SCION CALL

I am not a footlocker for odd clothes, cookies, and drinks. 

I am not a go-bag even though evacuation came in threes. 

I’m no knight in shining armor, recusing you from yourself,

though you’ve slept on the backseat, took cramped refuge

when there was nowhere else left to go. No late-night couches.

I am most certainly not not your pet cage—

that little deermouse who came in from the cold 

who built nests in my wiring, plumbed my secret places. 

Someday there will be hell to pay it, but not just yet. 

Remember how you drenched air filters with peppermint oil 

to discourage the wayward beast, but the volatile oils 

burned your eyes, so you couldn’t see where you were going, 

it was midwinter, an exceptionally cold one at that. 

Remember how we drove around with all the windows open. 

The wind finally stung those repressed tears from your eyes.

My floor was generous, the mouse could’ve dined for months. 

We couldn’t go on like this. Something had to be done, but what? 

And when snap traps caught only fingers, you resorted to glue traps 

with little almond eyes, they caught flack, but no wayward mouse. 

Finally someone took pity, gave you a rat-sized glue board 

that finally did the trick, but the interior smelled grassy and pissy, 

there was no easy fix. The mouse lived on, but it was doomed, 

so when it was caught, it was end of an odd migration story. 

No time for remorse. All that tasty rubber made with soy, 

a siren call for small woodland creatures with no travel guides.

It’s a good thing the packrats didn’t squeeze through the ducts. 

That would’ve been a three-ring circus. They ate their way 

through my landlady’s semi-new Camry, right down to the bone. 

The damage was more than the value of the car.

And then, they moved onto my flat mate’s snazzy sports car. 

The spark plug caps and firewall was tastier than acorns.

The packrats circled my old Scion, saved by the manufacture date.

See, all the newer cars are made with soy-based rubber. 

Rodents are flocking to this new Japanese food source.

But packrats also like to do a brisque trade with trinkets.

All those shiny treasures snoozing on the dashboard.

Like so much money in the bank.

9/6/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

Pathetic fallacies

When I was taking Celtic studies at UC Berkeley, my Celtic studies and rhetoric professor, Dan Millia introduced us to this list. Once applied to presentism, looking back at how we so erroneously interpret the middle ages with 21st century lens—this was a brilliant tool. When he introduced the idea, I thought I had gone to heaven, I was so enamored. Suddenly, all kinds of ideas fell neatly into place, things that I didn’t have words or categories for previously. I suddenly realized that the basis, and the urge for my poetry writing was definitely tied up with defining and arguing with those pathetic fallacies. (No, not pathetic phalluses, but there’s room for argument there too.) See, I was born ready to argue under the yabbut sign (yes, but…), never taking anything at face value. Then there’s gaslighting, a whole ‘nother ball of worms.

TRUE CHANTERELLES in Medicine for Minds & Hearts anthology

TRUE CHANTERELLES (2013) was (re)published in Medicine for Minds & Hearts, an anthology of mushroom poems from Fungi Press, 2023. It originally appeared in Fungi Magazine in 2020. I had sent the poem to Art Goodtimes soon after it was written, but it languished in email format, then we dusted it off for publication, and he asked me to go ahead and load it up with scientific terms, which I did, and then, eventually it was published, but it was a long birth! A decade later!

• 

AT THE POETRY READING

He leaned forward in his seat as if to catch 

every word, every line she said. Her breath.

He was a speckled trout in a deep pool at dusk, 

the mayflies occluding the smooth surface, 

like rain on a window after the storm. 

How the poems moved him, you could see it 

in his glistening eyes, as if backed by starlight, 

the words holding up a deeper promise. 

She should’ve seen the warning signs. 

Or maybe she did, and ignored them—

 

the way uncomfortable truths, disguised as hope, 

led us astray, and so we believed what we wanted, 

and fell into that convenient offering,

because the bed is a prop, the backdrop to a story, 

but the actors have already left the stage.

And so we fell into tangled sheets, playing at love. 

The heart takes solace where it finds refuge. 

And the river always whispers of darker shores.

At the reading, there was that same glow in his eyes, 

as a poet read the hard terrain of her poems. 

I think of how we confuse the poem with the reader 

instead of the mouthpiece of a larger truth. 

I let him go like the fading stars at dawn

drifting off, setting sail for another shore.

8/23/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

Billy Collins’ The Night People, the Cool People 3-year Zoom celebration

I grabbed up some books collected during the plague, in case we were sharing. I came to the Poetry Broadcast series in June 2021, after I had taken a writing workshop with Billy Collins via Zoom at Book Passages, and then soon afterwards, Gwyndolen Soper, the founder of TNPTCP, noticed I was commenting on the thread during Billy’s Poetry Broadcast, and kindly asked me to join the group. I had no idea of its existence. I am so glad she found me. And I’ve been here ever since. Someone said we are family. Yes, we are family.

One of my Covid activities was hunting for used Billy Collins books on eBay, and giving them a new home. I looked for bookseller specials where you could by three books and get one free, it took a lot of juggling and maneuvering to get the titlesI wanted. But I was patient as I had nothing but time. I have an armload of them now. Not quite every book he’s ever published, but pretty close.

Mr. Nunes’ bison bull calf, Lagunitas, ca. 1982 (photos)

While scanning my tear sheet archives, I stumbled across some poor scans of old photos…. If I ever find the negatives….Mr. Nunes feeding Nickel, the bull calf bison while a scandalized Hereford heifer looks on incredulously as he feeds her hay to the stranger. Lagunitas, ca 1982.

I wonder what the heifer thought of the bison? It looks like the only romance going on was with the hay. Old Man Nunes was so proud of his little bison calf. What was he thinking? (Besides the price of beefalo.) Bison are completely unpredictable and are bulldozers when it comes to fences.

There's a backstory, bison are part of the fabric of my childhood. When I was a kid, there was another bison—yes, we called them buffalo—in Nicasio right by the church. The only reason why Belle the Buffalo stayed put in the church pasture was because she liked the other cows. I used to save my buffalo head nickels and named them all Belle. 

Tuesday was bank day at school. I was in second grade. We had a little manila envelopes with rope ties and we were encouraged to save a nickel or a dime a week so I put all my most treasured coins, Indian head pennies, buffalo nickels, and liberty dimes in those little envelopes thinking that I would get the same ones back again later from Bank of America, in the old brick Grandi Hotel in Point Reyes.

Then one hopped up Saturday night some hoodlums came out and shot the poor buffalo for no reason at all. Or, so the story goes. We were all devastated. Or so I thought, you know how gossip misdirects itself.  As it turns out, she up and died for no real reason. That’s the official story. Maybe it was natural causes like age, or disease. But I suspect some guys did shoot at her. It was that kind of an era with loaded gun racks across back windows of pickup trucks.

So, when Nickel showed up, we were all insane with joy. I used to take my grandmother up to the ranch for a visit (today would’ve been her 130th birthday). It was a case of Meet the new family pet, Nickel. I wonder what happened to the little bison when Old Man Nunes died. He was fence-resistant as I recall. The bison, not Mr. Nunes. 

Now there are fancyass palaces on Portola Road (the fire road to the Lookout) once my own private Eden, and I can't imagine they'd tolerate a wayward bison.

Both Tony Senior and Tony Junior have crossed the rainbow bridge, and Nickel, too, I presume. I always meant to collect Tony Junior’s folklore. Too late. I heard that the youngest brother, Mel Nunes, who was a few years ahead of me in school, became a volunteer fireman for the Woodacre Fire Department—still lives at the ranch. Maybe I’d better pay him a visit before it’s too late.

UNSEASONABLE RAIN

The pale summer sky is cloaked 

with an unseasonable beauty of thunderclouds, 

ladened with promises of lightning and wildfire.

We hold our breath, pack our go-bags, and hope for rain.

The Perseids whisper of distant light in the northern quadrant. 

I imagine angels imposed on the levity of the sky, 

and think of the inevitable promise of the grave, 

how the pretenders and believers alike 

eventually succumb to that final darkness.

Don’t they know the story is a run-on life sentence?

8/16/23

STINGING NETTLES

Pretend that the world is an oyster 

sleeping on the clouded bottom of the bay. 

A cliché, I know. Pretend that it dreams 

of the luster of pearls it will never make.

Pretend the grit beneath your skin isn’t an irritant, 

or the slender blackberry sticker in your finger 

that you worry with your teeth, hoping to dislodge it,

does not bother you. It swells up anyway.

It’s embedded in your skin like an old memory.

Pretend that those stinging nettles 

growing in a boggy patch down by the creek 

will not sting you. Not this time. You get a free pass.

Do you remember how your grandmother 

donned leather gloves to gather nettles for potherbs? 

They tasted of dank secrets of the creek, midsummer. 

Was it because she had no money for dinner greens?

You probably shouldn’t have told those city kids 

to grab them like that. Such childish meanness. 

They were not the enemy. You were too young to know 

that change is inevitable, but you fought it anyway.

Soon it will be time to return to school. 

That new dress she made is a song of the future.

But you couldn’t let go of summer’s hard promise, 

the tawny hills, the dark oaks whispering secrets 

you couldn’t quite translate in the breeze, 

no matter how hard you listened. Meanwhile, 

the last wasps droned on, deer desperately browsed, 

looking for anything green—even the bitter ivy.  

Pretend the golden bay leaves 

clattering like hooves on the tin roof

are not small coffin nails 

hammering home the end of the season.

8/16/23 Write On! with Terri Glass

BRÓN TROGAIN, SUMMER’S END

Fading August light, 

the clattering of bay leaves. 

A sharpness in the air.

These are the seeds of memory, 

the mountains painted blue,

the hayfields of stored sunlight.

The waning moon sings of despair, 

and the wild iris by the side of the road

slumbers toward winter darkness.

The sky shrugs its shoulders,

covered in a shawl of clouds.

The thunder answers

with an empty promise 

of late summer rain.

8/9/23

HUNTING STONES ON GRIZZLY PEAK

The odor of eucalyptus after first rain dazzles 

the senses with the memory of thirsty rocks,
small pieces quartz resurface on the fire road
like blind hail after the deluge, quiet stars 
dozing in red Franciscan mud.

I gather them up, not random shards of upheaval,
but the remains of fossils filled with quartz,
the unkempt story of seed clams and shells
still crawling out of the sea.

As I glimpse the bay from a limestone reef,  

I hold a hard beauty in my pockets.
There are more treasures to be found,
dark obsidian flakes also swim in my pockets.

Someone’s attempt at resurrecting the art 

of flint napping, a dark tide at my feet.

All this immeasurable bounty of the past 

teases me away from the 21st-century.

The spine of the drought is broken. 

The coinage in my pockets pulls me down. 

My pants are in danger of slipping off 

with the combined weight of rocks. 

I return those stones back to the earth, 

taste the pungent air, breathe in the mist 
with a sense of finally belonging 

to this landscape not of my own choosing.

8/9/23 Write On! Workshop with Terri Glass

REST IN POWER, DAVID LAFLAMME

Rest in Power, David LaFlamme, 

it’s a beautiful day in the West..

The white bird is flying free

to the edges of all the small circles 

in the universe, uncaged,

while the aspen leaves fall 

and the violin gently weeps. 

It is all part of the pantomime.

8/8/23

PD obit

Apparently, the New York Times of it was a little more in depth. Judith Gips reported.: “ Piquant family and early history from the NYT obituary for David LaFlamme:  I somehow like his father being a stunt performer who became a copper miner. "...born on May 4, 1941, in New Britain, Conn., the first of six children of Adelard and Norma (Winther) LaFlamme. He spent his early years in Los Angeles, where his father was a Hollywood stunt double, before settling in Salt Lake City, where his father became a copper miner."

David was about 5 when he got his first violin, a hand-me-down from an aunt.

“I began fooling around with it on my own and taught myself to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’” he said in a 1998 interview. Formal training followed.”

Who knew Einstein’s desk meme went against Facebook community standards?

I do keep track of these Facebook absurdities on my blog. Why Facebook continues to harass a 70-year-old woman for using metaphor and creative language is beyond me. but re-posting photos that everyone else on Facebook has re-posted, and then being sanctioned, for it is at best egregious.

OMFG, I posted an old meme from Facebook about Einstein’s messy desk on the day he died onto a friend’s comment and got dinged by FB AI bots for “going against community standards.” The desk is not nude, in fact it’s well covered, dressed with lots of papers. And as far as I can tell, there was never any sexual activity on that desk, ever. Unless crunching numbers counts. Facebook AI bots evidentially need glasses. And they have a dirty mind. Censor the Facebook AI bots already. Or bust the people that do actually post censorious material. Leave me alone already. This is flat-out harassment.

And I got yet another ding for actually posting the Einstein meme in my Facebook thread, below. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Facebook thinks there is nudity or sexual activity going on. It’s a desk and a chair, a bookcase and a smudged blackboard.

So if you don’t hear from me, it means I am in Facebook jail again. And every time I’ve been thrown in jail, I have literally not done anything that even remotely goes against community standards. Except use simile and metaphor. I’m too old for this shinola. I am seriously considering parting company with Facebook. This is beyond ridiculous. Last photograph I posted to demonstrate the vagaries of leucism, also went against “community standards” was of a spotted chicken and an appaloosa horse. At least they were mammals in that photo.

Let the record show the offending meme in question. Do you see any nudity or sex in this photograph? Yeah, neither did I. Perhaps I need stronger glasses.

Part two: And now I got yet another Facebook ding for reposting the above meme. I fear I may be headed for Facebook jail once again. And as usual I have done zip zilch nada nothing wrong, and certainly have not gone against community standards. Stupid. Facebook is a bully.

Yep, once you start getting Facebook dings, you’re under surveillance and you cannot edit your own comments for a period of time. Sort of an extra gaslighting punishment. I edited the above comment and it was summarily erased. I hate typos. And clearly Facebook AI bots hate to be outed. Sort of a bonus prize, I guess.

The last time I posted one of Facebook’s dire warnings like this, it dinged me twice for the screenshot of the comment, so I got two consecutive jailbird sentences for the price of one. For hate speech, mind you. And all I was doing was using a poor metaphor. Certainly the metaphor was in poor taste, but if you look at most of the stuff posted on Facebook, Facebook itself survives on downright dicey posts in poor taste. It moves the machine.

“It seems I am always being called out by Facebook for my figurative use of language. Facebook actually gave me 13 window’s-worth of admonishments. And, I’ve been thrown in jail. A red card jail, I tell you! And not even for making a pithy political comment. Since when is wanting to “strangle someone’s voice,”  hate speech or a crime against humanity when the woman’s incessant whining throughout the entire video itself, was a crime against humanity? OK, so it was in poor taste.

There are Facebook sanctions—and I do mean “sanction” in both terms of the word: certain taboo words, of which no one knows the complete list, that cannot be used alone, or, and here’s the clincher—or to modify another word, or idea. OK, fine by me. I’ve been sanctioned for going too fast or for liking posts too fast, I’ve been sanctioned for posting my own links on my own page—marked as spam. And I’ve received multiple yellow card warning sanctions for use the use of unusual figurative language. Only, this time, the card was red. Let the punishment fit the crime. In the klinker for making bad mixed metaphors.“ I’m in Facebook jail again…and again

And I don’t even watch dicy videos. The most exciting things I watch in the Facebook video section at this point, are dog grooming—they get their matted hair shaved off, ergo they’re naked, or naked horse hoof trimming (no shoes), and Kiftness kitties singing. They could be saying anything for all I know. Since they’re screeching at each other, clearly sex or turf is involved.

Barbie-heimer

I must admit that I don’t have an overwhelming desire to see the “blockbuster”movie Barbie. Sure, I had a Barbie doll. But I didn’t relate to her. She was tall, and impossibly thin with a long blonde ponytail. I took a blunt pair of scissors to her ponytail at one point. Her head came off so easily. As did her arms. Pieces easily went on walkabout.

I couldn’t afford to buy Barbie clothes, she came dressed in a zebra striped bathing suit, and nothing else, other than tiny white high heels. So I made clothing for her but eventually I became bored with her and abandoned her for Tonka Toy (Breyer) horses.

I don’t remember who gave me the doll, I think it was a Christmas gift from our next-door neighbor, ca. 1959 or 60. I was short and dark, and had no boobs to speak of, they were a long way off on the grown-up horizon, so I didn’t relate to her all that much. Besides, I hated the color pink. I think she met her demise via a 4th of July firecracker. Her graffitied carapace became housing for a tiny bomb.

I will probably go and see Oppenheimer, because some of my family history is tied up with Los Alamos—my mother’s cousin, who was brilliant in mathematics, was whisked away right out of high school to work on the bomb. 

We only found this out much later after Marie had died of cancer. In 1990, I made a pilgrimage to the Delgado Bridge in Santa Fe where the Rosenberg spies were captured, and also a visit to the Pajarito Plateau, where we visited the petroglyphs of T’sanque/T’sankawi, and Los Alamos where a spare shells of Fat Man and Little Boy still doze in the museum. 

The place names still haunt me. Los Alamos, Alamogordo, Stallion Gate, Trinity, Oak Ridge, Fermi Institute. I am a child born of the Age of Light. Meanwhile, on the rock outcrops, near Los Alamos, the petroglyph of Kokopelli, playing the water sprinkler, abides.

My cousin’s name was Mary—or Marie—Walsh, as we called her. She was the daughter of Wild Bill, the gambler, and grew up on Home Ranch, in the Reese River Valley. I think she was also my grandmother’s goddaughter. 

My grandmother sometimes received postcards from her, addressed from New Mexico, but no PO Box, or return address. I remember there was a letter with words cut out of it, clearly censored. Like little blank eyes. My grandmother hid them in the top drawer of the bureau beneath her handmade Irish lace, and all her sewing scraps.

In the mid-1970s, I worked for “Crappa,” retired politician Roger Kent, whose father was Senator William Kent (who gave Muir Woods to the Department of the Interior) and Roger’s brother “Buffalo” that is Sherman Kent, was head of the CIA, and they both admitted the Manhattan Project was the best kept secret. 

Even the Kents didn’t know about the Manhattan Project until it was declassified. For a government that didn’t keep secrets well, it was the best kept secret of all. And Sherman—if anyone should have known, it was him, after all, he was a CIA. But Sherman was also in the dark.They were surprised to learn that my cousin, who was gifted with numbers, had worked on the bomb at los Alamos.

Sadly, the math gene blithely skipped over me, is, despite having an Olympic gold medal winner try to teach me, but I do remember the bomb drills where we hid our heads under our desks at Lagunitas School. We covered the back of our necks with one arm, and our eyes with the other, and waited for the drill to be over. The day they were detonating atomic bombs over Jackass flats in Nevada, the entire school went outside to the playground to witness the light. 

We were in West Marin, a long way from Jackass Flats. The sky did go white. And it did sound like you could hear a muffled bomb go off in the distance. 

Later, when I tried to look this information up, I was told the detonation was underground. That what we witnessed was impossible. Maybe so, but we did hear and see something that day when the sky was robbed of color. And we were 500 miles away on the northern coast of California. It made the presence of the atomic bomb far too real for me. I was haunted by nightmares for years to come.

As it turns out, the last above ground nuclear test was July 17, 1962, so yes, we could have witnessed an above ground blast. And every year on Labor Day weekend, I can’t help but think of all the artistic hordes intent on radical self expression, gather at Black Rock Playa to ignite a Burning Man— to burn away the corporate sins of the world. (I attended the first burning man at Baker Beach in San Francisco, 1986.) 

Each year, my old college friend, David Best, erects a phantasmagoric wooden temple—just downwind from that radioactive Armageddon of Jackass Flats. prayer flags in the wind. I can’t help but think of all those radical isotopes on the wing. And how we are all glowing from within during this Age of Light.

see my atomic poem list below

Potayto, potato. How about tomapotatl as pomato is already taken?

Do check out Cultivariable, a great site for everything potato, including buying seeds.

The other day I recalled reading an article in July, 2017 that claimed that potatoes also grew in North America, and I thought what was dubbed the Indian potato was merely a simile, something lost in translation, or a case of mistaken identity. There was almost no follow-up information on it. I chalked it up to a mistranslation. Looks like, but is not equal to….and then Covid came along and I forgot about it. 

Yesterday, on Facebook, Discover Magazine reposted an archived article from 2021 on Solanum jamesii, or the Indian potato, now renamed the Four Corners “potato,” which renewed my interest. But the somewhat updated article compared it to domestic potatoes because it produces tubers. I thought to myself: hundreds of others solanum species have tubers too. 

However, the Four Corners potato, Solanum jamesii, is not what we think of as the ubiquitous potato. It's related to, but not the same as the garden potato, Solanum tuberosum, domesticated in the Andes 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. 

I let my fingers do the Googling, and found that what are called Apache and Navajo potatoes were hybrid varieties of the domestic potato. A dead end. Back in the summer of 2017, potato farmer /poet Art Goodtimes piqued my curiosity about Solanum jamesii which led to a spirited discussion about the origin and nomenclature of potatoes. And researching "Indian potatoes" led me to another order of plant altogether, an aquatic species related to taro root, Sagittaria latifolia, or duck potato. If it walks like a duck... What quackery!

Growing up Irish meant I ate potatoes every night for dinner. When I traveled through the Andes, I ate many varieties of strange potatoes, the most bitter was black, and grew on the island of Amantani in Lake Titicaca. My GI tract never forgave me. Apparently I was supposed to also eat the arcilla de chaco, or clay jacket—which absorbs the bitterness. When it comes to eating wild potatoes, bitter is not good, and sour is even worse. Spit it out, I tell you.

Astonishing diversity of Incan potatoes in CIP International Potato Center's seed bank.

There are something like 53 known species, and 4000 types, or varieties (not sub-species) of domestic potatoes in Peru alone. And even more in Bolivia and Chile—not to mention the Amazon. According to CIP, the International Potato Center, a genetic seed bank located in Lima, Peru, there are 151 to 180 species of wild potatoes, worldwide. The actual count is in dramatic flux as we discover new species, lose others due to climate change, and make advances in DNA sequencing. 

In fact, the entire Solanaceae family is undergoing genetic reconstruction. Solanaceae is a huge family, there are over 3000 to 4000 species worldwide. And solanum includes a whopping 1500 genera: potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, tobacco, datura, and petunias, to name a few. They’re all members of the nightshade family.

And like most solanum species, the Four Corners “potato,” Solanum jamesii, prefers to grow in disturbed soil—which suggests to ecologist Bruce Pavlik and his wife, Lisbeth Louderback, who is an archaeology curator at the Natural History Museum of Utah, that this wild potato may have been domesticated as early as 11,000 years ago. I'm not so sure about that. It’s not like hybridizing teosinte.

Escalante Valley was once referred to as Potato Valley. Pavlik and Louderback have been genome sequencing the wild potatoes near the pueblos for signs of domestication—they're looking for a genetic bottleneck. Ok, so I have trouble with their advanced reference date, as it predates Andean domestication, and, besides, it was the end of the Ice Age. Potatoes hate frost. (In the 2017 Salt Lake Tribune article, Louderback, in her doctoral thesis, quoted 10,000 to 11,000 years. See also University of Utah News).

Everything about the Four Corners “potato” is toxic—like many members of the nightshade family—unless you boil or eat the immature tubers with gobs of white clay called gleesh’ (think Kaopectate) to counteract the toxins—so it’s different than the domesticated South American potatoes of Bolivia and Peru. It’s more of a dangerous wild potato cousin with a deadly kick.

It also turns out that the Four Corners “potato” toxins are also different than those found in domestic potatoes. The toxin is the same found in tomatoes. So maybe cavalierly calling it a potato just because it has a tiny tuber the size of a grape, is a bit premature. Maybe call it tomapotatl? 

Oddly enough, Santa Rosa, horticulturalist Luther, Burbank, the man who invented the Burbank, or russet potato, aka the Idaho potato, did developed an edible white potato-tomato berry called a pomato. But, unlike the ill-fated Wonderberry, also a nightshade, which resembled a huckleberry, victim of a smear campaign touting its toxicity, the pomato didn’t breed true, so he gave it up. But in 1934, an Australian successfully bred a pomato. Many flowering ornamental solanum produce tubers too, but noshing on them could be a one-way ticket to paradise—no matter how you roll the old snake-eyes.

I realize that it’s a handy linguistic shortcut to call this wild potato cousin a "potato," because it’s so much easier to say potato family instead of saying the nightshade family. Old habits die hard. And then there’s the toxic baggage attached to the word nightshade. Think Atropa Belladonna and deadly atropine. How about an expansionist mindset, with a new name, instead of a reductionist one handcuffed by the tyranny of simile?  

The Diné word for the potato is Nimási. Maybe we should call the Four Corners “potato” that. But then we’d also have to include the Apache, Hopi, Kawaik, Southern Paiute, Tewa, Zia and Zuni names, etc., not to mention the Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) names. So maybe calling it the Four Corners “wild potato” is a far better name. Otherwise we’ll have hordes of eco-nuts going afield to nosh on them thinking they’re benign.

For the record, botanists insist that pretty much all wild potato species are not safe to eat, other than in small amounts, due to their high glycoalkaloid content. Also, Solanum jamesii is not native to California, which means it was introduced from somewhere else. But where?

Wiki spells it out: “Solanum jamesii is a species of nightshade. Its range includes the southern United States. All parts of the plant, and especially the fruit, are toxic, containing solanine when it matures. Immature tuber roots are edible.” But they’re the size of grapes, so how do you know if they’re immature? They tell off-color jokes? 

It turns out that Solanum jamesii is not the only “wild potato” in the old pueblo. One or two other southwest wild potato species, depending upon how you count your potatoes, are Solanum stoloniferum aka Solanum fendleri, or Fendler’s horsenettle—genetically speaking, they are variants of one species, the controversy rages on. Horsenettles are generally not called potatoes, BTW. 

Because of the toxicity, they are often considered famine foods. And people sometimes eat the ripe berries, or ground cherries. And since they vary in toxicity, you never know which ones will be real stinkers I’m not willing to be the guinea pig.

Let’s talk toxicity. “The primary glycoalkaloid in this Solanum jamesii species is tomatine, unlike the domesticated potato, in which the primary glycoalkaloids are solanine and chaconine." And there’s also a smidgeon of the nicotine alkaloid too! Tomatine puts this species firmly in the tomato camp—name your poison. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. 

Wow! Potato blossoms. Cultivariable is a great site for everything potato, and then some.

The question begs, how closely related is the Four Corners “wild potato” to South American potatoes? As James Dinneen in The ancient potato of the future, quipped, DNA-wise, “The Four Corners potato, Solanum jamesii, is related to the common potato in somewhat the same way coyotes are related to dogs.” Both are canines and can interbreed. But the domestic dog is descended from wolves. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you think they're siblings.

Why does any of this matter? Because, Dear One, genetic diversity. Wild species carry a wide range of unusual survival traits. Take the Irish potato famine—had there been a way to introduce more resilient genes into the potato monoculture against the potato blight (Phytophthora infestans), then one million people might not have needlessly died. Or immigrated.

The USDA is interested in the Four Corners potato’s astonishing 8-year shelf life, resistance to disease, and to drought. Climate change is affecting domestic monoculture potatoes, which is the world's third largest important food crop. Potatoes need specific heat requirements and 12-hours of daylight in order to reproduce. Not all nightshades reproduce by seed, some spread via tubers, or reroot via creeping stolons.

I plowed through a lengthy list of solanum section of Petota, and found that Solanum commersonii is resistant to root rot and nematodes. Solanum demissum, Solanum pinnatisectum, and Solanum bulbocastanum, an ornamental nightshade, are resistant to the potato blight, and "has been used to genetically engineer resistance into the cultivated varieties of potatoes around the world." —Wiki 

Genetic traits from tough wild potato species can be hybridized into our domestic potatoes. And before you go off the deep end about genetic modification, every plant we consume has been genetically modified—from aubergine to zucchini. Especially corn and broccoli. Besides, the voodoo magic of crossbreeding solanum species is far better than sticking pins into a potato. 

Where is Mr. Potatohead when you need him?

RIPTIDE

Who said to always swim toward the outsider?
I was far from shore, the waves stacked up,
gnawed the coastline, a storm far out to sea,

an offshore trench fed the undertow.

I slid down each trough to meet the next wave.
And so on. A glimpse of the beach, a silver,
as I rode each crest. Was I mammal or fish?
I might drown this far from shore.

The lifeguard station was a flyspeck,
I was a whitecap, a seagull on the waves.

I knew I could only save myself.

I could disappear forever in this vast sea.

How long before she missed me? 

That mother sleeping off the night.
I body-surfed in, but it was a long way to land.
I was learning to rescue myself. Again.

Gasping, I lay face down in the warm sand,
numb from the icy embrace of the sea. 

I was 10.

8/2/23. This is a revamp of part 2 of Lúnasa. I suddenly realized it was two poems.

LÚNASA

1. The roaring sky brimmed with thunderclouds, 

as the cupped wings of birds scalloped the air. 

Fall leaves feathered a vertigo edifice on the wind.

In the creek, shards of sunlight glinted 

and drifted off towards the shadows.

I thought of the siren call of sky and clouds.

and how the birds are born explorers, 

and the clouds are the culmination of dreams 

stitched to the hem of the horizon.

 
But I was caught up in familial distress.

How easily the acrobat of the tongue 

betrays us when we least expect it.

I didn’t know that a derailed tongue 

was merely one train of thought.

There were other stories. Other endings.

The bog is a transition between land and water. 

Its buried secrets harbor the still music 

of the speckled pools of wisdom, and trout

seeking a story line, a neutral buoyancy 

between solidarity and solid ground. 

2. The abyss offshore fed the undertow, 

the coastline scalloped by hungry storms.

Who advised me to swim toward the outsider?

But the waves kept stacking up far from shore, 

remnants of an invisible storm far out to sea.

I swam down each trough to meet the next wave.

And so on. The invisible strand only came into view 

when I rode the crest. Was I mammal or fish? 

Would I drown this far from shore?

The lifeguard station was minuscule, 

and I knew that rescue could only come from within. 

I was no more than a whitecap, or a seagull on the waves, 

an afterthought. I could disappear forever in this vastness.

How long would it be before she missed me? 

That mother sleeping off the night before.

So I began that long trawl toward the beach 

learning that I could rescue only myself.

Winded, I lay face down in the warm sand, 

numb from the cold embrace of the sea. I was 10.

8/2/23 

This was a collage, a pastiche—as poets read their poems, my mind wandered, so it’s half freewrite, half stolen words, exacerbated by the imperfect transcription onto page, with no thought of subject or structure, that came later. My collage was in three parts then written as one piece., but this sure looks like two poems versus one.

MAL DE MER

There is that one invisible moment 

when you are far from shore, 

but the horizon line has other ideas, 

as to what plumbline is real.

That moment where you give up all hope 

for a terrestrial reconciliation with the land, 

because in the trawler, the sea is your only cradle, 

in that briny bath from whence we came,

and you regress to an infantile, colicky stage, 

where nothing is solid, not even the mutiny 

of your traitorous, roiling stomach

and you become like the hunted sea cucumber 

spilling its guts in order to live another day.

The salmon escapes the hook, seeks new depths.

And then you too let go, give up the conflict

of all your worldly goods in the vague hope

for stasis, and seeking a safe harbor, 

you pray for equilibrium, a balance

between sea and sky and horizon.

8/2/23 Write On! Workshop with Terri Glass

I really disliked the model poem. I guess I should post a link to our model poems, but we tend to wander so far afield when we write, that the model poem is merely a jumping off place. An incidental prompt.

Remembering The Buk

(Beat poet Al Winans posted a photo of Charles Bukowski on Facebook, with an amazing letter from the Buk for Al’s 50th birthday. I liked the letter (see below) which shed some light on his bad behavior, and with that, came understanding. But so much faux idolatry emanated from that post it made me gag as my reaction to meeting Bukowski was decidedly different. So I posted my own not-so-pretty two-cents-worth. And, thanks for the unexpected writing prompt, Al!)

I met Charles Bukowski around 1982, when he was crashing on a friend’s sagging couch in a farmhouse perched by the railroad tracks in Cotati. My friend wanted me to meet him to organize a reading at Sonoma State. So, Becca (Rebecca Clintron Osvald) took me over to her friend Ricky Appelbaum’s old white farmhouse over by the trailer court to meet the Buk.

Ricky‘s house was a crash pad for thespians, artists, and wandering poets. The rent was dirt cheap. Every time a freight train rumbled by, the house shook, we’d all scream Stella! like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, because Ricky was playing the lead at a local theater. 

Unfortunately, Charles Bukowski was dead drunk by early afternoon, nursing a gallon of cheap Red Mountain wine. He had been at it for a while as empty wine jugs circled the perimeter of the couch. The Buk was also in audition-mode on Ricky’s chintzy couch, already in training for his semi-autobiographical screenplay, Barfly. 

I guess by that point, the Buk had already thoroughly burned his bridges with his sole poetry publisher, my friend, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, who wouldn’t let him crash at his place up in Healdsburg anymore. John, who had founded a successful office supply business in LA, hunted Bukowski down in 1966, and found him working as a letter clerk in a post office. 

In 1969, John sold his collection of DH Lawrence first editions to fund his Black Sparrow Press. And then he made an offer that Bukowski couldn’t refuse, $100 a month to write full time. A month later, Bukowski submitted his first novel, Post Office. John made Bukowski famous again—as a poet—after he had burnt his literary bridges as a writer with a 35-year-long drunken binge which led to a hiatus from the publishing world. 

Bukowski‘s myriad poetry books put the fledgling Black Sparrow Press on the literary roadmap. John, whose first words when he finally met Bukowski, were, “I worship you,” Buk’s reply was “That’s nice, you wanna beer?” But this time John was done with the Buk. (Note to self, need to find Barnes & Noble PR on John.)

I introduced myself. The grizzled, greasy-haired poet, enveloped in a thick grey cowl of cigarette smoke, didn’t even get up off the couch, but he grabbed my proffered hand, said something rather nasal, and then tried to drag me down to his level on the couch. 

Because I was living out of my car, I was rather formally dressed for the times, kitted out in a retro 1940s long teal pencil skirt, and my Irish grandmother’s peach-colored lace insert crepe silk blouse with a maroon leotard beneath. So you couldn’t exactly blame my demure wardrobe for his dirty old man social malfunction. 

I fought like a banshee, red lacquered claws extended, and I had some pithy words to say. I hissed like a car, escaped unscathed, but I was so furious, I was shaking. He was so lecherous that he literally had me puking, Though I was attractive, men rarely hit on me. Ricky used to call me the China doll because I was so pale and wan. It was my anorexic phase (I’d lost a lot of blood from an abortion), so I was fey, not quite of this world.

To be fair, Bukowski tried to call me back after my dramatic rebuke, quite possibly to apologize, but I was gone. I remember running out of the house, and throwing up in the rosebushes, tripping over an orange tomcat desperately weaving around my ankles. all I could think of was handcuffs. I sped off in my old rustbucket of a VW bug, a trail of gravel spluttering behind me. I never talked Charles Bukowski again.

I never could read Bukowski’s work after that. I was running a poetry series at Sonoma State. Ironically, all he wanted was a reading, but he thoroughly burned his bridges with me. Having growing up with far too many alcoholics in the family, I had zero tolerance or coping skills for that kind of behavior. You might say my judgment was colored by the deep well of the alcohol school. 

I ran into Bukowski later in 1984, he was celebrating the sale of his screenplay to Hollywood at the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati. It was drinks all around the house. A deep well at the bar. Needless to say, I gave him a wide berth. He never saw me leaving.

Years later, in an Amsterdam bookshop, circa 1992, I discovered I liked his work. He was wildly popular in Europe. People were amazed that I was probably the only person that ever refused to give the infamous Charles Bukowski a poetry reading. Sure, on some level I regret it. It would’ve been a booking coup. But between The Buk and Gene Ruggles, I was so fed up with the bad behavior of macho male alcoholic poets with flagging egos, I didn’t want to babysit them.

I did produce a couple of disastrous readings for Gene. Unfortunately, he was alway falling down drunk. I was humiliated and horrified. I had known Gene since I was a child, he was a friend of my mother’s, so I couldn’t say no. Only two people would call me up at 3 AM for crazy drunken phone calls in the middle of the night: Gene and my mom. I guess it was a good thing that the Buk did not have my phone number.

AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT

I don’t know why I’m charmed by that synthetic borderline 

between this day and the next, a fixed point on the clock, 

on the calendar, an arbitrary measuring of time. 

We take it for granted, and it exists within our minds, 

but not in the minds of all those other beings. 

Does the cat care for the stroke of midnight? 

No, it only cares for the staccato of kibble in the bowl. 

Fairytales began at midnight. Cinderella, for example. 

And in Brittany, one night a year, the old rocks at the River Ys 

come down to the banks at midnight to slake their thirst. 

I remember how we waited for Midnight Mass to end 

so that we could feast on ham, and unwrap our presents. 

It was a witching hour that lasted until dawn, 

the bird chorus echoing our own arias as we waded 

through the flotsam of tinseled madness.

And at the stroke of midnight, India became a nation, 

shaking off neo-colonial shackles, slaking its thirst for freedom. 

My grandfather, an Irish gunrunner who also sent arms to India, 

invited to the midnight gala where they danced beneath jeweled stars 

in New Delhi & San Francisco until dawn sent them all to bed.

Then the real work began, building a nation out of hope.

It was a time between times where anything was possible.

At the Exploratorium, I was mesmerized by greeny mirrors

endlessly gazing into each other’s sublime faces, 

reflecting themselves and their endless visages, 

where suspended time traveled at the speed of light.

7/26/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

THE SONG OF BARBED WIRE

The song of barbed wire, strung taut on old posts, 

the way my grandfather labored on the steep hillside, 

the horizon distracting him as he wiped sweat from his brow.

Already the siren call of the deep valley below the mountain

will lead his children astray, the long arm of the known world 

promising so much and yet offering little in return.

A torrent of syllables and fragments slipping over rocks 

among the old bones, in the creekbed in deep summer. 

The body’s doubt, and the knowledge of regret holding us back. 

7/19/23

STAND UP COMEDIAN

It is curious how memory is embedded 

in things ordinary, how it arises like a dust storm

as you unravel the past, packing up for yet another move. 

An old sequined dress in the back of the closet 

promised much more than it delivered. 

Yet you kept it anyway. For no real reason. 

At least it still fits, so much for small victories.

And remember your grandmother’s old fur coat, 

someone said pony hair so you never wore it again. 

You heard the hooves following you in dreams.

Then there’s curious sensation when memory 

coalesces like blood as you relive a day in the life of… 

The unanswerable: why did that particular moment arise? 

And where did all that sequestered time go anyway? 

Especially those moments when you weren’t paying 

attention and forgot about the grind of dailiness. 

The box of broken earrings stashed under the bed

is whispering again of the not-so-good good old days. 

You know, those inconsequential moments, 

surfacing like a gateway drug in need of a fix. 

None of it is real. Curious how we define ourselves 

with detritus of the past. So much treasured junk.

You’d think by now, we’d know better. 

Memory is a standup comedian: 

part paper, part animal, part rock 

as you snip snip snip away at the past, 

trimming the split ends with dull nail scissors, 

the hinge protesting the conversion 

with a song of rust and regret. 

I want to say to my younger self, regret not the past 

because it is all but a trick of memory. 

Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle made of clouds

with pieces missing.

7/19/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

Moonstones

I still have some moon-snails, still looking for my moonstones.

When I was young and foolish, I once hiked out to Arch Rock, or was it Double Point, I don’t remember which, I was hiking south along the deserted shore below Alamere Falls, when I came to a rocky outcrop and I couldn’t get to the other side. So I climbed up it and there was a big sinkhole down to the beach, and the arch looking out to sea—Double Point, I assumed. There are several arches along that part of the seashore. 

So I jumped down into the sinkhole to the beach below and went out the second arch and continued on exploring the isolated southern strand. Moonstones and moon shells galore. A treasure trove. By the time I returned at sunset, the tide was coming in and time was running out. What I hadn’t planned on, was the problem of climbing back up out of the concave walls of hole. For a while there I thought I was a goner.

Luckily when I jumped up I could just reach the lip overhang of the sinkhole with my hands, I held on for dear life, but I was sweating it trying to gain purchase on the eroded, not to mention slippery, concave walls of that sinkhole. A vertical wall would’ve been a piece of cake. I hadn’t counted on the curved walls. 

I utilized all my gymnastic moves and rock climbing skills, with a lot of adrenaline—which helped. I pulled myself up via a chin-up and hoisted an elbow over the edge. Victory. But getting my much heavier legs up to rim level without anything to use as leverage was much harder. As I flailed my legs, I thought for sure I was a goner. 

And yes, I was a little more than a teenager, so I guess we could blame my prefrontal lobes. Luckily, I had massive upper body strength, and I didn’t weigh very much. I pretended the cave lip was a horse, and eventually got a leg up and wriggled myself to the top. I was more than a bit shaken. I lay facedown on the rock counting my lucky stars. 

I remember the utter thrill of jumping down from the cliff into the sand. I felt like an intrepid explorer on an adventure. I never once thought about my personal safety. I’m sure there were moonstones in the sand egging me on as I was collecting them at the time. I felt invincible, it was a real Robinson Crusoe moment. Until I had to return the same way I came. Oops! Then, the long hike back along the Palomarin Trail to Highway One in the dusk.

THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE

THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE

So much language is lost in the labyrinth of the throat. 

The face you see in sleep, iridescent in the air 

like the memoirs of ghosts at a banquet, 

recording the remembered past. But your face 

is a map of sorrow packed in a carry-on suitcase. 

Did the mouth lead you too far astray? 

We are all drinking from the same ancestral river, 

dissipating the dream, waiting to be named. 

The indigenous women of the desert held stones 

at the back of the throat to belay their thirst. 

The poetry of negligence lays down its burden at the gates 

of the old cathedral, prays for divine intercession. 

I swallowed small stones and tried to hide 

the obligatory ephemera of my mind from everyone. 

Who shattered the 4th wall, a 2-way mirror staring into the sun?

What is riding whitewater on the river of memory? 

What about the storyline, the cast of characters? 

Who will be last one standing with one foot in the void? 

The clock is hungry but the numbers of darkness 

are always too late to see the the precipice or the void.

We are counting down the days and the nights 

marching towards the harvest of death. 

Solar flares reach into the darkness 

disabling all the motherboards. The alpha 

and the omega of the Anthropocene Age. 

7/12/23 Write On! with Susie Terence (take two).

Unanswerable questions inspired by Michael Torres’ poem, Writing Prompt

What if I were stuck in space, at the point of no return, would the urge to write even be an issue? Who would I write for, and why, especially if the forest inside already caught fire long ago, and all that was left were the charred stumps of the past? Being above the clouds like this, watching those lightning strikes from space is like witnessing a coronation of the petty gods. Then what? My hands, like the lost wings of birds, orchestrate the music of the spheres. The river of regret is filled with starlight singing of celestial events. But I am not an astronaut stuck in space. That thin ribbon of life, all that intense blue leaking into darkness, that is home, the big blue jewel. But in the distance, the impenetrable blackness inside a song, has lost all the notes. Remembrance is an Oort Cloud in the first mind of regret. The great white what if? What comes into focus, stars waiting in the limelight. And what about the gravity and weight of stars circling the brink of a black hole, what about the hunger, what do they regret, do they feel the edge of Occam’s Razor slicing through the sorrow, paying out their light like that in the undertow of experience? Do they perceive themselves as selves as they circle the drain of oblivion, or is that being too specific? Am I being too anthropomorphic? We have entered the Anthropocene Age. What is selfhood when we have changed the course of earth’s destiny? Do we replay those eons of storied light feathering the pages of an old book where the letters escape to their own darkness? And what about the transience of constellations, depending upon one’s point of view? What does Orion look like from the other side of the Andromeda Galaxy anyway? Can you still see his large shoulders carrying the weighted stories of humanity? The sheath of his sword, that singing blade, will it slice through the darkness? They say consciousness is like a river rippling over stones. But the creekbed is tired and wants to sleep.

7/12/23 Write On! with Susie Terence 

I am still not ready to unpack this one. Perhaps never.

Do guinea pigs have souls?

Someone on Facebook asked us to pray for the intersession of their dead guinea pig. My first thought was that I don’t pray for guinea pigs, cats, chihuahuas, or trivial pursuits. I can’t understand people asking for prayers for the daftest things. Part of me is scandalized by the concept, thinking it’s downright sacrilegious. Maybe even a venial sin. But then I find the idea of prayer and intercession ludicrous—especially for pets. Do guinea pigs or pet rabbits even have souls, and what about goldfish who can’t remember anything longer than five seconds? And what about the rainbow bridge? Someone points out that the Bible doesn’t specifically say that animals don’t have souls. I want to counter that interpretive theological dance of anthropomorphism by saying nowhere in the Bible does it say that animals do have souls. Nor is there any mention of the rainbow bridge. Perhaps they don’t know what the concept of immortal soul means in regards to western religion. Or the idea of animals, with no concept of mortal sin, needing salvation and redemption. Do they need to tally up a purgatorial piggy bank of prayer credits in order to be able to go to pet heaven—the rainbow bridge? What is soul vs. spirit? An entity separate from the body. During the Middle Ages, barnyard animals—especially pigs—were hanged from the gallows tree for gluttonous misdeeds. Did their owners eat those condemned felonious animals? Did that make them sin eaters? Then I think of all the barbecued guinea pigs I ate in Peru. Should I have also said grace for their souls? Of course I stay silent, for fear of stepping on anyone’s cosmic toes. But also, I realize that it gives people a tangible form to contain emotions that they otherwise cannot cope with. Perhaps invoking St. Francis would make more sense. And what about that coin for Charon? And of course, then there’s the big taboo to never mention the D word—saying something has passed versus died. I abhor euphemisms. Is it because I am a writer in love with strong nouns and active verbs, not adverbs and adjectives. I want to be able to blurt the word death with impunity, and not be sanctioned for it. I want to scream it from the rooftops, and not let it get expunged from our vocabulary. But I fear it is too late. The parrot died. It didn’t pass. When somebody says so-and-so passed, I think he passed what? The test, the corner, gas? The past? Now there’s an idea. Like Dylan Thomas, I will not go gentle unto that good night. I’m not too sure how the avoidance of the word death began. The beginning of taboo, that which must not be named. The idea of praying for pets, like saying Bless you, is so Deep South. But I can’t help but think it is a curious sociological concept of sanctioned avoidance. I never say anything, but I do acknowledge their grief, usually with the care button. What else can one do? It is horrible to lose a pet we get so attached, but the idea of praying for its intercession seems downright silly. Then I realize I don’t have to accept their bizarre theological constructs, nor do I need to enter their world in order to understand that someone is genuinely grieving for their small, dead pets.

This was from a Facebook comment on Judith Gip’s page that I worked on and expanded instead of doing my Write On prompt for July 5.

Poem forthcoming in Spectrum 36 NOT Don Campbell took down the web page. Gone.

 

OPEN-ENDED POEMS

• Spectrum 36 well, I guess the poem is not forthcoming. After all it is the editor, Dan Campbell took down the blog, so now it is once again unpublished.

July NaHaiWriMo, 30-something haiku

31. Papyrus

30. Pulp

29. Apple

28. Sugarcane

27. Hydrogen

26. Oak

25. Kenaf

24. Wheat

23. Banana

22. Oxygen

June NaHaiWriMo, haiku

Playing catch-up on haiku prompts, I only just discovered this Facebook NaHaiWriMo site on July 5. There are also May prompts. (I’ll stop here for now). Since I injured my leg June 28, it’s been hard to think about writing, but haiku is feasible.

30. Summer's end 

BRÓN TROGAIN, SUMMER'S END

Lúnasa dances 

with the coming dark season. 

Winter's cold music.

29 seashells

BEACH GOSSIP

Listen to seashells—

long distance conversations 

with tide, wind, and waves.

28. ocean

ANOREXIA

The ceaseless hunger 

of the ocean nibbling 

on towering cliffs.

SHAME WORN HAND-ME-DOWNS

My aunt brought home a cardboard box of old clothes.

It was like Christmas in July. My heart foundered

on the festive picnic of a gingham dress 

with puffy sleeves and ruffles framing a scoop neck. 

It made me feel so grown-up as I whirled and twirled 

like a dust devil dancing up a storm in the driveway. 

I wore a funnel of pleasure floating off into the blue sky. 

I wore it to church. I wore it to school, it made me feel 

like a princess with its full skirts rustling in the breeze.

I vaguely knew the girl from catechism, she was older,

she didn’t go to our church or to our school. 

But it was a tight-knit farming community 

so I was careful not to wear it to the other church 

where her family were parishioners. I was in 5th grade,

it was a time of transitions. At our annual church bazaar, 

as my grandmother culled clothes on the rummage table,

there she was, whispering to the others, pointing a finger

at her old dress. She made me feel so ashamed 

for wearing hand-me-downs. Thing is, there was 

no shame attached to old clothes—until she outed me 

and I put that dress away, never to wear it again.

6/28/23 Write On! Prompt. Terri Glass

Facebook addiction and other revenge leitmotifs

An artist friend, whose work and being I very much admire, announced that she was leaving Facebook. We later found out that unkind comments were behind her urge to leave the platform. I periodically run into jerks on Facebook too. Aside from wanting to kick the scumbags in the proverbial kneecaps, or perhaps a little bit higher, my revenge is often siphoned into writing scathing blogposts about the situation. 

I was saddened to learn of her experience because I enjoy seeing her artwork and I enjoy her commentary. It made me think about the role of Facebook in my life. So much depends upon… a right attitude to commentary. If I do run into nasty commentators, I usually gain satisfaction by leaving a pithy comment, and if they persist, then deleting all my comments, and erase myself from the particular site, leaving a grim archaeology of their negative comments behind, stet. There are a lot of loonies out there in Facebooklandia, for sure.

I used to worry about Facebook addiction, but then the pandemic came along, and I realized that social media was not necessarily an addiction, but also a lifeline for me to keep my sanity and to be able to interact with a wide swath of people I have known throughout my crazy myriad walks of life, bringing them all under one roof, so to speak, and also to meet many like-minded new friends. The best bonus of all.

Because of Facebook, I now know many passing acquaintances on a more intimate level, despite the physical distance between us. Some folks whom I’ve never met, I could count among my closest friends. I’ve met many Facebook friends later in person. So many kindnesses. One time I needed a place to stay for the Highland Games and a Facebook friend offered her floor for the weekend. Getting to know her in person was delightful, but it was facilitated by Facebook.

When I decided to join Facebook back in 2009, I vowed that I would use it as a tool, and to not be sucked into the shallow world of senseless trending inanities. I primarily use social media as a stimulus, and a platform for my writing, art and photographs. The people I befriend are primarily creative colleagues, so Facebook offers me an opportunity to keep up on their dailiness as well as their creative processes.There’s a certain comfort in knowing that an artist acquaintance is going through similar things as you. Life as we know it. One way or another, we are all in this together.

I use Facebook as a tool to learn new ideas, to expand my reading repertoire (before the introduction of those inane sponsored posts), get ideas for new artwork, and to also write new blog posts. Heh. The Facebook groups I belong to tend to be science and nature groups, so I also use Facebook as an online learning tool for geology, plant and bird identification. I had to give up the bug group. It was just too squeamy for me. 

I think the secret is to make Facebook work for you, and not to be a slave to it. I mourn the loss of those who have permanently left Facebook, like UC Berkeley classmate, the brilliant engineer and musician Chris Devine, but I understand their motivation. And then, there are all the ones that we’ve lost. And their Facebook pages become a perpetual memorial to their memory. Norton Buffalo, Howard McCord, and others.

There is so much trivia in the shallow end of the wading pool. I, for one, am glad that my artist friend has returned to the Facebook fold after a hiatus, because I so enjoy her posts and I love seeing her artwork. It changes my daily outlook for the better. For me, seeing her art process is a golden bonus.

Maybe the right attitude is to ask not what you can do for Facebook algorithms, but what Facebook algorithms can do for you… Perhaps, in my case, the best revenge of all is the excuse to write about it, warts and all.

My father’s pony

Not all of us had functional fathers, or parents that were present. Neither of my parents were cut out for the job of marriage, let alone, raising a child. Let’s just say, it’s complicated. Mine was an absentee father who drowned in the belly of a Seagram’s 7 bottle, and never recovered. His heart failed him. It’s heartbreaking that he turned out to be such a tragically flawed individual. From a photo I learned that he loved Big Band music and played the piano. Recently I found a news clipping—very nearly accidentally—where it reported that  his mother had committed suicide using rat poison, leaving him to find the body after school. And a note saying that he should join the priesthood. The only thing I was ever told was that she had committed suicide, nothing more. Finding the news clipping was devastating. Also enlightening. And with that, came the beginning of compassion. No wonder the poor man was so effed up. His father, a San Francisco cop, died earlier of TB. Perhaps it was all too much for her, being a single mother, and it sounded like she suffered from depression. And a sadist uncle stepped in to raise my poor father. He might have been better off in a foster home. I chose this photo of my father on a pony because obviously it was a time of innocence versus the grim reality of what was to follow. My crazy, gorgeous, talented, bipolar mother wasn’t much better a parent. She left me with my grandmother as she went off to design costumes for Frank Sinatra’s showgirls, and to pursue Hollywood dreams—but then, when she came to collect me, I refused to leave my grandmother. I was extraordinarily lucky in that my grandmother raised me. She was both my mother and my father. And I don’t regret that in the least. However I refuse to close ranks for the sake of Hallmark cards or sympathy, by hiding the unacknowledged family trauma caused nearly as much damage and grief as the myriad traumas themselves, that is why I chose to share this story. I’m not one to latibulate. Cormac McCarthy, God Rest his Soul, ain’t got nothing on my family tree! After all that, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. For those of you who had extraordinary fathers in your lives, I wish you all a Happy Father’s Day.

COYOTE COMMUTE

In the rearview mirror, I saw a scrawny coyote 

trot down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard,

midday, in the tiny hamlet of Forest Knolls, 

looking over his shoulder, watching for cars,

before turning up Tamal Road, 

headed for home as if he lived there.

I kept looking for Road Runner, 

knowing I was in the wrong cartoon.

6/16/23

Taming my spam box

It seems that once a year I get fed up with my bulging junk mail folder and begin deleting hundreds of political newsletters. During spring cleaning, I go on an extreme culling binge. If organizations ask me for money instead of offering a petition to sign, I give them the proverbial axe. 

In order to tame my Gmail inbox, I send Zoom events, newsletters, rewards, and political action items to my junk mail folder. It also means those pesky emails load in plain text, sans imagery. I have issues with flashing graphics, too much color on a page (especially red and yellow) interferes with my reading comprehension—which makes me angst ridden. And, more importantly, anything in the spam folder is a one-click forever delete button away instead of the usual three clicks to banish it from the trash. 

When I am on the unsubscriber warpath, very few sites escape my delete finger.  I don’t mind when reputable political websites send me petitions, as I spend considerable time each morning signing them as my standalone civic duty, but I get irritated when organizations attempt to either shame, or browbeat me, use insulting infantile, or alarmist verbiage (DCCC), or aggressively seek contributions. I am also not fond of surveys either. It seems like it’s another bogus attempt at drumming up money for their coffers.

In that case, very few political websites get a free pass. Most California politicians, also Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sauders, and Robert Reich, and most progressive websites such as Daily Kos, WinWithoutWar, MoveOn, Social Security, Medicare for All, and a few environmental websites—all get to stay and play.

I think some political organizations exist solely to pad their own coffers, rather than actually offering successful progressive political acts with those petitions. It’s a racket. The thing is, once you sign a petition, they often pass your email address onto the next political entity, and so on, like a bad virus. I don’t worry about losing touch, as the deleted political action websites eventually find their way back to my junk mail box.

I swear some of those sites look legitimate, but I have to wonder why I get an influx of weird spam email after signing some of those petitions—as if my address was intercepted and held hostage in a Soviet silo along the way. The past few days I’ve been unsubscribing to nearly every entity that has asked for money, thus taming my spam inbox. Blessed quietude. At least for a while. But then it will begin all over again in a few months.

HOUSE SPIDER

HOUSE SPIDER

Nearly invisible house spider 

spins desoléis on his delicate web 

searching for breakfast 

in all the wrong corners.

6/15/23

PLAYING WITH WORDS

There are holes in the lost ecology of language. 

Words, falling from grace, out of lack of usage, 

acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, otter—

words wandering far from home, looking for loose lips 

of poets, perhaps long in tooth but not short on ideas.

I never meant to play with words, it wasn’t my idea,

they came to the rally all jumbled up and in a mess. 

It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces 

no endgame photo in sight, or a Rubik’s cube bereft of color—

as if to taunt the most OCD of us to complete the poem,

so we ratcheted color into shape, hoping for form.

Sometimes I want to take a hammer to language 

or to pry syntax apart with a flathead screwdriver, 

and beat it up until the cube shatters, internal structure lost, 

leaving larger puzzles to decipher in the aeolian winds,

but the lyres are silent, once destroyed, won’t resurrect.

Only a pale shaving of sawdust and grit riding the wind.

And as we grow grey with age and larger in vocabulary, 

old words continue to haunt us, wanting a mouthpiece,

but the audience shrinks to nothing until we are left alone 

in a cavernous barn with archaic words roosting in the rafters 

looking for flight to escape the throat of darkness.

6/14/23 Write On! With Terri Glass

Swapping MacBook screens

Well, Margretta’s old 2011 headless MacBook Pro is still running. But swapping out a new screen didn’t fix its problem. Namely, it doesn’t have a working screen, which is a real bother, complicated by the fact that I actually need a laptop that will also run Snow Leopard (mid-2011 was the last year that the Snow Leopard OS was supported) for editing and scanning software that too has been rendered obsolete. Not to mention software for those back taxes.

And it’s nice to have a laptop I can move around. You know, actually use on my lap. Margaretta’s old MBP is tethered to an wonky lavender-hued external Apple LCD monitor—which is also losing its resolution. Now, I love lavender and all things purple, but not on a screen. It’s OK for Netflix, but makes editing photos a nightmare. I harbored some vague hope that swapping screens would work, I had nothing to lose. It was way easier than I expected, so I was pretty chuffed.

I do have other obsolete MacBook Pros, but this one was once my main squeeze for a few years as it has most of my work (photo archives) on it. And it runs my scanning and editing software. I have an exceedingly pricey top of the line Epson negative film scanner that cost $1200. Scanning old negatives was my big pandemic sequestration project.

I have file cabinets of thin black and white negatives of famous artists musicians and writers I need to bring into the 21st. c. (See a few samples here.) Reason enough to keep a working version of Snow Leopard alive. And before you ask, yes, I tried some of the newer third-party scanner software. No joy.

Then there are those back taxes. Shhh! As a teaching artist/poet, I make so little money, I am below the poverty belt, so to speak, but because I am also self-employed, I might as well be a billionaire as far as filing complicated taxes goes. 

Why do I write, and who do I write for?

Today I spent several hours fleshing out a rather long paragraph I had written on the ambling gait of horses way back in 2019. It’s sort of a longish sidebar or a companion piece to go with my Kiger Mustang blogpost. I posted it there because that was when the genesis of the essay began, but the bulk of the work was done today. And little of the original writing remains. What took so long? Every time I circled back to it, I never felt like I had the chops to flesh it out. Today was different. I was ready to tackle it. I realize that I have an audience of one.five people on this rather obscure topic. But that’s what floats me. Sometimes my thoughts are like a three-dimensional scaffolding built by synesthesia. I hear rasping sandpaper sounds as I uncover ideas, words take on notes and color. Writing soothes them, puts them on the bookshelf. Ever since I was a child, I was fascinated by obscure and ancient horse breeds. In contrast, I wrote my Connemara pony piece all in one long go—because I was irritated that an acquaintance, Phil Cousineau, who leads spiritual journeys to Ireland wrote that the Vikings brought the Connemara pony to Ireland. I went ballistic—nothing like cultural appropriation via Wiki and Google to get my knickers in a twist. So why do I write, and who do I write for? Myself, alone. And for you, Dear Reader. I don’t think the web crawlers can read.

BLOW WIVES

BLOW WIVES 

She filled a cow pelvis with wild roses, 

as if that would repatriate the long dead. 

Scapulae nestled like snow angels

in the powdery alkali dust as if

the beauty of death in bleached bones

was seeking a redress with the darkness. 

Her small poems traveled on the wind 

like the wishes of blow wives, 

lost in the desert varnish of time.

6/7/23 Write On! with Terri Glass

Note bene: this is a stub, no idea where it’s going. Sort of Georgia O’Keefish! I have been looking at a lot of her work that I’ve never seen before.

About those famous musicians…

A silly Facebook meme asked what famous musicians we’ve met. There were so many, I couldn’t choose. I liked Allegra Broughton’s (Solid Air) idea of telling the backstories of how we met. Much more interesting than a vanilla list.

After I posted a partial list, someone asked me how come I’d met so many musicians, I said mostly it came down to time and place. Many nearly famous rock musicians played at our high school assemblies and political rallies (Class of 1970—we made the 6 o’clock news when we shut down the Marin County draft board). From the Tubes, Moby Grape, Talking Heads, Country Joe to John Cipollina. So we thought hobnobbing with musicians was normal. 

After the Summer of Love, when utopia began to sour, and society as we knew it had the DTs, the rock musicians and hangers-on began to flee the Haight in San Francisco for Marin County, they invaded our tiny little valley. We all had to learn to live with each other, which was an uneasy compromise. Old redneck school met hippiedom. It was not love at first sight. And I was not at all starstruck. If anything, I was angry that our valley had been invaded. 

The influx of new people stretched and tore the warp and weft of our bucolic valley. And when Tam school district took away our buses (too expensive, they said), we had to hitchhike in order to get to school. We demonstrated, we walked to and from school—but it was 17 miles each way! I was exhausted. I took up hitchhiking. And the only folks that would stop to pick us up were the rock musicians. Never the ranchers who even knew us. No solidarity there.

I grew up in west Marin so I met many of the musicians while I was hitchhiking home to Forest Knolls. I thumbed rides with Van Morrison, Jesse Colin Young, Sons of Champlin (our main lid connection), Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and of course, Janis—many of them lived on my road. Carlos Santana was always good for a ride. Janice never stopped for us, but then she only had a two-seater Porsche. She always braked for young men hitchhiking.

Linda Ronstadt, Grace Slick, most of Jefferson Airplane, Maria Muldaur all lived in nearby hamlets at one time or another. When Jefferson Airplane moved to Woodacre, they hung a model biplane that was featured on one of their albums from an oak tree.

I met many, if not all of the Grateful Dead—both living and dead, Micky Hart was a neighbor both in Forest Knolls, and later in Forestville—we boarded his girlfriend’s horse. Later, poor Jerry Garcia was in rehab at Forest Farm Camp, renamed Serenity Farm, so we saw him dawdling down the hill to the little grocery store in Forest Knolls to get his daily fix of Häagen-Dazs, or Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, right before he died.

Bobby Darin was a very good friend of my mom’s. I tried to play If I were a Carpenter for him on my Palamino Pony guitar. He was not impressed, I was 12, but he showed me an E minor progression chord I was having trouble with. I met Pete, Mike & Peggy Seeger at several venues. I must’ve been radiant with joy because after one concert in Grass Valley, Mike Seeger came up to me and gave me a huge bear hug, and wept on my shoulder. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott used to hang out in downtown Forest Knolls. He liked watching all the girls on horseback. I was one of them.