BUDAPEST, 1992

Ken said: How about using respectable, 

unmade-up terms that sound archaic & obscure, 

like escutcheon? It's short, to the point

& still polysyllabic! I love the sound 

of escutcheons, flanges, and finials—

But such odd words for a poem to make.

Take, for instance, Gül Baba's tomb

on the banks of the Danube, 
on Turkish soil in the middle of Budapest,

with its finial, a spire & crescent moon

against a breathless summer sky.

And the roses. Oh, the roses!
As Ken held the camera steady,
I nearly swooned in the midday sun.

4/26/18

THE ORIGINAL NIGHTSTALKER

In Law & Order, the characters discuss pathology, 
how a perp has to escalates the gruesomeness 
of his crime because the thrill is gone. 
He has to keep upping the ante to get the rush. 
If all the crimes attributed to this perp are indeed his, 
it follows a pattern from peeping into windows, to burglary 
to rape, to murder, to kinky murder/rape (with dishes on top), 
but then it all stops, dead. The trail went cold. Why? 
What made him quit? Time? Or did he reform? 
What else don't we know? How did this Nightstalker 
go clean 30 years on the straight and narrow?
This despicable man with an angelic pseudonym,
who dispatched his victims with cudgels and ropes,
who balanced stacks of dinner plates on the naked backs 
of husbands, to keep them quiet under threat of death,
while he raped their wives, but murdered them anyway.
DeAngelo told them if he heard one plate drop—or even rattle
he’d kill them both, then he tucked in, raping the wife.
One victim said he left her ravaged in the living room,
stomped into the kitchen chanting, I’ll kill ‘em, I’ll kill ‘em.
One couple’s Christmas turkey leftovers were taken
from the fridge. The killer stayed for a snack.
During one rape, he paused for a slice of apple pie.
Another victim said he mentioned his mother,
sobbing, mummy, mummy, over and over again.
Sometimes he called his victims to chat. A former cop,
and perhaps a thwarted poet, he's said to have penned,
“Excitement’s Crave."

Sacramento should make an offer.

To make a movie of my life
That will pay for my planned exile... 
See you in the press or on T.V....
Your East Area Rapist.
Well, he finally got his day in the sun. 
Surely there will be a movie yet to come.
What will it be called? The Golden State Killer,
The Original Nightstalker was a play
on serial killer Richard Ramirez’s nickname.
Did his friends call him Jim? If he had any, that is.
His downfall, he collected memento morii: ID cards,
engraved wedding bands, and monogrammed cufflinks. 
He was caught up by his own DNA, on national DNA Day,
from a partial match of a relative's DNA profile,
and now his surviving victims may finally sleep at night.
So many friends of friends terrorized by deAngelo.
Is there any such thing as a reformed serial killer? 
Of course, it's harder to imagine a fat 72-year-old 
crawling through windows at night, let alone, 
getting it up. But that's probably how it all began,
stalking single women living alone, for the thrill.
How did he live with himself all these years,
knowing what he had done? 
And what of his daughters? 

4/25/18

LITERARY PERDITION

—with thanks to Stephen King

The literary road to hell
is paved with weak verbs,
flaccid nouns, excessive adverbs,
anemic adjectives, Latinate words,
and gratuitous exclamation marks!

4/25/18

OBSCURE WORDS, takes one, 2, and so on....b

OBSCURE WORDS

Overfond that I am of obsolete, 
chiasmic subjunctive-sentence constructions, 
like Would it were true! I have been known to gambol
among the the dulcet chimeric inversions of speech,
and I have lost entire days perusing the OED 
for Anglo-Saxon onomatopoetic imagery,
and the desuetude of obscure Latinate words.
Call these vagaries of speech antediluvian if you must,
but these defenestrations of language 
are sometimes more pellucid
than the vainglorious riposte tongues
of our so-called modern argot.

4/25/18

BUDAPEST 1992

Escutcheons, flanges, sconces, and finials

such odd words for a poem to make.

Take, for instance, Gül Baba's tomb

on the banks of the Danube, 

in the very heart of Budapest,

with its finial, a spire and crescent moon

against a breathless summer sky.

And the roses. Oh, the roses!
As you held the camera steady,
I nearly swooned in the midday sun.

4/26/18

NICOTATING MEMBRANE

Notty Bumbo handed me 
a word to poemize: nictitating.
as in nictitating membrane, 
the translucent inner eyelids of cats
(from Latin nictare, to blink). 
I knew the word since childhood,
when my cat lost his eye in a catfight, 
love gone all wrong in the night.
I learned how to clean the hideous wound,
and was plagued by nightmares from it,
but I always thought it was spelled
nicotating membrane, 
and I wondered what nicotine 
had to do with the inner eyelids of cats, 
other than both were smoky 
as burnt quartz.

4/26/18 

OBSCURE WORDS, TAKE ONE, or what passes for word-wanking

Unable to pull a suitable obscure word out of my hat, I Googled Google for Googlisciously weird words. I found a list of 30 weird words, but I've already used some of them like crepuscular, and petrichor already in poems. The rest are boring palimpsests, not that I can pronounce palimpsest, repurposed skin burdened with multiple stories, each obscuring the other, it's a bit chcthonic, so much of this is underground, where is Cthulhu when you need him?

I too dislike that Eliza Doolittle schwa-sound that drove 'Enry 'Iggins to drink, oenopihile, that he was. Dipsomaniac, more like. Any cook worth her salt knows what umami is without knowing the word for that bitter yet savory mouthy feel. The four sacred sensations of the tongue, plus one.

That leaves tmesis, which I ab-so-fucking-lutely do not want to use, or say, ever. Is the t silent or not? I'm too much of a nebbish to use that word. How about skeuomorph, that plastic Adirondack chair, a form of mimesis, or lucubration? Pedantic writing created in the wee hours while burning the midnight oil. Writing that sheds little light for all its efforts. But who works by lamplight these days, er, nights? Gaslight, maybe.

We all know far too many ultra-crepidarians on social media opining away, over their heads, offering free advice. The Greek painter Apelles overheard a cobbler criticizing the way he had rendered a foot, so he chapped the cobbler's hide for presuming to judge beyond the sole. A bit like how all this piece is cobbled together.

The idea of zeugma intrigues me, I like the economy of two-for-ones. She stole his heart, and his wallet. Poetry banks on that one. That's right up there with synecdoche, that simultaneous understanding where one thing stands for another.  That's poetry's bread and butter, a form of metonymy, a subclass of metaphor. Hoover it up, boys. Which brings me to flahoolick, from flaithulach, Irish, that is throwing your money about. Not that I have any money to squander.

As to chiasmus, like being dyslexic, it's a story of my life, but Kennedy said it best, "Ask not what your country can do for you," or to Byron's "Pleasure is a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure." The sin is all mine, I'm sure.

This frivolous persiflage is right up there with the aeolist, or the dark, secret cultist, who meets up with the panglossian singing "Always look on the bright side of life." Brian, is that yew? Chalk it up to the rhetorical pretensions of paralipsis—did I fucking say that out loud? Again?

Hiraeth, a notion I am intimately familiar with —the nostalgia of the past, a home that one cannot return to, hiraeth informs my writing, while I yearn for another undiscovered country, wanting the couthy comfort of hygge. The warmth of a fire, a cat, a book mid-winter, with the storm lashing at all the windows and doors. Nesh means being unusually susceptible to the cold, it has no synonym, but the freezing sensation that my days are numbered, is not. This is no time for cold feet.

Zugzwang is a a no-win chess move. It all comes down to loss in the end. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Just don't indulge in schadenfreude, that malicious joy. Whatever happened to non-zero-sum?

And who can even pronounce Eisenbahnscheinbewegung, it makes my eyes spin. It's that false sensation of movement when you're sitting in a parked train, and see another train depart. And the train hasn't even left the station. Is leaving the station. Will never leave the station. Sort of like Pogo's statement: I have met the enemy and he is us.

TG Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft wasn't on the list. Hint: Danube steamboats and electricity are involved. That's the second-longest word in German, BTW. 

German dropped its longest word in 2013, rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz, a beef label, after an EU law change.

The longest word in English has 189,819 letters, and takes 3.5 hours to pronounce, which is a chemical name for the titin protein found in humans. Is that really necessary?

The second longest word in English, at a svelte 45 letters long, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, or silicosis from inhaling too much volcanic smoke, or vog, for short. The citizens of Pompeii never stood a chance. What's with this scientific oneupmanship on naming lengthy diseases? Nanner-nanner-nanner, my disease name is longer than yours.

Here on the Big Island today,
cough, cough, gone to Maui.

It bumped the previous lengthy contender, electrophotomicrographically for a loop. At least you can grasp the meaning of this word. Squirrel it away for Scrabble.

And all this time I thought that antidisestablishmentarianism was the longest word in English. I got it right in a third grade spelling bee.

I won't mention Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, (that's llan-vire-pooll-guin-gill-go-ger-u-queern-drob-ooll-llandus-ilio-gogo-goch), or Saint Mary's Church in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio of the red cave, an-18 syllable word longer than the trainstop itself. I've been to Llanfair-pwll, for short, but I've never successfully pronounced it. Talk about Eisenbahnscheinbewegung!

Steatopygous should never be used to describe a woman's bottom, no matter how callipygous it is, unless it's Queen singing Fat Bottom Girls. And who the hell describes a sliced papaya as yonic anyway? I'll take mine with lime.

But I digress, this piece has become tediously prolixian and persiflageous, I'm in danger of becoming dunandunateous. This is going nowhere fast. All this work, and I still did not get a suitably obscure word for a poem. There's a reason why most of these words are obscure, and perhaps they should stay that way. Begin again.

ANYTHING FOR BEAUTY, and Retinol as a night creme?

An advert for Retinol Night Cream.
I wondered, what's the point?
Bald men's shiny pates aside,
who wants to extra hair on their face?
An anti-aging cream erases deep wrinkles
while you sleep. But the skin elixir backfired.
One woman said her temple hairline
was dangerously close to her eyebrows.
Another woman thought she had developed
a rare disease, policyst ovarian syndrome.
Yet another was convinced she was channeling
Frida Kahlo's famous unibrow.
A single man, intent on tightening up his pores,
sprouted velus hairs on his nose and cheeks.
He must've slathered the elixer on,
even his eyebrows were thicker,
he was well-pleased with the results.
No mention of downunder, TG,
The hirsute women, however,
were experiencing mid-life crises,
sprouting downy hair on their faces,
with their wrinkles still intact. 
These dewy-cheeked matrons,
seeking the elusive Fountain of Youth,
have taken up shaving.
Anything for beauty.

4/24/18

Retinol as a night creme?

An advert for Retinol Night Cream for women took me aback. I wondered, what's the point? Bald men's pates aside, who wants to grow hair on their face? So I Googled it and found this: This anti-aging cream visibly reduces the look of lines and deep wrinkles on your face while you sleep. OK. I get that. But then I found this: How I Accidentally Grew Hair on My Left Temple with Retinol. It looks like the skin plumping elixir sometimes backfires. One woman said her temple hairline was creeping dangerously close to her eyebrows. Another thought she had policyst ovarian syndrome. Another thought she was channeling Frida Kahlo's unibrow. A man, intent on tightening up his pores, sprouted velus hairs on his nose, cheeks, and bonus eyebrow hairs. I guess he was overgenerous with his application because he had a systemic reaction. He became hairier all over, and was well-pleased with the results. The hirsute women, however, were experiencing mid-life crises! Sprouting downy hair on their faces, and no sign of wrinkles going away. The dewy-cheeked matron, seeking the elusive Fountain of Youth, has taken up shaving. So very Neanderthal. Talk about a close shave. Anything for beauty.

CAMINO

I should get up, do something useful,
other than lounging beneath an umbrella
reading a stack of books from a dead ex-lover,
their covers curling in the heat like nuns' wimples.

I'm looking for traces of myself in his old poems,
but there's so little of me there,
there's nothing left to do, other than to crow,
But I was there! I was there! So what
if I am reduced to a her or a you,
those impersonal substitutes that sting and maim 
the memory of a relationship long after it's over.
A namelessness, a negation. A particle of speech.
Then I realized my path leading to uncharted territories
was never about being la mujer de John,
included as a footnote to the future.
I took a camino of my own choosing.
Perils and risks, part of the baggage
we always carry with us.
Making us who we are.

4/23/23

ALKALI LARKSPUR

This time, last year
I was standing on the Carrizo Plain
a week too late for the superbloom,
another bucketlist item checked off,
like Antelope Valley, but the long drought
had thwarted the poppies for another year.
I resolutely admired how Soda Lake mirrored
the sky and the Temblor Mountains.
You could still see vague yellow swaths
painting the crevices. I sat down in the tall grass,
annoyed by our late start, the plants whipping me
in the strong winds, wanting a riot of color,
angry to have missed the bloom of a lifetime
by a mere week. I swatted the plants aside,
they were oddly shaped, then I noticed
they had pale pink throats, and snowy petticoats.
They reminded me of a flower I had seen before,
but what? Then it hit me, I was sitting in the midst
of a superbloom, they were a kind of delphinium,
like nothing I'd ever seen before, alkali larkspur,
thousands of them facing east toward the Temblors.
The hillside was covered in snowy splendor
like a vast frothy cotillion ballgown.
Sometimes you just have to look aslant
to see what's right in front of your face,
and then you can hear the music of the wind.

4/30/18

BLUE-FOOTED BOOBY

In the Galapagos, I met a blue footed booby 
who liked the cut of my jeans 
and he danced for me with his blue feet 
waving like little racing flags, 
singing Ayeh, ayeh aheh, are you my mate?
He bowed to the sky, then gazed at me 
with his mad blue eyes, so like John's.

4/22/18

Poetic sendoff for John Oliver Simon at Jered's pottery shed

We attended John Oliver Simon's literary memorial at Jered's Pottery, a warehouse in Emeryville next to the railroad tracks. Sarah Kobrinsky arranged the event, which was fairly well attended. Tobey Kaplan was emcee: Jack Foley, Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, Clive Matson. Lots of poets from his Poetry Inside Out program, Sophie Dahlin, Lilian Autler, Temina, I took photos. Somehow I expected more people.

The day before was John's birthday, and judging by the amount of people who wished him a happy birthday on Facebook, I'd say that some of them aren't aware that he is gone. I was going to say, gone from this planet, but even when one is cremated, one is still of this planet, even in the form of ash. But having a poetic send-off on Earth Day was fitting. No stardust need apply.

DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD

There is an inherent danger in the way
bedclothes mingle with rampant abandonment,
or the way that dirty laundry begets
more dirty laundry, and the cat ecstatically
rubbed its jowls along the inside of your shoe,
the one that was lost under the bed.
Remember the time you reached under
to grab his lost collar and came up
with an irate alligator lizard latched to your hand,
the cat's sudden interest in things abandoned,
a flight of fancy, somewhat like the day you left
and never looked back, leaving me wondering
whether you were dead or alive, I never saw
that danger sparking in your eyes,
nor how the open road beckoned.
I never saw the signs warning me to yield,
for soft shoulders, dangerous curves ahead.

4/21/18

LATINATE NAMES

I may not know the Latinate names,
or sometimes even the common ones,
I cannot key a plant for the life of me,
so I remember native blooms by sight.
Except for all the little yellow ones.
They're a seething sea of mystery,
Except buttercups and butter & eggs.
And the cream cups, of course.
If a buttercup reflected light under your chin,
it meant you loved butter,
but the cows avoided them,
their cool, peppery odor
staining the milk
with the taste of sunlight.

4/20-21/18

LAPIS HEART

      —para John

After I gave you a blue lapis heart,
which you always wore on your vest,
you said: if I love you am I trapped forever?
We didn't know the answer was an infinitive Yes.
Even when I left. I had to. And yet you still loved me
the way I loved you all this time. No matter what.
At least at the end, we were able to say, 
I love you once more to each other,
and really mean it, no holds barred.

Goodnight, Sweetheart.
I give you back your blue lapis heart,
lost so many years ago in the wash.
You were never alone in the dark, nor unloved.
Safe journey, mi amor, and may your ashes
enrich those desert oases you loved so deeply.

Right up to the very end,
poetry was your other woman,
but the desert was your real lover.
Perhaps that blue lapis heart
is waiting somewhere on the trailhead
whispering secret words of love
to the pale desert sky, waiting
for the next star-crossed lovers
to cross its path.

4/23/18

MOUNTAIN MISERY

Someone wanted an identification of a wild lily,
once called Zigadine, now Toxicoscordion fremontii.
My eyeballs weren't yet awake. Batting 50/50,
I mis-ID the bearmat as gold-back fern.
Then realized no self-respecting gold-back fern
would ever grow out in the open like that.
And the location, pine foothills...
But I know a death camas when I see it.

I loved saying the old name, Zigadine!
One of the few Latin plant names I know by heart.
The way it explodes off the tongue
and becomes something like shooting stars.
I never once called it a Fremont lily,
for John C. Frémont was a toxic mass-murderer
of the California Indians. And he fomented a revolt
for personal gain, choosing a bear as his bandolier.

I never knew the other moniker, and was horrified
to discover that I had transplanted death camas
to our lower field where we grazed horses in spring.
No wonder the gophers always left it alone.
And luckily, the horses did too.

As for the bearmat, aka kit-kit-dizze, 
which is also a placename where
poet Gary Snyder lives, on North San Juan Ridge.
My old boyfriend from Grass Valley,
who admired Gary Snyder from afar,
and accidentally introduced me to poetry,
said that the bears liked to roll on it.

I loved the tarry odor of the leaves, but they're clingy.
Some folks call it mountain misery, or bear clover.
Despite its lovely white rose petal blossoms,
bearmat is the bane of careless hikers and dogs,
because it's so stickery, and its seeds are hitchhikers.
It has some redeeming qualities as well,
you can make rheumatism tea from the leaves.
Maybe the bears had rheumatism too.
We were always on the lookout for it.
And the bears. But when the words found me,
much to my old boyfriend's chagrin,
he ambled off into the mountain misery,
never to be seen again.

4/20/18

MAN IN THE BUFF STEALS BEER TRUCK

Santa Rosa—The nearly naked thief

clearly didn't have good taste in beer

stealing a Coors' beer truck like that

in broad daylight, before noon,

dressed only in boxers and sneakers.

Someone commented: It's the water—

and a lot more. Well, maybe not so much more...

If only it had been Duff beer, she said.

Man in the Buff heists Duff.

Now, if it was Pliny the Elder...

But then, he'd have to rethink the wardrobe,

American flag boxer shorts just won't do.

A toga, maybe. And sandals, not sneakers.

But you know how it goes—

Coors beer always comes out

the same way it goes in. Unadulterated.

The police apprehended the thief

cowering in the bushes.

Ya ever notice how no one

ever steals a Miller High Life truck?

Ya can't make this stuff up.

4/20/18 

OCD-MINDED

OCD-minded that I am,
I spent the morning re-formatting
blog pages from April of 2009,
because someone had asked me
who was the most famous person I'd ever met.
I couldn't choose just one, I chose many,
so I looked up an old blogpost of mine,
and noted that it needed a little tweaking.
I fixed a typo here, an extra space there,
an unfinished thought with the verbs gone missing.
It was a good a place as any to begin, scrubbing text,
and whipping those old pages into shape,
but one bad post invariably led to another.
What was Google thinking,
changing formatting mid-stream like that?
It makes me look like an idiot
in retrospect. How many more pages?
Wrestling with bad HTML code
is like grappling faulty memory banks
with gaff hooks, reliving the past
viewed in errant type and odd spacing
is a stubborn clown's holiday.
The broken code just won't let go
of that sudden blossom of words
in extra large type, or in a different font,
midstream. You have to strip it clean
of all commands, and begin again.
Or you can't see the bleedin' forest,
or even the trees, for that matter,
on the cyber page. This mayhem
a frog's breakfast of electronic ink
gone awry.

4/20/18

OLD THREADS

I inherited my grandmother's thread basket
filled with wooden spools labeled Coates & Clark,
bone buttons from longjohns laced together like necklaces,
the heavyweight linen thread, waxed and aged,
a dented thimble, rusted needles, an awl,
a long hatpin, a woman's first line of defense
as she traversed the city streets enroute
to the Rixford mansion where she was a tailor and nanny
to the wealthy scions. The daughter threw it all off,
became a pein air painter, leaving my grandmother
tiny postcard-sized canvases of marshy landscapes
that would disappear beneath the weight of prosperity.
But the stock market crash took care of that wealth
just as she was making a name for herself. Claire,
a name for light. Or was it Caroline? I don’t remember.

By that time, my grandmother married,
had eight children, moved to the country
but she never painted. Instead, she waited for her daughters
to imagine landscapes stitched with fine brush strokes,
but she couldn't nurture that fey spirit in herself,
there was always the garden, the next meal,
or a mountain of laundry that needed washing and mending,
her grey hair, a halo, as she bent over her children's clothes.
That click of her teeth as she severed the thread
from the needle, as she surveyed her handiwork,
the knot and heft of time well tied.

4/19/18

MONA THE ONE-EYED CAT

Jannie Dresser lost her one-eyed wonder,
Mona, a tuxedo cat, who went missing
on a souped-up Saturday night.
She slipped out, thin as a shadow 
through the crack of the door 
into the darkness that beckoned.
Her lone eye fixed on the siren moon
while Jannie, heartbroken, walked the alleys
crooning for her lost cat. I said:
Cats sometimes go on walkabout,
and return a little worse for wear. 
Perhaps she's searching 
for the lost dreams of her other eye.
What tall tales she'll have.

4/23/18
(the cat returned five nights later)

MIRAGE

I am saddened to report that,
having fallen sufficiently behind in my writing
while on the road, I can't seem to close the gap.
I'm always a fortnight out of sequence,
no matter how I try to bridge the distance.
The adage, you can never make up for lost time,
is true. I'm sad to say. Sadder still,
are all the lost lines that spontaneously arose
as we hurtled across interstates,
I never wrote them down, said I'd remember them.
But they disappeared, like the ephemeral
mirage on a dry playa in the mid-day sun.
Crossing the valley I couldn't tell the difference
between solar panels and ghost lakes.
I am left with a thirst for those lost lines
that I will never quench.

4/25/18

IRATE BEES haiku

Carpenter bees shred
red sage blossoms trying
to get to nectar.

5/2/18
NECTAR THIEVES, haiku

EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

Donkeys were our early warning system.
No one could sneak into the barn, or the tack room
without a hefty announcement from the burros.
Full moons set them off too,
you could hear their cackle and haw
all the way down Arroyo Road.
Pity the would-be thief who forgets the mordida
when the desert nightingales are on patrol.
They take no prisoners.
Sneak up on you with no warning.
Demand their pay in oats.
Unless there are carrots.
Then it's all bets off.

4/21/18

RUNNING ON EMPTY

I'm running on empty,
where will I pay for the dawn lights?
My grandmother whispered
and the waves answered
while the fish flew with the doves
into the somber clouds.
The moon rose, pirouetted,
a symbol of the divine dance.

4/11/19 2018
from word cards

VENIAL SINS

I'll make you a deal,
you can have all my past sins,
all those dark hosannas
that I flung along the country road
like a trail of venial stars
while walking a mile and a half home
from catechism on Thursday afternoons.

4.10.18

Bill the Bass

The first time I met Bill, the Big Mouth Bass, was in a guest loo at a small dinner party.  Bill was a game fish, hung above the toilet tank. I thought it an odd place to hang a hunting trophy. And even odder to name the fish. I wondered if my host ate him before he was stuffed. Coincidentally, we were having fish for dinner. I guess my host admired his trophy fish anew whenever he took a piss. I must've been talking to myself in the bathroom, because suddenly the fish went postal. I shrieked, and then giggled. I had no idea there was even such a thing as an animated fish. He slapped his tail, looked me in the eye, opened his mouth wide, then began to sing Take me to the river. Put me in the water. When I emerged several minutes later, after a good singalong with Bill, everyone was asking me if I enjoyed my pitstop and meeting Bill. I was red-faced, caught in the act of singing in the loo with a talking fish.

HOUSE OF THE SUN

While scanning old photos, I found one of me
sitting on top of the world, at the Kalahaku Overlook,
Puʻu ʻUlaʻula on Haleakalā, the House of the Sun.

The crater at the summit was Māui's grandmother's home.
Māui's mother Hina, complained that her kapa bark cloth
wouldn't dry because the days were too short. All that work ruined.
So his blind grandmother helped him snare the sun with a net
made of his sister's hair to slow its journey across the sky.
The sun pleaded for its life, they came to an arrangement
that the days would be long in summer and shorter in winter.
It 's a good story, no matter that we're close to the equator,
where the days and nights are nearly equal.

Going down the Sliding Sands Trail into the volcanic desert
was the easy part, like schussing in snow,
only it was made of red pumice.... We took giant strides
where each step took us one body height downward.
It was like walking on the moon as we descended 2000 ft
to the crater floor in minutes. Our ears strained like divers.

Will Staple and Gary Snyder opted to take the trail
down the mountain out the bottom of the crater.
I had to hike back up to the observatory by myself.
I felt abandoned. I was alone on the steep slope,
with only my restless thoughts to accompany me.
The sun scorched my arms, until I was on fire.
The thin air at 10,000 feet whistled,
my tongue was like a dry stone.

I had opportunity to study the rare 'ahinahina,
or Haleakalā silverswords, looking like porcupines
or a bouquet of swords tipped in the purple blood of flowers.
They may live a century, but only bloom once,
one chance to make seeds, no multiple families.

I slid back down the trail backwards a half-step
for every step forward. Pumice singing beneath my feet.
Then I had to face the long drive back down the mountain,
jelly-thighed, I just wanted to sleep by the side of the road,
become part of the mountain, and wait for Māui to push up the sky.

4/8/18
rev. 4/21/18

BIRTHDAY HAIKU FOR PETE SUTTON

My heart is achin'
for trout dressed in bacon caught
by the stream of life.

Broken winds behind
your back and the road is long
without such good friends.

On Route 66
may you always find your way
back to the garden.

4/8/18

SECRET FALLS

SECRET FALLS 

Deep in a slot canyon Trümmelbach creek 
drains the meltwaters of three glaciers.
You can hear the thundering and roaring falls
from the Lauterbrunnen Valley, the valley of 72 falls,
but you can't see the ten waterfalls 
because they're hidden deep inside the mountain,
You have to enter the darkness in order to see 
the brilliant light of the subterranean falls.
It all boils down to black and white.

5/1/18

this evolved into TRÜMMELBACH FALLS

For the complete list of prompts, visit Robert Lee Brewer's A Poem a Day challenge. I have a jammed month, then we're off to Vegas, so these are placeholders for when I can get back to them later. If I've a poem, the title is in caps, if it's lower case, then I haven't written the poem. It's merely the prompt. The only problem with filling in the poems after the fact, is that the creation date will be different. So I'll date when I wrote the poems at the bottom.

Unused Robert Lee Brewer Poem a Day Prompts

I deleted these prompts as separate posts because I never got back to them to write poems for each of them, and my blog is hard enough to navigate as it is. The links will take you back to Robert Lee Brewer's original posts.

On researching my Irish patronyms

 
This blogpost evolved in response to some comments on a Facebook West Cork Genealogy site. One woman insisted that the variations in patronym spelling, was because everyone was illiterate and only went to school a few days of their lives, because they had to work on the farm—back in the day. Another poster assumed the clerks were just too lazy to add those pesky apostrophes. Not necessarily so.

Good Friday translation rant, aka an odd insomnia cure

I awoke 4 AM, with a blinding headache, from pulling recalcitrant honeysuckle vines from the engulfed Meyer lemon tree. I was in dire pain and the Advil hadn't yet kicked in, so there I was, with full-on insomnia, resurrecting my rusty Irish translation skills on a Facebook genealogy site. Perfect thing to do on the aftermath of Good Friday, no?

It's almost impossible to resurrect the meaning of Irish placenames as they've been Englishified and phoneticized to death. The English attempt to destroy a language. With no small thanks to the Royal Engineers and the 1833 Ordnance Survey. Irish playwright Brian Friel's play,Translations, tackles the systematic disembowelment of the Irish language by the English hellbent on cultural imperialism. But sometime enough of the original ghost Irish remains behind to see the meaning behind a placename.

WHAT THE EASTER BUNNY SAID

Well, Doctor, I don't know where the eggs come from,
and I have no idea why I feel a compulsion to hide them.
And this year, some April fools are yelling White Rabbit!
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Go ask Alice, he said.
And no, I am not sleeping with the chickens.

3.30.18

Putting the grant to bed

Didn't sleep at all last night, too keyed up with grant writing. I came home & crashed—only to be wakened by a phonecall at 10PM, I thought it was time to get up again? Now what? Exhausted doesn’t even cover it. At least I managed to nod off again around midnight, and scored 12 hours sleep! Since I average 6 hours per night, that’s a grand slam. Grant to bed. Me to bed too. Recovery is Act III. Salmon and wine on the horizon.

Updating old technology for tax season: The horror! The horror!

I'm about to upgrade to El Capitán/High Sierra, as my trusty Mac OS companion of 8.5 years, Snow Leopard, is no longer long of tooth, but bereft of any pearly whites whatsoever. The latest discovery that the Intel chip has a back door, much to the delight of Hackers Anon, means every technological agency is tightening up bootstraps in order to stick their big toes (and cocks—whatever is largest) to shoal up the wall of data vulnerability.

And in turn, data service providers are also tightening things up. This translates to my web browser Firefox being no longer upgradeable, Safari  5 is next to useless, having long since lost The Great Browser Race. I can't even load a Daily Kos petition because my browser's too old and therefore "vulnerable." I can see tighter security needed if I'm actually donating money (I'm not), but to fill out a petition? And who knew that MacWorld articles were top secret documents FYEO fergawdsakes? (For your eyes only.)

Then there's the new and improved software: take TurboTax. Ah, yes, the tax season rears its ugly head, and shoves it up yer arse looking for fool's gold. That's the litmus I use to update software. When I need to load TurboTax. That's how I updated another hard drive to Mountain Lion, and later, to Mavericks.

Suffice to say, I hated both Mountain Lion, and Mavericks with a passion (I hated all the OS updates until Catalina), but I managed to convince TurboTax to play nicely on my MacBook, so I could file my taxes. Sort of. (BTW, TurboTax did not require such stringent hoops for Windows users during this time. And we KNOW how vulnerable Windows is. My partner has an old PC laptop with a crusty virus-ridden version of Windows that still runs TurboTax. What's with that?)

So, after I blithely purchased this year's version of TurboTax, I read the FINE PRINT. Minuscule. Unreadable without a microscope, or #2 readers, whatever's handiest. Minimum system requirements, written in 6 point white type on grey background: such secretive minimum operating system requirement: OS 10.11. Whoa, Nellie! That's El Capitán. O Captain! My Captain! Decapitate me now.

We went from the rogue sneaker waves of Mavericks, that's OS 10.9 to you, to the heights of Machu Pucchu, I mean—that mile-high monolith, that sheer granite wall of El Capitán, AKA OS 10.11, that has challenged so many climbers—in one fell swoop? In one year? What happened to OS 10.10? Holy crappy crampons! The Krampus came late this year. Or he came back for seconds.

So, (remembering to breathe), I took a shot, and steeled my nerves. I girded my loins, and began to upgrade a hard drive to El Capitán. Painful. After more than an hour of upgrading, it worked swimmingly. Until it didn't. This I found out after I went two OS'es further down the plankety-plank road to perdition, to the holiest grail of OS of time present—High Sierra, AKA OS 10.13. Lucky 13, it wasn't. I was locked out. Epic password fail. Black screen. Spinning cursor of death. Random restarts. Complete disappearance of the Finder. Again. And again. And again.

So I spent an entire day (and most of the next day too), trying to coax two fussy operating systems to play nicely on my souped-up 2011 MacBook Pro. I learned some things. New tricks, old dawg. I practiced deep rebuilds and even deeper cleanses. I gnashed my teeth. I invented new portmanteaus swearwords. Corrupted kext files? I found combo update fixes. Suffice to say, El Capitán is now working. Or at least, I can load it. I haven't even opened TurboTax. Too exhausted. I'm afraid to even restart High Sierra.

Ah, well, there's always next year.

Night heron on the Petaluma River, photo

Night heron. He’s no singing canary. I told him not to give up his day job. With a voice like that, he could wind up in Sing-sing. The song of his people is somewhere between an Edgar Allen Poe inspired death rattle, and someone being vigorously strangled. Looks can be deceiving. He’s got a long neck stuffed underneath that feather ruff. Like a jack in the box. Otherwise, he’d starve to death as his beak couldn't reach the ground.

• NOTE: THIS POST ALONG WITH 12 OTHER POSTS WAS ERRONEOUSLY REMOVED BY BLOGGER FOR VIOLATING COMMUNITY STANDARDS ON 5/14/21. It was reinstated as a draft the next day. I am still pissed off.

CONE FLOWER, OPEN VALENTINE, BLUEBIRD, CORONA, 4 concrete poems

OPEN VALENTINE

My heart on a string

tugging the heartstrings

of the sky

but the pen no longer writes

my heart….

Archer and arrow pierces

feather

feather

feather

CORONA

The corona of the sun

shone like a diamond ring.

we could see the mountains

of the moon.

The moon passed in front of the sun

it was as if time stood still.

I'd never witnessed 

an eclipse like that

totality

and when night fell

again in the morning

the birds they all

stopped singing

and so did the tide.

All was still.

Fish slept in my arms

like pale autumn leaves

their gills, small half-moons

Moon and stars, the sky

was one vast quilt of stars

and then the corona

burst into petals.

I was looking at 

vast tongues of fire licking

the sky.

It was as if…

we could see the mountains

of the moon.

The corona of the sun

shone like a diamond ring.

CONE FLOWER

in the sky

and my dreams

are like thorns

in the book

of memory

the petals

they shine

like gold

in the sun

and my heart 

is like kite

cone flower

flying

stem grows

to the earth

BLUEBIRD

May the bluebird of happiness

fly fly fly

wing wing wing

fly fly fly

eye

tail tail tail

feathers feathers feathers

delicate toes legs

delicate toes legs

up your nose

and may your nose

fly off into the sunset.

I'm not sure when these concrete poems were done, at Glenview School, possibly spring 2018.

Will Durst asked: How many of your high school teachers would you have confidently armed?

Will Durst asked: How many of your high school teachers would you have confidently armed? The ex- Marine wrestling coach? The English teacher who spaced out during John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn?” The librarian regularly hitting her flask behind the stacks? Sister Mary Uzi?

I replied: Our English teacher Ms. Mary McKay spaced out over Eleanor Rigby, and got a contact high from Kubla Khan. But then, she wore rose-colored glasses, had a permanent headcold, and lived in her own personal Xanadu in the Haight. No telling how she managed to get to school and back on her own. She was always enveloped in blue smoke, her aim would be clouded.

Music teacher Darryl Parker laced his coffee so heavily, it was a wonder he could drive over White's Hill at the end of the day, let alone, aim a gun. Art teacher Warren Fairbanks who sampled the ample wares of one classmate, was also an imbiber of sorts. His aim was sexual. The school narc married a classmate. His gun was always loaded. Kelly was one hot redhead.

Maybe I would trust my math teacher Archie Williams, who won the 1936 Olympic gold medal, and shook Hitler's hand, but he was far too kind a man to pull the trigger. I never did learn much math in his classroom but loved him anyway.

Maybe the Dean of Girls, Miss Ann West. She suspended me for wearing culottes, and for cutting class to hitch to Stinson Beach in February (the sunburn gave it away). She could have handled being armed. She had plenty of ammo. No problemo.

Philosopher Jerry Lucy taught us to question everything. I can't imagine twin Uzis mounted to his wheelchair. But hey, something he said must've resonated, we shut down the San Rafael Draft board and said no to war. But then, Michael Rossman's little brother was our school president, we had a direct line to the Free Speech movement even though we were tweeny-twerps.

The FBI was very interested in us, and well-armed right from the very beginning.

Mad donkeys

Someone posted photos of donkeys wearing floral headbands, they looked so angelic. But looks can be deceiving.

My donkey Joshua was one of the mean ones who didn't like kids. She plotted all forms of nefarious revenge for riding her. One time I was feeding her a carrot and she latched onto my finger, knowing it was my finger, and then ground away, and sawed her jaw back and forth, hell-bent on severing my finger. I had to pound on her somewhat hollow head in order to get my finger back.

Josh was plain old mean to the bone. She didn't like kids, and I was stuck with her because no one else could, or would ride her. Or get past her teeth. Born under the mean tree. She taught me to be wily. She'd dump me in the most awful of places. Ditches, briar patches, thistles. 

She'd bloat, would wait for the cinch to loosen up, hit a gallop (she was otherwise lazy and dawdled), then slam on the breaks at a strategic spot. She even broke my arm (but I never knew it until I was in an accident in 1997, as I hid all wounds from my granny....) 

There are many sour donkeys out there. I love Jim Dodge's descriptions of Ol' Pissgums in Not Fade Away. Our neighbors had tall grey donkeys who were sweet. More like Irish donkeys. I wonder if it was the particular breed that was so ornery? Josh was the smaller brown Spanish type. She had the Latin temperament down cold.

 I'd rather take my clever, scheming Shetlands (who kept me up nights) any day. Luckily Joshua's lame daughter Nay-nay was sweet. My horses were sweeter yet. I understand there are sweet donkeys out there...but Josh was not of that tribe. 

One of the few times Josh was a good donkey was when we were part of a Christmas pageant in Marin City. We began at the top of the hill, and there I was, Joseph, decked out in white sheets (al la KKK) leading Josh down the hill with my friend Step as Mary on her back.... (everything hinges on the location location location...I knew something was off, but I didn't know what.)

I do wonder if the type of donkey has something to do with their temperament. When I was young, I thought there was only one breed, I was astounded to discover there were many breeds of donkeys. I suspect Josh was a Spanish donkey, the donkey breed of the American West, and of prospectors. She came from Clear Lake, and lived a very long time...

A photo of my friend Steph and Nay-nay, caught diving through the fence. (She got stuck...) Sadly, I don't have a photo of Josh.

Donkey Wars
EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

ODE FOR JOHN OLIVER SIMON

May you always dream
of the freedom of clouds
scutting across the sky.
May your laughter be
raucous as the crows at sunset
and carry their dark wisdom forth.
May you sleep soundly
with wild birds in your heart.
And may your thoughts be
like godbeams of the sun
at daybreak to pierce
the ordinary and the mundane.
And may the mountains rise up
to hold you on their crests
so that the stars may find you
shining among them
like a thought bearing witness
to your words shedding light
on this earthly plane.

2/14/2018

Almost Ten Years a Bloggin'

Wow! My blogpage counter whirled past 500,000 hits in January and I didn't even witness it. I never imagined having that many readers, ever. I know that people are reading my blog, I just don't know who my audience is—whether they're avid readers, or merely flybys. About the only thing I do know is what people are reading.

I added the blog counter in 2010, I would imagine that I didn't have all that many visits during the first two years, perhaps 40-50,000. But it's 517,056, right now, and whirring up. It boggles the senses. My most popular post, The Viking-Irish Redhead Gene Myth 3/23/2009, has garnered 87,113 hits. Does anybody actually read it, or do they just click on it? Gratified to see Mill Valley's Unknown Museum and the Gluers Junk Art move up to fourth position. The art movement was important, and there was very little about it on the internet.

I've been blogging for nearly ten years. I began blogging in 2008, though I founded the blog in January of  2007, I let it lay fallow for a year. I was a slow adopter. To be fair, I really didn't begin blogging until August, 20, 2008, so I guess this is a bit of a preamble.

Since ca. 2015, I've been actively filling in the backstory timeline, posting work from the early years. (Groan.) I've still got a long way to go, as I am gleaning old journals. I'm branching out to include prose—and especially my travel journals.

Right now I'm focusing on the John Oliver Simon years (1985-89). Not that there were that many solid years, as I ran far from him when things went south, but he continued to influence my life and we finally buried the hatched, to become deep friends again.

My goal is have at least 52 posts a year, some years' worth of material is rather slim on content (especially 2005 and 2006), but most years are robust.

Because I've given myself permission to also post freewrites, vs. polished poems, I'm beginning to see crossover connections between posts (and also anchoring the actual date some of the early writing was written.) Matrix. Matrices? Who knew my Tengo Dinero piece had its roots in a CPITS workshop on Marge Piercy's Charm for Attracting Wild Money?

I still hold a vague hope that some of those early corrupted files where I lost vast swaths of work, will resurface, at least in draft form as I glean my old journals.

Thank you Guy Kawasaki for getting me into this mess. It's been a fascinating journey. LITERRATA or Veritas and the art of Memoir.

Happy blogaversery!
Sort of.

NB In case you're wondering why I even bother posting all these blog milestones, it's so I can keep track, and it's a way to measure my progress. Otherwise, I despair. It becomes a morass, and when self-doubt kicks in, it becomes a raft, and a memory aid. And as an added bonus: a timeline!

• Blogger stats (23)

Changing my Facebook name

Kewl, I can change my name on Facebook. I am now the Mighty Mo. My friends said, you have always been The Mighty Mo. See, I was called Maureen when I was in deep trouble, and it was my public name at school, and that was a permanent case of deep trouble. My real name was Baba when I was growing up. Maureen was my mother, her nickname was More. I resisted the nickname Mo for decades, It began with the publicity on the Beatles, Ringo Starr’s wife was called Mo, but by the time I got involved with John Oliver Simon, I quit fighting the nickname, and have grown quite accustomed to its face... Someone quipped, I assume you know that is the name of a battleship? And I replied, If the battleship fits! It’s in Oahu, at Pearl Harbor, and yes, I have the photos  to prove it. A survivor.

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