Blackbird and crow

In the sky, a blackbird dives and pecks at a crow flying too close for comfort. Tiny speck, like a period at the end of the sentence, the blackbird harries the tail of that interloper in his airspace. With this airshow, we begin to understand the fable of how the wren became the king of all birds by hitchhiking on the back of an eagle to see who could fly the highest. That little bird, well out of his comfort zone, dived and swooped in the air like an acrobat, leaving the crow so perplexed, he headed for safer skies.

Wild grasses

There is that moment of utter beauty, when the non-native grasses grow tall enough to ripple in the wind with a certain sheen like watered silk on the hills embroidered with deer trails. In the scars of old edifices, and in a field, a compass of native willows covers the bowl, the lowest place were water collects, not quite a stream, but groundwater. I realized suddenly, all those trees were one organism. One willow that lost its branches and fell making new life again and again and again. And I wondered, how long that grove of willows had stood there? Very much like the Panto alders of Colorado, maybe they are not clonal bodies, of course they’re clonal. The branches fall off, maybe they’re not joined at the hip or root, but they are all one organism. I repeat it many times over like a stutter, Water willow, water willow yellow willow pussy willow pussy willow, say it say it again say it. Laugh, say it again.

Drought journal

I awoke this morning to the unfamiliar sound of rain falling on the roof, the wind picked up, and the pine needles danced on the tin roof like a downpour. A sonorous lullaby, and I drifted back to sleep. What is it about the rain falling on the roof that suits us so? God knows we need rain. We’ve had almost none this year. Sure, we had a deluge in October. Luckily it filled the lakes in Marin County and other stockponds, but most of the state did not get rain. Southern California has gotten more rain this year than we have. 

Another drought year coming up, I post online. Someone says no, another drought decade. And I think of all the decades that we have been in this drought. My neighbor dropped off a logged tree. I counted the rings and you could see for the first 35 years of its life, the tree got plenty of water. But then the rings towards the outer bark were packed in so tight that you cannot count them. These rings our drought journal, the real drought journal.

All in a day’s work

It seems a poet’s work is never done. Poets are always analyzing everything, searching for the exact right word or phrase to describe things. For example, driving down the road this blustery morning, I saw something luff and waft in the breeze. Thinking it was a bird, I slowed down, only to realize it was a branch, but it wasn’t a branch, it was the tip of a branch. And in that moment I realized how much we keep searching to get closer and closer to that moment when we have the aha, the moment of Epiphany. That moment when you know that you have chosen the exact right word to describe what it is you’re seeing or feeling. Or include the philosophical level when you go back to layer or imbue a poem with meaning. But you can’t kill the baby in the process. 

Sometimes, stacking image after image after image creates meaning in the reader, but other times we have to strife with, or settle for artifice to ensure that it is understood by all. Well not maybe by all, but by the reader—whoever the reader is. Take care of the reader. Something I always tell my students. It was so funny to hear one student saying it back to me when I was teaching. If we get a new student in the classroom, I will sometimes have students catch the other students up by explaining what it is we do. In this way I can tell if I am reaching the students and if they are retaining the information. 

It is rare that I get a chance to dictate to my iPad. Because usually I do not have the clarity of mind to focus in that way. And I think of how poetry has a home in my brain making it much more pliable, making it possible for me to talk to a machine, in order to write a poem. Truly, poetry is the mother of all arts. And then some.

Back in October, 2017 while driving to Sonoma County to meet or friend, Kathleen Carr, I was broadsided by a jumble of words tumbling fourth, and having no paper and having no iPad, I grabbed a marker and on the side of a zucchini box, I scrawled the poem as it came, fast and furious. But I waited too long to transcribe it, and couldn’t read some of it. The juxtaposition, the leap from idea to idea is interesting. I have no idea what the poem was about, or what prompted it. I just know that sometimes when driving down wild backroads, words speak through me. And I am merely the scribe.

I scribe, scribble, scribe. A scribe rights, a child scribbles, scrawls poems.

THE GOOD DOCTOR POET

      —with thanks to William Carlos Williams

So, we were at this boring party deep in a dull suburb,
much to our surprise, we met an aviator in the atrium—so much

depends upon casual connections, conversations drift and float
upon a sea of ambient noise, the generic hubbub fueled by

a mix of alcohol and angst, the party fizzled, it was a case of nature

red in tooth and claw, soon drunks would be carted off in red

wheelbarrows, our New Jersey pilot was out of his depth, his face

glazed with boredom, he told us a story of scars when he was five,

without preamble, he rolled up his pants, to show us his knee, his eyes
watered, a yawn, he fell out of an apple tree, the poet-doctor stood

beside him, and stitched him up. We leaned forward in unison, was
the name Williams? He said, yes how did you know? We were

white-knuckled with anticipation. We cackled like triumphant
chickens, high-fiving each other, and said, because we’re poets.

4/11 NaPoWriMo 

CLEAR CUT

When I was a child, our neighbor, 

Lucien Vincilione—his name, a clue—

in an attempt to establish a preordained
sense of order in a fecund wilderness,
vigorously cleared manzanita and coyotebush,
to let the land breathe. He sawed and whacked
and sprayed the brambles with a vengeance,
leveling with impunity the berries and wild roses,
eradicating the snowberry and the pipevine—
what we called the greeny Dutchman’s pipe,
never learning the names of those wild plants
that survived for eons in that unkept garden.
Still not content, he torched the honeybee nest
in the bay tree down by the creek, he
felled the venerable crabapple in the gulley
all for the idea of order, and a good riddance,
he said, having abolished the slovenly wilderness
for a sterile landscape of non-native grasses.
First to go were the shooting stars, then the creamcups,

then the larkspur, and the tiny wild strawberries,

the death-knell of the blue-eyed-grass and hounds-tongue 

and the dainty iris. Only the death camas survived.

Of course we were unaware of the role of symbiosis,
an interdependent dance of host plant and insect.
And for all his efforts, for decades there was no longer 

a verdant wildflower carpet to greet us,

nor a crown of black pipevine swallowtails
with luminous indigo and russet eye patches
swooping around our heads in spring.
No accounting for taste, my grandmother said.
Not even the small birds could survive 

that onslaught of progress.

4/10 PAD

Persian door, Aleke and Kobe

Southern Iran or North Kurdistan. From Hawraman, Facebook

The hen contemplates the day, standing on the lintel hovering between inside and outside, the enticing odor of green grass, an oasis, as she can’t fathom the distant lake or the the dark mountains, or gender; her world is contained within the twin cerulean doors opening inward spilling the memory of sky inward onto the dung walls of a room with a flagstone floor, a curved mosaic bowl worn down by time, and the secret whisperings of the past. The hen stands on the women’s side of the doors. They each have their own gendered story of segregated entrances. The verdigris brass aleke, a delicate wing, or more often, a finger-shaped knocker for the women to gently tap, was on the right side, and the thick kobe fist, in the shape of a lionhead or a hand for the men to bang upon the door was on the left. The pitch of the knock, a code, so that the inhabitants each knew how to answer the door. Women answered to the tap and men answered the more robust knock. But in order to close the door, both halves are needed—you can’t have one without the other.

4/9 PAD. Aleke and kobe

ON THE KLEE WYCK TRAIL

Raven, Gene Tagaban at Xunaa Shula Hit; Kenneth Grant video

I once witnessed a Kwakiutl raven dance, 

in the wayback days of youth, in some longhouse,
when we made summer sojourns to the Pacific Northwest.
Tricksters, and creators of light, those long summer nights
when I was but half-formed and didn’t know the confines of shadows.

Seeking fish wisdom, we ate salmon sizzling from the campfire,

under faint stars, the feathered cloak of night tucking us in.
Perhaps this is why I talk to those ravens canted against the sky.
They always seem to circle back and listen, tilting their heads 
to gaze upon me with dark eyes as if to understand each nuance.
Unfortunately I always talk to them as if they were cats
or killer whales. As if expecting answers. Maybe a warble or two.
Don’t they know that all cats, and ravens, by extension,
are black at night, which is probably a good thing
they can’t decipher anything I say.

4/9 NaPoWriMo

Day jobs

No one ever told me that I’d be come a jack of all trades and master of none, if I became an artist. That my life would be filled with myriad meaningless day jobs. They said get a real job. I didn’t listen. I danced from job to job. I began young following my passion, supporting hopeless causes. To support my horse rescued from the glue factory, I was a babysitter, gardener, errand runner, stall shoveler, horse exerciser, salad girl. When she died, there were more horses and ponies to support, I was a stray equine magnet perennially in debt to my vet. In my Junior year, I sold off the last of the ponies and became a waitress in Switzerland, to see the Alps. I got stranded there when the airlines went belly up. To put myself through college, I was a small tarot press manager (where I became pen pals with Ken Kesey), a housemaid, a house cleaner, au pair for the rockstars and the rich (wi’ a cuppa tae in me hond with Fleetwood Mac)—and that was all before I hung my artist hat up and took up the mantle of poetry. Somewhere along the way there was love. And travel.  I’ve been a caterer, server, bartender (don’t talk to me about slippery nipples), an independent newspaper paste-up and layout troglodyte (we worked all night), a darkroom film developer, photographer and writer (I met lots of famous people while wearing my ace cub reporter hat, not to mention my usher duds), a graphic artist and calligrapher, an Elderhostel lecturer on local history and geography, arts facilitator and presenter, seller of Dish satellite TV antennae (apparently I was good, I won a Mickey Mouse watch, but watches don’t like me). I’ve even been an extra in movies (with Brian Cox, and a glaring Faye Dunaway), and TV series—a face-to-face with Cheech, where I played a reporter—and I’ve never seen any of those clips. I’ve been a madcap storyteller for school literacy programs. Before the pandemic I was an intreprid traveler, a petsitter, a housesitter, a Living History silk artist teacher/storyteller, and a whisky wench for Highland Gameses, educator-trainer, artist in the schools, both poetry and art, I am still hard at it, still waltzing, though I approach my 70th year filled with curiosity and trepidation that I made it this far without ever having held down a real job. Well, unless you count that stint at Trader Joe’s where I learned the rules of commerce, and became their top cheesemonger, but it was a place where the customer is always right, and haughtier than hell, and more than willing to take you to the cleaners for the most minor of infractions. What can I say, my face was an open book. I didn't have to practice my fuckyouverymuch smile. It came naturally. But that’s where I met Rita Moreno and we danced in the aisles after her hip surgery. Oh, how we danced. And laughed. Poetry was my beacon, my true north. I’ll dance to it. I only just now learned the full phrase is “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” Hear, hear.

What were some of your day jobs to support your habit?

4/9 PAD

RIP Vito Orlando

 I have not taken the time to properly mourn the death of an old friend. One of the fallouts when you break up with someone, is that you lose a whole circle of friends. Vito was part of my support system for nearly 22 years. And then, because I felt I couldn’t revisit my friends for fear that Neil would find me, I hid out, laying low since that cataclysmic blowup that left me unhomed in September of 2018. Then the pandemic. Diana died soon after, we were unable to mourn. Shiva died durimg the pandemic. We were unable to mourn. Then Vito, I was unable to mourn. When I left Neil, I left everything behind. My known world, my friends. A death of sorts to a significant part of my life. Vito was one of those casualties of failed relationships. But every time I drive down 580 towards the Richmond Bridge, I have imaginary conversations with Vito. The one-way conversation begins at the Center Street offramp where Costco is, and ends at the Richmond toll booth. Mostly I wish him love. Life is like that, I told him. I was not invited to the memorial service. This photo was stolen from my ex’s wall.

MAKING A BREAK FOR IT

It feels weird doesn’t it, to make a break for it,
go out into the world for nonessential things.
By that, I mean things you don’t need to do
or need to have in order to survive.
By that, I mean all the things that we let go of
during the pandemic, By that I mean how
we sequestered ourselves from everything,
until toilet paper became essential,
then paper towels, then alcohol.
Now poetry.

4/9 PAD

WAR PROFITEERS

WAR PROFITEERS

With the price of gas, nothing could move

me off this hill except sour

milk, big oil barons raking 

it in, hand over fist,

with windfall profits

enough to sour

anyone’s 

milk gone 

rogue.

Which begs the question: is sour two

syllables or one, ditto that

with oil? I guess it depends

upon where you live and

how you speak to dogs

and horses, no

mistresses

to speak

of.

4/9 NaPoWriMo

 TODAY

I wrote two nonets, one about milk

and the price of gas but Blogger 

erased it, the other too,

now I can’t remember—

something about fugues

of dailiness,

the weekend

still in-

tact.

4/9 NaPoWriMow

ALL THAT BLUE IN THE FIELDS

 ALL THAT BLUE IN THE FIELDS

When I was a child, our lower field was blanketed 

with myriad cornflowers in late summer. 

I marveled at their variety and depth of color. 

Indigo and woad. I coveted the ones with the purple hearts, 

of course, as purple was color of forgiveness, 

something I was always in short supply of.

When I went to the Ukraine in late summer, 

I was surprised by cornflowers, blue eyes in the wheat. 

And there you have the the colors of the Ukrainian flag. 

The wheat and the sunflowers, and the cornflowers and sky.

And sometimes there were wind poppies 

remembrance for all the blood that was shed.

4/7 PAD

MORNING TEA RITUAL

Morning officially begins after that 2nd cup of tea 

in a blue mug, the color of flawless summer skies. 

In the half-light of dawn, 

the neon blue light of the electric kettle 

is as mesmerizing as a bug zapper. 

Or a Blue Light Special on Aisle Three.

I try not to circle its aura, like moth to flame,

but I’m helpless in its neon wake, 

the silver bubbles roil to the surface, 

seeking the solace of gravity in jetstreams.

I pour boiling water into the flask. 

Two Red Roses, one Barry’s, to be exact.

Replicating my grandmother’s favorite blend, 

only it was McGrath’s—long gone now, like all the rest. 

Like sneaking into the closet to try on on her Sunday shoes, 

carved and etched by bonespurs and bunions.

And I dole out a jamspoon of sugar from a crystal bowl, 

it could’ve been hers, but it was a thrift store find 

that rings true to the past, like the knell of a church bell,

when I strike it with her silver scalloped jamspoon 

that doubles as part clapper and part shovel. 

Only then can I survey the wreckage of morning, 

composed, girding my loins, ready to face this day.

4/6 Write On! workshop with Terri Glass

AEOLIAN DREAMS

In Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah, an alien throne
awaits the song of the rogue wind
in the heart of the iron-stained hoodoos —
nestled deep in the Valley of Dreams
where rests the fossilized remains
of the five-horned pentaceretops.
Let misfortune and sleeping fossils lie.

4/5 PAD

Lost Time

Catch up, catch up, always out of breath,  it seems that I am always running  from one appointment to another, like Alice’s white rabbit who was, and who always will be late, late, for a very important date, as he said, anxiously checking his pocket watch for the umteenth time, having misplaced both gloves and fan. Clearly, he has never heard of Ram Dass, who famously said Be here now. Lord knows, we’ve been trying ever since. Do we ever really catch up with ourselves, once we’re out of synch? Doesn’t he know that no one knows when to arrive for the Queen of Hearts? It is always noon at the gates of the garden. But we all know how Alice fell down the rabbit hole. The real question is, why is the Cheshire Cat always smiling? 

4/4 PAD

DEMI-GLOSA AFTER RILKE’S AUTUMN

      a glosa after Rainer Maria Rilke’s Autumn 

Yes, of course, the leaves all fell, and of course, 

as they fell, they wept to the winds as if the orchards 

were stealing their stuffing from the dark clouds. 

Each leaf, a poem waiting for the right words to find it. 

It was a time of burning tears and the earth hesitated on its axis, 

it took Ithuriel a moment to take stock in the orbit of the stars, 

they were drowning in their serene loneliness in the vacuum of space. 

And there is always some wayward angel waiting in the wings, 

who thinks he is a demagogue, waiting to ambush you, pick you up 

and throw you over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes after the fall.

4/3 NaPoWriMo

I have some questions for the geologists:

I have some questions for the geologists: I absolutely cannot remember the eras of the geologic calendar. I got the seasonal epochs down, PMC, but those little leapy subfloor eras trip me every time. Is the glass of geologic time filled with Pliny the Elder? Or was it Pliny the Younger? What happens when it’s half filled; is it not-only-but-also half empty? I never remember who observed what. What about PtheE’s little blue rowboatie in the Bay of Naples, giving him a ringside seat, when Vesuvius erupted in 79AD? Did Pliny, who identified and named hops, Lupus salictarius, aka Humulus lupulus, drink and dream a little wolfdream before he died of ash / smoke inhalation? Not to mention those clinkers falling from the sky. Did you know that the alcoholic content of Pliny the Elder XX Imperial IPA- is 8% ABV. His nephew Pliny the Younger is XXX-rated and clocks in at 10.5%. Would that help me  to remember?

Lou Lambert’s Rockpile Ranch, Sonoma County, drawing 6x9”

Lou Lambert’s Rockpile Ranch, Sonoma County

Obscure words and poem fragments

Obscure words lifted from @Haggard Hawks

§

Take the Greek word for running, 

drumos, and we are off to the races. 

The hippodrome is for horses, of course, 

not for hippos, those ill-tempered water horses.

Imagine dromedary camels or dromedary dates

racing a mirage of lost palindromes in the desert. 

A man, a plan, a canal, Suez. 

§

Wielding my pen like a ski pole, 

I am torn asunder by a pain in my shoulder, 

My shoulder sundered, separated, an old wound, 

a bad spill on the last run of the last day of the ski year. 

Don’t worry, a torn rotator cuff and a separated shoulder

are enough to keep a firm grip on my imagination.  

TO A BULLFINCH

 TO A BULLFINCH

The Manx word for bullfinch is roo ruy. 

Embedded in its branches, the Irish rí ruadh hidden within. 

The roots of the teanga, destroyed when the English bearla 

was used to capture a dying language. Hurrah for John Bull.

The red lord of the trees sits high upon his branch,

heralding spring with his red breast so like that

of Cock Robin, anglicized from the Welsh, coch rhi ben, 

Lugh’s little red lordling with his breast made of sunset.

A brû-dearg or spideóg with messages from the Otherworld.

Who killed Cock Robin? I did, said the sparrow.

He was having an affair with Jenny Wren, the dreolín.

And who remembers the crime that traitorous bird committed?

Who tolled the bell? I did, said the bullfinch

as he hung the sparrow for his well-placed arrow.

You’d think that the arrow maker, the fetcher did the deed.

There was a goldfinch, a chaffinch, all manner of finches 

and sundry birds who attended Cock Robin’s funeral.

But only the dove truly mourned for him. 

The story got truncated along the way to a bull.

I have never seen a bull with his hangman’s noose 

sitting in a tree, nor a bullfinch, for that matter.

4/2/22 NaPoWriMo.  variants of Cock Robin here 

Obscure words lifted from @Haggard Hawks

Harmonic Convergences

After Robert Hass’ Story About a Body

How we define Eros, the breast becomes the talisman, she said. I gave them back when I was done with them, she said. Mother Earth was there to greet her when that too failed. She was cleansed by fire, she became ash and bone, and carried on with the harmonics of the universe. I have outlived my mother by five years, I am ready to give back my breasts, but it may be too late, as I watch my left breast turn its eye ever inward. Things are what they seem, angry wasps inside my breast seek an escape from the confines of the body.

4/1/22 NaPoWriMo

(I’ve been haunted by this image ever since Bob tried it out on us during a workshop at a Napa Poetry Conference in the early 1980s. I never knew the title.)

FULMINATING OVER FOOD

As a child, I was a finicky eater, figuring that if 

I forsook all responsibility for my foolish dislikes,

I could get a leg up. A leg up. Over what, I’ve no idea. 

Forsooth, I said, fulminating over the likes of frumenty to fungi.

Who knows that the letter F was once a rake to furrow the land,

to grow the grain, to finish the job. We rake ideas over coals, 

avoiding food groups, in search of the secret elixir to longevity.

4/1/22 PAD brought to you by the letter F.

April Poem a Day and NaPoWriMo prompts

Robert Brewer’s Poem a Day Challenge and NaPoWriMo poem a day challenge writing prompts (Blogger helpfully removes the links and renders them useless, so you will need to visit their websites.)

TO BEE A FLOWER

To be a flower is a profound responsibility. 

So much depends upon whether or not one has already gone to seed, 

or set seed, even if the bees forgot to visit. It’s one big sex race. 

Finally, I’m old enough to let today be today and not be tomorrow,

or let memory attempt to set back the clock of regret. 

4/1/22 NaPoWriMo

DEMI-GLOSA AFTER A FEW FRAGMENTS OF EMILY’S

Glosa after Emily‘s elliptical lines

So Emily once said forever might be short
and since I’ve been short forever, barely reaching 

my own lofty height, proscribed or otherwise. 

And if to be an elder means pain, I am old enough today.
I’ve got the pain part down cold after a shovel incident,
I eat CBDs and sleep on a heating pad of misplaced desire.

And, I think I’ve got the old part down as well, as I’m pushing 70.
Emily said, the second half of joy is always shorter than the first—
by far, because you already know what to expect, don’t you?

3/31/22 NaPoWriMo

BETWEEN WORLDS

1. The day dawned, smoky and sultry, 

as I prepared for a poetry reading, 

As I stepped over the lintel, I heard the news… 

The sky stopped, my hand froze on the doorknob. 

I was halfway between worlds, 

a liminal portal, a threshold. A day where 

we could never go back to who or where we were. 

Our days were spent in speechless horror 

as we watched one atrocity after another unfold

again and again on phosphor screens the world over. 

The images, indelibly etched on our retinas, 

of people falling falling from the sky, afire,

an image I would revisit again in my mind’s eye. 

Strangers holding hands as they fell that morning. 

All that blue sky above them like a flawless quilt. 

The thick dust settling like a blanket over them. 

My heart in my throat, the vertigo that followed. 

I was never so afraid of heights 

until that moment frozen in time.

2. To this day I cannot shake the image 

of those random couples falling from the sky, 

holding hands, as they plummeted from great heights, 

as there was nowhere else left for them to go. 

So they plummeted like birds of prey 

toward the solace of the ground.

Sometimes I imagine 

that we have wings inside our bodies, 

held prisoner by a cage of ribs and viscera.

Late afternoon we visited a woman 

in the Berkeley Hills who was at Ground Zero. 

The afternoon light flooded the room 

and the piano keys glistened and smiled, 

a melody that fell silent so many years ago. 

Later, I heard how she had died, 

having inhaled too much death that day. 

It came back to claim her. 

Those interior wings of desire.

3. Sometimes when I am at great heights, 

I imagine wings transporting me 

across a great chasm, like that thin landbridge 

on the crest between Mount Whitney and King’s Canyon. 

I peered down into forever, watched carrion birds 

circling the updraft with wingspans taller than me, 

the feathers of my inner wings 

tickling the back of my throat until I coughed 

and spluttered, gasping for breath, 

those wings that kept me aloft.

4. The sisters separated us in church 

to keep us from disrupting the mass, 

saying that we needed to leave enough room 

for our personal guardian angels. 

I thought it grandiose but I became obsessed 

with the spaces between us, not knowing 

which side s/he sat on, and did that mean 

we needed to leave enough room 

for two angels to sit side by side? Were they hes or shes?

Suddenly the sparsely populated pew seemed overcrowded.

Parishioners glared at us for taking up so much space.

And then I began to worry about how much room 

they needed for their wings and could they even sit?

Could their wings even be folded back to fit the pew? 

Or were they relegated to a life of standing around 

watching snotnosed brats rather than soaring the skies

or taking up dancing on the heads of pins?

5. How far have I fallen? The mighty Mo, 

having tumbled from great heights, she, 

having dangled her legs from great precipices, 

contemplates the fall from youth into old age. 

The time my horse took the bit in her teeth

as we barreled up the fire road, her head in my lap, 

flecks of saliva, foam and blood covering me 

as the bit cut deep into her tongue. 

My penance, to cleanse the stickers from her tongue 

cauterizing it was silver nitrate. 

The cost of speed, asking a racehorse to run, 

 not being able to control her, the blood lust was up 

and the adrenaline pummeled her heart 

so she felt no pain that day and the wind had wings 

but the crash landing brought us back to earth. 

The overwhelming guilt and grief. 

6. The mezzanine is a midway place between below and above. 

A kind of purgatory of our own choosing.

7. We had climbed an old oak overhanging the creek, 

my aunt walked out the mossy limb. 

I stood to follow, but I was four and lost my footing. 

The rocks in the gorge below gnashed their teeth. 

She grabbed me by the arms, hauled me over the rough bark 

like a sack of potatoes to the safety of the branch. 

My armpits were bleeding. My granny treated my wounds 

with zinc oxide and the cats were terribly interested. 

Afterwards, at Speck’s Bar, a stranger tried to pick me up 

to raise me up to his eye level, but I screamed and screamed. 

The man startled, dropped me, until my aunt explained. 

The Shirley Temples used to assuage my pain 

were as crimson as blood of Christ. 

Where was my guardian angel that day when I needed her? 

Was she more earthbound, or did she merely abandon me?

And what about my aunt saving me from the rocks below?

3/30/22 Write On! workshop with Terri Glass

DITHEROTOMY

He drove his Honda Odyssey so slowly
thru the Fairfax intersection,
it was as if he was taking pious instruction
from a page of the Book of Ditherotomy.

AN OFFERING

    —after Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Ofrenda

        For John Oliver Simon

I offer you these two scarred hands,

palms up, holding the sign of the letter K,

cupped hands to drink from the spring.

Or a gift of letters etched on the farthest shore.

I have nothing to give but these empty shells

of words, unvarnished, dressed in sheepskin 

and stardust at twilight. A distant congress 

of ravens deep in primeval forests, where 

forgotten totems still dream of the ancestors.

Te amo, he once said, long ago.

If I could, I would offer you these old hiking boots 

& socks, once shot through with silver and dawn light,

that once took us to the heights of Machu Picchu.

We’d go back to the lowest place on this continent, 

to where the pupfish still swim in Salt Creek.

We’d revisit the umbligo of Death Valley, where the spirit level 

seeks equilibrium with the lofty heights, that wilderness

of spires that puncture the blueness of the sky.

Yo también, I answered.

In this wilderness where we are only visitors, 

where life is insignificant, a sliver of the past,

where memory sleeps, then reinvents itself

when we scry our unborn poems on the lake

that offers them up to the wind. Small sacrifices.

I have nothing left to give you except these worn words, 

so like hummingbirds building nests of spiderwebs,

hope, and thistle-down over Palo Verde Creek.

These words still seeking an audience with your ear. 

Remember, 

I will always love you, said the darkness.

Te amo, mi amor, I said.

MORNING AUBADE

Outside the window of the old house, 

slumped glass distorts the morning light 

that illumines the matins of the buckeye buds,

like a rippled Monet painting of water lilies. 

The stippled grass and filtered light is painted

with myriad strokes of unmeasurable greenness—

no wonder my grandmother loved this place 

of bright spring grass, flanked by meadow and gully,

a reminder of home, in another country, 

of what was lost, the idea of homeland, 

a country she could never return to, 

not even as she worked the garden, now unkempt,

a place carved deep in the thickets of the heart.

3/23/22 CPITS Write On! with Terri Glass

BUCKEYE BUDS UNDER AN OPEN SKY

BUCKEYE BUDS UNDER AN OPEN SKY

Each spring I await the opening 

of the first buckeye leaves. Palmate 

fists stretch and unfurl their buds 

as if in supplication, 

that greeny prayer to the turning of the year. 

Palms together, they pray to the sky 

and to the returning light. 

Then, as the days grow longer, 

they begin to unfurl, 

offering small green hands, palms up, 

as if a gift to the sky and air, 

opening up into starfish promises 

until the trees are filled with offerings. 

Then, the formation of small buds, 

becoming vestal tapers to light the way

to the impossible blue vault of sky, 

redolent with the sweet narcotic scent 

the delicate blossoms, ladened with pale hues,

blooms no less complicated than orchids, 

their stamens like curious whiskers 

entice the honeybees in to drink deep, 

only to die from that fatal ambrosia,

the mad honey’s revenge 

on the footsoldiers of the hives. 

A case where unexpected death occurs 

when two incompatible systems collide.

Not so much for the native bumblebees 

who sip and suck the buckeye with delight, 

their sonorous song, a drone that fills the air

with the returning victory of spring.

& again, we are on the brink of yet another war.

3/16/22 CPITS Write On class, with Susie Terence

Reward reality check

So, in years past, I bought a microwave, electronics, a nice camera, but this year I think I’ll buy a tank of gas with my Costco Rewards check. A friend said: Good luck getting through the lines at the pumps before next year's check arrives... Well, a year later, the price of gas has dropped a little bit, but not enough. Somebody is still making vast profits. Price gouging—there is no shortage. This year my Costco rewards check went for food since the price has been going up like crazy, supposedly because of fuel, inflation. No matter how you cut it, we’re all sitting ducks, or is it stool pigeons, aren’t we? Don’t even get me started on trying to score toilet paper.

TRAFFIC JAM

Massive traffic jam in the commute lane,

amidst construction, cars stalled in all four directions,

at the foot of University Avenue and the Berkeley Marina,

where three wild turkey toms celebrated annual spring rites, 

with gallopavo powwows right in the middle of the intersection, 

tracking the sun with splayed iridescent fantails, chest-bumping 

rivals into submission while the unimpressed hens look on.

3/10/22

Teaching in a time of plague

Yesterday, a young student asked if he could see my face. I obliged, pulling my mask down, smiling wide, and said, is this what you were expecting? I asked if they could tell when I was smiling when I had my mask on. They said they could see, yes yes yes. They said that my eyebrows spoke volumes. My eyes also  smiled. Ironic, that wearing masks, the equivalent of a Middle Eastern burkah, allows us the opportunity to read each other’s eyes.

PAINT ME IN TENDER MORNING LIGHT

Paint me in tender morning light with nectarine skies. 

Paint me in lapis lazulite veined with pyrite and gold.

Paint me like the virgin with her celestial robes so blue. 

Paint me in ultramarine, the ocean’s final promise, 

so that I may know the soothing sound of the sea. 

Paint me a starry night or a severed ear like a nascent shell.

Paint me paradise with blossoms the color of midnight. 

Paint me blue verging on violet. Paint me in indigo and woad.

Paint me the iridescent throat of the hummingbird,

Huitzilipochtli, the god of war, and the bringer of luck.

Paint us in the colors of the Ukraine. Paint a trident for Kali.

Paint us in blue for endless summer skies and yellow sunflowers 

with blue-eyed cornflowers hidden in the golden wheat.

Paint me a heart made of lapis and turquoise and silver and gold,

and let not my old love lose that heart. And yet he did.

Paint me in waves of lupine foam, poppies cresting the hillsides,

and with sky pilot from the secret summer of mountain passes. 

Paint me in imaginary colors. Paint me anadrio for good luck.

And paint me the color of the wind on the day of your birth. 

Paint me with the knife of sunset slashing the edges of night. 

3/7/22 CPITS in class poem Hamilton AFB, Novato

RANDOM COMMUTE NOTES

Stuck behind in traffic—
Timid two-footed driver in a new SUV.
Think I’ll take the long way home.

Children of migrant workers,
newly landed, in federal housing,
pregnant mothers in used SUVs
dropping off rafts of children,
who have no basic language skills
in Spanish or in English
or in any language,
except that of the heart.
I fear for their future.
Their dreams are small.

Why is it people driving expensive cars
assume that you will just make room for them
as they merge into you, defying physics?
Every one of them, BMWs doing 60 in a 40 mph zone.
How did they become so privileged
to endanger the lives of road workers?
Those who have so much care for so little.
Teslas, BMWs, VW and Cadillac SUVs.
Social equivalent of invading tank army on the road.

These days, everyone has an SUV.
Those of us in small, economical cars,
are routinely shoved off the road, run aground
and into the guard rails by drivers who can’t see us.
We are the new invisible people.

I pass a huge truck with the words Pegasus
emblazoned on the back, no wings on the swan.
Another flatbed truck filled with massive bags of dirt,
as if giants had gone shopping at Costco.

There are days I leave my iPad notes running,
to take notes as I drive down the road.
Am I taking dictation from the gods of the automobile industry? 

BMWs doing 85  in a 40 mph zone. Privilege at its worst.
And we wonder how we got here.

Along frontage roads, the disenfranchised
park their dilapidated motorhomes.
No rest anywhere for the poor.
In Berkeley, the freeway overpasses
have become the land of Sharia law 

for those who are displaced.
The rubble reaches mountain high,
no place to put the garbage.
So much garbage that even a dumpster
would be overwhelmed in no time flat.
The detritus of civilization survives us
as the homeless move onto yet another encampment.

And there’s that same lone fuckwad Tesla driver
in the commute lane meant for carpools.
Every single driver abusing the law, 

and every car is a BMW or a Tesla.
Can you spell white male privilege in action?

At the Golden Gate Fields on-ramp
I watch jockeys breezing their thoroughbreds,
sometimes two at a time, one being ponied,
others galloping against the direction of the track. 

They are glad to feel the morning breeze.

Even the trucks have joined in the supersize me
automobile race. Everyone with their double cabs
and double-wide wheels commuting to work.
It’s not like they need all that horsepower
in order to drive down the freeway.
We snivel about the price of gas
yet continue to drive our gas hogs. Lemmings.

My new favorite commute word
seems to be asshole asshole asshole.
I drive across three counties in order to teach children
poetry during this time of Covid.
Trying to find balance when the scales themselves
have been thrown out.
Trying to find balance during a time of pandemic
is difficult because the scales themselves have been discarded. 

Sometimes I drop off food at the Berkeley encampments,
knowing that many have no source of food.
The supreme irony, parked at a homeless camp,
SUVs and massive pickup trucks with double cabs.
Homelessness is a virus spreading throughout our cities.
Berkeley is particularly hard hit. Councilmembers talk
about what to do, while doing nothing at all.

People stake out postage-stamp yards 

in their homeless encampment using police tape. 

One encampment has a rickshaw replete with buggy. 

Another encampment builds walls of made of tarps.
Some semblance of the old life persists like memory

in this dystopian Mad-Max world.

Meanwhile, at yet another construction site,
high-rises for the high pollutants
while the homeless continue to sleep 

under the overpasses.

3/4/22

UNFURLING AN OLD FLAG

UNFURLING AN OLD FLAG

       —With thanks to Nâzim Hikmet’s Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

It’s summer, 1989, I’m standing in the back 

of the old wood-panel theater, filled to the rafters with comrades, 

filled with the sultry August heat and sweat, while outside 

the open windows, linden trees conspiratorially whisper 

the secrets of the air to the dank river.

Our oppressive clothing, like the local KGB, sticks to us like glue. 

Minoga ludi, says Oleg, my interpreter. 

Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best 

                   though it is not Sunday. No church bells tolling.

                   I am a visitor, not a tourist, I am bearing witness.

                   An Irish-American poet lost in the land of fields.

In the corner, stands the obligatory red flag of the USSR, 

soaked in the blood poppies of the fallen, 

       with its golden hammer and sickle, that reaped more 

                 than a harvest of wheat.

On the stage, Cossack dancers in red boots

             lash out with their feet, while an old man recites 

                    Taras Shevshenko’s verses 

to the strands of the balalika. A hush falls over the room 

as two maidens join him onstage, 

they are dressed in national costume 

     with wheat fronds in their floral headdresses like a halo

                or a nimbus cloud catching the last light of the sun. 

They carry something old and tasseled, on a pole,

       and as they unroll it, the audience gasps. 

             This is treason, said Oleg, despite Glasnost.

             But there are too many of us to be disappeared 

             during these halcyon days of open-armed Glasnost.

             I repeat, I am bearing witness. I am bearing witness

as I watch

a flag that was hidden, silenced for nearly 75 years, unfurl. 

Blue for the sky and the cornflowers in the fields, 

and yellow for the endless wheat and the sunflowers. 

The lustrous silk quivers and glistens in the limelight,

takes center stage as if it were about to sing an aria. 

              And so it did. Words once uttered, cannot be unsung.

                     There is no taking it back. The road goes ever onward.

I have some questions: who kept that flag safe all those years 

and how was it hidden from the aggressor? In what attic, or dacha?

In what Peredelkino? First, they came for the poets….

A call to poetry is a call to arms. 

                                They are one and the same, said my friend.

The silence in the room was astounding, no one dared breathe. 

And then one old voice began to warble the strains 

of the Ukrainian national anthem. 

         Another voice, also hoary and frail with age, joined him. 

Soon, others joined in, at first, hesitantly, mouthing the words,

       and then they sang with vigor and gusto, as they dusted off 

                  the words unsung for a nearly three-quarters of a century. 

We had witnessed something holy and profound. 

The word was on everyone’s lips 

          though not all knew the anthem. 

                And that day, there was no going back. 

I didn’t know I loved the way that old flag unfurled, 

or the way that paper sheath, stained with age, crackled like fire,

or the way the dustmotes trapped in the floodlights 

took on the twilight of the stars. Sometimes, the road stops here.

And there are things you can no longer retreat from.

It’s February 28, 2022, as Russian tanks wend their way 

towards the heart of the motherland, all roads lead to Kyiv, 

the ludi running ahead of those tanks, removed all the road signs,

they blew up the bridges, sacrificing their lives, 752 civilians dead.

Electronic road signs & billboards, uploaded with words in red lights:

Go fuck yourselves! до росії на хуя. Go back to Russia on your dicks.

You cannot cross the same river even once, said the Dnipro River.

Gospodi. There is no going back. Naked aggression comes 

in the form of Russian airstrikes on civilians. Putin is a whore-

cum-war criminal dressed in his Sunday-best despotic czar fatigues.

                Ukrainian soldiers are bringing their cats to the Russian front.

                Grannies lying on yoga mats, lock & load & aim their AK-47s. 

                Meanwhile, in the Kyiv subway-stations-cum-bomb-shelters, 

                babies are being born, a set of twins, oldtimers play chess,

                mothers & children make Molotov cocktails with laundry soap

                for sticky fire, while a million refugees flee their homeland. 

                               There really is no going back. 

Checkmate. Crimes against humanity. Rust and iron curtains.

                                             The colors of the Ukrainian flag 

are emblazoned on every bridge & every public building 

the world over, as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity, 

dusting off the dulcet words of democracy & freedom for Ukraine.

Babushki offer bread and salt and sweet tea to the defecting soldiers

while Putin sends a bouquet of missiles to the city Kherson, COD.

A Russian soldier wrote to his mother, I am in the Ukraine, 

This is not an exercise, we have bombed all the cities. 

They are throwing themselves beneath our wheels,

they don’t want us here, Mama, this is so hard, 

                                              just moments before he was killed. 

As Lew Welch said, This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

The babushka hands young Russian soldiers handfuls of seeds, saying, 

Put these sunflower seeds in your pockets, please. 

You will lie down here with the seeds. 

               You came to my land. You are occupiers. 

                        Do you understand? You are enemies. 

                             Fucking pieces of shit.

This is the last place, there is nowhere else left to go.

They have already lain down their bodies & souls.

For the seeds of freedom are the only crop 

that will surely grow in black Ukrainian earth.

A vast army of sunflowers tracks the sun.

Slava Ukraini!

           2 March, 2022 From our CPITS Write On class, with Susie Terence

FIRST LIGHT

The year my grandfather died, 

we left the city and moved to the country. 

It was only the two of us left, the family scattered.

We were leaving behind the old family house 

once filled with a dozen people, 

with memories stashed on every landing, 

the hidy-holes and forgotten treasures—

my favorite armless ragdoll. Once my mother’s.

The new house, really an old summer shack, 

lined with sleeping porches, was hardened for winter, 

the Wedgewood iron firebox glowed, 

heating only the kitchen with a nimbus of woodsmoke.

The rest of the house was an icebox.

We watched our breath create ghosts that followed us, 

then disappeared into the woodwork, 

only to be joined by errant brethren and kin.

We tucked ourselves in closer to the woodstove 

until the morning sun cresting the ridge, 

sliced through the air, illuminating us in the kitchen, 

dazzling us with its brilliance,

the curtains drawn back to capture that first light.

2/23/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class

Selling the city house

prose meanderings for next poem

I am sure there were moments when I felt cherished as a child. But when I think back on the details of my early life, it was a constant upheaval of movement, water circling the drain. My grandfather‘s death brought about the first major shift, the city Victorian was sold, the aunts and uncles scattered in all directions. The cavernous house that had sheltered many lives, with its basement flat for my aunt and uncle, the marble steps leading to the first floor where the kitchen and the living room were separated by a large paneled foyer, with pocket doors—and the serpentine stairwell that led to the top floor—really the attic filled with bedrooms that my mother and two aunts shared. The house sold. It’s hard to imagine eight kids raised in that old house, it must’ve been filled to the rafters with noise. Four boys on one side, four girls on the other side. The uncles all moved out after they were drafted, fully fledged, but the all the aunts all stayed in the family home, including my mother. With two married couples, one in the basement, with its own kitchen, it was still a crowded house. I don’t remember my father ever being in that house, but I suppose he was. After the city house was sold, we had briefly moved down the road from my grandmother’s summer house, to live in Speck McAuliffe’s apartments in Lagunitas. I don’t know how long we lived there, not long, because my father disappeared soon after, and I was packed up and sent to live with my grandmother on Barranca Road.

Two bags full

I was a kindergarten dropout so I had low social skills. Desperate for a playmate, I decided to visit a little girl down the road, even when she was a year younger than me, and not in my class. I was young, perhaps five-going-on-six, and I want to play with my neighbor down the road. But I didn’t know what to bring, so I loaded up two shopping bags with my most precious toys. Stephanie, who graduated from kindergarten, met me at the end of her driveway, the halfway mark. The bags must’ve been heavy as I had set them down to catch my breath. Her father said something under his breath, I didn’t understand his remark, but it was probably a derogatory aside, probably something about being a young bag lady in training. Les Stone was overly protective of Stephanie, who was a year younger than me, a year and two days to be exact. I was so pleased to finally have a playmate my age. Billy Joe Bianchi was two years older than me, and didn’t want to play with girls. His sister, Cottie moved away when Joe and Irene divorced. So I lived alone at the end of the road. I was willing to put up with shame, for I did feel shame—as I knew on some level Stephanie’s father was making fun of me. He always thought I was a bad influence on her because I had no visible parents, only a grandmother. But Steph and I became inseparable blood sisters. I don’t remember what was in the bags. If I were to peek inside those two bags now, they were the kind with rolled twine handles—like the ones from Macy’s, not grocery store bags. One bag was filled with doll parts and doll clothes. The other held my art supplies. A watercolor set, crayons, a coloring book, and the treasured detritus of childhood. A china tea set, with pieces missing, a rag doll, and other oddities. Hoarding began at an early age. I learn to compartmentalize, to categorize my belongings as it seems that I was always on the run. Of course I was, the break-up of family, my grandfather’s death, selling the city house, the aunts in the uncles scattered. My mother‘s marriage falling apart at the seams, my father‘s disappearance into the neck of the bottle. I arrived at the house at the end of the road with bags that I never unpacked—eventually evolving into the go-bag of today, a necessity during a time of wildfires. I began early, isolating parts of myself. Baggage, excavating my past.

2/17/22 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

URBAN RENEWAL

URBAN RENEWAL

I used to dream the Bay Area was surrounded by snowcapped peaks, 

and I wondered which mountain range I was channeling. 

San Francisco was home, my natal ground,

but wanderlust took me to the Sierra Nevada range,

then north to Seattle, Vancouver, and Horseshoe Bay, 

and then up-island to isolated fishing hamlets, Naniamo, 

Uclulet on the mailboat, we drove to Tofino on dirt roads 

before there was a gringo trail. 

I remember walking along the bluffs below Pike Street Market 

where the native people slept it off from the night before, 

they were littered along the railroad tracks like strange pinnipeds.

The forgotten ones filled the jails, and a nation turned its back 

on the indigent and those of fragile mind and body, 

pushed for urban renewal to clean up the riffraff for once and for all.

The detritus of the past, swept away like a tidal wave before our eyes.

In Vancouver BC, first Gastown, and then Chinatown disappeared.

The streets of Ferndale and Eureka, steam-cleaned. 

There was nowhere else left for the indigent to go. 

Folks rejoiced waiting for fresh-eyed tourists to arrive.

The Marin architect that cleaned up Ghirardelli Square, 

blueprinted the way with cookie-cutter plans for urban renewal.

The underbellies of cities, gutted like fish, stripped of psyche.

It was like an echo, the cavernous gods of tourism, each town

lost more than an inconvenient eyesore. Now, across America,

malls, dressed in brick façades and quaint lamp posts, lie fallow, 

a wasteland of tourist dollars with shops selling teeshirts 

as if to prove residency, and bright trinkets made in China. 

Meanwhile, the indigent moved uptown to sleep on street corners.

Those mountains in my dreams, they were in mourning, 

protecting those who grew up in their shadow.

2/16/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class First final draft.

On finding an old spoon hanging on an old fenceline on Valentine’s Day

As we were pulling what seemed like acres of invasive scotch broom in the lower garden, my cousin found an old teaspoon attached to the fence, bent and gnarled, and green with the patina of age, as most of the silver-plating had long since sloughed off the spoon. Because the base metal was copper, I knew it was a very old spoon. More than a century old. 

The design had a crest and a big silver trophy bowl at mid-handle—like the classical trophies filled with champagne and red roses that race horses won—perhaps a depiction of the Grecian urn filled with fruit, but it was so worn, it was hard to tell. If the crest had an initial, it too was worn away. 

Once this cutlery was part of a matched set that graced a linen tablecloth in some genteel hotel. Probably pinched by someone, then later lost, or set free. It looks as if the spoon was used as a hand tool to tighten the baling wire along the fence line. Sounds like something I might have done long ago. Or maybe it tossed out in a paper napkin, into the fireplace, after evening tea with Irish sodabread, and dumped in the garden along with the ashes, and later hung on the fence like a trophy, or a wind chime. You must admit, finding a bent teaspoon hanging from an old fenceline is in want of some sort of explanation.

Was it a piece of cutlery from the original owner, a railroad man, who kept his silver in a hidey-hole beneath the kitchen floor that was later to become my bedroom? Much of our worn silverware came from that hidey-hole and we continued to use it through the generations even when most of the silver had long since worn off the bottom of the cutlery, imparting an acrid brassy taste in your mouth if you ate homemade blackberry jam right off the spoon with your tea.

I straightened out the old spoon as best I could to read the manufacturer’s mark. Initials and the words Pure Silverplate, as if you’d be fooled into thinking it was solid silver, and then you’d have to pinch it to augment your income. As we stood there catching our breath and contemplating its age, we heard a shuffling sound in the shrubbery below the embankment. 

Thinking it was a deer or dog, I peered over the edge to find a porker, somebody’s pet pig. She was heavily furred with black with brown and russet splotches—perhaps denoting some Russian wild boar ancestry. When she heard me, she came over to investigate, snortling and chuffing with pleasure, pulling at the bunchgrass while eyeing us like a hungry horse looking for treats, and grunting all the while, but I could not translate, nor parse her guttural sentences. Perhaps it was a love poem or a serenade about apples delivered by a wandering minstrel pig. She was obviously a long way from home and was glad to see us. That much was obvious. 

We were glad to see her, if only to cach our breath, as we were two old weed wenches pulling broom. Perhaps she was charmed by the sound of our voices—we always talk to animals—as we are all one thing. There is no separation between us and them. Even the blasted invasive scotch broom. And we caught our breath, our hearts were a little lighter because of that brief encounter with an errant pig, and we got back to work pulling broom. The pig ambled off, clattered down the road on her little pink hooves, looking for home, snuffling and grunting all the while. The old spoon in my back pocket for luck.

Making mudpies

Love meets the dirt. I am slovenly, yet strangely OCD. When I’m in the zone, I’m messy, Pigpen ain’t got nothing on me. But when I’m in my procrastinator mode, then I’m a clean freak. Sometimes I wonder if I’m on the spectrum. When I was a child, I was mesmerized by mud. I had a small summer mudhole where I patted my feet like a duck. Mud pies were a speciality. I’d haul out my doll  china tea set, and serve fresh baked mud pies with my water tea. Did I attempt to eat them? Probably. I loved their sleek surface, how the clay slip rose to the surface and filled in the grit. Later, when I became a potter, it was like making so many mud pies all over again. I was happiest when I was covered in mud. I was in my element, covered in mud, I was a grubbucket to the core. But that fastidious side could also arise, and then it was about issues of control. I was afraid to let go, I hated the mud baths in Calistoga. I couldn’t wait to get out as soon as possible. I felt so smothered. So much for a Valentine’s gift, it was not romantic at all. I felt like I was being strangled, and it was an apt metaphor for the end of that relationship. I have found that the best way to clean a house was to have a deadline, I am a true procrastinator. Those moments of vacancy. I am always in a state of flux, many half-finished projects rime my room with detritus, a cart of negatives to scan, another cart of sewing projects, mostly mending the past. Stacks of books unread, important papers. A tea cart and snacks, a bowl of favorite rocks, copper canisters, my art supplies and everything all kitted up, fastidiously portable and ready to go. I am still in the go-bag mode, after so many years of living with wildfires. My day pack is a go-bag, my car is a go-bag. I could easily live a week, and teach classes with all the stuff stashed in my car. I am collecting small segments of past lives to fund, in case I lose the rest, a bag lady to the very end.

2/11/22 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

CURSING THE DEAD

CURSING THE DEAD

My grandmother cursed Cromwell daily. 

She cursed the Anglo-Saxons, then relented, 

saying their children were so like angels, 

with their blonde hair and blue eyes, 

so like angels, she said, tisk-tisking.

It was years before I realized she was cursing the long dead, 

those oppressors of the past who were her daily tormentors, 

they were the backdrop of her living history.  

Never forget, she said. Drougheda, she said, 

Barbados, Jamaica. They sold our children, she said.

In this way, I learned how the sins of oppression 

stained the generations. This is how I learned my history, 

through the rough lens of her curses and laments.

Even in San Francisco, immigrants were ostracized.

No Irish need apply. They formed revolutionary social clubs, 

the KRB Hall was a cover for gunrunning to Ireland. 

The 1916 Uprising was in the marrow of their bones. 

I remember she said the Americans called her a cow

on the street, and refused to give her a seat on the tram— 

though she was nine-months pregnant with her firstborn 

when her water broke. She cried for shame after all these years, 

she still cried, and I was a secret witness to her grief. 

That the oppressor wasn’t just her generation. 

When the nuns came to school, they asked us Catholics 

to raise their hands. We were new fodder in their gunsights.

And the ostracism began anew. We weren’t welcome 

at the Improvement Club pool, we might dirty the water.

Nor was I wanted in the Bluebirds, by then lesson learned,

I knew better than to join the Rainbow Girls.

We weren’t the right kind of daughters, 

we weren't the Daughters of the American Revolution. 

We were part of another kind of revolution in progress 

who couldn’t let go of the past, who couldn’t forgive or forget. 

I was a child of two worlds—an outsider to the Anglo world

a hostile witness to that grief my grandmother carried.

I didn't know we were all championing some form of segregation.

The Us/Them model kept us all apart. Kept us warring.

Meanwhile, on the news we learned that in Selma, Alabama,

they were marching, marching. Neighbors boarded buses.

Some didn't come back. That was when the riots began.

A man spoke, I have a dream. And the world came undone. 

I didn't realize it was all the same struggle.

2/9/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class First final draft.

A BLT for the horse

One afternoon I was eating a rare treat, a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich—something I had recently discovered. My old horse Chiquita, who was grazing on the grass around the front of the house, was so used to sharing snacks with me that she reached over and snatched my sandwich right out of my hand, and gobbled it up. I was stunned as I had barely taken a bite. When she hit a strip of bacon, she was surprised and began nodding her head for all she was worth, because I don’t think she’d ever experienced bacon, or any meat, before in her life. But it was salty and she liked that. See, it all began innocently enough. We used to collect day-old bread from Bordenave and Lombardi bakeries and feed it to the animals. So she thought anything that resembled a loaf of French bread was for her. She looked like Winston Churchill in the war-room with a cigar in his mouth, as she tilted her head sideways, and got a dreamy look in her eyes, whenever she ate those loaves of French bread. Her sidekick, Winky the cat, was standing on his hind legs, wanting in on the action, got a piece of bacon for his efforts.

The mountain of many names (photos)

The mountain of many names. This iconic mountain in West Marin once had a Miwok name, but that is lost. Dewey says it’s Oyen Mucsis, but no one really knows. It has had many, many settler names. The Russian names and the Californio names are lost. James Black was merely an owner, so it was called Black’s Mountain. As in the man who paid the taxes. It was a name on a geodetic map. We never used it because we didn’t even know it was his mountain. In those days, who had geodetic maps? Who can own a view like that?

As it lay dreaming, it was variously called Knuckle Mountain, Sleeping Elephant, and Elephant Foot Mountain, that’s what we called it when I was ten, and Marin hadn’t yet been invaded by the rockstars—so we can’t blame them. From the top of Mt. Barnabe, it looks like an elephant’s foot. An elephant dreaming of the sea.

As for the current coloquial name Elephant Mountain, it was called that long before Jesse Colin Young moved to Inverness and named his album after it in deep homage. Banana of the Youngbloods knows the backstory, he confirmed to me that a local, Hannah Bauer, gave them the name. (NB Hannah grew up in Sausalito.)

And yes, there were once elephants here, once upon a time, both mastodons and mammoths—and they grazed on the lush sweet grasses of the verdant lush plains that rolled all the way out to the Farallon Islands. They wore the rocks smooth itching their butts near Goat Rock. And then they all died. 

But the mountain that arose from the depths as pillow lava, is sleepwalking towards the sea. It endures our the fog of our transgressions, it forgives us our erosion of names, and still it feeds our imaginations. This mountain of many names.

From a Facebook photo post, you can see it here, but for this blog I used my latest iteration of the mountain.

• BLACK MOUNTAIN
• Channeling the clouds on Elephant Mountain
• Three views of Elephant Mountain (drawings)
• Two colored pencil drawings, Elephant Mountain, 
• Two pastels, Elephant Mountain
• Black Mountain after the fire (colored pencil drawing 
• Elephant Mountain & fog, (colored pencil drawing)
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This old house

The old house in limbo, decades after her death, is in purgatory. The floorboards have given up their tiles to reveal buckled plywood that sheds layers like the pages of a book, a story of word and wind.

I remember my uncles, one just home from the Korean War,  pounding nails into the joists as I peered down into the basement below. I was fascinated with the darkness hidden beneath our feet, as we walked from bedroom to kitchen, past the expanse of living room to dining room, and the front door. I must’ve been looking out that door into the summer light as I headed toward the kitchen, my toes finding a jagged edge of wood as I thrust a bare foot forward.

Perhaps I was hungry or just careless but the splinter buried so deep that bright blood blossomed like poppies in Flander’s Field.

I don’t remember who removed that sprinter, my grandmother or an aunt, it was large. When we say splinter we think of something small. But this was massive, larger than a needle, more like a pencil, but that may have been an exaggeration. I was young.

But my blood was written on those floorboards, and in that sacrifice, I opened up a part of myself and let the darkness in, the floor spoke of time passing. It wasn’t the original floor of the old house, but a copy, subjected to the idea of modernization.

CHAOS COORDINATOR

She said, pick something ordinary 

and see it as if for the first time. 

On the nightstand, a homely cylinder ascends space, 

a hollow well for for morning tea, a cistern of thought, 

a place where I dwell, mornings, as I begin the day’s journey. 

The handle sticks out like a sore ear, I’m listening to the air.

Sometimes in my hand blocks the sound 

as I raise it closer to my lips, it whispers secret assignations, 

and it carries the burden of proof that morning has arrived, 

and that I have survived yet another night. 

When I am done, it shakes its mane like a lion 

as if to greet the open savannah ahead. 

With its speckled skin glaze, it’s a reverse map of the stars.

It says Chaos Coordinator etched in gold, and indeed it is.

2/5/22 From Patrice Veccione’s Write Your Eyes Open Zoom workshop

Hot water in the house

When I was young, we had a small Spark stove in butter-colored enamel on shapely celadon cabriole legs associated with Queen Anne or Chippendale furniture. It had a gallon kerosine jug (an old repurposed paisano wine jug) for fuel that hung on the top left side of the stove that went glug-glug-glug when the burner was lit. I used to lie on the floor with my legs under the stove, where it was warm, and watch the bubbles rise. It had an oven and a woodbox too. I remember my grandmother boiling the weekly bathwater in an old oval copper tub that would be worth a bomb today. She eventually replaced the old stove with a 1940s Wedgewood which was way more modern. It had matching salt and pepper shakers and a clock that didn’t work. But that was OK as we were entrenched in another time. We had to get a propane tank to go with it. And with that we finally had hot water in the house.

2/3/22

FIRST LOVE

FIRST LOVE

     —after Billy Collins' Going Out for Cigarettes

The story goes, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. 

Nothing famous about it. One day, he 

walked out, moved back to the suburbs. 

They took him in, swallowed him up,

it was a slow suicide of self. 

I never heard from him again, 

not a letter, not a phone call, nada. 

I mourned for what was lost. 

It was as if those seven years were for naught. 

In seven years our cells replace themselves. 

We were not the same—even though seven years 

was a marriage sentence of sorts. He left me in spring 

when the words began to rise like first sap.

He left me when I became a writer, 

as if the words themselves were unfaithful wives. 

As if I needed the corpse of experience to hone 

and sharpen my nascent sullied craft.

Decades later, his first girlfriend, Dulcie—

whom he had left for me, 

and then in a boomerang move, 

he left me again for her—we became friends, 

we shared war stories that mirrored each other.

We were sisters of the same cloth, 

rent with holes and jagged three-corner tears. 

It was as if Bob had become a lost vanishing point, 

a two-point perspective laid down in lead,

the horizon-line on an architectural drawing, 

disappearing into the infinite, off the edges of the page,

only to reappear in the house of memory 

like a möbius strip endlessly repeating its cycle.

But theses days, no one can hide forever.

We found him on the Internet. The woman he married 

looked a lot like me, but her sullen face said it all.

Needing to put old dogs to rest, Dulcie wrote to him, 

but silence was the loud reply. What did she expect?

You can't teach an old dog....

However, his sister was delighted to hear from us,

as he had given her the cold shoulder too—

just like he gave us so many years ago.

A family gift from his long dead father.

We put Bob to rest that day, no more 

dog-eared pages or sticky forays into the past.

Some 40 years later, I’m still wedded to my word-wives,

those dark rubies glistening like blood.

2/2/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class  First final draft.