Weak bladder, strong mind

I had a rather sodden thought while sorting laundry: Nothing worse than your bladder thinking of giving it all up for Jesus by baptizing the floor. 

It literally was a line that came to me unbidden. I grabbed it before it escaped into the void. I dictated it to my iPad, knowing full well that I wouldn’t remember it by the time I got the laundry in the machine and back upstairs again. Besides when the Gods of Poetry hand you a line, albeit dubious, you don’t ask questions.

To be clear, I didn’t actually pee on the floor. It’s just I had to go while I was trying to gather up the laundry and there was a maddening sound of running water, which imbued an incredible sense of urgency on my bladder. A line of poetry that came quickly and unbidden, and I just snagged it before I forgot it. Now forgetting things is a whole ‘nother conversation. All those ideas you think you’re gonna remember? Yeah, no. 

When I was young, my grandmother and my aunts used to turn the tap water on, to make me go to the bathroom, I guess I dawdled too much, the aunts were always complaining that I wouldn’t go in public bathrooms. Still true to this day, the sound of running water is tricky. And aging out doesn’t help.

Part of it is the party panic syndrome, my grandmother could not make it out the front door without having to run back into the bathroom, even though she had just gone. Something about crossing the lintel and going out into the world wreaked havoc with her bladder. The poor thing had a children and botched episiotomy, so it’s understandable. And she always said, it’s better to have a weak bladder than a weak mind.

Lockdown drill (Uvalde)

Yesterday, during poetry class, there was a a lockdown drill, we hid under our desks waiting for it to be over, thankful it was just a drill. Utter silence. #Uvalde

I couldn’t help but think how similar this was to preparing for the atomic bomb in the 1950s. I told the kids how we could under our desks covering our necks and eyes from the fallout. This time we are hiding from potential gunman. Uvalde in Berkeley. The teacher locked the door, and we could hear someone rattling the door knob  to get it open. My heart stopped, even though I knew it was a drill.

Normally the school sounds like a big beehive with all the kids buzzing in their classrooms and on the playground. During the drill there was utter silence. Silence equals life. Sound equals death. I couldn’t fit all the way underneath the coffee table with one student, my legs and feet hanging out, my red boots like sirens. Or pooled blood.

Atmospheric Storm #10 arrives

The problem with being wakened by relentless rain hammering the roof during the dead hours, is that now it is a dark, dark dawn, and I needs must sleep. The rain was hammering the roof so hard, it was enough to wake all the dead orcs and trolls trapped in the salt mines. And now I am drop-dead tired. It is difficult to mine sleep, and it is even more difficult to get a jump-start on your day when you are purgatorially half asleep, even after downing a flask of tea. Is it the dead hours, or the witching hours? Those hours nearest 4 AM, the witching hours of gamers and whores calling it a night. Those zombie hours at the tail end of the night and a staccato of rain arrives in torrents hammering the tin roof with its dark hooves.

Seeking the green comet

Comet Kahoutek ready for its close-up, 1973. Trust me, it never looked this good.

I must confess that when I saw Comet Kohoutek it was underwhelming. Kohoutek, aka C/1973 E1, was heralded with much fanfare as the Comet of the Century. Kohoutek turned out to be little more than a faint streak passing by Venus, low on the horizon at sunset. The underwhelming comet was so faint that it looked like a bug smear on the windscreen. 

During the dog days of summer of 1973, we trekked up the mountain and lined up along the Bolinas Ridge Road to pay homage to the celestial event. It was a good excuse as any to drink, or light up while staring directly into the setting sun. If you got lucky, you got to see the green flash at sunset. More like purple spots in front of your eyes from staring too long at the sun.

Kohoutek was nothing to crow about, its name, or rather the name of the astronomer (who was looking for a different comet), means rooster in Czech. Unfortunately Kohoutek became synonymous with spectacular disappointment.

The comet was thought to have originated somewhere in the Oort cloud. Whether it was of this solar system, or from the next galaxy over, no one knows, but Kahoutek was much smaller than Halley’s Comet, aka 1P/Halley, which looked like a bit of cotton lint on your lens. At least it was visible in the dark sky if you knew what to look for. 

One night I was driving up Guerneville Road from Santa Rosa after a poetry reading, I thought I had something in my eye. Then I noticed a bit of fluff was on my windscreen. Forgetting that it was Halley’s Comet, I pulled over to clean my window, looked up and then realized it was the comet. 

I thought of how my grandmother saw this same comet in Ireland, as it visits our galaxy our every 75–79 years. For a moment we were united in time. My grandmother said that Halley’s Comet was bright. A wonder to behold. Of course it was, there was less light pollution in those days, especially in Ireland.  Somehow, I don’t think I will be around for Halley’s fly-by visit in 2061.

Comet Hale-Bopp was the Big Bopper of comet sightings, April 1997

At least Comet Hale-Bopp C/1995 O1 put on a good show. One of the comet’s discoverers, a backyard amateur astronomer, Alan Hale was tracking the night sky from his driveway in New Mexico. Meanwhile, Tom Bopp was hanging out with friends in the Arizona desert and saw something fuzzy in the sky. He didn’t even own a telescope. Apropos of having two backyard discoverers, the Comet Hale-Bopp had two, maybe three tails. It didn’t know whether it was coming or going. But it was spectacular. 

We cheered it on that April foolish night in 1997 when it outshone itself. I was teaching poetry at Alexander Valley School and the night sky was stunning as the Milky Way wheeled its way across the sky. Even the moon didn’t put a dent in its beauty. The comet was probably first sighted in 2215 BC, in Egypt, dubbed the nhh-star, or the hairy star that accpmpanied the soul of the last pharaoh. The thing about comets is they’re like a bad penny, they’ll come around again. Hopefully the pharaohs will stay put.

Comet Hyakutake C/1996 B2, another backyard discovery in Japan, shone bright for about a week, but couldn’t hold a torch to the staying power (18 months) of that two-tailed Comet Hale-Bopp, the Big Bopper of the comet kingdom. That was the year we read poetry with Bill Moyers to a packed house in Sonoma. I was starstruck driving back to Forestville, I thought that was the epicenter of poetry. But the comet following me home was the brightest thing in the sky.

I guess none could surpass the most famous comet of antiquity, Caesaris astrum, or Sidus Iulium, dubbed Caesar’s deification star, it was considered to be the soul of Caesar, with its whopping eight tails. It was so bright that it appeared during the day right in the middle of the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris festival—right after Caesar was assasinated in 44 BC. Apparently Caesar’s grand-nephew, Augustus Caesar rode the tail of that comet to launch his own meteoric career, and issued a coin of Caesar with his rising star. 

Caesar's Comet coin, with an eight-rayed star and its flaming tail pointing upward

The court poets went nuts. Virgil wrote that the diefied star of Caesar has appeared to gladden the fields. "Never did fearsome comets so often blaze." Ovid went way over the top, and said Venus “took up the newly freed spirit of her Caesar from his body, and preventing it from vanishing into the air, carried it towards the glorious stars.” Calpurnius Siculus mutteted something under his breath and predicted that trouble was brewing in Rome. Ya think?

Who remembers the brief bright shining moment of Comet Neowise C/2020 F3 hanging off the Big Dipper? We may have been all collectively howling from Mill Valley to Mozambique at sunset, but I don’t think many of us were looking up into the night sky during the height of the COVID quarantine. We were afraid to go outside. Not even a plane in the sky. I think we all thought it was the end of the world as we knew it. But the Milky Way never looked so good.

Comet Neowise, July 20, 2020. But we were all in hiding with our heads in sand.

This time I didn’t even bother looking for the green comet with its nameless handle, Comet C/2022 A2 (Pan-STARRS) as I’ve been disappointed before by Kahoutek, K2, and co. Every comet I’ve ever seen hovers in the sky, it doesn’t stretch out and spread tail feathers across the sky like in the simulations. I couldn’t see the green comet when I looked for it, but when I was driving home the other night, I noticed something greenish flaring in the sky and I pulled over, thinking maybe I had seen the comet. 

Well, my eyes are no longer so good, so it was hard to tell. I got out a monocular lens to see if that would help. I found that my naked eye was more reliable than the monocular lens. I could see the Pleiades, Cygnus, not to mention the Gazelle Leaps. And there was some hanky-panky going on with Venus and Jupiter on the western horizon. I did not find the green comet with the lens, every breath I took sent the stars scattering across the sky like a a racked-up break and run in a game of pool. No dice, I guess it’s not easy being green.

But while I was busy searching the sky somewhere below Orion‘s kneecaps for the comet, suddenly to the north, a string of lights went galloping across the firmament like pearls. I was witnessing the spectacular SpaceX train headed east. I was both delighted and horrified at the same time, thinking of all the massive pollution and space debris that we have littered the sky as well as planet earth.

2/2/23 Mill Valley non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

2/19/23

I tried to look up a star map to see if I could find more information and the rather unhelpful SpaceX site says I couldn’t see them in the sky, but I sure did. There were a lot of them, and they just kept coming. They were going from west to east in a slight curve in the northern sky. It was very cool to see them, but the whole concept makes me very uneasy. And I can’t help but think how we’ve littered the sky with even more space debris  And then I think what an egotistical schmuck Elon Musk is. #Conflicted

Found it! Find StarLink

past) 6:50 pm, 9 Feb 2023

Starlink-70 (G5-3) (new), DIM (3.3) for 5 mins 

Look from WEST to NORTHEAST (details) 

Elevation (from horizon): start: 10°, max: 35°, end: 27°

Before the storm

As I drove down Hicks Valley Road at dusk, three flocks of starlings converged over me, accompanied by the first drops of rain falling on my car roof. It was astounding to see hundreds of starlings murmurate overhead. I stopped my car right in the middle of the road to watch them pulse and bend and weave a dark curtain overhead. The bursting of their wings as they moved in unison was like ocean waves, or a gust of roaring wind in the pines. I thought: wow, such big drops of rain, the beginning of the storm. Only in this case, I found out it was a shitstorm. Literally. My car was splattered in birdshit, as if the storm clouds had taken up fingerpainting on my windshield.

AT THE END OF THE PANDEMIC

At the end of summer, the grass bends 

and leans towards its own sorrow, 

a tawny mantle draped across the hills, 

like a fine shawl for the coming winter. 

It waves and ripples in the wind, a girl 

letting down her long braids. Time and distance 

crenelated with longing and endless desire.

Sorrow is plaited and woven into the dregs 

of grief and forgetfulness. But summer 

is getting longer. The earth's thirst. We are left 

with unquenched distances opening into a void, 

where the small ghosts of our hands 

push back the future, keeping it at bay, 

dressed in the castoffs of desire and longing 

for a time that may never come. We tailor

time to fit into the crammed closets of the past, 

to find a home among the orphaned shoes 

and detritus we defend and hold onto. 

And yet in the dark, we want to own that bright eye 

of the sun lingering on the cusp of the horizon, 

until the pangs of an unimaginable future become

an iron fist squeezing the ventricles of the heart.

2/1/23 Imbolc, Write On! with Terri Glass

RIP Cindy Williams (photos)

I’ve been wondering how I could possibly have known Cindy Williams, as I'm no fan of American sitcom TV, having avoided it like the plague most of my life. I never watched Laverne and Shirley. I'm no groupie either, as I was a theatre brat—some of my babysitters were the funny men, not to mention Sea Hunt. I've only been starstruck twice, when I met Col. Chris Hadfield, and Eric Idle. Not at the same time! Well, maybe Brian Cox too. Robin Williams doesn’t count because I went to college with him. Then I remembered where I’d met Cindy who starred in Menopause, the Musical, at Harrah's, Las Vegas, April 2017. A promoter gave us free tickets at the Las Vegas Highland Games. I’m no fan of musicals either, but I LOVED it. I think it was her closing performance. After the show Cindy and cast waded into the audience and dragged my friend Chris (center) and me (left) onstage for a rousing can-can finale. I love the way all three of us are making beseeching little church mice paws after the leg-leg-dance. And for the record, I'm wearing an elegant baggy flannel PJs top—after a long grueling weekend as a volunteer booth wench in the desert, you wear whatever’s left in the bottom of your suitcase that isn't stiff with alkali dust. It took me a while to place Cindy, but I never forget a face. She was so talented. And she was an absolute gas. The musical was about the empowerment of women. And Cindy was a powerful force. She had a fire burning within. May she RIP. Happy Saint Bridget’s Day.

Hick’s Valley chicks

Every time I pass the Hicks Valley Chicken Ranch, I keep an eye out for escaped chickens. There are three naughty chickens that have figured out a way to fly the coop, and make their way towards freedom, rather than be stuck in the pasture with hundreds of  hens, all grubbing for the same morsels. 

It’s not for lack of food, there is plenty of food in the pasture. For some reason these three hens think that life is always greener on the other side, though they are not cattle. We’ve taken to naming them since we only see three escapees every single time we drive down the road several times a week, so I know the stretch well. 

I have named the chickens Galloping Gertie, because she lummoxes along with her sides heaving like bowls full of jelly. She is built like Jabba the Hutt. The other two have more pedantic names than anything else—or swearwords for lack of a better term. 

Chicken number two is called Fuckwad because she is a little fuckwad. She is so small, she can slip through the cracks to get her own way. And the third one, because she is so excellent at being busted, is called Jailbait. No matter what, even if they re not the same chickens, three chickens always escape. These are their names. 

You may well ask what happens if a fourth chicken escapes. Good question. However, because we are partial to the Indo-European law of threes, we inherently like this balance of three chickens versus four. Now, of course, if this were Japan, then it will be de rigueur to have four chickens as four as considered a lucky number in Japan. Three is bad juju. 

However, we are not Japan. We are in the west. This is the land of cows and rolling hills. A chicken ranch is all little exotic here, but with, shall we say, designer foods free range chickens and free range chicken eggs have become a big thing.

Even though there is heavy frost in the mornings, after the deluge of epic proportions breaking the spine of the drought, there are riotous signs of spring everywhere, from the butter cups, showing their little yellow heads, pale creamcups, and the dandelions grow taller, not to be undone by their splendor. 

But more than anything else there are formerly amorous dead skunks littered all over the middle of the road, not to mention by the side of the road. Usually they come in pairs. But every once in a while, there are a few ménage a trois. Kind of like the hens. Good things come in threes. 

The owners of the chickens at Hicks Valley Chicken Ranch say that every night they round up those errant hens and lock them back in their chicken palace. It’s a lovely monstrous affair with two turrets, and those chickens should be very proud of their abode. 

Why these three chickens are not contented with their pasture, defies logic. Tonight the chicken wranglers will round them up and put them back in their corral. But come morning they will make a run for the border. This might be the place where you ask where did the chicken cross the road? Entirely appropriate and I do understand the reason why you ask that. 

So far, so good—the chickens have not decided to take on that particular aphorism, a good thing too, because a lot of creatures get squished along that particular stretch of road—human, or otherwise. 

For a while, there, there were escaped domestic bunnies living in the culvert alongside the road, near where the chickens love to hang out. They did well, until they got too full of themselves, and decided to cross the road. 

Notes on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, renamed the Marginalian, posted an essay on Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring. I had no idea that that Carson was a poet who became a biologist. Makes perfect sense. She was channeling the music of the hemispheres. 

When I was a child, I noticed the disappearance of bluebirds. I was confused, thinking they were a kind of robin because of their red breasts. But the robins abided. How was that so? Were the blue ones boy robins? That idea was a conundrum.

As a child, I was always making similes and mixing metaphors, but I sorrowed for the loss of the bluebirds from the ecosystem. And for a long time, the spring was silent as avian populations plummeted because of the long-term cumulative effects of DDT in the ecosystem. Hardest hit were the apex avian predators. I’m not sure why bluebirds were on that list, but they were.

I had to wait until I was nearly 30 before I saw another bluebird again. One time we were trespassing in a rancher’s field near Goat Rock in Sonoma County, when suddenly bluebirds burst into a cloud around us. I was transfixed. This was about the same time when I took up the mantle of poetry. (I was a late bloomer—as dyslexia dictated what I could do.) 

I remember puzzling over an article on Carson in the Sunday paper supplement explaining the effects of Silent Spring—which also already had profoundly affected me, though I was a child. A convergence of time and place, as it were, though I wasn’t yet ten.

And, of course it wasn’t just the bluebirds that were disappearing, but also the peregrine falcons, the hawks and the eagles too. A classmate’s father, Mr. McBride, had captive peregrine falcons, and sometimes he brought them to the marshy wetlands below Lagunitas School in San Geronimo. 

I remember him unhooding the peregrine, whose little hood bells tinkled like distant water, and I love the way they soared into the blueness of sky and then dived down faster than the eye could see, to strike down a pigeon mid-flight. I was transfixed.

At a summer party in Point Reyes, I met Brian Kervin’s father, Monte, who single-handedly saved the peregrines from extinction. Monty was a biologist who was an expert on the plight of the peregrine falcons. While he was doing a bird count, he noticed that when the birds sat on their nests, their thin eggs collapsed because of the cumulative effects of DDT in their systems.

Monte set out to save the peregrines from extinction. He scaled treacherous cliffs, stealing peregrine eggs from their eyries, and replacing them with marble eggs, invoking their wrath, as they dive-bombed him as he rappelled down the cliffs. He hatched peregrine chicks in incubators, and returned them to the wild—thus saving the species from the brink of extinction.

When I met Monte, I had come full circle. Of course, I had read Carson’s work in the 1970s, but I didn’t pick up the poetry connection, and I’m delighted to know that poetry is the foundation of her beginnings her underpinnings—because my love of science and the natural world is what led me to writing poetry. 

And of course, poetry is what saved me, giving me access to my poor locked brain, my intellect, hobbled by the chains dyslexia. And all the bluebirds, how they soared!

See THE MAN WHO LOVED FALCONS

• TWO BLUEBIRD MORNING
• baby bluebird (photos)

• BLUE COYOTE, 2/4/04

• Journal entry, 4/21/92 housesitting

9/11, A DEFERRED TRAGEDY

Who is the offender, and who is the victim? 

When the falcon and the eagle fly together

the doves know they must dive for cover. 

Christianity and Islam at odds with each other. 

And no reconciliation into the valley of wounds, 

the decay of a society, a rain of flesh and bone

and the curtailing of dreams of the past 

where plane were once an escape 

to a more clement shore, 

not weapons of mass destruction.

1/25/23 Write On! With Susie Terence

Standing on the lintel between worlds

Everything was stepped down like a cinema vérité film noir clip. The eyes pieced together an alternate reality where everything took on new importance, or became irrelevant. And our hands fluttered like flocks of pigeons circling the corn, as if we could achieve lift-off by the movement at hand. My hand, acrid with sweat, poised on the brass doorknob, I was headed for an early poetry reading way up north, when the news came. On the TV, I watched the two planes strike the twin towers that fell again, and again, in slo-mo. As I straddled the lintel, the front door became a liminal boundary painted blue. Not wanting to let it in, I closed my eyes, but the images were indelibly burned into the retina. I had no words, they had flown like dove seeking clement shores. My stomach twisted into a gordian knot, severed from reality, as I stood at the threshold, trying to reverse time. But there was no going back. The old world collided with the New World order. Dark storm clouds of smoke, not only on the horizon, but also within. The shock, followed by an inferno of rage as we all adjusted our headsets trying to redefine humanity, after this jihad of the soul.

1/25 Write On! With Susie Terence 

Irish Travellers are not related to gypsies

Here we go again, on Facebook people are madly conflating Roma “Gypsies” with Irish Travellers, two itinerant nomadic groups who are ethnically and linguistically unrelated, other than by superficial outward lifestyle. But people persist on keeping the clichés alive. 

During my great-grandfather’s time in Dumanaway, near Bandon, County Cork, the Travellers visited his farm each year to fix broken farm equipment, and to work as laborers on the family farm. My grandmother would tell me stories about how the Tinkers (an older name for Travellers), named for their trade, would make tin household items as well as fix old pails, pots and broken crockery. 

My grandmother had a favorite aluminum pot that had developed a hole in it, and since we were centuries away from Ireland in Northern California, she showed me how the Travellers would have fixed it. She took a nut and bolt and threaded them through the hole in the pot and then hammered it flat with a ball peen hammer. The pot worked fine after that.

The Travellers, an ethnic Irish minority group, named after their lifestyle, camped in my great-grandfather Michael Walsh’s lower fields. They were welcomed, not shunned, not like today. During the 1960s, the Irish government was atrocious when it came to the treatment of Travellers. Of course they were trying to force them to give up their itinerant ways.

The Travellers, who refer to themselves as Pavee, or Rilantu Mincéirí, speak the Cant, the Gammon, or Tarri. Linguists refer to it as Shelta, a term that dates back to the 1870s, which is also the name of the community (from siúltóir, walking people). Shelta, the language, is a crypto-linguistic mixed Hiberno-English and Gaelic-based language. Other names: Sheldru, Shelter, Shelteroch seem to be derivatives of Shelta/siúltóir. 

There may be two distinct dialects of Shelta. The language was also referred to as Bog Latin, a derogatory term meaning Latin as spoken by the Irish, coined before 1811, the Ould Thing, and Tinker's Cant.

The word Shelta appears in print for the first time in 1882 in the book The Gypsies by the "gypsiologist" Charles Leland, who claimed to have discovered it as the "fifth Celtic tongue". The word's etymology has long been a matter of debate. Modern Celticists believe that Irish siúl [ʃuːlʲ] "to walk" is at the root, either via a term such as siúltóir [ˈʃuːl̪ˠt̪ˠoːɾʲ] "a walker" or a form of the verbal noun siúladh (cf. an lucht siúlta [ənˠ ˌl̪ˠʊxt̪ˠ ˈʃuːl̪ˠt̪ˠə], "the walking people" (lit. "the people of walks"),[8] the traditional Irish term for Travellers).[5] The Dictionary of Hiberno-English cites it as possibly a corruption of the word "Celt".[7] Since Shelta is a mixture of English and Irish grammar, the etymology is not straightforward. The language is made up mostly of Irish lexicon, being classified as a grammar-lexicon language with the grammar being English-based..” —Wikipedia

Travellers are thought to be the indigenous people of Ireland, their distinctive DNA bottlenecked around the 16th c. (Due to the Cromwellian?) and they have been genetically isolated since at least the Great Famine, as they tended to keep to themselves and marry within their clans— because they often marry first and second cousins there is some genetic duplication. 

According to a comprehensive recent DNA study, there are four distinct DNA clusters that differ from that of settled Irish people. “One cluster is associated with the “Rathkeale group.” Two other clusters are linked to the Cant or Gammon dialects of the Traveller language Shelta.“ —Irish Times. The study also concluded there is no Roma DNA within the Traveller society. 

The [study] found that Travellers are of Irish ancestral origin but have significant differences in their genetic make-up compared with the settled community…because of hundreds of years of isolation combined with a decreasing Traveller population. “The findings confirm that the Irish Traveller population has an Irish ancestry and this comes at a time where the ethnicity of Travellers is being considered by the Irish State.”—Prof. Gianpiero Cavalleri, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.  Gene study reveals Irish Travellers' ancestry

According to one Traveller, Ellen Mac Donough, there are about 35,000-49,000 self-identified Travellers in Ireland today. Traveller diaspora estimates: 25,000 in England, and 49,000 in the southern US, and 7,000 in Europe. I shudder to think what would have happened to the Travellers if the genetics had not supported the Irish DNA theory.

The Travellers were once called Tinkers in my lifetime, but they do not prefer that title, and it is now considered to be an ethnic slur, along with Pikey, and knacker. If you look at ancient Irish customs, there were always itinerant Irish people who traveled from place to place. Especially the lawyers, doctors and storytellers. So traveling is a long-standing tradition that was disrupted by the British ascendency and occupation of Ireland.

Roma, or Romani people, aka “Gypsies,” originally came from India, by way of  Romania to Britain some 300 years ago. The term, gypsy is considered an ethnic slur, like saying the N-word for African-Americans.

I have musician friends who are Travellers. And I know linguists who have studied the Cant. It’s probably a lost cause to try to educate people on the Travellers’ horses, the Irish cobb, which were imported to America and renamed Gypsy Vanners. Another cultural rip off.

Few Shelta words traveled into English but the word "bloke" may be a 19th c. crossover. 

A long time coming

How do you escape velocity? How do you escape the earth? First, you must plan an orbit, in order to escape the gravitational pull of your homeland, and then make a pathway to the stars. The physics of displacement and the direction of time will narrate the story. Then, when you enter deep space, and as you approach the Kármán Line, that firmament where space begins, the only sound you will hear are the red blood cells pulsing past your eardrum. Your heart will become a massive drum keeping time with the angels of the universe, and then, every breath you take, it will be like the ocean, pulsing inside of you. We are 97% ocean. Fish swim in our blood. I think of how lyrics of songs define a generation. Jesse Colin Young singing Come on people now smile on your brother.  Wooden ships catching the wind in their sails, seeking the lee shore. And as you dream of the star lines, the songs of deep space will carry you in that deep turning within. And today another brother among us has ascended to the clouds, perhaps to ride the tail of that comet home, we’ve been a long time gone, and we’ll be a long time coming home. 

And it's a fair wind
Blowin' warm out of the south over my shoulder
Guess I'll set a course and go.

1/19 Mill Valley Non-fiction workshop

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.