the boundaries of self and will,

the anarchy of culture.

Ta me go maith. I learned some Irish at the knee.
I am the broken vessel, the carrier of a dead language.
I had to change my mother tongue in school
because Irish syntax didn't fit the American way.
We were like Simon Ortiz's Aco-ma
where the preposition does the work of language
the harbinger of direction and time.

Our mind works mysteriously, circuitously
and it remembers in spite of ourselves.
What is hidden, the hidden places
we all write it into our selves
our own way of being guided by the ancestral tongue.
Naming is a language event
that moment when you're presented to the sun, an Grian.
We write it into our selves, in stone.
We may have lost our language
but we have not lost ourselves.
We have not lost ourselves.
We have not lost ourselves.
We have not lost ourselves.
Hoh.

Maureen Hurley 9/7/2007 Warner Springs Ranch

NATURAL SELECTION
—from Maggie Anderson's class

Straddling a bridge of indecision
I face two paths, two beds of the same stream
one runs hot, the other is cold.
California Fan Palm is rooted deep into the fault
and grows as close as it can to the fire
where boiling water burbles out of the earth
while stinging nettles of the northern latitudes
lean into the perpetual shade on the cold bank
and remembers an age of ice and perpetual winter
the willow guards both sides of the bridge
but the datura of oblivion chooses
the wash of the desert wadi as its dream
Maybe I should seek its counsel or go mad
should I stay or go? 

A decade or two and then what?
I test each stream with my feet
my left foot in the cool creek bed
the other dips into hot water
but the voices of both streams gurgle in unison
they offer no solace, no sage advice
nor do they drown the stinging words.
The moment of change is the only poem.

Maureen Hurley 9/7/2007 Warner Springs Ranch

NATURAL SELECTION, II
—from Maggie Anderson's class

Desert willows guard the footbridge to another world
with a cacophony of graygreen leaves
while the honey locust spreads
its ordered palmate structure in lacy patterns.

California Fan Palm is rooted deep into the faultline
and grows as close as it can to the fire
where boiling water burbles out of the earth
while stinging nettles of the northern latitudes
lean into the perpetual shade on the cold bank
and remember an age of ice and perpetual winter.

But the datura of oblivion chooses
the wash of the desert wadi as its dream.
Maybe I should seek its counsel or go mad.

Where am I today with one foot in each stream
I can't decide whether to stay or go
whether to write poetry or prose
Am I done with poetry or is it done with me?

I let the next thing to cross my path
guide me and offer instructions.
The first is a bluebird flitting after flies,
the other is a pileated woodpecker
jackhammering holes into the pulpwood
drilling deeper, do it again.

But the voices of both streams gurgle in unison
they offer no solace, no sage advice
nor do they drown the stinging words.

A red dragonfly bleeds against the thermal pool
algae plants itself in vermillion & verde
three cottonwood leaves float, sun yellow
a raft of two crow feathers eclipses them.

Murmur of voices in a room, a steady stream of words.
Fear of change keeps me rooted here.
The moment of change is the only poem.
Maggie says that exact moment of change
that moment when we're neither here nor there
that is where the poem lies.

Maureen Hurley 9/7/2007
Warner Springs Ranch

UNTITLED SOUND POEMS
-from Dan Levinson's class

knock, knock, anyone there?
In the alley, broken glass questions
the soles of my shoes
again and again
Willful destruction of a window
an eye of the wind
Someone lived here once
He sweeps the glass across the cement floor
with his shoe, cleaning up
centuries of sand and glass
I'm shattering the surface of what I know
skimming the depths of what I am
ascending to the teatime level of the noon whistle

Maureen Hurley 9/8/2007 Warner Springs Ranch

UNTITLED SOUND POEM, II
-from Dan Levinson's class

bowl of sound
the tubes warming up
electronic buzz
a TV after hours
Frankenstein bellying up to the bar
for another shot of juice
birds twittering
or an old radio
can't pull in the station
Hello? tap the mike, blow on it
then inanely ask if you can hear me
too torturous to tell what the message is
morse code written by mice
I'm searching for an old SOS on the upright Royal
a gumshoe ganglion of words
staccato of bullets
an air raid of words
end of a song
an old 78 record hissing in the grass

Maureen Hurley 9/8/2007 Warner Springs Ranch

SIMMER RITUAL
-from Joe Milosch’s class

Nestled at the foot of the Palomar mountains
the thermal pools at Warner Springs Ranch
ripple with myriad prisms. Refracted light
bends our legs into sevens and elevens.
Palm leaves clatter in the desert breeze
like a film projector at the end of a reel
the audience waits while the spliced leader
flashes crosses and numeric bulls-eyes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...
The Cupeños, Bing Crosby & the Duke
once soaked their weary bones here.
Joe asks us to write about a time when we were young.
I can't think of anything. I'm pushing 55, and I think
soon I'll be able to get into the movies cheap.
But the price of admission has more than tripled
since I was a kid. Yesterday I was the Baba, the baby.
Time is zooming by art the speed of regret.
I may have passed the half century mark,
but behind the long distance of these eyes,
behind this crepe thin skin, I am still young.
My hair is a raft of chestnut light
floating behind me like a horse's tail
and I'm remembering the ritual
of the first pool dip of the season.
Sometimes we'd sneak into the water
before the sun had done her job
as if to rush the coming of summer
and a glove of icy fear gripped our hearts.
We were left gasping for breath.
When I was young, I spent the entire season
swimming myself into aqua exhaustion
the healing plunge into a pool where pale bubbles
rose up to challenge the endless sky.
A crimson leaf floats in the pool.
Stains the retina.
For a moment time had stopped.

Maureen Hurley 9/9/2007
Warner Springs Ranch

UNTITLED
—from Kim Shuck's class

Walk into the red morning
set your intentions of the day
What is the difference between prayer and poem?
I have been fighting that religion since I was six.
Things to be said, that should be said
transforming the noun of self into the verb of being.

Honor the tongue
drinking deep from the stream
drinking both hot and cold
drinking the ancient artesian water
drinking fire from the earth
to get to the heart of things.

Words from the Cherokee:
this woman's soul has come to rest
on the edges of your body
Let it linger there a while.

Poems have a specific time of morning
Four things that need to be said.
You breathe a poem, you don't recite it.
Simon's Mai Lai May Lai, letting it out
letting the breath out.

Small summit reaching the sky
reaching, reaching, reaching the blue
the blue granite, holes in the rock, mortar and pestle
winnowing, winnowing, winnowing, winnowing on granite
buckwheat and artimesia
granite reaching its stubby fingers to the sky
mountain mother milking the sky
cloud milk in deep blue (thin spring milk)
hangliding buzzards and sky hawks circle
ravens gossiping in the cottonwoods
buckwheat fingers accusing the sky
cabbage moths sucking nectar from tiny flowers
beneath the desert sun, a spittling pine,
cooling rain of tree sap on the skin
two dragonflies the color of blood, knot the air, red, red.
The crow and raven clans have come to an understanding
they each stay on their side of the creek.

Maureen Hurley 9/9/2007 Warner Springs Ranch

UNTITLED SOUND POEM, I

UNTITLED SOUND POEM
-from Dan Levinson's workshop

knock, knock, anyone there?

In the alley, broken glass questions

the soles of my shoes

again and again

Willful destruction of a window

an eye of the wind

Someone lived here once

He sweeps the glass across the cement floor

with his shoe, cleaning up

centuries of sand and glass

I'm shattering the surface of what I know

skimming the depths of what I am

ascending to the teatime level of the noon whistle

Maureen Hurley 9/8/2007 

Warner Springs Ranch

UNTITLED SOUND POEM, II

UNTITLED SOUND POEM, II
-from Dan Levinson's workshop

bowl of sound

the tubes warming up

electronic buzz

a TV after hours

Frankenstein bellying up to the bar

for another shot of juice

birds twittering

or an old radio

can't pull in the station

Hello? tap the mike, blow on it

then inanely ask if you can hear me

too torturous to tell what the message is

morse code written by mice

I'm searching for an old SOS on the upright Royal

a gumshoe ganglion of words

staccato of bullets

an air raid of words

end of a song

an old 78 record hissing in the grass

Maureen Hurley 9/8/2007 

Warner Springs Ranch

ANCESTOR TONGUE

ANCESTOR TONGUE

—from Simon Ortiz's workshop

Conas tá tu. Mo anim Mairín

I am called Maureen, she of the sea,

Sometimes I am the Morrighan of the Battlefield

She who stood on the shoulders of CúChulainn

as he slumped tied to the Lía Fail

to the Stone of Destiny

as darkness descended

behind the corneas of his eyes.

She, who became the enemy

when he spurned her love—

she was steadfast in death.

I am not little Mary, the mother of God

as the Jesuits were wont to say.

To be the great three-fold goddess

the raven, forever associated with death

has me worried

because I was given the owl nametag

no raven, but still the same messenger.

Why it worries me is because of what follows.

Sometimes I dream of things no one should see

but the witness is an afterthought.

They say it's the Second Sight

a gift from my mother's family.

They say that in dreams begins responsibility.

but my mother's craziness chased me toward sanity

and I ran from that responsibility.

I'm supposed to be writing a poem

going deep inthe the verbness of am and is-be.

Instead, I'm skittering on the surface of fíos

of what I know, knowledge stacked like facts

cords of wood to hold us against the winter

instead of an airy dance of water skeeters on a glassy pond.

I'm skittering on the brink 

of imagination into the precipice.

I have been the standing stone,

the Oghan writing on its edge

the raven, and the washer at the ford.

We wre uncertain of where we stand

the boundaries of self and will,

the anarchy of culture.

Ta me go maith. I learned some Irish at the knee.

I am the broken vessel, the carrier of a dead language.

I had to change my mother tongue in school

because Irish syntax didn't fit the American way.

We were like Simon Ortiz's Aco-ma

where the preposition does the work of language

the harbinger of direction and time.

Our mind works mysteriously, circuitously

and it remembers in spite of ourselves.

What is hidden, the hidden places

we all write it into our selves

our own way of being guided by the ancestral tongue.

Naming is a language event

that moment when you're presented to the sun, an Grian.

We write it into our selves, in stone.

We may have lost our language

but we have not lost ourselves.

We have not lost ourselves.

We have not lost ourselves.

We have not lost ourselves.

Hoh.

Maureen Hurley 9/7/2007 

Warner Springs Ranch

NATURAL SELECTION

NATURAL SELECTION
—from Maggie Anderson's workshop

Straddling a bridge of indecision

I face two paths, two beds of the same stream

one runs hot, the other is cold.

California Fan Palm is rooted deep into the fault

and grows as close as it can to the fire

where boiling water burbles out of the earth

while stinging nettles of the northern latitudes

lean into the perpetual shade on the cold bank

and remembers an age of ice and perpetual winter

the willow guards both sides of the bridge

but the datura of oblivion chooses

the wash of the desert wadi as its dream

Maybe I should seek its counsel or go mad

should I stay or go? 

A decade or two and then what?

I test each stream with my feet

my left foot in the cool creek bed

the other dips into hot water

but the voices of both streams gurgle in unison

they offer no solace, no sage advice

nor do they drown the stinging words.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Maureen Hurley 9/7/2007 

Warner Springs Ranch

Poem published in Memories of Southern California: Poetic Recollections, Four Feathers Press, Don Campbell, Editor, 2022

NATURAL SELECTION, II

NATURAL SELECTION, II
—from Maggie Anderson's workshop

Desert willows guard the footbridge to another world

with a cacophony of graygreen leaves

while the honey locust spreads

its ordered palmate structure in lacy patterns.

California Fan Palm is rooted deep into the faultline

and grows as close as it can to the fire

where boiling water burbles out of the earth

while stinging nettles of the northern latitudes

lean into the perpetual shade on the cold bank

and remember an age of ice and perpetual winter.

But the datura of oblivion chooses

the wash of the desert wadi as its dream.

Maybe I should seek its counsel, or go mad.

Where am I today with one foot in each stream

I can't decide whether to stay or go

whether to write poetry or prose

Am I done with poetry or is it done with me?

I let the next thing to cross my path

guide me and offer instructions.

The first is a bluebird flitting after flies,

the other is a pileated woodpecker

jackhammering holes into the pulpwood

drilling deeper, do it again.

But the voices of both streams gurgle in unison

they offer no solace, no sage advice

nor do they drown the stinging words.

A red dragonfly bleeds against the thermal pool

algae plants itself in vermillion & verde

three cottonwood leaves float, sun yellow

a raft of two crow feathers eclipses them.

Murmur of voices in a room, a steady stream of words.

Fear of change keeps me rooted here.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Maggie says that exact moment of change

that moment when we're neither here nor there.

That is where the poem lies.

Maureen Hurley 9/7/2007

Warner Springs Ranch

IN THE MOUNTAINS OF CHINA

IN THE MOUNTAINS OF CHINA

In the mountains of China
An apricot holds
the architecture of sunrise
in the rosy blush of its flesh.

Last in line, photographs,
a doorway from the past,
breaking the silence.

Architecture of sunrise
the firebird of the alps awakens.

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

The wild northwind

When the wild north wind blew, my horses would dance and skedaddle down the fire roads as if death were on their heels. They became unpredictable in flight with leaps of fancy and sudden swerves that left in my heart and stomach abandoned by the side of the road, or caught in my throat. They imagined fierce creatures chasing them, they took the bit between their teeth and ran harder still. Their hooves beating a staccato on the hardpan earth by the lake. Inevitably gravity was around the corner in the form of a cliff, or low hanging branches. I don't know how we survive childhood. But those horses, once they had run their course, were weary with a savage grace and they had a lightness of step, a new glint their eyes. And I realized it invigorated them. Perhaps they felt more alive at that moment, having run a race with imagined death, and won. Descendants of the tireless Arabian, hey held their tails up high to the wind and pranced more like swallows them horses, with nostrils flared, and breaking a sweat and solidly alive. 

(A Bedouin escaping his enemies threw off his cloak in order to let his mare run faster but her tail was raised so high it caught the cloak and he still escaped.)

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

ARCHITECTURE OF SUNRISE (short takes)

ARCHITECTURE OF SUNRISE (short takes)

An apricot holds
the architecture of sunrise
in the rosy blush of its flesh.

Last in line, photographs, 

a doorway from the past, 

breaking the silence.

Architecture of sunrise 

the firebird of the alps awakens.

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

The architecture of sunrise

A faint haze across the sun colors the evening light into orange and amber. A shaft of light paints the curbs so red that Niel's afraid to park there for fear of tickets. But the sun's about to set, no police will come. It's as if the fading sun were leaving us with a phoebian gift, painting a picture to be rebuilt in the rosy-fingered dawn. The architecture sunrise splashes against the slopes of the mountains and leaves sinewy beads in the canyons of its absence.

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

A nature of the mountains of China

An apricot holds 

the architecture of sunrise 

in the Rosie blush of its flesh.

Last in line, photographs, 

a doorway from the past, 

breaking the silence.

Architecture of sunrise 

the Firebird of the alps awakens.

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

A 9/11 survivor

Today I met a 9/11 survivor, an artist, Jeanette McKinley, who told me tales of what it was like being at Ground Zero. She talks of  huroncito depression, of how the material world accounts for little. She can’t make her art.. she is mute. She and Jane Bark trade conspiracy theories, but when it got interesting was when she told her personal story. I had no notebook, no camera, so this will be a story told in spurts, in no particular order. I will write until my wrist tires. I took a spill on a month ago and I am gimpy in both knee and wrist. But 911 is on everyone’s minds, subtext, and context. No time to write, but then the story dissipates. Unlike Allan Beavans, she was given a few more years’ worth of life to contemplate being a survivor. (She died a few years later of lung cancer, having breathed in lungfuls of toxic smoke.)

At the No Name Bar

We are at the No-Name bar in Sausalito, once my mother’s favorite haunt. Tonight it’s a different crowd, there’s a whole lot of hog-washing and posturing going on before this event. Sign up for open mic was at 8:30. Everyone’s late. First one up is a drone, drowning on in his own voice. Whole herds of hopeful guitarist enter the doors. Women aredressed for poetry readings. There’s a couple deep throating it. Yuck. This is a very tolerant audience. Anything goes. He drones on and on. I’m doing the math, at 15 minutes per person, we will be here all night. The emcee is lame. Number two plays a classical piece. I’m scanning the crowded room for people I might know but everybody I knew is long gone. The next one is a mouth harp piece, dude is on LSD. And now it’s 10 PM. It’s turning into an endless Neil Young kind of night.  I’m taking photos in the dark where people are ghosts, moving faster than light. I am bored. It’s all relative, we talk of those neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. My camera is demonstrating the principle now. A truck passes, it’s transparent in the camera —only the lights show where it has been. I am nameless in the dark at the No-Name with Neil and Jack McElroy who is knocking it back on heaven’s door. Jack, an Irishman, is passive aggressive. I can never figure out his game. It’s like sliding your hands up and down a guitar neck seeking the right fret. At this rate, Neil’s turn will never come. I haven’t hung out in a bar in ages. I did this open mic thing for 20 years and I’m antsy. Luckily the photography is a good distraction. I am literally shooting to keep my sanity. Hostile boredom is a lethal combination. Am I shooting through photographer Jan Bogaert’s eyes, or is it in my own composition emerging through the lens? Will this night never end?

No date