Porque Anadrio!

I am re-reading Otto-Raúl González'
Diez Colores Nuevos en Españo, aloud, badly.
Porque Anadrio es el color allegria!

Re-reading old journal entries from 1985, I was surprised to discover that John told me about Otto-Raúl's poem, Anadrio, when we first hooked up. No wonder I've been fulminating over that poem lately.

Funny, how the mind works circuitously, and circles back to settle like an old dog in front of the hearth. I guess I am seeking joy in a time of sorrow.

After I had helped John's daughter Kia scan photos last Thursday for the memorial, she was browsing John's bookshelf, and out of the blue, handed me the book. Of all the books on John's bookshelf, why that one, the one I wanted? Surely it was fate.

Looking up into that exact blueness of sky, I say, I begin to understand the how the theory of time and space continuum began. You say the word, Anadrio, an invented name for a new color for joy. You tell me of a Mexican poet, Otto-Raúl González, who invented ten new colors, and you said Anadrio is the color of joy and of good luck. —from Long Distance Relationship, 1985

see also Mexico Journal: getting our Guatemalan visas

It took several years for De Diez Colores Nuevos to be published (1993), and John was beginning to translate them in 1985.

Anadrio

Quien primero vio una nube de color anadrio
era un joven pastor de diecisiete abriles
que más tarde fue monarca de su reino
y hombre feliz hasta decir ya no,
porque el anadrio es el color de la alegría
y de la buena suerte.

¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!

En mil quinientos veinte
un español porquerizo de Castilla
vino a América y cuando se internó en la selva
vio un árbol de color anadrio
ese mismo soldado de fortuna
más tarde comió con Carlos V
y fue virrey;
porque el anadrio es el color de la alegría
y de la buena suerte.

¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!

En la época moderna otras personas
han visto objetos de color anadrio
y su suerte ha cambiado en forma radical.

Un pescador vio una sirena cuya cola
era anadria y desde entonces
pescó y pescó y pescó y pescó y ahora
es dueño de una flota ballenera;
porque el anadrio es el color de la alegría
y de la buena suerte.

¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!
¡Y de la buena suerte!

Vendía periódicos un niño,
rapaz sin desayuno, de pobreza trajeado,
un día en su camino vio una piedra
que era, por supuesto, de color anadrio.
Ese niño actualmente es accionista
de una inmensa cadena de periódicos;
porque el anadrio es el color de la alegría
y de la buena suerte.

Pinte usted
las paredes de su casa
de color anadrio
y le irá bien.

(Otto-Raúl González, De Diez colores nuevos, Editorial Praxis, 1993)

White amaryllis photo

White amaryllis, it was scented, but overly so. Kathryn Mapps gave me a bulb many hears ago, and it didn't do much other than grow leaves the first couple of years, so I stuck it outside. Then last year, it made its debut, one small flower, and this year, many flowers. Coming into its own, finally.

Scanner woes

OK, so my very, very elderly technology is biting me in the butt bigtime. The scanner I have does not have high enough resolution to scan negatives, and now the light table is off, so one side scans darker. So not OK.

I either need a GoFundMe project or find Patreon support (or both) to get a decent scanner that also scans negatives (Epson V800/850, around $1k used), and the time to scan. Any takers/supporters out there? I have some incredible photos of poets spanning 30+ years.

Luckily, I had already scanned most of the travel photos of John Oliver Simon earlier...

In the box: Harry Mattison & a poet flasher (aren't they all?), Will Staple & Gary Snyder at poet Robert Aitken Roshi's zendo on Maui...and that box is filled with photos. Mostly from Napa Poetry Conferences, and National Poetry Week, but also other events. Nice ones of Carolyn Kizer, Carolyn Forché, Galway Kinnell, Tess Gallagher, Frank Bidart, Janice Mirikitani & Cecil Williams, Jessamyn West, Meridel LeSeuer, Dennis Banks, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Ann Waldman, Alan Ginsberg, Larry Ferlinghetti, Bobby Kaufman, Gene Ruggles, Judy Grahn, Derek Walcott, Shirley Kaufman, etc...

And somewhere I have negatives of Alberto Blanco, Otto Raúl Gonzalez, Elsa Cross, Carlos Orellano, etc.

Then there's Poetry International negatives as well: Seamus Heaney, Dmitri Prigovv, Iosip Brodsky, Breyten Breytenbach, Miroslav Holub, the two Adrians....Henri, and?

Happy Imbolc, let there be light.

AFTER SCANNING PHOTOS of an ex for his memorial (haiku)

Haffa bottle of wine
and a haffa cheesy pizza
and I'm right as rain.

2/1/18

Epic Facebook fail (again) JOS obit flagged as spam

 

I got dinged this morning for posting spam when I was posting the name of the photographer that took a photo of John Oliver Simon who died today. I’ve noticed that the Facebook AI spambots troll particularly heavily around any personal death stuff. It’s as if the smell the blood of compassion or sorrow and strive to delete it. Here is my offending post that the FB spambots have been relentlessly attacking this morning.

So the FB spam censorship works both ways, Hector Berebguer's post too was marked as spam here on this thread.  Hector's post on John's page was one of the posts where my post was marked as spam. Reciprocal?

Hector wrote: Aquí te va un enlace a la página que John Oliver Simon y Lorena Lobita con muchas de las traducciones que John y Lorena hicimos juntos...                              https://poetasjuntosalrio.blogspot.mx/#!

Dear Facebook, what constitutes spam if you don’t randomly post links? Is it the length of the post, the number of times you repost information on friends’ sites? If we post memes till the cows come home, you don’t flag people for spam, so what gives? Clearly spamalot.

RIP John Oliver Simon 23 April 1942 - 16 Jan 2018

¡Presente! Mi corazón de los sueños. Buen viaje mi amor viejo. This was the back cover photo of our bilingual chapbook, Falling to Sea Level, Aldebaran Press, 1986. A chronicle of our many journeys to Mexico and beyond. Jorge Luján photo. Safe journey, old friend. 23 April 1942 - 16 Jan 2018.

JOS poet teaching article in T&W

JOS in Argentina 2012

JOS OBIT
John Oliver Simon, one of the Bay Area’s most beloved poets, died in the early hours of Jan. 16th, from cancer, in the home of his fiancée Susie Kepner. He is survived by daughters Kia Simon and Lorelei Bosserman, son-in-law J.D. Moyer, granddaughter Tesla Rose Moyer, and former wives Pam Simon Hazel, Alta, and Jan Courtright Simon. He was 75.
Born in New York City in 1942, he wrote his first poem under a full moon in 1956. Educated at The Putney School, Swarthmore College (Phi Beta Kappa), and the University of California Berkeley, Simon was mentored by John C. Adler, Jeffrey Campbell, Daniel Hoffman, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Carol Lee Sanchez.
While at Cal and after, Simon was active in the Free Speech Movement and in the famous struggle to liberate Berkeley’s People’s Park. Of this time, he wrote “I was a newcomer to the Bay Area, having arrived in Berkeley in September 1964 in time to sit down in the crowd on Sproul Plaza surrounding the police car which was holding Jack Weinberg prisoner in the back seat in the first act of what would become the Free Speech Movement. I came west three months after graduating from Swarthmore College, planning to get my Ph.D. in English at Cal since I had not been accepted to graduate school at Harvard, and because my mother’s forebears had arrived in San Francisco a 110 years before that and California was my terrain of legend.”
Simon’s nine full-length books of poetry included Caminante (praised by Gary Snyder and Juan Felipe Herrera), Roads to Dawn Lake (Oyez Press, 1968), Rattlesnake Grass (Hanging Loose Press, 1978), Lord of the House of Dawn (Bombshelter Press, 1991), and Grandpa’s Syllables (White Violet Press, 2015). His poetry was published in numerous literary journals and reviews, “from Abraxas to Zyzzyva.” He also co-founded and edited the poetry magazine Aldebaran Review, which ran from 1967 to 1978.
In 1989, Simon was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship by the California Arts Council. He also received an NEA Fellowship in Translation for his work with the great Chilean surrealist poet Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011). On Jan. 20, 2015, Simon’s contributions to the Bay Area writing and educational community were recognized by the city of Berkeley with “John Oliver Simon Day.” On May 14, 2016, the Berkeley Poetry Festival presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
As an educator, Simon devoted himself to teaching children to write poetry. He co-founded and taught at the People’s Community School in Berkeley, 1969-1973. He was a former president and board member of California Poets in the Schools (CalPoets) and served as the artistic director of Poetry Inside Out, a program of the Center for the Art of Translation. In 2013, he was named the River of Words Teacher of the Year by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass.
Despite not learning Spanish until the age of 40, Simon became a noted translator specializing in contemporary Latin American poetry. His cultural reporting was featured in Poetry Flash and American Poetry Review. In 2017, he traveled to Madrid to attend a conference of translators of Gonzalo Rojas.
In addition to his daily writing practice, Simon was an avid backpacker, kayaker, gardener, and baseball fan.
John Oliver Simon touched the lives of thousands with his teaching, friendship, and poems. Mexican poet Alberto Blanco wrote, “The poems of John Oliver Simon, like all true poems, trace a map, a psychography, which allows us to enter, not only into another life but into the voyage of that life, and not only into another culture, but into other cultures: into another point of view.”
Simon himself wrote, “Language is the central human invention, the hive which we are ceaselessly elaborating, even as I speak.”
A memorial service will be held at the Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, on Feb. 3rd, at 2 p.m.

A video of John produced by Érica Goss.

John Oliver Simon dream

Last night (or rather, this morning) I dreamed that John Oliver Simon and I were on the road. I'm not sure where we were but it was something like New Mexico, or it could've been Nevada. I don't think it was Mexico. We were in a new white VW Beetle, crammed to the gills with all our gear. I must've been driving, because when we parked the car, he took my face in his hands, and tenderly kissed my cheek, saying, I love you. It was so tenderly sweet. He was so present. Not his ambivalent self. I said, I love you too.

We pulled into the driveway of a sagging two-story house that spoke of the Southwest. We clamered up the steps to meet some poets, and were talking for hours. I went out to get my camera gear and the car was gone. John joined me on the porch, as we looked all over the yard for the car.

Someone had stolen it with all our gear, electronics, cameras, clothes—everything. I was too shocked to be angry. Then as I looked around the yard, John had disappeared. I was alone, cameraless, in a strange town, in a strange state, or country, utterly alone, with no way home. He had left me. He had left me.

I awoke feeling utterly bereft. Abandoned. It was almost 4 AM, I couldn't go back to sleep.

That afternoon, as we were headed to Savers in Dublin to get rid of old clothes, and buy some new ones, I told Neil about the dream. I said I think it's a warning that John is dying. The doctors gave him a year or two, but I had a bad feeling. I couldn't shake John from my mind.

Next morning, Tina from CPITS called to tell me the news and I said, I already know. I could feel it. His leaving. She said he died between 2 and 3 AM on Tuesday. I knew. Irish clairvoyance at work. We dream of the dead. They come to us in dreams to say goodbye. Somehow I thought we'd have a little more time together.

I am so grateful we had such a sweet goodbye after our Emerson after school class on the eve of the Winter solstice. Complete and total melding into each other's arms. I said, I love you John. He said I love you too, Maureen. He didn't shove me away, or do the ambivalent hug.

He said, I want you to meet Susie. I haven't told her about our star-crossed path, but she knows about you. You'll come to our wedding. I said, I'm still wrapping my mind around that one. He laughed, and said, Yeah, me too. I held his face in my hands, and wished him well on his upcoming chemo. I said I will hold healing thoughts for you, We want to keep you for a good while longer. He laughed and said, Me too. That was the last time I saw John alive.

TO SLEEP, perchance to dream (haiku)

TO SLEEP, perchance to dream (haiku)

Good news: I slept 8 hours last night.
Bad news: It's  2:30AM
So, how does the full night's sleep thing work?

What fresh hell is this?
Resist mid-winter, sleepless
& cranky as a bear.

I resorted to
watching Hawaii 5-0, 
worked like a charm. Zzzzzx. 

A rockabye shake
from a 4.5 quake
thus murdered sleep.

1.4.18

I strive for 7 hours sleep a night. So I was excited that I got in a full 8 hours on NYD eve (even if it was in two shifts), I woke up at 5:30 AM and was so tired, after 5 hours sleep, I actually went back to sleep until 9 AM, which is pretty rare.  

I don't want to embrace my sleeplessness at 3 AM. But I've been so tired, averaging 5-6 hours sleep a night. So I was excited that I got in a full 8 hours (in two shifts. Then, with a full 8 hours sleep under my belt, I couldn't go back to sleep last night. Pie owl-eyed.


Reading articles doesn't work, BTW, no matter how boring they are....

I can't nap. If I do, then I usually feel awful (hung-over), when I awaken. Then I have to redo the full morning wake-up routine at dinner time—sans tea (a miracle drug.) No flasks of tea are ever harmed after about 1 PM. 

It could've been the wee bit o midnight chocolate. Apparently I slept on a piece of fudge. (I do make a mean bittersweett fudge, flavored with Kahalua.) I don't recommend sleeping on bittersweett fudge, a batard adaption of a See's recipe from when my aunt worked at C&H. See's was a very good client. But when they sent her the bill, she nearly fainted, it was something like $250 in 1960s economy. So she sold copies of the recipe for $5 ea.

Why it's all such a big deal, besides being permanently cranky, if I don't get enough sleep, (7+ hours), then I fall prey to every virus that comes along. In fact, one of the signs that I'm getting a virus is when I nap! Two bad colds in December.

On second thought, it was probably the full wolf moon, as my bed is locked away in a dark recess, where no streetlights or moonlight falls, I'm extremely sensitive to light at night. But to be fair, I was editing photos til late last night, and that tends to amp me up, as it's such intense work.


If only I could schedule sleep...well, every once and a while I meet the sleep quota.

Preparing for The Big One, 'QUAKE! (and other qaiku)

Last night, or rather, this morning, I had just fallen asleep around 2 AM, but I had trouble sleeping as I was having odd pre-'quake symptoms—like before the 1989 6.9M Loma Prieta, and the 2014 6.0M Napa earthquakes struck. I felt ill all over right before this earthquake. A weird musty smell was wafting from the closet. It was so strong (something like mold hitching a ride on argon, or radon gas?), but the closet door was firmly shut. What's with that? I firmly resolved to clean up my bedroom.

I buried my head under the covers, but I could still smell it. The odor was coming up from the floorboards, and from under the bed. I was so queasy so I swigged some Pepto-Abysmol. But it was more than GI indigestion. I was uncomfortable all over, prickly, as if I wanted to run away from my own body. It was just like before the Loma Prieta, and Napa 'quakes. But I was also so tired, I just wanted to sleep.

I dozed off, then the earthquake struck, practically beneath my pillow. A magnitude 4.5M, and 8 miles deep, with the epicenter under the Claremont Hotel. OK, so the earthquake wasn't under my pillow, but it was less than 4 miles away. 

There was a big cataclysmic jolt, southwest to northeast, then when I ran to the door, the wooden  floor was undulating, making me stumble as I headed to the doorframe.  

A real bitch-slapper. It hit so hard, I thought there was no way there wouldn't be another aftershock. I was positive this was a precursor to The Big One. Nada. A one-off. I was thoroughly awake—but I found myself shakily counting quaiku syllables at 3AM. Most of the 8 million of us who call the Bay Area home, were awake at the same time.

Big 4.5M 'quake, Hayward Fault, Berkeley.
House lurched, a sharp jolt, but nothing fell.
And I was waiting for another strike.

A rockabye shake
from a 4.5 earthquake
it doth murder sleep.

Big 'quake slapped us awake
The house lurched, and settled down.
We wait for the Big One.

I invent a new poetic art form
quaiku haiku—after the quake—
to measure a magnitude of words.

Jack Gilder asks: So, how's that insomnia coming along? I had to laugh as I got a rare 8-hours'-worth of sleep NYD eve, only to be up all hours last night. Again. We're a right buncha loony nightowls on FB. I wrote back:

Good news: I slept 8 hours last night.
Bad news: It's now 2:30 in the morning.
So, how does the full night's sleep thing work? 

The problem is that the Hayward Fault north of Berkeley has not budged in more than 175 years, meanwhile the bottom end of the fault from Fremont to Oakland is creeping north at about one-fifth of an inch a year. And the San Andreas Fault, which moves north about 1.5 to 2 inches a year, is dragging the Hayward Fault along with it. This can't end well.

The last major earthquake on the Hayward Fault was October 21st, 1868, flattening Hayward (then the Alameda County seat), and San Francisco. The estimated 6.8M temblor was called the "Great Earthquake" until April, 1906, when it lost its heavyweight title. I imagine Santa Rosa too sustained significant damage, as the Rogers' Fault may actually be the Hayward Fault. Since the Hayward Fault has erupted on average, every 140 years, we're all sitting ducks waiting for The Big One.

The last big middle of the night temblor was the 6.0M Napa earthquake, Aug. 24, 2014. I was visiting a friend in Point Reyes at the time and was flung from his couch. We thought the San Andreas Fault had ruptured. A brand new fault was discovered, much of Napa was destroyed, and a lot of wine was spilled.

You can bet I went through the food cabinets the next day to check my food stores. And I carefully restacked my wine—preparing for The Big One.

WELCOME, RAIN

I hear mayhem and people cooing in the street
like fat pigeons strutting in figure eights.
I'm playing a useless messiah line 
in my head like a broken record.

Is that the slender rain I hear
thrumming a staccato beat
after having gone missing in the fall,
and all the the winter too?
The sirens, our city bred wolves, 
begin a lonesome chorus.

We danced to fallen embers
and we breathed the hellish smoke,
while the infernos raged, both north & south,
and we wondered who was left to count
among the missing and the dead.
The cats of Coffey Park keep close vigil
where their home hearths once stood.
When the wind blows, love letters,
in the form of singed pages of books
continue to fall from the sky.

So many of homeless, and so many more,
living in parking lots, under bushes, and underpasses.
They say that after the fires died back
their hearts were still intact.
But the ranks have swelled like an angry river
at full flood. King tides and new rain
under a full werewolf moon.
O welcome. Welcome, Rain! Oh!

3 Jan 2018

Happy Perihelion Day!

Happy Perihelion Day! Today, tho it be mid-winter,
the earth (in the northern hemisphere) is close to the sun
than any other day of the year. Let there be light.
Let Apollo race his chariot across the sky.
And may his pale horses fly like the wind.

After Kliban

 I once met Kilban at a picnic table in Tiburon....drawing cats, of course. I was an insta-fan. None are wearing red sneakers here, though, but it might make climbing trees out of the question.

I dedicate this cartoon to all the firestorm cats and other critters that survived the California wildfires of 2017. So many have found their owners, so many have not and are still orphans, so many perished.

Something I wrote a long time ago. One of my first published pieces. I didn't think it was any good, and was surprised it was selected.

 The Cat Wears Red Sneakers

                    —After Kliban 

The cat wears red sneakers. He's been hanging around here for some time now. He's heard that on the streets of Guerneville, it's a good place to hang out. He's as good as any punk. As he rolls up his tiger stripe socks and shirt cuffs with such an air of nonchalance, you suddenly realize that you've met him before. Was it in the park when the fog rolled in in in grey cat feet? No, he's wearing red sneakers. Still, his feet could be grey underneath. If only you could induce him to remove one sneaker, then you could be sure.  But how can you ask him such an indelicate question? He may take offense, and depending on the moon, he may want to rumble or even have a good caterwaul. Just look at his tattered ears. You know he can whip out a claw with switchblade precision. Suppose you are a ladycat, you could walk right up to him real cool and drape your tail right across his shoulders and say...How about a little red sneaker, baby? But somehow you sense he's not in the mood, so you stroll up to him real cool, toothpick hanging out of your mouth and say, Hey man, got a light?

9/10/1979

Published in Shadowbox/Sonoma Mandala

http://mohurley.blogspot.com/1979/01/the-cat-wears-red-sneakers.html

MoHurley's Amazon Book Reviews 2017

Dear Ones,

Thank you for stopping by and reading my ebook reviews. I am primarily interested in women's fiction and the well-crafted murder mystery genre. I delve into historical fiction, and cozy mysteries, sometimes even alpha make action adventure series, but I am no fan of chick-lit Regency bodice rippers, nor am I a fan of sugary cupcake who-dun-its, though I will read them if there's nothing else to read.

End of year writing stats 2017

So I washed my hair at noon
making ready for the New Year,
I wasn't expecting it to be freezing all day.
Only to say, Stay cold, Pony Boy.

Of my 137 entries for 2017, at least 60 to 90 are poems (some posts have multiple poems), a few are prose poems, a few are themed haiku. I try & tag all my poems. I'm not always successful. Standard poems have BLOCK CAPITALS for titles.

My Facebook words aggregate 2017

Dear Facebook, stop blocking me

Dear Facebook:

Nearly every time I post a link anywhere on Facebook these days, it is marked as spam. Your newest spambot algorithm sucks. Usually it is a link to one of my own blog posts that sets it off, and now even a friend's very benign YouTube link was marked as spam.

Zima, Russian winter, trading sides

When I was doing a big poetry and art exchange with the former USSR, we collected poetry from the people (vs State-sanctioned poetry), and translated it. We remarked upon the fact that so many poems were filled with images of snow and winter (zima), for the winter of their discontent was still upon the Soviets in 1990, then the putscht brought a thaw of sorts. Then the NEA Jesse Helms-Mapplethorpe art scandal. My Soviet friends laughed and said, this is how it begins, and they said that the US and the USSR were trading places. What strange times we live in, trading sides like that. We are reliving the winter of our discontent, brought on by the Republicans, who were once so rabidly anti soviet, they blackmailed a whole generation of artists, and executed the Rosenbergs for treason—for conspiring with the enemy. Pogo was right. We have seen the enemy, and it is us.

A MADRIGAL FOR THE MILLENNIUM

The conch sounds

calling the distant sailors home.
The waves curl and beckon.
The sailors chant. 

The gulls dive and weave 

the air into nets.
The fish rise, 

they rise up 

and gather in the clouds.

Something holy and profound—

the clouds part.

I tell John Godbeams 

pierce the sky's heart,

in Gregorian time

while roses bloom midwinter.

Milagros de Guadalupe!

A madrigal for the millennium

an open mind of music.

Insects practice percussive 

dance steps. The scent 

of roses in an empty room.

12/20/17

Winter Solstice
CATHEDRAL OF SOUND
Last time 

CATHEDRAL OF SOUND

Bird voices find the wind
speaking in tongues.
The trees shake off the night,
stretches a little closer to the sky.
The clouds shed their tears,
the memory of water,
a rainstick takes us deeper
into the cathedral of sound.
Peace comes dropping slow.

12/20/2017
Winter Solstice
A MADRIGAL FOR THE MILLENNIUM
Last time

RED HERRINGS

RED HERRINGS

—for Sara Menefee

our iPhones

seeking shoals

of lost words
to compose small poems

catch unschooled fish

inappropriate

placeholders

leading us astray.

12/8

She gathers
purse seine nets
on the city streets
where the homeless
tell her stories
small poems
flashing a silver
currency
of hope
in the gutters
of despair.

SINGING BETWEEN THE LINES

Because there weren't enough altos in the choir

my high school music teacher, Mr. Parker,

shipped me off to the meager alto section

where I sang Handel's Messiah in monotone riffs 

like a scald crow, or a ploughman at the fields.

Never the white dove soaring in the vaulted sky.

Decades later, after an accident, a punctured lung 

left me breathless, my therapy was to join a choir, 

where I discovered that all this time that

I was a soprano. I felt cheated at both ends: 

I was given no melody line when I was young,

singing a supportive third below the gilded flock 

who preened their swansong feathers, 

& screeched high notes because they could.

Mr. Parker's nose was as red as that fictional reindeer,
as he spiked his coffee with endless libations.

And now, with no way to reach the upper arpeggios,

I stagger between the two parts, a switch hitter

baying out all the song lines.

No wonder I was always trying to braid 

the alto and soprano lines together all at once, 

splitting the difference between the sour notes. 

No wonder I still can't sing to save my life.

12/8/17

No alto, I sang
the Messiah in flat notes
no melody line

to soar in the vault

of the soprano songbirds

preening their voices.

12/8/17

Firestorm of Words reading in Healdsburg

I'm still feeling a bit under the weather, after a week of intense headaches and earaches. Smoke inhalation takes its toll. Trying to muster energy to drive to Healdsburg for our big Firestorm of Words reading at the Healdsburg Center for the Arts, organized by Penelope la Montagne to honor Brian’s dad,  Monte Kervin who died in the Tubbs Fire. 

Bea & Fran Hawkes in the 2017 anthology, Singing the Feathers of Freedom. 

I was almost about to cancel, but as Sean Folsom flagellated me on Facebook, and said, The show must go on. So, I girded my loins, I rallied the ponies and had a great time. My Alexander Valley students were stellar. A good reading all round, and I wasn't as tired! I went back to Nicasio and spent the night there, as Sinead was driving. Emotional times.

Alexander Valley School students in both California Poets in the Schools 2016 & 2017 poetry anthologies!

Historic Alexander Valley Schoolhouse by Frances Hawkes, 1st Grade

WAITING FOR LAUNDRY

Waiting for laundry: the clothes in the dryer 

go round & round, round & round, 

round & round—they don't dry any faster 

no matter how hard I watch.

Internet again!

Yay! After three days of no internet and no landline phone, Elvis from Romania, I kid you not, got us up and running at top speed. You vant I should fix, yes, he asked? I looked at his shoes. Blue. Suede. You have got to be kidding. He shimmied up the pole, cleaned out the cruft. Voilá, dial tone, internet again. AT&T insisted the problem was at our end, blamed faulty house wiring. Elvis is now a personal friend, Neil gives him a CD after a mini concert in his honor. Our little ponies are happy. The squirrels, less so. Private acorn stashes and squirrel larders in power boxes may have been involved. Yes, AT&T, that’s it, always blame the customer—we often shimmy up the telephone poles late at night and stuff our nuts into the cable boxes. We’d love to shove yours instead. Reciprocity, and all that.

At the Babi Yar: eating the dead

 

I have stood at the palisade of the Bibi Yar. The Babi Yar was "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust." I mis-heard it as Bibi Yar, as there wasn't much available information about it in 1989. 

So much of what I learned was in the oral tradition from the Ukrainians themselves. During the height of Glasnost, they began to speak of the dark secrets of the land. I wonder if it's Ukrainian vs Russian sp.? Baba as in babushka. Babii, plural. The grandmothers' ravine. Yar, A Turkish word. A multi-cultural name. 

 It wasn't just  a mass grave of Jews. Armenians. Tsigani/gypsies. Ukrainian dissenters, students, poets, musicians. Any Nazi dissenter, and later, Stalinist dissenters as well. 

My friends spoke of the massive bonfire funeral pyres that reached to the Ukrainian sky because there were too many bones to hide. Stalin was sweeping it under the rug, so to speak. That summer, Ukraine's golden wheat fields were a carpet of shame. Bone ash fertilized the crops—the Ukrainians were eating their dead for decades to come. 

But the dead were speaking through the mouths of the living—a vast hunger for truth. And so they began to raise the Ukrainian flags for the first time in nearly a century. A vast blue sky over golden fields nourished with bones.

I remember standing at the rim and weeping. It was so visceral. So real. The wind in the trees whispering. Yet there were only a handful of us, there was no memorial. No visual markers to tell us how to feel, like at other holocaust memorials. Just the deep sorrow of the ravine. 

BUD-JET TRAVELER

If I sneeze any harder,
I will be residing in the next county.
Or offshore, say, near the Farallones.
Maybe pee my pants in the process,
I seem to be leaking at all ends.
I'm like a crawdad shooting backwards
out of danger. I scoot into a corner, 
or prop my back for a tuck and roll.
We're not talking petite parakeet sneezes
women seem to manage in public.
But bull-roaring tonsil severing sneezes
that would threaten any crown or filling.
I've heard of people breaking ribs
or rupturing a disk. Seems extreme 
just to get a bowl of chicken soup.  
But a jumbo-sized glass of wine
seems to have quelled my sneezing fits. 
Offers me some form of respite.
Sure, I could take some Sudafed 
to dry up the dripping faucet, 
but then I can't sleep at all. 
Besides, wine's much more fun. 

Dancing on the Brink

Last day of the year, 2015: the Farallones, 20 miles  from Point Reyes

On the last day of the year, the Farallones, 20 miles out from Point Reyes, seemed so close, I could almost touch them. A pumpkin sky and ominous black islands. A last gasp from a dying camera; its swan song.

Farallón means "pillar" or "sea cliff," they were once known as "Devil's Teeth Islands," for the treacherous shoals. Part of the Sierras, a block of rifted granitic continental crust thrusted up. A place where I though the dead dwelled. I had no idea that the islands were the abode of spirits, called "Islands of the Dead" by the Ohlones.

The Farallones are home to 400 species of birds, many of them rare, or endangered. I once saw a tufted puffin wing his way off Point Reyes. A small clownish football of a bird winging home with a beakfull of fish.

Vizcaíno's friar, Antonio de la Ascencion, called the islands los Farallónes, the place of cliffs. Probably why San Francisco Bay was never discovered by Vizcaíno, or Drake, who called them the Islands of Saint James. A place of treacherous shoals. A place of many shipwrecks. Not to mention the thick summer fog.

The American whalers, and Russian explorers built sealing stations there, manned by Alaskan Kodiak Islanders, until there were no more northern fur seals left. Whether Northern, or Guadalupe fur seals, we will never know. One of the largest seabird colonies in the U.S. Then the Gold Rush—millions of seabird eggs (500,000 a month) collected, led to the San Francisco Egg Wars.

When I was a child I loved the mournful sob of the bouys when the thick fog rolled in at night. Classmate Ingrid's great-grandparents, the Cains, were lighthouse keepers on the Farallones. The other lighthouse keeper's wife, Wilhelmina Beeman delivered Ingrid's grandmother, Farallon—a child named after the sea cliffs. They moved to the mainland before the 1906 quake, and lost everything. Only a photo of her grandmother in a basket on the porch, in a book, was what survived.

Then the island was Rum Row during the Prohibition. Then we turned our backs on the islands. The shoals were a nuclear waste dump during the 1940s to the 1970s; 50,000 radioactive drums, and 44,000 shipyard containers were scuttled, and are still rusting away—we still don't know what is in them. But it can't be good. Stories of massive sponges growing in the littoral zones.

Yes, and here we are, still dancing on the brink of the world. Words from the lost Ohlone language:

uxar-at kai pire.
On the cliff, on the edge,
on the brink of the world,
we are dancing.

Day of the Dead, All Soul's Day, The beginning and the end of the Celtic year. My grandmother, brother and mother all died right before Samhain. So, Samhain, All Souls' Day, and El Dia de los Muertos is a three-fold sorrow. Thinking of my mother who wanted her ashes scattered off the Golden Gate, to drift to the Farallones. Maybe I should give her back to the sea.

Fitting image for El Día de los Muertos.

SFSU survey may have got more than an earful from me

A SFSU alumni survey may have gotten more than an earful from me, I wrote lengthy diatribes, so I saved my responses (below). (Say how ya really feel, Hurley...)

Name one person who made a positive impact: Advisor and mentor, English/ Creative Writing teacher, Prof. Dan Langton, who went out of his way to assure that I was able to transcend the process of being a returning student; he helped to keep things relevant, and offered community credit for work I was already doing; he was not a bureaucratic hoop jumper as so many teachers I encountered at SFSU have been.

GERRIT VAN HONHORST'S MUSE

    —with thanks to Sean Folsom for posting the painting

A woman playing a viola, Gerrit Van Honthorst

A young gambist gamboling about 
with her viola da gamba, not a viola á' amare,
caught firmly between her plush thighs. 
Titillating how that fine-drawn bowstring 
is playing more than one drawn out note
as she frets the long neck of her instrument
in the key of C.  She rubs her bow 
across the basso string, and plays underhand 
in the German style.

In a primeval dance between flame and air 
the only candle in the tavern wavers, divine light
threatens to gutter, but flares up before the finale.
The gamblers lean in as she reaches the crescendo.
Who cares what she's playing? She plays them well
with taut bow strings thrumming a primal tune
drawn on chiaroscuro and lace-nippled light.
She's about to have an epic wardrobe fail.

She's wearing the same dress in The Matchmaker.
Clearly she's hot. Perhaps she's having hot flashes.
By contrast, the Man with a Viola da Gamba
is sensibly dressed in a teal silk tunic and lined cape.
They're playing the same scroll-headed instrument.
In Musical Group on a Balcony, her chemise slips
off her shoulders in hopes that the wind will pick up,
under her skirt, a glimpse of a gartered red stocking.
Isn't that her nippled visage in Granida and Daifilo?
Is the painter's wife cavorting with shepherds too?

Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst was nicknamed
Gherardo delle notti, as he was in love with the night.
Gherardo Hollandese was a master of nocturnal light.
It all must be true as Rubens painted our Gerrit
as the one honest man Diogenes sought by lamplight.

I am reminded that gamba is Italian for leg, or thigh. 
As in: She had a pair of great gams. 
Also the word for ham comes from gamba. 
We can't see her gams, as she hams it up,
but she has some mighty fine yams.
Caravaggio would have been proud 
of this most opulent display of her finest fruits
escaping the fragile loom of her corselet.
And there you have the entire gambit.

10/29/17

Last time I saw Steve Tristano, and Scott Huntsman

Last time I saw Steve Tristano was at the old Forest Knolls train depot (now a bus stop) in the 1970s, it was their hang-out. Scott Huntsman, Johnny Kaufman, Mike Frank and Steve were the four muscateers. Thicker than thieves. I learned that Mike had died a while back, but I didn't know about the heart attack. At the age of 42, that seems harsh. What does one know about life at 42? I know Scott Weaver died about the same time. I assume it was drugs. It was his flat horizon line. Neal, and David Weaver, long gone. An with their passing, something of our youth died too. Only Kent survived. I was surprised that Johnny Kaufman made it into the 1980s and beyond...another classmate I thought was long gone—drugs required their mordida.

What I remember about Scott Huntsman, was that despite his silver tooth, he smiled a lot. (How did he lose his tooth?) He was steadfast and kind (though there were a lot of bullies at Lagunitas School in the 1950s). He was very self-conscious, sometimes awkward within his body, he never knew how we envied his thick mane of long black hair. Probably the only thing that saved him was the hippie movement, he could move into becoming who he was, without reserve, without judgement. He became one of the cool ones. Generous with his time. I lost track of him after high school. (As I did with most of my classmates).

When the Gundlach-Bundschu winery burned down during the fires, Phil Bundschu's name came up. I remember a poetry reading we did there sitting on hay bales, on a bluff, overlooking the vineyards, reading to the westering sun, in late fall, and incongruously, Phil, crippled by polio, was there, all golden, on his winged motorcycle. A blast from the past.

Last time I saw Johnny Kaufman, he was sitting on the ground in front of the old bus stop in—I guess he was still strung out. Like Jimmy Bohman. Morphos never let go her grip. But Steve Tristano, I was just writing a music review of his father, Lennie Tristano's album on the indie music site, AmieStreet. Steve's half-bro, Guy, saw it and we corresponded for a while. He sent me a photo of Steve. He said Steve got clean, moved to Oregon, still played a little guitar. I was so glad to hear of it. I always liked Steve, the boogie woogie man of my childhood. But then, I heard he died in 2015. I never got a chance to say hello in there. How's it goin'? Didn't see much of them at Drake High School. but then, we were all playing hooky one way or another. And now, I heard Scott Huntsman has joined the heavenly bus stop choir. All aboard!

Viva Che! O'Hara & Fitzpatrick!

The iconic Viva Che! image by my Facebook friend, Dublin artist Jim Fitzpatrick, is now commemorated as an Irish postal stamp, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the death of the revolutionary leader, Che Guevarra. Jim never received a dime for his print, one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. And now it's a €1 stamp! Can't lick that.

Jim Fitzpatrick is best known for his detailed illustrations inspired by the Irish Celtic tradition. Jim produced most of the album artwork for Irish rock group, Thin Lizzy, and Sinéad O'Connor. His most recent work includes commemorative portraits of Ireland's 1916 revolutionary heroes. However, his singlemost famous piece is the 1968 iconic two-tone portrait of Che Guevara, based on a photo by Alberto Korda.

A note on the Che poster, from Jim Fitzpatrick's website:

In 1967 I was outraged by the manner of Che Guevara's execution while a prisoner of war in Bolivia and it led me to create this now world-famous image.
I have now also made this image available for free download so that it can be used by everyone -including those who cannot afford my prints or canvas of El Che: the unemployed, the oppressed, the victims of banker-imposed austerity here in Ireland, the EU and elsewhere, those who fight against the legal/political elite and the corrupt banker cartels who think they rule us -and those who rage against injustice.
This image is yours. Use it!  No resale or commercial usage please -it has been exploited enough. Please remember I do NOT ever license this image for commercial usage. Misuse this image or resell any reproductions thereof and you will be liable for a fine of $10,000 per item sold or for any violation of my copyright of this image.
Time to RECLAIM CHE! Free usage for leftist causes under Creative Commons Licence. No fee for leftist/socialist political usage.—JIM FITZPATRICK. ARTIST. IRELAND.

Jim Fitzpatrick holding up the controversial Che postage stamps.

BTW,  the postage stamp is taking some heat:

That the Viva Che! postal stamp is very much a celebration of one of the most important pieces of twentieth century Irish art, Jim Fitzpatrick’s Viva Che!, seems to have passed many commentators by.
In an Irish context, Guevara is very much associated with Fitzpatrick’s iconic artwork and the words of his father, who proclaimed following his son's death that “the first thing to note is that in my son’s veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels.” They were powerful words, even finding their way to the painted gable wall of a Derry house in time."  from  A Dubliner encounters Che Guevara in Havana, 1959.

and

The postal service described Guevara, killed by CIA-backed Bolivian soldiers in Bolivia in 1967, as “the quintessential left-wing revolutionary.”
It said demand for the stamp has rivaled that of its two previously most popular releases, commemorating the sinking of the Titanic and Ireland’s 1916 Rising against British rule.
But it was quickly reminded that Guevara remains for many symbol of the violent abuses of Cuba’s communist government, with one Irish senator describing Guevara as “a barbaric interrogator, jailer and executioner of hundreds of supposed ‘class enemies’.”
Cuban-American radio host Ninoska Perez Castellon joined the fray urging listeners to write to the postal service to ask for the stamp to be scrapped. Irish postage stamp homage to Che Guevara stokes criticism

Controversial or not, said Fitzpatrick, "The stamp sold out in less than a week. I'm so proud to have had this happen at all but the response has blown me away! Amazing! They say An Post are going to reprint them as the demand was 'unprecedented'." It's also selling like hotcakes on eBay.

FOUNTAINGROVE ROUND BARN

Round barn, red as the setting sun,
doubly vibrant against the fresh green
of spring grass where countless horses
once grazed, tearing away the past 
with each mouthful, their hunger 
is now the fodder of sorrow
for what the eye is missing.
If I tilt my head just so, I can still hear 
the ghost horses whinnying from the stalls 
of that venerable redwood barn 
now returned to silica and ash.

10.23

Will Chubb's photo of the iconic Red Barn

Perhaps the one thing I will mourn the loss of most is the Fountaingrove Red Barn. A photographer is offering prints of it free.

Will Chubb Photography wrote: "Many of you are requesting a print of our beloved Red Barn. Just email me at rwc@sonic.net, or @WillChubbPhotography, and I will send in the order to Costco, free of charge, just let me know what size you want. It will be printed on photo paper. All you have to do is go to Costco and pick it up. If you want a metal or canvas print, I'll let you pay for it."

LOVE IN A TIME OF FIRE

LOVE IN A TIME OF FIRE

Some blamed the hot Santanas
while others cursed the Diablo winds.
howling at 75 miles per hour.
Whatever you call it, a maelstrom
devoured Santa Rosa de Lima's namesake.
The city blanketed in a layer of ash
so a friend left red roses on all the cop cars.
What else was there to do in a time of fire?
We became the light in a darkened land.

10.22.17
Forthcoming in Molly Fisk’s Fire and Water poetry anthology 2020

Facebook Rant, Tubbs Fire

For all you naysayers who can't fathom the enormity of the Tubbs fire, and are making senseless remarks about people not saving their animals, you are pissing those off who actually witnessed the devastation.

In case you're impoverished in imagination, here is a description of the fire. Imagine embers the size of golf balls falling from the sky, dropped from the next county over (12 miles away). Imagine a tornado of fire touching down, lifting cars up, and tossing them around like toys. Imagine walls of orange fire that sucked all the oxygen out of the air. Imagine everything reduced to ashes in minutes.

This firestorm was so powerful it generated 157 MPH winds, flames several stories tall, traveling faster than people could run, than cars could drive. It was estimated by one of the fire scientists that the fire was traveling at 258 feet per second. Animals were incinerated in their tracks, in mid-run. 

All this happened in the middle of the night, with no warning, no official evacuation notice, and most people, who were fast asleep, had five minutes to evacuate. The Tubbs Fire is ranked as the singlemost destructive wildfire in California history.

You have no idea what it was like. No one had advance warning, no evacuation notices were issued. At midnight, the fire was still in the next county over. Twelve miles away. People had no leisurely warning of smoke. Nada. This is nothing like what anyone has ever experienced before.

Note that the terrain is extremely mountainous, there are few roads (except through the canyons—where several deaths occurred because people couldn't outrun the fire). The fire began in Napa, the next county over. It climbed several ridges and came down the other side of the mountain range into Santa Rosa, while roaring through Porter Creek. Meanwhile a vanguard of sparks and embers driven by fierce winds lit the way. The Tubbs fire moved at astonishing speed, growing exponentially larger by the minute.

I wasn't there either, but I was following the Napa Atlas fire via Mike Thompson on Facebook. At 1AM, the Tubbs/Calistoga fire hit Santa Rosa, I warned Mike Thompson that no one was reporting alerts for Sonoma Co. All hell was breaking loose, when I started posting what info I could find on his wall. Mike jumped into the fray and we posted fire and sheriff notices until dawn.

Evacuations began at 1:30AM. By 2AM the fire winds were hurricane force. By 4:30AM, entire neighborhoods disappeared. Fire tornadoes whipping faster than 100mph, super-heated roaring winds combusting everything in their path, including hurling cars over.

The fire traveled so fast, it leapt the freeway, and my cousin and aunt escaped with only the clothes on their backs, another friend wasn't so lucky. He never even made it out of bed. Cadaver dogs found his bones where his bed would've stood. You naysayers weren't there. You haven't a clue.

There should be a special kind of hell for people like you, carping on others' misfortunes. YOU WEREN"T THERE. 

Think before you post. We are all grieving and we don't need your wanky BS hypotheses, what you'd do. You weren't there. You don't know what you'd do.

Hindsight is 20/20. So bend over and kiss your own heinies goodbye before you unthinkingly post your blanket condemnations. You weren't there. You weren't there. You weren't there. You don't know what you're talking about.