BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

     —after Naomi Shidab Nye’s Alive

Dear Cat, yes, I know it’s raining outside every door at the same time. Meowing at the back door won’t fix the situation. I know you haven’t seen rain before but complaining to me won’t work. I know you think I have the power to move heaven and earth, but, seriously. Besides, it’s so cute watching you take dainty steps across the void, shaking each paw as if you were dancing hokey pokey in double time. 

Dear Road, I watched in astonishment as you opened up your maws and swallowed all those entitled SUVs, tires and all. You were like Saturn eating his children. I don’t blame you, I hate them too. I bet you’ve been waiting a long time to do just that, to open up. And then, how you bared your underbelly to the sky, with the drought and all. How did it feel, did they taste good to you? Did they taste good to you? Like a box of See’s candy?

Dear Meadow, yeah, sure, often I am called onto you, just like Robert Duncan said. It’s the buttercups reflecting sunlight under your chin. But he left out the messy part about your feet stuck in the mud, like cement boots. And that running carefree part, The Sound of Music wafting from the cloud-speakers. Yeah, no. Surely you must know by now that rolling on wet grass is never a good idea. My granny warned, that when you caught a chill, it meant someone was walking on your grave. Horsemen pass by.

Dear Mr. President, did you really grab Marilyn behind a closed door after she sang Happy Birthday to you in a bias-cut sequined silk dress—so tight that she had to be sewn into it? Or was it the other way around? We witnessed your fall again and again in slow-mo on that grassy knoll, with Jackie piecing together the star maps of your soul. Something was lost that day. Call it a loss of innocence. We are still struggling to find our way back to the garden.

Dear Self, may I call you Self? It’s more polite than saying, Hey you! I know you feel that your life was put on hold, shelved in a dark closet. But surely you know by now that life isn’t fair, and admit it, it was a void of your own choosing. You didn’t play the game right, and 1997 was not a good year for you. But if you latch the door, and then look up, you will see a trail of stars sliding across the darkness that engulfs us all in the end.

1/18/23 Write On! With Susie Terence

I write this poem beginning with Mr. President, then I flipped it from the bottom up.

Breakfast of campions

One summer day around 32,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, an arctic ground squirrel stopped to sniff the Siberian wildflowers and nibbled on little white campions gone to seed. As the squirrel digested his breakfast on the banks on the River Kolyma, we will never know how his life abruptly ended. Did a flood cover his burrow? Did a mastodon tread on his home, grinding him into the earth? Too much ice to burrow through, come spring thaw?

Enter Time present: in 2007, the squirrel’s tiny body, buried 12 stories deep, still asleep in his burrow, was recovered from the melting permafrost with hundreds of seeds still in his gut. And a well stocked larder, a seed cache for the coming winter. Russian scientists sorted and counted the seeds.  

Years later, enter Svetlana from the Russian Academy of Sciences who tried her luck at resurrecting the seeds, she extracted placental tissue and nurtured the silene stenophylla embryos along. Sure, it was a longshot. Damned if the 32,000 year-old Methuselah seeds didn’t sprout and grow leaves. All 36 seeds sprouted and bloomed in profusion all at once like good little Soviets as if they were thrilled to be free from the permafrost at last. Not a false spring—like so many others.

Winter was finally over. The little white campion flowers bloomed for the first time in 32,000 years. The lab was perfumed with a spicy clove-cinnamon odor as they unfurled their finery and went about the business of pollination. Svetlana and her sable hair brush did the honors. A squirrel, a freaking carnation. A regeneration of the world’s oldest seeds. Talk about bloomin’ luck. It was like Lazarus rising from the dead. Nostrovya, they said.

I love this story of silene stenophylla, a.k.a. white campion. 

I remember finding bladder campion in Wengen, the Swiss Alps in 1972— it had little pink and white candy stripes on its bladder as if it was the frilly apron, or fancy bloomers worn by a volunteer nurse. I was lonely working as a waitress, in a hotel one summer, without a common language. So I turned to that of flowers. 

The campion, a silene, was similar to an Indian pink (actually a scarlet wildflower with pinked, or sheared decal edges), that I knew from West Marin. Gentian and chicory I recognized. Dandelions and buttercups, eiderweiss and pearly everlasting. But there were so many flowers I didn’t know, I was hooked. It got me interested in botany. 

That summer I collected, pressed and dried alpine flowers between the pages of old books. Though I was desperate for my mother tongue, I forfeited my novels weighted down under the legs of my bed, they had a more important job— preserving flowers. I didn’t know the names of most of the flowers—other than edelweiss and gentian, heather and clover. But the silly silene, a card-carrying member of the pink, or carnation family, (Caryophyllaceae) is what kicked off my interest.

Some say that the carnation stands for fascination, and others say for love, whether filial or maternal. Agape. According to one legend, white carnations grew from the Virgin Mary's tears as she wept for her son hanging on the cross. 

But the red ones were the eyes of the shepherd that Diana, the huntress, plucked from his head for throwing her off her game. Dianthus: either way, is the flower of the goddess. White for luck and pink for gratitude and red for revolution. I remember buying carnations from the street vendors in Red Square keeping their fragile blooms warm in little glass houses lit by candles, snow falling like feathers on the corpse of a failed experiment.

A few years ago, I was hiking in the deep canyons above Santa Barbara, headed towards the top of the ridge. I was winded and grateful for a chance to rest—I was on my hands and knees with nose pressed to the ground. Right in front of me, on the umpteenth switchback, was a plant I’d never seen before, pink, like a carnation, but thorny. 

It reminded me of those alpine campions. My memory wandered back to those good old days, hiking in the Swiss Alps, startling other hikers who found me on my hands and knees by the side of the trail, doing a faceplant. I later realized I was looking at a member of the Cichorieae (Dandelion) tribe. Santa Barbara wire lettuce. Not a campion, but close enough—call it convergent evolution. Even way back then, I was always looking for equivalencies. Call it simile. Or perhaps metaphor.

• Summer's End in the Alps
• USSR journal, Russian New Year’s, Eve, Scrying the future
• With thanks to Marc Nassar’s FB post.

Pikas in the Year of the Rabbit

Ili pika, Tianshan Mountains, Xingjiang Province, China. Li Weidong photo

A friend posted a photo of a weird-looking ili pika with big furry ears, dubbed the “magic rabbit” by its discoverer, conservationist Weidong Li in 1983. He named the new species Ochotona iliensis, after his hometown, Ili. 

Thought to be endangered 20 years after its discovery, then extinct by 2003, an ili pika was spotted in China in 2014. Few critters make a successful comeback from extirpation! However, they are in serious decline, with a loss of 70% of its species due to climate change (they croak at 80°), the ila pika is circling the drain of extinction, as are all the species of pikas in the world.

The ili pika of the Tianshan Mountains, in the Xinjiang province of China is a lagomorph, same order, but not the same family as hares and rabbits. They are more like distant cousins.

Since bad reprints of the story has eked its way across the internet via dubious websites, it took some doing to find the original story via CNN via Daily Mail (stories are from 2015). Also in Nat Geo. That was seven years ago. How many of the estimated 1000 ila pika still survive? During the past decade, the median world temperature has gotten progressively warmer each year.

When we hiked up Mount Whitney, long, long ago, their cousins, the diminutive American pikas, (we have two surviving N. American species—once there were seven), and burly golden mantled marmots were despotic little monsters ruling the base camp with ear-slitting arias and iron teeth. 

While we made our slow ascent to the top of the mountain, traversing the fabled 97 switchbacks and back again, they ate through the pockets of my backpack, and a massive hole right through the middle of my insulated foam sleeping pad so all I had left to sleep on was the head and feet part. I guess they were mining the foam as insulation for their nests. Sleeping on cold granite above timberline at 12,000 ft., even in late summer, was pure misery. 

Hiding in the talus scree, the pikas whistled and bleated in the pitch of  high A, while making little haystacks in the sunshine, and the golden mantled marmots screamed in the key of Queen of the Night. It was cold. We even had snow flurry in August. Luckily it was clear when we got to the top. 

When we reached the summit, there was a forest fire raging in King’s Canyon and a fighter jet flew so close, I could actually see the pilot’s face inside the cockpit. The stone hut at the top of the mountain, built by the Smithsonian in 1909 after a trail worker was killed by lightning while eating lunch, had a mini glacier parked inside of it. A good thing we didn’t decide to sleep at the top. 

I still can’t believe I made it all the way to the summit of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain the contiguous continental United States. Was it all a dream? My knees, old before their time, certainly don’t think so. The Paiute name for the mountain is Tumanguya, which means 'very old man.' It is said that the Great Spirit who presides over destiny once lived on the mountain. And now that I am old and grey, I am so glad I once stood on top of the world.

In those days (1974), Mt. Whitney was 14,494 feet. But we now have better tools by which to measure it, and the Sierra Nevada Range is still growing. Now the official elevation is 14,505 feet. But soon even that won’t be tall enough. Our alpine pikas are victims of global warming. An indicator species, they are disappearing all across the west at an alarming rate. 

At least the ili pika live at a higher altitude than our American pikas and northern Yukon collared pikas. Ain’t no mountain high enough in the contiguous continental United States where our American pikas can escape to. They just don’t do heat. And the ambiant world temperatures just keep on rising. Stay safe, little magic rabbits. It’s the year of the rabbit.

I’ve come a long way from first draft! Thanks Marc Nassar

Driving to work in floodwaters

Looking north on 101, at Petaluma Blvd. & Stony Point Rd. Used by psrmission, Scott Hess photo

How was your commute dear? Well, deep subject, I know. Laguna de Santa Rosa and Atascadero Creek were already flooded up to the berms of Occidental Rd. A few more feet and we’ll need amphibious cars. Lots of kayakers and Canada geese out cruising among the snowy regrets… 

Luckily Irwin and Llano crossroads were open—to a point. All the other smaller feeder roads are pretty much underwater. Todd Rd. was the only road—erm, make that a causeway—open, but just barely as you need to ford a lively stream by the slaughterhouse. Luckily I didn’t have to backtrack. I literally zigzagged my way across the llano, like a big game of water Tetris.

Best flooded road strategy is to ride the middle hump of the road, where you can see the dotted, or yellow line, which also requires playing chicken with oncoming cars. And when they pass you, it’s a ferme lá douche wall of water if your window was open like mine was.

Stony Point Road from Santa Rosa to Hwy 116 at Cotati was clear—but not the Rohnert Park Expressway. You’d need a snorkel. Maybe some fins too. 

But Stony Point Road south is an inland sea, a brothy mess well seasoned with eau de cow-cow. We were above waterline at the Redwood Penngrove exit, the offramp was innundated, but doable. However Petaluma Boulevard North was completely underwater. Lots of kleig lights. The cops were lined up, saying You shall not pass! One guy thought he’d try anyway. Didn’t get far.

Growing up in West County (both Marin and Sonoma), I have a large backroad database, which paid off during the wildfire evacuations. I wove in and out of flood zones via Highway 101, as I needed to get to Petaluma Hill Road, the fastest way to work. 

I slalomed my way back on the freeway again, running a newly obsolete red light, to navigate toward Washington Street. For the first time, I was grateful for all the massive retrofitting that Highway 101 underwent. Above the floodplain. The Petaluma River wasn’t too high, but wait for high tide, and Washington, and 116 would be real river roads.

Most of the small feeder roads are flooded in West Sonoma County and in West Marin too. Luckily, D Street-Red Hill Petaluma Hill Road was a breeze. Small landslides were rerouting water ditches. Why did the water cross the road? Because it was cross when the ditch ditched it.

At least the road south was clear, in a manner of speaking, but the potholes are so big, they’re stoned. Or the road is a vast jigsaw puzzle with several pieces missing. Especially in Hick’s Valley. Don’t hit those potholes, you’ll either bite your tongue off or get a whiplash.

But the Hick’s Valley chickens at Petaluma Hill Road looked like they were half-drunk, all piled up in a corner as if they were at a rave grunge concert. Not enough sense to come in out of the rain. 

There are three special renegade chickens that fly the coop (and the fence) every day. Every night they’re put back in the hen palace, a sort of Taj Mahal for chickens. Repeat this scenario the next day.

The escapee hens were happily commuting their sentence on the wrong side of the road. They like to hit up the tourists for free food. One of these days they’re liable to be flattened, or will have to answer the age-old question with their lives. Meanwhile the opportunistic vultures were lined up along the road waiting for the party to begin.

Alternate route via Hick’s Valley Road has fewer potholes. Watusi cattle with their massive horns, on the ridge of Wilson Hill Road were like prehistoric silhouettes holding up the skyline. What epoch was I in, anyway? Chileno Valley Road is in good shape. But it had flooded near Helen Putnam Park. Spring Hill Road and Pepper Road were dry as was Meacham Road, but there are a few low spots that too will flood.

From the top of Wilson Hill you can see the old Laguna de San Antonio is back—stretching from the Laguna School to the far end of the valley. Yeah, about the name: don’t call it Lake Laguna, that’s an embarrassing Anglo cartographer’s error. See my segue below.

Nicasio reservoir is so full, it looks like it’s going to pop. Nicasio school was closed—no power. My last bottleneck hurdle, Nicasio Valley Road, under the redwoods, was open, TG. Otherwise I was fresh out of alternate routes. Some acacia branches are leaning on power lines across from 2100 Stuart Ranch at the old McBride place where the old fire truck lives.  

Made it to Forest Knolls in record slo-mo time, the potholes out there are the size of hot tubs. All the roads are flocked with tree limbs and pine/cypress/fir carpets. Power was out everywhere, I did what I could at work—at leas the stove worked. Chainsaws, and gas generators were sonorously whining their little hearts out everywhere. It was as if the little valley was collectively snoring or purring in unison. Like a big cat.

About Laguna Lake….

I think this is an 1890s map, lookimg for date.

An aside. I know that I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. As I was navigating my way back north on an alternate route as the traffic was slow on Petaluma Hill Road, as I crested Wilson Hill Road, I noticed that the old Laguna de San Antonio was back from the top, so you know I had to go there. 

The once massive Laguna de San Antonio, California’s largest vernal pool, and a major flyway, used to span all of Chileno Valley, from the vast distance from the Laguna School to Chileno Creek, at the other end of the modern day Laguna. But all the old waterways were recently drained off in the name of progress.

Google map, and the silly name, most of the wetlands were drained in the 1960s-70s,

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, I remember the Chileno Valley shining with a series of gem-like pools, and in spring, the wildflower carpets were amazing. But someone decided they needed to live right across from the school and they did a massive hydrology rerouting. That kind of thinking would never fly now. Now, no more massive Laguna, and no more wildflowers. That’s how we measure progress. 

We began messing with the Laguna by calling at Lake Laguna. You won’t find its full name on Anglo maps. What a stupid honky mistake. Or was it a slight? Laguna and Lake mean the same thing in two languages. Its original name—and I actually looked it up—is Laguna de San Antonio. So I am all for bringing the original name back. Besides, we also call the Laguna de Santa Rosa, the Laguna. We need San Antonio, which is also the name of the creek that probably once drained the laguna, also divides Marin from Sonoma, to differentiate between the two massive lagunas.

Laguna de San Antonina, ©️ScottHessPhoto.com 2023

The water level at the Laguna proper is about three feet from Chileno Valley Road West. Way over its banks. There were only two wild swans. I wondered about the rest of the flock. I didn’t want to go all the way out that end of Chileno Valley Road because it is gnarly and another storm was threatening.

So I headed back towards Helen Putnam Park and then, on a lark, I went out Spring Hill Road. OMG. They paved it! I was on a roll. Intricate laced waterways and reflecting pools everywhere. Beauty times beauty. But I was racing daylight. Not time to stop. And my drive-by car photo shots were an epic fail.

The oddest thing I saw was a line of swans in a field with black cows near the old creamery. I could not figure out why they weren’t at the laguna just on the other side of the hill. So I got out to investigate, and it looks like one of the swans got caught by a wire in the water trough and drowned. Then I realized the swans were holding vigil for their fallen comrade. Since there was nothing I could do, I put my hand on my heart, wished it well. And continued on my way.

1834 map shows a large body of water, Laguna y Arroyo de San Antonio

Seadrift at Stinson Beach innundated by waves

A knockoff of 1908 map, below. No Kent Island & the sandspit is almost an island.

As we batten down the hatches, pummeled by a series of mega-storms pounding the coast, low lying coastal villages are being hammered by massive waves from Crescent City to San Diego. Capitola has lost its pier along with several buildings. Pacifica lost massive chunks of sea cliff, those remaining coastal houses are being licked clean by the sea. Global warming has arrived. The sea levels are rising.

Exposed Stinson Beach was hit hard by the storm. Especially the Seadrift housing development. Massive waves washed right over the sandspit, like rough tongues scouring the houses. That sandspit should never have been built upon. Bolinas Lagoon was already compromised by siltation from logging, and when Seadrift was dredged and widened with a second lagoon and manmade spit during the 1950s and 60s, it led to stagnation and the demise of the once vibrant Bolinas Lagoon. 

Weirdly, rising seas from global warming may help to restore Bolinas Lagoon, created eons ago by the movement of the San Andreas Fault, along with Tomales Bay. After the 1906 quake, a sandspit was thrown up across the formerly navigable mouth of Tomales Bay, where sailing ships once entered. How did it affect Bolinas Lagoon? Still looking for an older map that might give a clue as to the mouth of the lagoon.

Google map of Bolinas, dredging and landfill of Seadrift changed the ecology of the lagoon.

At one point I tried to look up Stinson Beach on old maps to see what the Stinson Beach sandspit looked like—when it was merely a spit. Houses were being built during the 1950s and 60s. Not a particularly ecologically-minded era. I wanted to see if it was an actual tidal island, a sandbar. I suspect the causeway where it attached to the mainland (the Stinson Beach parking lot) was ephemeral. 

Bolinas Lagoon filled in to create Dipsea Rd. & Seadrift Lagoon, 1960. The causeway is visible. SBHS

On some of the old maps, Bolinas Lagoon is depicted as a deep harbor. What really destroyed Bolinas Lagoon was all the Seadrift dredging. You could see the lagoon dying in the late 60s, early 70s. It took a long time to stop the “improvements.”And then there was that nonsense about making another fancy-schmancy island for an exclusive Disney enclave? Was I imagining that? Long time since I even thought about it. 

Postcard, ca. 1962, bt Mike Roberts, Stinson Beach Historical Society

In the way-back days, during the mid 1970s, before I was a poet, I was friends with San Francisco Renaissance poet Ebba Beauregaard, (aka Gerard Boar) friend of Jack Spicer, who was rebuilding an Egyptian dhow at the Bolinas Lagoon Marina. By then, the lagoon had silted in so much, he had to wait for a full-moon king tide in order to float his boat in and out. The rudder wouldn’t clear the mud.

Ferryman’s shack, from Bolinas looking toward the mainland, 1904 SBHS

And apropos of nothing, one November night we built the cement retaining wall at the Kent place near Wharf Road, across from Kent Island. Ebbe was foreman, mix-master of cement, my boyfriend Bob was master of the wheelbarrow, I was the grunting. The Frost Moon was our lantern as we waited for ebb tide to build the berm.

The mud excavation and the laying down of jute gunnysacks filled with cement, anchored with rebar was back-breaking work. In addition, it all had to be done when the king tide was at its lowest, which was at midnight. The unstable putrid bay mud squelched and threatened to swallow our boots. We worked through the night, under the full moon, miserable, and wet, while curious Bay ghost shrimp crawled out of their long burrows nestled in the sulphuric mudbeds to see what was going on. The sandbags settled in the mud as we drove rebar spike through them to anchor them from the incoming tide. I was never so glad to see the dawn.

• 
  

1908 map of Bolinas Lagoon and Seadrift sandspit/island. No Kent Island, no causeway.

This is supposed to be an 1898 map, but they’re the same map—the writing’s the same.

Fist fight

Questions: How do I frame the story? How do I get out of the story? Resolution: an epiphany to uncover an emotional truth. Plot your strategy. 

Setting: Lagunitas school, eighth grade.  Wanting revenge, she used her tactics, and was a good mimic, and that way she was able to fly under the radar to avoid ostracism and unwelcome attention. But there were times when she could not avoid conflict with her classmates. Backstory, she was bullied one time too many. Her motivation. Her crime: she embellished upon a story she overheard, and then told it to to someone she thought she could trust, a friend. But she miscalculated the malevolent power of gossip or slander, and the cost of defending one’s honor. A lesson learned. The moral breakdown and disappointment are central to the story. She didn’t see the the flaw in her thinking versus outcome. But she was already feeling marginalized and overwhelmed, having been relentlessly bullied during the past couple of years in school. Yes, she wouldn’t have done such a thing if she had really thought about the consequences. If anything, it made the whole problem worse and made her even more of an outcast. Going to high school took some of the sting out of the disenfranchised hell she had created for herself.

MEASURING TIME

During the dark of the year, 

my grandmother said, open the door. 

Let the spirits in. Or was it out? 

As we burnt sage, and she tended the hearth,

I never could remember the sequence.

I was young, an imperfect student. 

But I learned to walk barefoot in the dust 

to let the soothing songs of the earth in. 

And that certain rocks had a powerful thirst 

that needed libation and coinage. 

We measured the arc of time 

by clocking sunrise through the seasons 

by the sentinel pines on the ridge. 

In summer, the sun hovered over the big rock, 

as if to land, then pushed south along the ridge. 

It’s all grown in now. We can’t see the markers. 

The world has become so far removed from the old ways. 

So, in my 7th decade, I tempered the passage of time, 

by witnessing the pulse of the seasons in the tent, 

so I could hear her again as she tended the garden.

1/4/23 Write On! Susie Terence

NB So, the tent is gone as of last night’s storm. I had no idea I was writing an elegy for the tent. It was hit with up to 80 mph winds. It lifted up off the ground like a mad UFO and hovered for a while before it crashed into the upper garden fence.

SNOWBANK OR DROUGHT?

So much depends upon
The mad March weather,
Whether or not the snowpack
Melts or holds its own ground
When the depth of snow
Is measured at Lake Tahoe
On April Fool’s Day
In feet or in inches.
In the snowbank account
There are severe drought penalties
For early spring thaws
And late withdrawals.

1/3/23

PSALM LINES

In the beginning
was the word, a flightless dove
In the psalm of your hand.

The candle guttered, 

the wind reads the blank pages 

of a book unwritten.

1/3/23

Wayward wethers

Alex, an Aussie wiley wayward wether wandered far away from his home ranch, or sheep station, roughing it out in the bush for a few years, thus avoiding all detection. He was so laden with his own success, he couldn’t even stand up. Shorn of 88 pounds of fleece, he was severely malnourished under all that wool. You could say he was given a new fleece on life. Alex has yet to make it to Wiki status. But Shrek the Kiwi merino sheep was the clear long-distance winner of escapee wayward wethers avoiding shearing, by hiding out in caves like Moses, on the lam for more than six years, carrying 60 pounds of dreadlocked fleece. He couldn’t even reach the ground to eat. Then there was Baarack who wandered alone in the Aussie outback for five years, also avoiding detection, a victim of his own success. he flogged a whopping 80 pounds of fleece. Some seeds sprouted in his crufty fleece. Then there was Chris the Ram, yet another merino sheep, heavyweight fleece champion, he clocked in with a world record fleece at 90 pounds. Forget about the Golden Fleece. His was the ultimate poopy fleece. But Chris the Canberra sheep and his hefty fleece made it to the Guinness book of world records. The average merino sheep grows enough wool (10 pounds) annually to make one sweater, and 61 socks. Chris’s wool, had it been usable, would’ve yielded 72 sweaters and 574 socks. What did they all have in common? Well, they were all merino sheep, three out of four were castrated, but all the boys who wandered far from home. And all were from downunder.

Coláiste na nGael, Leuven (photo)

In 1992, I was hot on the trail of an obscure folksong I was obsessed with, by Jacques Brel written in 1961, popularized by Theo Bikel. The euphonious Marieke was said to have died in Leuven, Belgium, a circular moated town. While visiting the moat where Marieke was supposed to have drowned, we stumbled upon an old iron gate, black and gold, with ornate lettering.

In those days, there was no internet, only this thread of faux memory to go by. So this is a cribbed-together hybrid memory fragment enhanced by Google. This memory fragment is a marriage of sorts: something old, something new. Borrowed. Certainly blue. A story that spans decades. Call it memoir. We also visited an homage statue of Marieke in Brugge as Brel sang that she was loved between Brugge and Ghent. I suspect Brel was also singing of a much older love story. And his Marieke was her namesake. 

Jacques Brel was popular well before my time. But I loved his songs, resurrected by folksingers, his songs were adapted and given a new lease on life via the 1968 Off-Broadway musical revue, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. 

Of course, I had no knowledge of any of this, but I was familiar with the haunting title as it was something my mother once said to me. It became a bit of a koan. And then sometime in the mid 1970s, I saw The Committee perform some of Brel’s songs in a street theater piece in Sausalito. Thats whers I met Mimi Fariña and Scott Beach of It’s white flower day at Macy’s commercial fame.

I first met Theo Bikel in 1981 or 82 at a Bread & Roses concert—I was working for Mimi Fariña. I asked him if he would sing Marieke. I think he was surprised by the request. I have photos of him from 1982 performing on stage. Larger than life, he stood at 6’1”, and could sing in 21 languages, whereas I could barely survive in one language. Theo made famous the songs of Fiddler on the Roof. But the mysterious Marieke took my breath away. I was haunted by it.

In 1992, my Dutch friend Vins took me to Leuven, where he had studied philosophy at the extraordinary beautiful marbled edifices of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, (est. 1425). Below the medieval moat, there was an iron gate. He couldn’t make out the lettering. Without thinking, I translated the Old Hibernian-Irish script which read, Coláiste na nGael (est. 1607). 

He said, Do you realize it’s in Irish? I did a double-take. My grandmother’s old Gaelic League copybook lessons paid off. That, and a mental crib note from an old tee shirt stamped with an antique Guinness label of St. James’ Gate. Fitting, as Leuven, the place where linen was made, was also the home of Stella Artois. Wherever there were Irish monks, there was always beer to be had—whether by morning or evening star.

This exchange sparked my interest on the role of medieval Irish monks founding scriptoria and universities on the continent—something my grandmother nattered on about, but I didn’t have the historical context by which to understand what she was saying. And here it was, proof positive. A portal to the past. An Irish gate in a medieval town in Brabant, reknown for linen manufacture, of all places. 

Marieke’s tiny moat was turbid. So small. How she must’ve suffered as the water dragged her down. Love gone wrong. I never did find the words to the song, and all I could remember was the refrain, Marieke, sea of bitterness, star of the sea, rebellious one, my namesake.

Ay, Marieke, Marieke
Your love alone, your love alone

The day is gone, the day is gone, the day is gone.

Theo Bikel, Bread & Roses, Greek Theater, UC Berkeley 1982

Jacques Brel singing Marieke, 1961. And the lyrics, thanks to Google.

Bio for anthologies

West Marin native who grew up on Coast Miwok lands, visual artist and poet, Maureen Hurley, is California Poets in the Schools Alameda County area coordinator, and former board member. She teaches poetry and art residencies in Bay Area schools, including Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley, and Alexander Valley School where she has taught poetry to kids for more than 30 years.

Recipient of numerous California Arts Council artist in schools grants, and other arts teaching grants and awards including nominations for the Golden Bell Award, and the Kawasaki Award. She has taught arts programming to students of all ages throughout California and beyond—including Montana, the Bahamas, Mexico, and the former USSR.

Maureen Hurley is a photographer and poet whose work has been widely published in print and in electronic anthologies. She has won several awards for her writing, she was nominated for Sonoma County Poet Laureate, and has several Pushcart nominations. Her photos are featured in an upcoming documentary on Berkeley street poet, Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit & Stone.

Her recent poems have appeared in Spectrum; Fly Like the Clouds of Time; The Freedom of New Beginnings: Poems of Witness and Vision from Sonoma County, California; Memories of Southern California; California Fire and Water; Our Lady of the Avenue; and the US Air Force’s Literature and the Arts.

END OF YEAR WRITING STATS 2022

Needless to say, I’ve long since blown right past the 4000 blog entries entries mark where I began the year. It’s now closer to 4500 entries. Because of revisiting and recording old journal entries, and using Facebook Memories, I’ve managed to garner dozens of posts lifted from Facebook comments that I had not posted before in this blog. It’s interesting to realize many FB comments are often the nascent beginnings of a poem. 

For example last year, in mid-December, 2021, for example, I only had 125 posts, and then, because of Facebook Memories, I was able to add more posts. Call it found art. For 2021, I eventually tallied 170 posts—that’s nearly 50 more posts. I thought I was not going to break the 125 posts mark either for 2022, but suddenly a rush of poems gave me 181 posts, with 90 poems and 28 prose poems written. 

Now I will need to revise that figure because I went through my latest writing journal whwich I am about to retire, for lack of pages, with a fine tooth, comb, and pulled up 10 more prose poems and non-fiction, leaving me with a total of 190 posts for the year. Wowza. Considering I began this stats analysis post with 125 entries, I'm stoked. 

The Isle of Staffa

In 2008, we sailed by the isle of Staffa from the Iona to Mull ferry and I was dumbstruck by the beauty of all that columnar basalt dressed in lichen, moss, and sea spray. I wanted to jump off the deck of the small ferry boat. Of course there was no time to backtrack and visit the island. 

Ours was a mad overnight run from Oban, courtesy of a newfound friend who scored us coveted ferry tickets for locals on an overbooked ferry. Driving down Mull from the wee village of Craignure to catch the Iona ferry at Fionnphort, we were late late late, so we barreled down the one-lane road like banshees along the glaciated Ross of Mull which took my breath away, such ragged beauty. 

Iona was extraordinary, on my bucket list for ages, My Irish grandmother, who inspired me to visit Iona, often talked about Iona and Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young, in the same breath—it was a whirlwind visit replete with several missed ferries, no place to stay, last minute reprieve, but then, it was over, we had to leave that singular beauty. 

In the new moon’s arms

“The new moon in the old moons arms” was something my grandmother always said to me whenever there was a sliver moon in the sky. So, of course, I was an inveterate word thief, and used it in a poem. But Sir Patrick Spens was probably the first to say it in print. Or rather the ballad about him. After a poetry reading at Garbo’s in Guerneville, Jim Montrose once pointed that out to me, and of course I was shocked, thinking I had thought the metaphor up all by myself, being newly arrived to the floodgates of poetry… And of course, Coleridge mentioned it in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.’  (That’s not marinara sauce!) Then it all fell into place. My grandmother used to quote long passages from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to me when I was young. I was well steeped in the arms poetry, yet never knew it. 

REMEMBER

             —after Ron Padgett’s How to be Perfect

First, begin by getting out of bed earlier. 

No need to be a slug just because the pandemic is on. 

No excuses. We are not living in a bubble. 

It is important to get out 

of your nightclothes before 3 PM 

so that you have something to look forward to. 

Put a padlock on your bed if you have to.

Wash your bedding at least twice a month. 

No need to sleep like a man as my neighbor once said. 

Make sure you herd all those crumbs from the sheets. 

Don’t let them be like grains of sand at the beach. 

Speaking of beaches, when was the last time 

you actually went to the beach?

I mean really went to the beach, 

not a drive-by sighting, and got sand stuck 

in all those embarrassing nooks and crannies— 

like how are you did as a child, body surfing, 

impervious to the icy water. Why wait? 

There is only now.

Housesitting for KitaKat, journal

Because I was kitty sitting, I missed last Wednesdays, writing segment, I was too distracted, and besides, my pen was out of ink, and somehow, procrastination was my best friend. I thought that I would get back to it, but no. New house, new things to see. Oh look, shiny.

I also thought I would do all this scanning on memorabilia, so I hauled boxes of memorabilia down to Fremont with me. Nope. I didn’t have the focus. But I did read, or, rather, I tried to read a letter from Rosalind Sharpe Wall which mentioned the Cherry Foundation, dated 1986 and she had suggested that that I apply for money. And of course I never did.

Rosalind also mentioned that she was still working on her book that I helped to edit when she lived in Petaluma. It’s called Pioneers of of the Big Sur Coast, so that makes it a valuable letter to decipher as archival material, not that it said very much.

I expected to get back to my writing prompts next day, but it didn’t happen. What makes moving to a new location so distracting to the point of exhaustion? Here I am sleeping indoors these days. I’m not cold there’s central heating. I lack for nothing. I even have a kitty to pet.

Here’s the thing, for the first time in months, I’ve been sleeping indoors every night. Something I’m not used to. While I was sleeping outside during the fall, I was battling record cold temperatures. One night it got down to the high teens, all that cold sapped a lot of energy from me. As Sinead said, you’re in a warm dry place. enjoy it. True. So I caught up on a massive backlog of sleep deprivation that I didn’t know I had.

The town dog catcher

When I lived in Cotati, I lived next-door to the town dog catcher who kept wolves in his backyard. Moonlit nights, it was magical listening to them howl. Their pens stunk, all that raw meat. Like lion dung. I learned that you couldn’t look at the wolves, because staring directly into their mesmerizing yellow eyes was like looking too long at the sun, like moth to flame, because to see into their souls like that would be a challenge, and they’d bare their teeth lunge at the chain link fences, ready to rip your throat out. So I would sit on a step ladder and looked off to the side, watching them with my peripheral vision, and I listened to the wolves sing.

RECYCLE haiku

Thoughtful cat barfing
In her food bowl, saving it
For later. Repeat.

Cat regurgitates

breakfast in her food bowl

saving it for later.

 12/23

…..

Cat moons my zoom class, 

flashing her tail, covering 

the lens with her love.

Writing down the bones, 

she strokes the iPod, claiming

my words with her scent.

12/28

War, Literature & the Arts publication of War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima)

At last, my Nagasaki poem appeared in the War, Literature & the Arts, an international journal of the humanities / Volume 34 / 2022, from the US Air Force. It was a long birthing process: two and a half years to be exact. And somehow strangely fitting that the Fall issue was published on the winter solstice, the coming of light. 

I don’t publish very often. But this was a wait of epic proportions. First there was Covid, then the editor retired, then the website died, and the web hosting site died as well, so the entire WLA magazine had to be reconstructed from scratch—so this is a brand new website. Thank you, editor Thomas Maguire. Perseverance furthers.

“In 1989 WLA was launched as a simple collection of six essays examining the nexus of culture, conflict, and war. More than three decades later, WLA continues its exploration through a growing range of creative genres. Artists of all types share wars' jagged and fragmented horrors alongside its provocative and captivating narratives.” 

When colleague Jane Hirshfield began to teach poetry workshops on the East Coast, I asked her why she was teaching poetry to West Point cadets, and she said they need poetry more than ever. So I took a page out of her book and submitted this poem to the US Air Force Academy, never dreaming they would take my poem. what a great solstice gift, considering the source of the light. I am Shiva.

Featured poet, John Balaban, with whom I shared a publication credit in the 1995 anthology, Atomic Ghost: Poets respond to the nuclear age, (his title poem, BTW), quoted WH Auden in his preface in WLA.

“The problem for a poet in writing about modern war is that, while he can only deal with events of which he has firsthand knowledge—invention, however imaginative, is bound to be fake—his poems must somehow transcend mere journalistic reportage.” 

Hopefully my poem transcends mere journalistic reportage.

Table of Contents and intro.

Maureen Hurley / War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima) 

Here is my blog link with photo which they didn’t use.

At the last minute, I was asked to create an author’s note:

Author’s Note

Hurley’s uncles served in the army and navy; one built Liberty Ships at Marinship in Sausalito. Her father served in the Coast Guard, and a cousin, a mathematician, worked on the Manhattan Project. Her neighbor, a ship’s captain, was torpedoed in the Mekong Delta incident. She remembers ducking under her desk as atomic bombs were being detonated in Jackass Flats, NV. Her algebra teacher was Olympic runner and gold medalist Archie Williams, famed Tuskegee airman who trained fighter pilots.

These fragments of personal history inform her writing. Her poems have appeared in Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press, 1995), and myriad periodicals. Hurley was co-editor of Tracks in the Widest Orbit: Collected Poems of J. H. Montrose (Russian River Writers’ Guild, 1985). Montrose, a WWII pilot, shared his observations of the Bikini Island nuclear tests with Hurley, and he told her how he flew over Japan dropping leaflets warning them of the Hiroshima bombing. Maureen grew up piecing together fragments of war stories. Poet Jane Hirshfield, who taught poetry to cadets at West Point Military Academy, suggested she submit her poems to journals that address war and its consequences

AT THE OLD PETALUMA BANK

The old Petaluma bank, once an antique emporium 

and before that, a real estate office, and a film house,

cleaned and scrubbed, is now an eyeglass store

filled with pricy lenses, so that we can peer into the past. 

A man with a paunch wanders in, curious, clears his throat, 

sings a Christmas carol, the bank embraces his voice, 

but when he hits the high notes his trousers drop, 

and the embarrassed song wanders off, collides 

with the vault of the ceiling, that much closer to God.

12/17-/28

SECRET ACROSTIC

I am the south wind 

moving among the egrets of summer 

who rise up and across the sky 

only to return to the east wind 

where everything is possible, even truth.

12/15 my acrostic word is secret, embedded. For Ms. Kosmos’ class, Malcolm X ES

MoSt NYWC poetry prompts

MoSt New Year’s writing challenge poetry prompts 1-20 Below are extremely annotated versions of the writing prompts. Go to the Modesto-Stanislas webpage to get the full instructions and sample poems. Otherwise you can sign up here.

Guilty pleasures

I was eating chocolate layer cake late at night, eating from the mother log. Just me and the cake. No knives or plates involved. The tines of the fork furrowed the sides of the cake like a plowed field, lifting the loamy frosting from the geologic layers of cake. Sowing my calories, I took time to sample the ganache frosting, letting it melt on my tongue like a molten flood, slipping down my throat like a mudflow, until I gagged under the sheer weight of all that chocolate, trying to figure out how to savor it, and coordinate the breath, the breath that couldn’t blow out a bonfire of imaginary candles, too many to count. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow the cake across the table. Enter a memory, a photograph. I was one, and the cake in front of me was an island in time, taking me on a journey of no return. My starfish hands covered with frosting, my face black as night and my eyes filled with stars.

12/15 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

Mother Thread

Before you became a bird, when you were earthbound, but the sky taunted you with the low clouds of escaped sunsets murmuring of empty seas, whispering of sailor’s delights. My grandmother said you were never quiet of this realm, always wanting to get to the other side—of what, we never knew. Perhaps the beveled edges of a clouded mirror. When reality became corseted, you traipsed off to distant horizons, but still, the darkness found you out. I was but a child. I had no words for the places you went, the people you met on the littered streets, that place where the fringes of humanity called home. When I was older, sometimes our worlds collided, we found a common ground that became a conversational thread, a place where memory and experience was topstitched into a quilt of longing and regret. A single feather drifts down from the clouds to land at my feet like a small oarless boat adrift on an empty sea.

12/14 Write On! Susie Terence

SNOWGEESE

I only saw the wild snowgeese migration once, while heading towards Mount Lassen to cross-country ski. As we rounded the bend, I was astounded by the beauty of snowgeese filling a muscular sky laden with the promise of snow, and the thunderous explosion of wings as they circled and landed on the molten gray mirror of an alpine lake. Apparently their idea of migration is really a group effort. The entire species congregates at one place at a time. Not a good strategy. I never knew that I was witnessing the entire population of a species on the brink of extinction. Only now, some 30 years later, are they making a comeback.

GUTTERED CANDLE

In my grandmother’s knotted hands, 

she held the sorrow and joy of a lifetime,

she held hope for the future locked

in the eyes of her grandchildren.

Those hands that tilled the soil, 

that harvested the fruit, shucked corn, 

skinned deer, plucked quail. I remember

the way she chopped wood, the heft of the axe,

how she banked the fire, the way she kept us safe.

She brought back the past, made it come alive—

all those old stories of the Ireland she left as a girl,

A time when people were closer to the land. 

She held the stories of the Otherworld, a record 

of when the old gods walked freely among us,

bringing dreams and mischief to the land.

Her mother lit the candle, as did her mother before her,

placing it in the window so that the ancestors 

could find their way home in the dark.

12/8

PICKING HUCKLEBERRIES

Come Labor Day, a trek to the coast, 

to our secret spot on the ridge where huckleberries 

waited for end-of-summer sunlight to sweeten and swell. 

When the coastal fog bank lifted,

the last rays of summer warmed the earth, 

the berries gave a last shout-out before the fall 

began its bone-chilling dance toward winter.

It was always a gamble to predict the ripening.

First to ripen were the smaller black ones, 

like beady eyes, laden with a pungent flavor, 

then the larger sweet blues, covered glaucous dreams. 

We’d pick those berries, plinking them into plastic milk jugs 

until the sun slipped over the edge of the the ocean. 

Cattle headed towards the barn as the last rays 

cast a mantle of vermilion light over the hills.

The song of distant coyotes, cattle called out to stragglers.

The edges of mist rose up from stock ponds

that glowed indigo and sparkled with stranded stars 

as if to witness earlier gatherings.

We hoarded our bounty, rolling berries on old towels, 

one by one, to remove the duff and leaf litter, 

until the white towels were stained purple as midnight.

We’d dream of huckleberry pies, and syrup over ice cream.

Our mouths, black maws, stained tongue and teeth, a badge.

There was no short cut, the cleaning always took longer 

than the picking, but more often than not,

our cache would soften and rot in Ziploc bags,

or turn to vinegar to dress the end of summer salads,

those vine-ripened tomatoes and basil,

hinting at the dank mossy breath of forest floor

covered with death, and the promise of ancient gatherings.

12/7/22 Write On! Susie Terence

In search of the Gorbals

The Gorbals was the ultimate slum of Glasgow, primarily settled by the famine Irish, Poles, and Russian Jews who worked in the shipyards, ironworks, weaving, and manufacturing factories during the Industrial Revolution. 

Probably the roughest neighborhood in all of Scotland, portions of the Gorbals were razed for the notorious substandard council flats, concrete towers during the 1960s, featured in a 2011 BBC exposé, were laden with serious structural defects, and rampant mold, etc., then replaced by the tony/ugly urban box renewal housing in the late 1990s-early 2000s, thus displacing literally everyone (90,000+) who lived there. 

I remember the plane circling Glasgow, 1972, the edifices grim, and streaked with coal dust. I never wanted that plane to land. That mean city. All that urban renewal merely traded one atrocity for another. Most of the blocks were leveled between 2000 to 2016. Then came the displacement. Now, the Gorbals houses about 9000 of the upwardly mobile in brutalist structures, but what happened to that writhing sea of humanity displaced by urban renewal? Where did they go, to East Kilbride?

I got to see a small section of what was left of the Gorbals in 2008. The Gorbals was famous for its ongoing flea markets. But, by then, most of the area was rubble rubble rubble everywhere. It looked like a bomb had been dropped. The novel, No Mean City (1935) is set in the Gorbals.

My friend’s father, Joe Hardstone, a talented musician, was born and raised in the Gorbals, it took a special ear to be able to understand what he said. He also spoke Russian and Yiddish with a Gorbals accent. I could understand him just fine because I was raised by my grandmother from southern Cork, Ireland. Joe/Isaac became one of the fastest sprinters in the Gorbals, outrunning the street gangs that lurked on every corner, with his violin under arm. 

Most of the famous Gorbalites were boxers and futba’ players on account of all that running. Perhaps the Gorbals most famous exports were the landed Irish who were murderers and gangsters. Jimmy Boyle, who murdered a gang member, switched careers and became a famous novelist and playwright while in prison. UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy grew up in the Gorbals. As did Sir Thomas Lipton, the teabag man, Allan Pinkerton, as in the detective agency, and Mickey Rooney’s Da. All Irish, I might add.

Mending the kilt

SALTIRE SKY (3 haiku)

Yesterday’s sky stretched

over taut coastal ridges 

was a vast saltire. 

Against a saltire sky, 

dusk flagged the coastal hills

with a catch of the day.

Mackerel skies 

crisscrossed with saltire jet streams

and billowing hills.

11/30

SPRECHGESANG

In my dead mother‘s purse, amid matchbooks,

roaches and cigarette butts, needles and pills,

a broken audiotape of Leonard Cohen‘s 10 New Songs. 

What she was listening to, what transported her

when the drugs no longer numbed the pain.

I fixed the tape and slipped it into the tapedeck.

His voice, a gift, having betrayed him early on

from far too many cigarettes, his song having gone 

gravelly in his prime, and yet here he was, 

talk-singing his way through a new body of work 

as he massaged his voice back into the game, 

taking me along for the ride to the end of love. 

I sent that tape off with my mother, lying so still, 

to be warmed by the bonfire, and the resurrection 

of Leonard sprechgesanging his way through 

the chorus of Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah 

all the way to the end of time.

1/30 Terri Glass Write On!

A NOTE TO CÚ CHULAINN

Oh, Hound of Cullen, 

I always wanted to ask you,

who did your hair? I mean 

with all those electrified locks 

standing upright like needles in rainbow hues,

capable of striking your enemies dead,

would be tricky to lime into dreadlocks.

And your superhuman strength—beyond imagining, 

with your seven fingers on each hand,

and seven toes on each foot, 

did they need special shoes, pampooties,

and which little piggies went to market? 

And what about those seven-pupiled eyes 

that could see beyond the curtain of time, 

unshielded by the glamor of Ray Bans,

did they help you to win your battles? 

What was the fabric of your dreams made of?

You, who were born of Lugh, the god of sun & light.

Sétanta, may I call you by your given name,

instead of your battlefield handle, Cú Chulainn, 

O Hound of War, for you turned your body inside out 

to scare the enemy, and your trusty grey horse & chariot 

were always at the ready, ready to die for you.

And you with your gáe bolga, a superpower weapon

unleashed against the backdrop of the Bronze Age, 

reimagined by monks during the Middle Ages, 

would wait another millennium before it was made real, 

a grenade for the ages. I am come. Destroyer of worlds.

But you broke your geis, because you could not refuse 

the hospitality of the hag, offering you the taboo 

of roasted dog, eating your namesake, 

or refuse hospitality, the cursed twofold dilemma, 

O Hound of Cullen, how you must’ve howled in rage 

by that base trickery, the lón láith, the long light 

shining from your brow, and you came undone, 

your superpowers bleeding back into the earth.

And to think of how you exploded onto the scene, 

upholding the honor of the world as you knew it, 

a world in turmoil, and how you died upright, lashed 

to a standing stone so you would not fall in battle,

the Mórrighan and her scaldcrows on the battlefield,

waiting to pluck out those marvelous eyes,

while we hid beneath our school desks, 

with our arms shielding our eyes, protecting 

our slender necks from the unholy light,

waiting for the bomb to drop. No magic cloak 

of forgetfulness to hide our fear.

11/23/22 Write On! Terri Glass

The doe’s breakfast

One of our young deer, Bucky’s sister, is badly injured. At first I thought perhaps she’d gotten tangled up in a barbed wire fence, as we’ve been working on the fence line. Or maybe she had been attacked by a mountain lion or a coyote—we chased off one opportunistic coyote yearling who came snuffling down the trail from the tank after her. There is transfer blood on the doe’s good hind leg, and she can’t put any weight on her right hind leg. The wound almost looks like her leg is broken, her hock is badly swollen. Because she can’t put weight on her hindquarters, she also can’t feed herself by rearing up on her hind legs for the meager winter fare of low hanging leaves of the fruit trees in the garden. We watch her limp across the field, debating what to do, no longer knowing anyone with a gun to put her out of her misery. We debated whether to call Fish and Game, or the Humane Society, a certain death sentence, but we aren’t willing to watch her die of sepsis, or let nature, long in tooth and claw, take its course. I come from that old rural school where you do not let injured animals suffer. You see, when I was young, I wanted to be a vet. I learned rudimentary feline and equine triage from Point Reyes’ Doc. Daniels, DMV. We wondered how the deer got injured. Then we realized the model was at hand, as a handyman jackknifed his truck up our narrow road as if he were a contender for the Indie 500. Perhaps he, a neighbor, or a visiting friend, hit that poor deer and then kept on going, never stopping to report the hit. Criminal, to leave her to suffer like that. We keep an eye on her, noting her minute progress each day, as she limps down to the creek for her daily drink. There is still not very much for the deer to eat after the prolonged drought cycle. And it is still too soon for nourishing winter grasses. They have taken to nibbling the jackets off the buckeyes and eating ivy leaves, both of which are toxic. So they can only eat a small amount without damage to their livers. I suspect she has already eaten her quota. Today is a black frost day. The pipes were almost frozen solid, I had trouble gathering enough water for morning tea. The frost has been thick every morning, leaving the tent painted in a mirage of crystals. I have been feeding the doe for days since it seems she may survive this trauma after all. Her hock is surely blown, but I think it is not broken. I know they can survive these onslaughts. (Another gimpy doe, hit by a tourist in Nicasio a few years ago, lives out a full life by my cousin’s old water tower. Each year she presents him with spotted twins.) At dawn I prepare a breakfast of Bob’s Red Mill organic oats garnished with yellow apple leaves, red plum leaves, rose petals and leaves, which at first, she viewed with suspicion, and then she discovered they were actually quite good. She still eyes the pumpkin with horror (Bucky and gang won’t touch them, so much for all those Facebook memes) but I have noticed that she has eaten some of the strands and the seeds. Progress. Sometimes I talk to her and she cocks her ears toward me as she listens to my murmuring. Sometimes Bucky stands on the other side of the garden fence keeping vigil as she eats her breakfast. This is our morning ritual.

Aurora borealis in blue

Once, during the 1970s, I was in West Marin, in Northern California, a stray wisp of aurora borealis was visible, a rare event this far south, and I watched the errant solar lightshow pulse and turn, shining in extraordinary shades of blues, greens and turquoise like a massive peacock feather against the  eastern quadrant of an indigo summer sky. In the gloaming, I imagined the backdrop of our planetary gods, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars to be astonished by the lightshow. People insisted that I was merely seeing the tail end of a non-existent rocket launch (I’ve seen a few of those too), but it wasn’t that. No manmade events to blame. Unlike a rocket launch, the celestial cloud didn’t dissipate, it lingered and hovered and pulsed for quite some time. It was an interlude of pure celestial magic that I never forgot. And now this video! I feel vindicated.

THE WHEEL

Don’t fall in love with a stray cat or horse, 

for once you name it, it’s all yours, 

until death do you part. Whose, I don’t know.

Don’t fall too easily in love with the seasons 

because they evolve into the next season 

and soon the years will stack up like dominoes 

and at the end of your life, the domino effect 

will take on a whole new level of meaning. 

Don’t fall in love with regret, or the future, 

because the future is always madly dancing 

on the edge of the sand dune, taunting you 

with the corpses of old promises and regrets. 

You know, those things you always meant to do, 

Those lovers whom you always meant to meet,

those places where you always meant to go, 

but you never had the urge or the inclination, 

and now that you have the time, 

if you can catch it that is, for it too 

is dancing madly on the edge of night, 

always hovering out of sight. 

Only in dreams can you grasp it, 

make sense of it, call it yours. That is, 

until you wake up and it fades 

into oblivion like some distant mirage 

taunting you on the horizon of regret.

11/16/22 Write On! Terri Glass

NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS

A busy moth led me to a night-blooming cereus 

lit by moonlight behind a low lava wall.

My cousin said the fragrant pānini-o-ka-punahou

blooms but once a year, and dies at dawn.

I leaned in to taste the intoxicating odor,

but it let go of its mooring and fell to the ground,

a fallen star or perhaps an angel. So I saved it,

and wore it in my hair the next morning, 

to witness the full eclipse of the sun, 
at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau, the place of refuge.

We watched the black sun become a vast flower 

surrounded by stars and solar winds as the birds 

and fishes slept in during that second false dawn.

Seeking asylum, I let the blossom go in the coral sea 

to dream among the honu turtles and seastars.

11/11/22

HOMECOMING

No one wants to witness a broken world, 

they want to recuse themselves. Call it an act 

of God, blame climate change, the list is long.  

The “not me “generation is an army 

of Jedi masters adept at deflecting blame. 

Not me, they say, not my problem,

as if their lives were as pure as the first snow. 

Imagine that dead tree hovering over the roofline, 

saying not me, as a limb sloughed off during the storm. 

Or the outcrop, loosened by rain, galloping into traffic, 

saying not me, not my fault. The cliff did it, it let go. 

It let go of my hand in the dark. 

Or the rising river after the storm, 

nibbling away at the ancient shoreline 

as the old house threw off its moorings 

to set sail for the open mouth of the sea. 

The sea whispered, not me, not me,

as a sneaker wave swept over the fishing boat 

too far from safe harbor to be saved. 

What treasures the sea holds, what stories it has to tell, 

where everything winds up at the bottom. 

RED SKY AT NIGHT

Mount Barnabe lookout tower

built like the cabin of a small trawler 

schooling for fish among the clouds.

11/4/22?

Morning aubade (photos)

The coyotes are howling at both ends of the valley—in broad daylight. Harvest moon has come and gone. Earlier it was a family of small owlets who still can’t properly hoot. Soon, Bucky and his old father with the hoarfrost dipped nose, will daintily dink their way down from the hill to get their morning drink from the creek. They have no fear, now that hunting season is over. Last night was supposed to be first frost, but again, the grass has no dew on it, so we can’t see the lacework of the orb spiders laying out their crocheted webs on the dry grass. Even the dew is forsaking us.

I love lying in my flannel sleeping bag listening to the morning chorus of birds. Mostly ravens patrolling the valley muttering grock-grock, and the small screech owls in the trees are having trouble getting the correct sequence of their hoot on, so I can’t tell what species they are, not great horned owls, nor burrowing owls. One-note towhees and chupping robins add to the morning’s cacophony. The robins and warblers are getting hammered on the clusters of madrone berries. Soon the quail will add their smik-smik sounds in the underbrush. The bluejay adds his metallic squitch-squitch scissor sharpening sounds to the score. 

The redtail hawks no longer circle this valley, nor call it home, but an opportunistic red-shouldered hawk moved in and has raised a family, she is constantly squawking like a fishwife, at war with the ravens and crows who are now barking like dogs. No love lost between them. I prefer the redtails with their lonely tcheer sound. My totem animal. I heard one redtail passing overhead, why do they no longer stay here? 

Who said nature was peaceful? It’s one massive turf war out there raging tooth and claw. A hummingbird lectures a poison oak bush with its mip-clicks. The gray squirrels are busy scolding each other in the bay trees down by the creek. I love waking up in the tent, knowing I don’t have much longer where I can sleep outside like this. Poignant reminder of passing time. Yesterday, I had to secure the tent, really a rickety summer gazebo, from the fierce winds bellowing in from the east. It rocked like a taut jib sail, the tie down ropes singing like harp strings. 

Yesterday I finished stacking the rest of the cordwood for winter. Like a draft horse I pulled 20 small wagonloads of wood up the hill. Mostly dense cypress and fruitwood. Day three of my second COVID booster, I’m puffing, but I feel surprisingly good. First sun illumines the buckeyes, small golden orbs. The deer are hungry, eating the jackets off the toxic buckeye. 

So much love and hard labor is required to clear out my grandmother’s old garden orchard after a half-century of neglect. Last week we took 16 loads of debris down to the road to the county chipper, we are fire hardening the land. We will haul 20 more loads down to the road, and repeat again the following week. Two little old ladies with broad backs and battery-operated chainsaws who refuse to succumb to the vagaries of age. My hips hurt from hauling wood, but this winter, my cousins will stay warm. 

The tongue of low lying morning fog is infrequent these days and because of it, the trees—especially the redwoods and firs—are aging out, dying from pine beetle infestation and a profound lack of water. A tinderbox of a pocket canyon waiting for the hunger of a match. The last time this valley burned was in 1942. The first thing that drew me to poetry was the the wind in the fir trees sounding like ocean waves. And the bluejays making similes. I didn’t realized how much I missed keeping rhythm with the seasons, especially the long dance of the fall. Saying goodbye to my childhood. Maybe for the last time.

HUNTER’S MOON

The warbler arrived during the very first days of fall,

yellow as the big leaf maple deep in the canyon.

Mornings I’m awakened by his body, a small sun

banging against the pane. He peers into my garret, 

determined to enter the dark dream of the house, 

but my grandmother said, Death always knocks. 

To let a bird in was to let death enter the house.

At first, I thought his reflection spurred him on, 

but on overcast mornings, he’s still at the ready. 

Sometimes he rests on the window screen, 

his tiny claws gaining purchase on the mesh. 

People offer sage advice, say, add pictures of raptors.

Close the blinds. It’s his karma, he’s not hurting himself, 

not like that nuthatch who attacked the outdoor mirror

with such ferocity, I gave him time out, between bouts,

he rested in the hollow of my hand, until the next foray.

Tiny warrior, he fluttered onto the daybed, spent,

his rage against the interloper knew no respite. 

I covered the mirror with a towel to ease our pain. 

But this time I’m not willing to cut off the light. 

Besides, this bird takes time out as he reconnoiters.

I wanted to write about something completely different,

not death, nor the monograph of a warbler seeking solace. 

I forgot the nuances of fall, the dim light, long nights, 

the waning hunter’s moon like a gourd 

glowing in the branches of the redwood. 

Hello Moon, I said, and the moon winked back.

10/12 Write On! With Susie Terence