GRAZING IN STARK BEAUTY, MONTGOMERY PASS, NV

A band of mustangs grazes 

in high mountain meadows, 

ignoring the man resting against his motorcycle. 

To each his own, horsepower is horsepower, 

even when it’s twice removed from beauty. 

The granite range the continental divide 

dreams of the snow that will paint 

the alpine meadows in white.

The weary sagebrush bend their heads,

grizzled before their time, 

scud clouds portending snow.

2/8/24 Molly Fisk, poem a day

Full moon bridge

The medieval bridge built in a half circle meets itself full circle in the middle of the placid river. It could be Tibet, it could be Italy, or Scotland. Once I saw a perfect reflection of Kelvin Bridge down at the river bank. 

The shore lined with hypodermic needles tied us to this century. Go down to the river and flirt with death, seeking a path to nirvana that will take you down. The circle of Kelvin Bridge and river contemplates itself in a wilderness out of time with the mean streets of Glasgow. 

Meanwhile in Tibet, the photo is of a primitive cow and her calf follow their owner across an old bridge, still standing. He should be from another era with his bamboo hat and palm frond rain cape. He carries the harness yoke for her on his right shoulder. She needs no lead line to know that they are going home.

Once I crossed the Brig o’ Doon in Alloway, a pure arc across the river. Someone had strewn red carnations on the cobbled footpath. There is a new bridge for cars, but here time stops and lets no one pass. 

The herringbone pattern of cobbles was laid to confuse and thwart witches, a drunken Tam O’Shanter on the run. Well done, Cutty Sark.The creatures of the night cannot cross the water so they sulk and wait for the poet. While he had the DTs, Rabbie Burns taunted too many thirsty warlocks looking for the keystone. Not to mention Nannie, who caught the tail end of the horse.

2/7/24 Molly Fisk, poem a day, OK, so it’s not a poem.

storm front

After five days of back to back storms, no power, I’m getting desperate. I am housesitting at Sam’s place while he is in hospital. I am desperate for tea, or anything warm, really. An all electric kitchen sucks when the power goes out. I am freezing as well. No heat, no hot water. No showers. I ache. My hip hurts. After five days of no tea, and no coffee, I have massive headaches and am cranky as shit. 

The power has been out everywhere including at the community center. Even their generator died. Sam’s landlord, Jay has solar panels but who knew they needed Wi-Fi in order to work? No way to talk to them. Go figure. So any chance of power is nixed for the long run. 

The nights are long when I am sitting in the dark. Luckily I have books on tape, but my iPad is having trouble keeping a charge so I spend afternoons in my car charging my iPad. I can’t sign into my Zoom writing class because there’s no Wi-Fi to be had anywhere in West County.  

So I drive into Fairfax, looking for godlight and for Wi-Fi. The library was closed, but it had an outdoor outlet, so I boiled water, and paid homage to the electric kettle gods. Hot tea never tasted so good. I charge up my iPad with the car and surf like a madwoman until it’s time to go. Click. Shit. Dead battery. 

So I roll the gray guppy backwards in the parking lot pushing off with my bum hip. I’ve been laid up for a couple of weeks now, somehow I managed to strain my hip flexor muscle again so walking is agony, but apparently pushing a car one-legged is OK. Go figure. 

I push the car out of the parking spot, get it rolling down the hill backwards, and, damned if it didn’t start up. Backwards. First two times I popped the clutch, I pre-empted myself, I forgot to turn on the ignition, then popped the clutch too soon. The car juddered. Third time’s a charm. 

A momentary break in the storm before the next front arrives. Sometimes it’s good to have faith in the ordinary, trusting that things will work out in the end. Now, that’s love.

But wait! Not content with just warm tea, I took a mug of soup down to the community center Hoping to find power. PG&E was their supplying power, but no Wi-Fi, no kitchen. Dorothy and Alexa were in the office. Dorothy Cox had power in Woodacre so we drove to her house where I heated up my soup, beautiful soup, chicken Thai coconut soup. 

And now that’s heavenly, or maybe it was divine intervention. Dorothy is a lay minister. God is not a metaphor to her. And now the thunderclouds are painted in pastel hues. Now that’s God painting the sky after the storm.

FALLOW DEER, ABANDONED HOUSE

And why wouldn’t a fallow deer 

jump through the open window of a building 

with paint crazed like the melting ice sheets 

of Greenland and Antarctica?

The lower four square windows are gone.

Maybe the buck sailed through the open window 

to get to the center of things, a portal, 

his spots, so like stars guiding the way. 

Adobe walls, a skin of plaster lime 

fashioned in the style of wainscotting. 

They say a wild bird in the house portends a dream. 

Where is he going? Someone said 

it’s a Wyeth kind of window, 

a painted dream remembered in half light,

forgotten by dawn.

2/6/24 Molly Fisk, poem a day

MACY’S DAY PARADE, 1969

Two young girls dawdle at the bay window 

anticipating the big Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, 

but at the last moment, turn their backs to the window, 

to face the photographer forever trapped in black & white, 

while a 3-story Snoopy balloon photobombs the image. 

The downtown skyline, opulent as a paste necklace, 

embraces the heaving bosom of the sky. 

What did they find so interesting in the living room? 

Canvas cushions line the window bench, 

an old wooden steamer trunk, relic of a bygone era 

of steamships and luxury liners,

turned into a chic coffee table,

that will no longer sail abroad to Egypt or the Continent, 

is docked in a walk-up apartment, 

strewn with glossy books offering distant vistas 

that no one will look at. Places they’ll never go. 

Snoopy dressed as an astronaut, moons the crowd,

takes that first giant leap into the future.

2/5/24 Molly Fisk Poem a Day

FRUITING BODIES

Budding like ripening cherries on stalks, 

a colony of slime mold raises cerise orbs skyward, 

holding aloft the next generation, small suns,

while droplets of water reflect a slippery realm 

of fruiting bodies so like a family portrait 

of Chihuly sculptures in the lobby of a Las Vegas hotel. 

They gamble, and grow a backbone to greet the storm.

2/4/24 Molly Fisk Poem a Day

AEOLIAN WIND

If you must yield, always yield to a whim 

because it’s a secret your heart admires. 

At the top of the ridge, it will hold you to it, 

show you your heart’s desire, even though the skies 

are laden with dark clouds, and the trees 

gossip about the upcoming storm. 

Hog wire fence tipped with strands 

of barbwire dazzled with rain

is for sheep, or horses, not for cattle 

who will push their way through it.

But the wires play an atonal melody 

with the aeolian wind.

2/3/24 Molly Fisk’s Poem a Day

Remembering Herb Caen

“Sacramenna Kid,” Herb Caen (April 3, 1916 – February 1, 1997), San Francisco’s epic satire columnist had a lifelong love affair with The City. He immortalized San Francisco with nearly 60 years’ worth of pithy columns chock full of local happenings, insider gossip, and puns. He was credited with coining the phrase, “Baghdad by the Bay,” and bestowed the term, “Beatnik” upon poet Bob Kaufman.

Caen introduced and popularized the term “hippie” (never hippy—unless you were a hippo), Summer of Love and Frisbeetarianism, and Berserkeley. But San Francisco, his real mistress, was always The City. Caen’s daily columns were paeans, "A continuous love letter to San Francisco" and a special Pulitzer Prize called him the "voice and conscience" of San Francisco.

Herb Caen loved what he dubbed "Namephreaks"‍—‌people whose names (aptronyms) were appropriate or inappropriate to their vocations including substitute teacher Mr. Fillin, piano teacher Patience Scales, orthopedic specialist Dr. Kneebone, and the Vatican's spokesman on the evils of rock 'n roll, Cardinal Rapsong.

I had a seriously uptight ramrod of a science teacher in seventh grade called Mr. Sliney. And the other science teacher who replaced him (after he broke a ruler over a student’s hands) was called Mr. Plant.

The quasily-fictional character, “Strange de Jim” was Caen’s chief informer, alter ego, and purveyor of naughty puns. Caen called him "gu-ru di tutti guruskies.” (Strange showed up to Caen’s memorial to deliver a eulogy while wearing two Sesame Street pillowcases over his head.) But soon everyone got into the informer act—he had an “army of reliable tipsters.”

If you made it into one of Herb columns either as an informer, or by (un)honorable mention, you had either arrived, or you had to live down the tale. It was an honor to be lampooned in Herb’s column. Even my father who lost his wallet to a combative squirrel in a park never quite lived down, or up to his new moniker, “Squirrely Hurley.”

*. *. *

Many of Herb Caen’s stellar columns were published in collection of essays, “Baghdad-by-the-Bay,” in 1949, and in “Don't Call It Frisco‍”—‌after a judge's rebuke to an out-of-town petitioner ("No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles")‍ in 1953. In total he wrote 11 books, including children’s stories.

One reader remembered: When Herb Caen left Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner to join the San Francisco Chronicle, he took 10k subscribers with him. Our man about town was so popular he was nominated for president at the 1984 San Francisco Democratic Convention. Word has it some of those buttons are still floating around in bottomless martini glasses.

Caen received a special Pulitzer Prize (which he called his Pullet Surprise) in 1996 for "extraordinary and continuing contribution as a voice and conscience of his city."Caen was an astute collector of The City’s urban folklore.

After writing upwards of 16,000 columns, at a thousand words a day on his loyal Royal, he thought it was a joke. "Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist," he wrote. "Well, it does have a certain ring to it. And it will definitely add a touch of class to the obituary.” Then he shut his door and wrote his column.

June 14, 1996, was officially celebrated in San Francisco as Herb Caen Day replete with a parade to the Ferry Building. TV news legend Walter Cronkite even showed up and the Damnbarcadero was rechristened "Herb Caen Way…

Caen, the king of what he dubbed "three-dot journalism" was famous for his signature three-dot ellipses separating his short news snippets. And the characteristic three asterisks designating a sea change, separating the acts from the grind.

“In 1993, he told an interviewer that he declined to retire because "my name wouldn't be in the paper and I wouldn't know if I was dead or alive," adding that his obituary would be his last column: "It will trail off at the end, where I fall face down on the old Royal with my nose on the 'I' key.” —Wiki

*. *. *

In his eulogy, Robin Williams said, “A very special Herb communion will consist of dry martinis and sourdough bread. And if you don't see God then, you never will.” And “I think that I know that you wouldn't mind me making jokes up here today because that's part of what you did. You made it kind of possible for us all to gather here and appreciate this very bizarre place.” Williams owed his early career success to Caen’s promotions.

My college schoolmate Robin said, I'd like you to turn to your hymnals. This is (Caen's book) "Baghdad by the Bay." and he read from it: 

"The crowded garages and the empty old buildings above them, the half-filled nightclubs and the overfilled apartment houses, the saloons and the skies and the families huddled in the basements, the Third Street panhandlers begging for handouts in front of pawn shops filled with treasured trinkets, the great bridges and the rattle-trap street cars, the traffic that keeps moving although it has no place to go, thousands of newcomers glorying in the sights and sounds of a city they suddenly decided to love instead of leave." —Herb Caen, Baghdad by the Bay

“I'm sorry you had to leave, man, but you're still here. See ya.”

*. *. *

“If I do go to heaven, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven. He looks around and says, "It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco." —Herb Caen

*. *. *

The day Herb Caen died, it was standing room only at Grace Cathedral, and at all his local watering holes, people stood a dozen deep, the Stoli and gin ran like water and the bartenders ran out of martini glasses, so they improvised with wine and water glasses. All for six-bits as Herb would say. A few parched souls opted for this infamous Vitamin V shot - Stoli over ice in a wineglass with a twist.

People noshed on his favorite meal, meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Next day, the entire city awoke with a massive, pulsating hangover. Pass the aspirin and Alka-seltzer.

Yesterday I had meatloaf and mashed potatoes in honor of Herb Caen, but I passed on the six-bit martinis. I had adult gu…I mean wine, instead. Here’s to you, Herb, wherever you are.

ONDINE’S REALM

That painting of drowning Ophelia at the Tate 

always haunted me, even in sleep. 

As a child I had nightmares of tsunamis 

or swimming the Australian crawl 

up the back roads after school.

Yeah, most people have flying dreams. 

Mine were always couched in subliminal terms, 

stranded somewhere between air and water.

When the tsunamis engulfed me, 

I discovered I could breathe underwater. 

Sometimes my safety raft was a shoe, the flat, girly kind. 

I was too young to read symbolism into my dreams, 

but I loved merging with the elements,

in the bathtub where everything was fish-eyed,

but after I nearly drowned, my grandmother dragged me 

down the road to Barbano's salt water pool, 

at 25 cents a lesson. I was an 8-bit swimmer.

That summer, I circled neighborhood pools 

seeking a baptism between air and water.

I gawped at pools, slipping in when no one was looking.

When I took to snorkeling, in the tropics,

I couldn’t get enough of that underworld realm 

where the sky and sun were distant wavery thoughts, 

the world I inhabited was painted anew.

Did Monet think about Ondine’s slippery realm 

as he painted canvases of waterlilies 

large enough to fill the imagination?

2/2/24 Molly Fisk’s Poem a Day

VENICE BEACH

My grandmother always said,

Never turn your back on the ocean. 

I learned that it was a seething monster 

riptides whisked you away to the great beyond. 

I learned to swim late, but water was a siren call. 

I had found my element. Small water dragon.

My grandmother, who taught me to count the waves,

tried to swim at Sutro Baths. It never took.

She never trusted the water. I was fearless. 

Even at ten, riptides whisking me out didn’t scare me. 

When I visited my mother one summer in Venice Beach, 

I spent every waking hour in the water. 

She had an apartment right on the boardwalk.

She slept all day, went out by night, 

leaving me in charge of my baby brother. 

But the mornings were mine alone.

There was never any food in the house 

so I ate cream of wheat until the box was empty. 

The taste of brown sugar and butter 

still takes me back to those days. 

Lately, I’ve returned to that sweet elixir. 

Call it a second childhood, it invokes 

those sandy southern California beaches, 

misted mornings, and the ocean, whispering, 

huge outsider waves urging me onward, out to sea, 

no strangely cheerful Pikachu offering a life-raft.

Just the raw power of the waves 

and the liminal horizon urging me onward.

2/1/24 Molly Fisk’s Poem a Day

About those wild mustards

With thanks to Ellin Barret who first piqued my curiosity for this post.

Because a friend posted this meme, I was off and running. So I decided to let my fingers do the walking through Wikipedia to resolve for once, and for all, the differences between the escaped feral “wild” mustards that ravage the California landscape in spring. And yes, we do have several rather diminutive native mustard species.

What I discovered is that there was not one species, but over 30 separate species of “wild” mustard plants or brassica. And very few “wild”mustards are actually wild, they are almost all feral. Our most favored mustard species, Eurasian Brassica oleracea, that the ancient Celts and Romans were so fond of, gives us those yummy cultivars (all from the same species, like a breed), including kale, cabbage, collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, etc.

Although some species of mustard plants were established crops in Hellenistic and Roman times, there are few archeological records. Wild forms of mustard and its relatives, the radish and turnip, found over Eurasia, suggests domestication took place in that region. However, Zohary and Hopf conclude: "Suggestions as to the origins of these plants are necessarily based on linguistic considerations." The Encyclopædia Britannica states that mustard was grown by the Indus Civilization of 2500–1700 BC. —Wiki

An Asian mustard species from the Hindu Kush, Brassica rapa, one of the first invasive field mustards to bloom in California, gives us bok choy, Napa cabbage (really Beijing cabbage!), rapini, turnips, canola oil, etc. More on native and invasive mustards here.

Highly invasive black mustard or Brassica nigra is the most common species found in California. The seeds were theoretically brought here by the Franciscan friars scattering mustard seeds as they walked from mission to mission—bits and seeds of B. nigra were found in adobe brick made in the 1700s. 

Also, according to the scriptures, tiny mustard seeds were held in high regard because though the seeds may be small, their potential for growth is enormous; to enter the kingdom of heaven begins with faith. Jesus was reputed to have said:

"For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:20-21)

Nearly all Brassica seem to have one thing in common, a four-petaled flower shaped like a cross, hence the name cruciferous vegetables. Even the diminutive jewelflower species of California, Nevada and the Southwest have four petals, but they are so tiny, they are nearly invisible. 

No matter how you feel about invasive species, I must admit that it is pretty stunning when entire hillsides are solid yellow with mustard in spring. It’s a great cover crop, conditions the soil (and kills pests.) But it is so invasive that it also smothers all native species—including our diminutive milk maids, and vigorous California poppies.

And yes, we do have many diminutive native California brassica species according to iNaturalist. My personal favorites are a magenta wallflower, or rockcress, milk maids, desert candles, and the crazy stripped-down endemic jewelflowers—some species so rarified they only grow in one small patch in the world. It seems that each mountain range has its own species of jeweleeed—and most are endangered species.

And closely related to black mustard, and B. rapa, the Brassica napus or brown mustard species, aka rapeseed, also gives us canola oil, Siberian kale, and rutabagas. Originally from India, it spread to Asia and farmers diversified it by developing cultivars. It's a really popular cover crop in Ukraine along with those heliotropic North American sunflowers. 

Yes, North American: Helianthus annuus—though they were first domesticated and cultivated by Native Americans 4500 years ago, they were commercialized in Russia and Ukraine. Sunflowers and mustard are important sources of vegetable oil. All that oil to fuel the world. We won’t discuss the atrocities suffered by mustard gas unleashed by the Germans at Ypres during World War I.

The ancient Romans not only invented fish sauce (of the Worcestershire persuasion), they also might have invented mustard as a condiment (the Egyptians also used mustard) by mixing ground mustard seeds with grape juice (called “must"), thus giving us the word mustard!

The word "rape" came from Latin for turnip, rāpa or rāpum, Greek word ῥάφη, rhaphe. The Romans were quite crazy for their cabbages. 

Radish means root in Latin. Apparently Egyptians were noshing on radishes before the Pyramids were built. Perhaps the workers were fueled on by radishes and salt. After all, the Romans paid their workers with salt, which means salted cruciferous greens, hence the word salary.

Meanwhile, the French are still buttering and salting their radishes. Forget about that sinus cleaner, Japanese wasabi. Medieval Germans were so crazy for radishes that they grew them bigger and better. Imagine massive 100-pound radishes ravishing the countryside. Radishes, not mustard, were the first cruciferous crops introduced to the Caribbean in the 1500s.

Brassica oleracea probably came from Crete. Or it was a stowaway on Jason’s Golden Fleece. The Greeks too were so mad for radishes (which probably came from China by way of Egypt), that they made little gold radish talismans to offer up to Apollo. Why the sun god needed radishes is anyone’s guess. You’d think horses or chariots or wine would’ve been a more practical gift. Ok, I’ll stop rooting around now on Wiki.

Note bene: I never know where writing ideas will come from. It always catches me by surprise! When I was a child, I was always making equivalencies, that is relationships between things—especially plants and animals. I guess some things never change. When I finally adulted (some could clain that I am still attempting to achieve adulthood), I discovered most of my correlations were spot on. 

At one point, I thought all that wild mustard was native, and it was only one species. When I joined a California naturalist group, I learned that there were more than one invasive mustard species, and that’s probably the thing that spurred me on because I cannot tell the difference between field mustard and black mustard, it’s all mustard to me.

Bringing in the sheaves

The flashing colon on the face of the digital clock, the way afternoon light illumines the frosted windows, the demanding cat wanting breakfast early, clearly not on daylight savings time. Explain that to the horses or the dogs if you have them. Time racing ahead at breakneck speed the older you get, the faster it goes..Time was once measured by water clocks, or nails embedded into burning candles that fell on the hour. Iron clattered onto the table or the stone floor, like tiny hooves, sleep disturbed by time. The monks were obsessed by time, for the world revolved around increments of time, because the universe would not hold, because God, hungry for dogma, needed constant assuaging and reassurance in the form of prayer from his followers. They were marking time for an inevitable future that may or may not come. The Medieval Book of Hours was a guidebook of feast days, measuring the seasons. On what tombstone, what prayer was etched in stone? The laws of oscillation, the guard rails of our lives keeping us in check. Time is cyclical, or perhaps it is a sickle, Ceres bringing in the sheaves.

1/17/24 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Measuring the sun

When I was a child, my grandmother measured the seasons by where the sun rose on our hill, the long ridge served as a fulcrum. In summer, it rose over the big rock to the north, and in winter over the tall pines along the fence line. In this way, we measured the seasons using the natural world, not man-made monuments. I was fascinated by the way sunlight raced along the tiles by the front door. Ours was an old house that kept to the old way, with the house aligned to the cardinal directions. So the morning sun shone through the front door, like a portal, or one of the gates of Stonehenge. We even had a big rock, a knob of limestone, or a chert reefer, perhaps blueschist sticking out like a menhir. She carried the old ways with her, the stones circles of her childhood landscape conflated with portals of time in the new world. I was an odd child, always measuring the world by criteria I didn’t quite understand. One morning, I got the idea to measure how the fast the rising sun over the ridge rose, so with my plastic ruler, I measured the speed between sunlight on tiles versus the advancing shadow. Each line on the ruler was a two-minute marker. I had half the equation but not the other half. In that moment, I realized how the shadows of a sundial worked, and suddenly I was connected to time in a timeless manner. Past and future fell away until there was only time present.

1/17/24 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Facebook AI bots blocked my cousin Michael Collins’ memorial service video of a medieval hymn

I won the dispute with the Facebook AI censor bots. Not only has the hymn, Salve Regina been copyright-free since at least the middle ages (the 12th century) it’s also within the public domain. by a very long shot. I told the litigious Warner Music Rights Management Group in no uncertain terms that it does not own rights to Catholic church music—especially from the middle ages. Eat it WB.

The Facebook censorship AI bots have now censored one of my cousin Michael Collins’ memorial service videos that I privately posted on Jan 9, 2022—because it had a medieval Gregorian Chant in it.

My mother’s cousin, Michael was a well-known tenor and Gregorian chanter (and  also a Latin teacher), and his friends were singing him off. Michael had some mighty fine pipes. His Nessun Dorma and Ave Maria could bring you to your knees, weeping with joy. But Facebook had to destroy that sublime moment with its heavy-handed Maxwell‘s hammer.

Not only is the use of the hymn, Salve Regina, considered fair use, and no money was involved, it’s been copyright-free since at least the middle ages. Warner Music Rights Management Group does not own Catholic liturgical church music—especially from the middle ages.

I also want to add that the videos were privately posted on my page, no audience, but I had them hidden so that only I could see them—except for one post—but that wasn’t the one in question. So, it seems that you can’t even privately post anything on your page that might break copyright—even if no one else can see it.

Michael’s Gregorian chant group sang liturgy from the mass, including Alleluia, Holy, holy holy, Angus Dei, which are merely a chorus to the mass, and the hymns Panis Angelicus, and Salve Regina. 

Salve Regina was the offending hymn.

“The work was composed during the Middle Ages and originally appeared in Latin, the prevalent language of Western Christianity until modern times. Though traditionally ascribed to the eleventh-century German monk Hermann of Reichenau, it is regarded as anonymous by most musicologists.” in other words, it is copyright free. 

The video in question lasted one minute and 19 seconds. I trimmed it down to one minute and .02 seconds but it’s still over the one-minute limit that triggered the Warner Music Rights Management Group bot on copyright infringement laws. We shall see. Facebook, Game On!

This is the second time that I’ve posted a personal memorial notice of a death in my family—and have been dinged for it by Facebook AI bots. Does Facebook have something against our sharing of actual personal memorial events? 

The last epic Facebook fail was when my mother’s cousin Liam Walsh died. I literally got thrown in the slammer for six days for mentioning to a cousin, a sweet childhood deed of his. Facebook claimed that it violated  “community standards.” There was nothing pornographic, and certainly nothing untoward about it. And there was no way to dispute it. I felt violated. At least with this latest absurdity I was able to file a dispute.

I won’t mention Facebook’s censoring and removal of my botany comment on the uses of native California fan palm seeds, or the naked black and white photo of Einstein’s desk, which Facebook deemed as “depicting explicit sexual content, or pornographic.” A fecking messy desk!

What a way to begin the new year, with Facebook trolling every comment I’ve ever made during the past few years. Talk about Big Brother. Thy name is Facebook. And to think we invited you in.But we have no rights because it’s a private entity.

Just out of curiosity, do you know of anyone else who’s being harassed like this by Facebook for nearly everything they post? it’s hard not to become paranoid in the face of this ongoing absurdity. And no, my account has not been hacked, I check that early and often. It’s Facebook, folks. Epic fail.

• Yet another epic Facebook AI bot fail Liam Walsh

BETWEEN AIR AND MATTER

When words barely scratch the surface, 

like a swimmer, frog-kicking across the pond, 

when dark things call us into the shallows, 

like watercress, pondscum, or duckweed, 

not the mauve flowers of the water hyacinth 

depleting oxygen from the waterways 

until fish drown in their own element.

The quick movement before a splash, 

a frog jumps, coming up for air, gasping, 

straddling a world between air and matter.

1/10/24

DURING THE FIRST DAYS OF THE YEAR

I am in love with the way light falls 

on the transom of frosted glass, 

late afternoon, illuminating the room, 

the transient sun reminding us 

it hasn’t forgotten that spring 

will again return like so many others, 

too many to count. 

I count the days where winter’s sentence 

will give way to longer days 

and soon we will find the time 

to complain about other things. 

That is our nature, always looking ahead,

anticipating the next move 

like a game of chess where the battle 

of nights and days are played out, 

an old scenario. 

To wait like the cat for first light, 

to curl up like that in the sun, 

to absorb the warmth, 

to be fully in present tense, 

not worrying about the next move, 

for the game is constantly being played out 

over and over for the illusion of our benefit. 

That urge to impose order is divine, 

a random universe is our lot. 

Does the cat on the windowsill 

worry about such things? 

I endeavor to be more present, 

not to fall into the veil of the future, 

because it is always running 

out ahead of us like an escaped horse 

fleeing the barn, not wanting to get caught 

up in plans that we have no control over.

1/10/24 Write On! with Susie Terence

Yet another epic Facebook fail, this time for dirty botany

OMFG, FACEBOOK, REALLY? since when does the description of the seeds of a California native fan palm, Washingtonia filifera in a botany group go against community standards, violate cyberspace, or is considered malicious content? 

“It looks like you tried to gather sensitive information, or shared malicious software.” 

There is literally no way to appeal these ridiculous Facebook decisions. Also, this comment was from a year ago, February. Does the AI sensor bot have nothing better to do? What a way to begin the new year, with Facebook trolling every comment I’ve ever made during the past two years. Talk about Big Brother. Thy name is Facebook. Palm face plant.

I wrote: “The California fan palm does not produce dates, but does fruit elliptical black "berries" about 1/2 inch in diameter. These berries have a very large, brown seed surrounded by a thin, sweet pulp, which native Americans ate fresh or dried. They also ground the seeds into flour. Hooded orioles and coyotes feast on the seeds as well, aiding the palms' proliferation…” 

So, does this sound like pornography to you?

End of year writing stats 2023

Is August too soon to think of end-of-year writing stats? Especially, since, come December 31, I will be more or less homeless. I need to vacate my lovely large room at Donna’s house in Sebastopol by January. And I have nowhere to go. My cabin that I’ve been paying rent on for 40 years, is kaput, the roof fell in during an epic rainstorm. The cave-in created havoc, as I had archives stored in the cabin including all my letters and news clippings.

Luckily, I had either boxed or removed most of my stuff before the roof fell in. I lost most of my teaching archives and CPITS poetry books to water damage. But I have back-ups of most of that stuff. Not the end of the world. The cabin will be remodeled. But I doubt if the landlady will let me move back in. We had some words—she’s toxic. Besides, people are renting hovels for $1000 a month. It’s crazy out there.

My Plan B is to live in a tent on my grandmother’s property. Hopefully we won’t have another epic wet winter. And then, my cousin Dave decided to move to Missouri with the cnt-wife and sell the Nicasio house where I had the bulk of my belongings stored. Because it was an epically wet winter, most of my stuff suffered severe water damage. The metal shed leaked. 

And we were given one weekend (no warning) in April to huck everything out of Dave’s Nicasio place within 48 hours, and then we had to move what we wanted to keep over to Sinead’s storage shed in Petaluma. So, sadly, this means all my books are in bad shape, and I was hoping to give them to a library. 

We had an epic yard sale where I re-homed and got rid of most of my old tchotchkes, and the rest went to strangers, or to the dump. We put some tasty stuff out by the side of the road and people went completely nuts over all the goodies we were giving away. Sinead gave away crates of of Sean’s Legos and matchbox toys. There was a massive traffic jam out front of the house. Those who scored goodies will never see that particular bend in the road the same way again.

So though it has been an eventful year, I don’t have much to report by way of publishing record. I’m starting this dinky retrospective early, during the dog days of summer, as I’m sure I won’t have the time to deal with it later. The 2017 Tubbs fire certainly brought it all home that I need to scan and document my stuff, and move on, because nothing is permanent. Not even this blog.

Seeking relevance

Water walkers, pronouns sinking silence and sound, the slow surcease of trees, a reflecting pond, held captive by lights. The herons, rising like mist, fish and frog slap a dark designation of self ready to forge ahead. I am swallowing the year on the rock pile of regret. The trees bursting with unseasonable birds. Arrest that image. Book it, Dano. Give it a cellmate of regret, nestled along the edges of the universe. Like combing the dregs of the past, old poems from another time, are still seeking relevance in a century that got off to a rocky start, like during the middle ages, when the plague made desperate believers of us all. Wearing self-imposed ankle leashes during a time when the reflection in the mirror is always reversed. The cat cruises by for a petting. Pine trees, a thought, unseasonable leaves on the pavement, an urban escape, spinning itself into time present, then the future within its black hole of a throat and gaping maw threatening to swallow us all.

12/27/23

The age of the self disguised as an uncertain future

The cat seeks wild water,

    she doesn’t care     where 

or what     is found. 

For her,      everything 

   is in time present.

No matter what     my age 

   I am like a baby     on a runway.

I can’t walk, it seems 

        I am always

 learning to crawl,      then run. 

Then, fall     again. Again.

I scroll my name,

     a calligraphy of clouds 

across an uncertain 

    sky.         The journey 

is always running 

    up against     itself 

in a crowded elevator. 

        I am the agoraphobic 

in the marketplace 

and I steel myself 

    with florid words 

and no one notices 

    my breath     trembling 

like unseasonable leaves 

on a lone tree. The winter 

    is a demanding bitch dressed 

in fancy ribbons and bones. 

    Bless the living 

and the dying of the past 

and the future is a war 

that never ends.     The thing is, 

    the journey is always 

in front of you.     How 

    do we cope 

when the chains 

of change     attempts 

to escape the sordid

confines 

            of the past?

12/27/23 Write On! Nancy Woo

Thanksgiving

Give me those red viscous cranberries, cooked in sugar and nothing else, dripping off a silver spoon. Give me that explosion of flavor where sweet-and-sour compete, neither predominant, a palate cleanser, someone said. It was declared a winner in my book, as we slogged our way through a bargain basement of calories. Don’t add orange juice to it. Please. Mashed potatoes made with butter and sour cream, became snowcapped volcanic peaks with craters filled with pan gravy, the raft of turkey, like a tabula rasa. We suffered through the diabetes-inducing sweet potatoes, way over the top with burnt snowfields of marshmallows—that’s where my taste buds rebelled. All that over the top gilding of the lily left them in diabetic coma. The top I could at least scrape off, but I couldn’t avoid the damned canned concentrated orange juice my aunt Jane was so fond of. I grew to hate orange juice. Once the aunts got it into their heads to dress up what needed no dressing, like yams, it was all over. We were never going to go back to the simplicity of butter again. My formally favorite dish was forever ruined. At least they couldn’t do that to the stuffing. Until someone got the idea to add oysters. Just, no. And then there was the strange three layer Jell-O, salads, quivering on the table—grapefruit slices in lime Jell-O, cream cheese, with the lemon layer with filled with walnuts and celery. And then something darker at the bottom, perhaps cherry Jell-O, where the cranberries hid in their dark depths. Another aunt added raviolis to the mix, and green bean casseroles, which became a tradition I abhor. I could not stand the taste of mushroom soup and green beans. The aunts modernize the menu to fit the era, then got stuck in the 1960s, and my grandmother who was still directing, was not willing to let go of the basic plot—at least the plot itself was fixed, but the walls of her small kingdom were closing in. What I remember most are the black olives we wore on our fingers and how we shoveled celery stuffed with peanut butter and cream into our mouth as if we were starving and there was no food in sight. And that transition phase when you got to leave the kids’ table for the grownup table.

A cat called Cheetos

We drove to the back of the parking lot at TGAL where my cousin had been feeding a family of feral cats. All that was left of the colony was an orange kitten. Orphaned. His siblings and mother were long gone. Could his eyes be any bigger than they already were? Deep pools of betrayal and anguish. This was in an age where it wasn’t cool to feed the feral cats. We swooped down on him in my VW, with its valves merrily clanging like Christmas bells, and whisked him away, as if he was Cinderella in a fairytale, no glass slippers to transform him, but a bath and food. The fleas didn’t stand a chance. Cheetos knew he was saved, he knew what side of the bread was buttered. As far as he was concerned, we were his hairless tribe, his safety blanket. He groomed our eyebrows. Slept on our pillows. But when he got older, when things began to fail, when his bladder betrayed him, he moved out of the house and slept in a wine barrel planter filled with wild strawberries in front of the Nicasio house. We called him the potted kitty as he got pottier with age, all orange and aglow like a trapped sun.

list three daring things you’ve done…

A friend asked us to post three things that we did when we were young—those adventures where you look back on and say "I can't believe I did that.” Well, apparently I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie. I couldn’t choose just three insane moments in my life. True, I was usually with a boyfriend, but not always. And it’s probably not fair to ask me about during exploits, there were too many to list. Probably one reason why I became a writer.

My boyfriend and I hitchhiked up from Marin County to Victoria, BC in the early 70s, slept under a spruce tree in Stanley Park. Then we hitched up-island to catch the ferry from Cape Scott/Port Hardy to Prince Rupert, but we missed the boat, then had to camp on damp moss covered ledges for a few days until the next ferry came in as there was nothing there, not even a gas station, let alone, a hotel. 

The ferry ride to Prince Rupert took  more than 15 hours, we hit huge swells in the open water of the Queen Charlotte Straits. The massive swells rocked the ship around like a toy and everybody was barfing. When we got to Prince Rupert there was no place to stay so we camped in a graveyard on top of a hill and the sun absolutely refused to set, it was June.

Then we hitched over to Prince George where the mosquitos were the size of hummingbirds, the resident moose was not happy to share his boggy meadow with us. Then we hitched down to Banff, and Jasper, and slept in hotel doorways as all the campgrounds and hostels were full. It seemed that all of Canada was on the move. We camped out in day-use picnic shelters. They had wood burning stoves! 

The worst part of the journey was when we got stuck in front of the Columbia Glacier, I resorted to wearing my down sleeping bag as a coat, the ice field was so cold. I looked like a mustard colored abominable snowman in my down bag so no one would stop for us. The toe of the glacier hissed and sung. I wasn’t prepared for that. Then we went over to Calvary (why?), and headed back down through Kamloops, and down the coast to SF. An epic summer journey.

I went to the USSR several times in 1989-91, created a poetry and art exchange (it was Glasnost) and traveled from Kyiv to Leningrad on a train illegally, incognito, sans internal visa, because I was told no, I couldn’t go by the local authorities, then we couldn’t get a train ticket back to Cherkassy. In those days, Americans weren’t allowed to travel freely, without a pass, and certainly not on common trains for the ludí, the people. 

In Leningrad, on another trip, a Soviet friend thought I would like to help restore a fresco in the dome of the Church of Atheism & Religion (St. Isaac’s). To get to the outer dome, we had to climb up an iron catwalk to the top of the outside dome, the iron railing was coming off, it was midwinter, and a long way down to the ground, OSHA would not have approved, but Russia was like Mexico, everything was jerryrigged. When we circled the dome where there was a little door that let us inside the brass dome between the fresco, a tunnel to the inner dome. Wild. We had to leap down to a trapeze net stretched across the opening of the dome (I was scared shitless), then we were suited up in climbing harnesses and ropes, suspended like spiders to clean and scrape the old fresco. Getting back down to the ground was worse. I had never rappelled down a rope before, the marble floor was a long way down, my hair got caught in the cleat and I thought it was curtains. Oh, and neither my friend or his friend spoke any English—just to up the game. 

Another time we walked out on a frozen Ozirkii lake, but when we got to the middle, we heard it crack, the loudspeaker from shore was telling us to get off the lake, but I couldn’t understand Russian. We got off the lake quickly.

We hiked in to Machu Picchu in 1989 the long way, 42 km, through milpia forest fires, and so couldn’t see the Andes, we went through a cloud forest, saw many fantastic Inca ruins over Dead Woman Pass. I rode a pack horse that had never been ridden before, I was stuck with him because we dawdled and missed out on all the good horses. He had no bridle, so I made a hackamore from an old stiff leather lariat. 

We were cantering along a stream when he veered left up a narrow trail and ran full speed to a chicha hut. I had his head in my lap and still he wouldn’t stop. We slammed into that adobe chicha hut sideways, so hard, that dust rose from the roof like smoke. I lifted my leg over the pack frame and let the horse take the brunt. He slammed sideways onto the wall. All the Incan men sitting outside at the bar, scattered like the wind, drinks in hand. The horse got the message, he wasn’t going to lose me. He was much better behaved for the rest of the trip. So when we went up an incline so steep, I fell off his back trying to avoid a tree limb, because my backpack had made me top heavy. I fell under the horse. Luckily he froze and I crawled out from under him. 

Then the train to Arequipa and Lake Titicaca was stopped by the army in the altiplano, and they searched everyone, they bayonetted the natives luggage (looking for smuggled people) because of the Sendero Luminoso uprising. We had just seen the corpse of the defense lawyer of Manuel Febres Flores, outside the Chorillos Tunnel near Lima. It was a hairy time to be in Peru. Tanks in Lima. Car bombs.

Then there was the time the US invaded Tegucigalpa right as we were headed there, oops! We were stuck in the Guatemala Airport for days with no flights out. We had just come from the highlands, had met the Guatemalan army there and in Tikal too. They were not the good guys. Neither were the guerllla. We learned to tell who was who by their guns: AK 47s guerrillero, Uzi, GA. People were being disappeared, including tourists. I had nightmares for years.

I never did get married, though my Soviet friend proposed to me in the lobby of the Hotel Cosmos in Moscow…

Then there was the time a young bear slept on me in Little Yosemite….before I went up Half Dome, I did it twice, why, I don’t know…. And that time in the Galapagos between islands in the open sea with too many people, in a tiny open panga, when a drifting fishnet got stuck in the propeller. Oh, but the albatrosses and flying fish and the dolphins alongside the boat made it worthwhile. 

I won’t mention the time I snorkeled alone in a volcanic crater, called the Corona del Diablo, and a sea lion mistaking me for one of his harem because I was in a black wetsuit, attacked me. Maybe he thought I was a silkie. I had to keep spinning like a top to keep him from biting me. I thought I was going to drown for sure but no one would even know because I was far from the boat. I was a super snorkeler. And I often broke the rules, never snorkel alone. I could never get enough of it. 

Then there was that time I was snorkeling alone, far from shore with a shark in the Bahamas…

I could go on….

MoSt NYPC prompt # 1, a haiku

** Prompt # 1 (for December 15):

View this email in your browser

You and a haiku
in the first throes of winter
tapping out kindness.

Greetings, Poets, and Welcome to NYPC 15! Okay, here we go… For your first poem——and in keeping with what passes for NYPC tradition: write a haiku. This year, write to the energies of kindness, mercy, grace, compassion, and/or generosity of spirit. Feel free to create a haiku series of instances of kindness, etc. if it’s difficult to touch on these themes in just 17 syllables.  —Gary Thomas

Remembering Mary Smith Taylor, & a backstory of The Birds, & Warm Springs Dam

As I was moving boxes of old papers, I stumbled upon some writing fragments in a copybook dating back to a time before I became a writer. As I added the nascent scraps, written in a naive, childish hand (though I was 22), to my blog, and as I transcribed my notes, I also uncovered writing fragments with little pockets of memory attached. 

As I followed a wild hunch, I discovered that I was indirectly related by marriage to my Native American studies teacher, Mary Taylor, who was Coast Miwok. Then, I discovered a link that also led to the Warm Springs dam project (1974-1984), thanks to the internet. The aha! I always wondered how I became involved with the rescuing of native Pomo basket sedges.

Mary Taylor was a Bodega Bay Smith of Captain Stephen Smith infamy—who at 57, married a 16-year old Peruvian, Manuela Torres, in order to claim the Rancho Bodega land grant, but Smith also had a Coast Miwok "wife," Tsupu. The story goes, there were others.

Their son, Bill Smith had 12 children with Rosalie Charles after his first Miwok wife, Walla Walla, died. The Smith clan was a massive clan, with whom I would later be related to by marriage, when Bill Smith's youngest son, Young Eagle Smith, married my widowed aunt, Mary Azalie Howard Reilly (her husband Myles was my uncle) at St. Eugene's Church in Santa Rosa. 

I remember talking to Mary Taylor at the wedding reception in Santa Rosa. And I was puzzled as to why she was at our family wedding. Thanks to the internet which most definitely wasn't around in 1975, I was able to place her as Young's older sister. Wow! So my wild hunch wasn’t off.

GIVEAWAY

For instance, my floor is covered with discarding clothing, 

of other selves, Goodwill bound. I take photos—for taxes, I say. 

The 1920s tuxedo with its silk lapels, victim of catering ventures, 

next to bright summer dresses, tropical sheaths that held promise,

the blouses and over-shirts that shielded shoulders from the sun, 

the closeted unmentionables that kept the wobbly bits in line,

old knee braces, banished to the discard heap. The things we rescue:

a dress is given a last-minute reprieve, perhaps to be repurposed. 

Yet I know I will probably never wear its next incarnation.

The urge to hoard facsimiles of texture and floral meadows 

is entwined with memory—for a future that will never come. 

None of us knowing if distant visas of summer will arrive. 

Call it Covid, call it cancer, or fate striking at any given moment. 

Call it a Thanatos approach to death lurking in every corner, 

this moment shapeshifting, perhaps severed from chronology, 

with only a handful of digital photographs surviving the tangible.

Last night’s rain on the roof is already a distant memory. 

Today arrives like a knife. As we approach the long shadows of solstice, 

winter grips our breath as we steam ahead—locomotives of a lost era. 

Meanwhile, the chains in the bilge of the coffin ships of self 

remind us the death knell of distant bells is playing a dirge for the soul.

12/13/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Robin redbreast

One summer evening, I was crossing the Church St. footbridge over the River Teith in Callendar, Scotland, when a small bird hopped up to me, expectantly eying my red boot. I let out a little squeal of delight when I recognized what he was. A real robin! I didn’t dare move for fear I would disturb or harm him. 

Of course I had no idea that the diminutive European robin redbreast of English literature and fairytale fame, a flycatcher, was a bird of a completely different feather than our rather robust north American robin, a large thrush built like a Sherman tank. Or a hefty bird in hand.

Both birds are more orange than red, but there, the similarity ends. The word for the color orange was a linguistic newcomer to 16th c. Britain. In those days, the color choices were either yellow or red, or both. But robin red-yellow breast doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. And as it turns out that there are many species of birds that are called robins the world over. Australia’s flame robin is similar in size to our American robin.

Callendar was home to the famous Scottish outlaw, Rob Roy McGregor, or Raibeart Ruadh MacGriogair. Rob, or Robin was a diminutive form of Robert. In this case, Roy was an Anglicized form of Ruaidh, or the red one. Rob Roy Way separates the Highlands from the Lowlands. 

And Rob Roy, a Jacobite rabble-rouser, was a cattle rustler cum folk hero. The Highland outlaw, immortalized by Sir Walter Scott, became a legend within his own lifetime. Liam Neeson made for a big braw rogue in the movie.

The lingering twilight on the footbridge spanning the Teith River was beautiful. The long golden hours of summer, were as good as it gets. As I was taking photos of the river reflections, a tiny orange-breasted bird hopped right up to me on impossibly thin legs, and promptly fell in love with one of my red Reebok boots. 

I had never seen an European robin before, I had only heard about them from my Irish grandmother, and of course the Mother Goose nursery rhyme and finger games came to mind—for species identification purposes only, of course. 

Little Robin Redbreast
Sat upon a rail;
Niddle noble went his head,
Widdle waggle went his tail.— Little Robin Redbreast

There are many apocryphal stories associated with robins, mostly to do with Jesus and purgatory. They covered the bodies of two dead children with leaves in Babes of the Wood. In Irish mythology to kill a robin is to invoke bad luck for the rest of your life. There is no cure. They’ve become a ubiquitous symbol of Christmas, featured on Christmas cards and postage stamps. And of course, they’re also associated with Robin Hood, defender of the poor.

Legend has it that when Jesus was dying on the cross, the robin, then simply brown in colour, flew to his side and sang into his ear in order to comfort him in his pain. The blood from his wounds stained the robin's breast, and thereafter all robins carry the mark of Christ's blood upon them. —Wiki

It was not the first time my red Reeboks were siren sentinels to robins. Once, while I was exploring the Crystal Lakes rift near San Francisco, an American robin, perhaps seeking a sole-mate, became equally enamored of my red boot. 

I had to stand patiently on the Callander footbridge in the gloaming until the little love affair with my boot was over. The fading of the light brought a close to this little romance. Pure magic.

 robin redbreast

NAVIGATING THE STAR ROADS

I imagine tomorrow’s house as a place 

of four walls invoking the four directions, 

instead of the sagging skirt of this tent. 

A roof, where stargazing is mandatory, 

where we once again travel the Milky Way, 

Orion’s sword cleaving the winter sky, 

though my eyes are always in need of reading glasses, 

to navigate the labyrinth of words that deluge us daily.

For a moment, it comes into focus, and I rejoice.

I may not be able to align a triple junction of tail-lights 

while driving down the road, astigmatism’s gift,

but for a moment, a constellation springs into focus, 

the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, the Gazelle Leaps. 

Once I could see more stars with the naked eye, 

like the time we hiked up Mount Whitney, 

and the Milky Way was truly a sea made of stars. 

Or as we gazed up from the loft of the Andes, 

the sky was occluded with wildfire smoke, 

so I wasn't aware the constellations had shifted. 

A consolation was a glimpse of the Southern Cross.

The Big Dipper hovered on the horizon 

like an afterthought pointing to the direction of home.  

But I’m thrilled that I can find any constellation 

at all in a vast wilderness of sky lonely as ice. 

When the Big Dipper emerges overhead from the blur, 

it steals my breath away, and once again, 

I can find true north within the void, 

not easy to do in a sky filled with industrial light, 

not like the dark nights of childhood, where stars 

shone with a brilliance rarely witnessed. 

All the cells that I have ever been in the past, 

are annealing the starlight like folded iron 

at the smithies forge into a sword of light 

as I fathom these four walls called home, 

then I realize that the idea of home is held 

deep within the memory of self.

12/6/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Hoppity-hop picking in Sonoma County

Historic Walters Ranch Hop Kiln, Westside Road, Healdsburg, built by Angelo Soldini in 1905. California Historical Landmark No. 627 ©️ Maureen Hurley ca. 1981.

Before Prohibition, Sonoma County led the nation in the production of hops. Hops, a beer preservative, was first planted near the Laguna de Santa Rosa in 1858, and by 1899, more than 2000 acres were in full production. A story from 1900 in the San Francisco Chronicle estimated that 7,500 acres of hops were planted in Sonoma. From the early 1900s to about 1940, hops, not grapes, was king.

“Sonoma County produces the finest quality of hops grown on the Pacific Coast….there is more lupulin and a stronger aroma…which brings from one cent to two cents per pound more money in the market.”—Sunset Magazine Homeseekers’ Bureau, 1915

Apparently the top dollar paid for the superior California-grown hops was London, England. 

“From 1915 until 1922 California was the leading hop-producing state in the Union." (Tinged with Gold: Hop Culture in the United States, Michael A. Tomlan).

Hops (Humulus lupulus) related to cannabis, originated in Egypt and China; there is also a wild species native to the US. With hops, it's all about the lupulin. The unfertilized female blossom, or cone, laden with yellow lupulin powder and resin, is used to preserve and flavor beer. The hops varietals grown in Sonoma County were far superior to hops grown in other regions. During the 1930s, Sonoma County produced over 30 million pounds of dried hops.

Hop production survived Prohibition and the Volstead Act of 1919, but languished, shall we say, even tanked? during the post-war economy—despite the fact that Sonoma County was a bootleg capital of California. 

The use of nitrate fertilizers also introduced a mildew blight which ultimately killed the hops industry. By the 1960s, hops was no longer commercially viable, though escaped volunteers grew along the Russian River along with the native wild grape vines.

My first boyfriend's mother Leeta (a Petaluman who went to school with Lloyd Bridges) used to earn her pocket money harvesting hops (and fruit) every summer. During hop-picking-time, she waxed on poetically how families camped out under the stars all summer long picking fruit. 

However, she said that picking hops was brutal on the hands. Not to mention feet—they used stilts to reach the trellised hop buds. Hopping for hops. She preferred picking pears and prunes to hops. Hop picking season was short, at the end of summer. In 1940, when his hop pickers went on strike, Florian Dauenhauer of Santa Rosa invented a mechanical hop harvester that is used to this day.

During the 1990s, I was at Kat & Boz WIlliams' home on Peaks Pike Road in Graton and they served me steamed hop shoots and buds for dinner—they tasted like asparagus—and I was even given a furry feisty hop vine to take home, but it just wouldn’t grow under an oak tree in Forestville. It needed more sunlight. Or I was a lousy hop grower.

Hop-picking at Healdsburg, Cal. photo: MD Silverstein —Healdsburg Shed

At Lake Merritt, on the morning of my 70th birth, 11/24/22

Last year, on my 70th birthday I was housesitting, waiting on a balcony by the lake, which was really a slough—a brine estuary glistening with adamantine stars in the hard winter light. I watched the early joggers pass by in slow-mo, their breath visible in the crisp air. And the small red hands of maple leaves, exhausted by all that applause with the wind, they danced down the footpath, across the sidewalk, and flirted with the dangerous wheels of passing cars. We waited for the windsongs to arrive, but the clouds cast their tarot cards on the mirrored lake, as wild geese patrolled the surface like U boats. I drew the hanged man. Some war was brewing, but there was yet another war in progress. Story of our lives. No escaping it. Once Iraq. Then Ukraine. Now, Gaza. The war against nature is a war against the self. I was so near, yet so far from home, that the words never came. I was mute. As if I were never born, as if the wind never had given birth, though this lake was once my constant companion, my familiar, perhaps even a muse. I remember one birthday as we circled the lake—maybe 10 years ago—for I measure this friendship in decades—I once saw what I thought was a white arm reaching out from the water, and I thought, Lady of the Lake. But it was the jawbone of a horse, or mule with large yellow teeth like pawns on a chessboard. Not a sword. No warrior heroes. No dragon quests. Its mate, long gone, much like mine. Has it really been five years? I leaped from the stone gat into the water to retrieve a story of the past, imagining a wilderness of horse-drawn carriages disgorging their bounty from a distant time. Pierced by an arrow of light, I could only imagine my Saggitarian kin, the dance of their clattering hooves on cobblestones, a type of music locked in the distant past. A sound that still stirred the blood and made me remember the names of my dead horses, the memories I harbored during that supple time of youth, when we rode out into the mist, seeking the glimmering light. And the articulate wind was singing, singing to me, a melody of the cosmos on the day of my birth. But I could not celebrate this turn of year, for I had no words left to mark the occasion. A slender silvered fish leapt skyward, as if attempting the rudiments of flight.

11/29/23 Write On! with Susie Terence 

Richmond Bridge bicycle lane

To Whom it may Concern:

Last week, at midday, when traffic is normally light on the approach to the Richmond Bridge, I was stuck in stalled traffic backed up three miles for more than an hour and a half at the approach of the Richmond Bridge. The traffic back up was worse than at rush-hour. It was so bad and there so long a wait that one driver in a jeep pulled over to let his young son pee on the left shoulder.

As we eked our way forward and across the bridge towards Marin, the reason for the traffic jam became clear. A van with a flat tire had nowhere to pull off, so it pulled off in the right lane as close as it could against the cement bicycle divider.

Because the van could not move out the right lane, traffic jammed up for three miles before the toll booth, and there was even more stuck traffic nearly the entire length of the Richmond bridge. No rescue tow truck was dispatched, either. I guess that’s a thing of the past. We just sat there and watched our fingernails grow. Wasted gas idling in line. And during that entire time, only one or two bicyclists used the bicycle lane.

Why are we being held hostage by bicyclists who do not need to use the bridge to get to and from work?For the most part, bicycling is a leisure-time activity, so we are subsidizing their leisure-time against our work time.

This is not acceptable. Either the bicycle lane needs to be removed, or a zipper needs to be put in allowing that third lane to be open during rush-hour and during accidents. By coincidence, my neighbor invented the golden gate zipper. And he would be thrilled if that were implemented.

Maureen Hurley

FIRST LIGHT

Once I held a dream of hope, 

a child looking forward, 

like a horse eager for the trail. 

Once I roamed the fire roads, 

and the backcountry above small towns, 

where the morning fog 

was a lid on the Pandora’s box 

of what was to come. 

Once those ridges held me 

like a mother to child. 

I knew no other home 

and I became a song of wind and sky 

as I traversed those ridges above Tomales Bay 

a sword gleaming in the distance, 

a path of light dividing the lithospheres. 

I didn’t know the wind was a poem,

was also a prayer as well as a road. 

There was only now. Always 

the now, even back then. 

Am I a prayer of the past, 

a prayer of the untrammeled land, 

a prayer of time anchored in memory, 

like a flag full of promise?

I mourn for those islands of youth, 

carefully folded into time, 

distant memories, reimagined 

and tailored to fit the present. 

How do I tell that child 

alone in the wilderness 

that the darkness of this world 

is a lens occluded with sand and grit. 

Call it despair. I am a prayer. 

Let the moon traverse the sky, 

where Orion keeps his sword 

sheathed for an eternity. 

Let the flags of peace be of hope 

to those in war-torn countries. 

Call it Ukraine, call it Palestine. 

It doesn't matter where.

A child once said to me: 

any step toward war is a wrong step.

The fallen children 

who will never again 

gaze upon the restless sea, 

who will never get a chance to share 

the occluded memories of old age,

because in wartime there are no victors. 

Only the wind whispers 

our names as broken prayers 

tangled in dark forests, 

greeting the first light.

11/22/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

The second age of light

I was never much good at hiding the truth, the open book of my face gave away more than it concealed. I never was a good shield, perhaps, because I was also very good at ferreting out the secret assignation and foibles of adults. Lord knows there were enough skeletons in the closet.

After Chernobyl blossomed, I could not hide my dismay when the rains came. The scientists said the cloud was too high in the stratosphere and it posed no danger, unless it rains. And despite all odds, it rained. And so we stood under the portico, listening to the rain. 

And that realization as I avoided the rain, that even the roof of my car offered no protection from the isotopes falling from the sky. This was nothing like what happened at Three Mile Island. That spring of 1986 was a time of no birdsong. 

What could I possibly tell the children when they asked the hard questions that even the scientists sidestepped during this newest age of light?

With an angry child, seeking revenge, said we oughta nuke those Commies, I said, do you think Soviet kids want to nuke us? And at that moment, the doors of perception opened a crack to let the light in.

11/15/23 Write On! Susie Terence

Writing for peace

On the day of invasion, a rabbi wrote a poem, taking the side of peace, no matter what side. But peace is a victim. Susie said to write a poem, personifying peace, hope, war, death, then dress it in garments. I think of the tallit and the hijab, the keffiyeh and the kippah. Neruda said death was dressed as an admiral. All I could think of were those tall ghost ships sailing into port, where the dead gather on the docks to welcome home the fallen. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote about pigeons and peace, clouds and refugee camps, he was a candle in the darkness that is Palestine. I think how we’ve suffered but, there are invisible bars that hold us in check, no matter what our beliefs. My grandmother said a country without a tongue is a country without a soul. I can’t think help but think of Darwish, a poet who spoke four languages who lived in exile all his life. He wrote: you are my country but I am a stranger stripped of identity. He said Hebrew is the language of love. A love divided from itself. Brother against brother. We are alone in our self-imposed exile. The prisoner said to the interrogator: My heart is full of sage, the remains of dawn, as I walk outside of my own being. In 1984, when we invaded Lebanon, I read Darwish‘s poem about the conference of the birds, and wrote a poem called Death in Lebanon. His poem is no longer on the Internet. The birds have flown. Einstein said to prepare simultaneously for war and peace is a non sequitur. A child said it to me more succinctly: any step towards war is a wrong step. What is the color of prayer, of death? What happened to: Love thy enemy. Darwish was once in love with a Jewish woman, but he was an internal refugee in his country of origin. He said: Without hope we are lost. His name means the wanderer, it also means poverty, but he did not suffer from a poverty of words. His words were a rallying cry. He carried his country within him always. In Paris, Beirut, Moscow, Cairo. He said: I am robbed of my ancestors’ vineyards. Now, nohing is left of his homeland except the thirst of mortared rocks that hunger for peace. Despite past atrocities, peace is always a gift. Where does peace begin with me? Peace is dressed in the feathers of doves in Gaza, and Ukraine. These days we are all living in the crosshairs of the unseen sniper.

11/8/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

Favorite stove burner

Molly Fisk asks what stovetop burner we prefer, and how do we brush our teeth, things which we never tell anyone. I’m a hard left front stovetop burner lover. It’s almost politically ingrained. I brush my teeth up front and center. The molars are in the wings, but my eyeteeth see everything. Corn is eaten in a circle, or more like a möbius strip circling back on itself. I have only two pair of shoes with laces. They rarely come out of the closet. I prefer to walk barefoot whenever possible. Socks are optional. To make up for Robert’s shoelace balancing age test, I have perfected the flamingo stance of dressing. Only occasionally do I fall over, hog-tied by my knickers and jeans. When I do, it’s spectacular. Things which I never tell anyone.

NaHaiWriMo November prompts (abodes)

“Welcome to November NaHaiWriMo! The posts this month will deal with creations, starting with a week of dwellings. Let’s try something different this month. Perhaps write a 3-5-3 haiku, or a monoku (single line), or write a poem that deals with the prompt without using the prompt word. Enjoy exploring the options. Please post your poems inspired by this prompt as comments in response to this posting.”

Visit the website too as I tend to fall off the wagon, and not stay the distance of the month. It could be because writing haiku tends to bore me silly. Maybe I should switch to haibun, to haikai or renga.

The NaHaiWriMo prompt for Nov 1 , 2023: CABIN

AUTUMN ARRIVES LATE

leaves scuttle and dance 
Smoke rises from a cabin in deep woods
woodpecker resumes his carpentry.

11/3/23

I lived in an old cabin

abandoned walnut orchard

slumps back into the mud.

11/3/23

Old walnut orchard

Cabin keeps vigil for signs

Still praying for rain.

11/3/23

DELUGE

Trees thirsting for rain

Cabin keeps an eye on things

Clouds weep in the orchard.

11/3/23

DIVIDED THOUGHTS

Break down the walls, 

reveal the killing fields, 

call it genocide.

Break down the politics 

of divided thought. 

There is no reunification of God.

Let me touch the sea. 

Our better angels 

will let the stars in 

to lick the sky.

11/1/23

BUILDING A WALL

Build a wall made of dusk and old saguaro lace, 

sew it with threads of tumbleweed and twilight. 

Then weave it into a net to catch the errant stars 

as they cross from one no man’s land into another, 

marking that liminal shore, where the voices of dreams 

become tangible, where the ragged mouth of time 

bends to its own vagaries. Tells us stories of the old ways.

A wall, where the past and the future merge 

into a shoreline where it is always now. No borders.

Nothing is written in stone. The old stories of sand 

at river mouths whisper a journey of unimagined time.

Let the river touch the sea until sea and sky become one.

Call off the coyotes and let the voices of the wind 

travel through razor wire, and border crossings 

unimpeded by politics and greed. We are all immigrants 

traveling to one promised land or another.

Make it not a wailing wall. Make it a singing wall 

filled with the wings of prayer rags, and the gods of hope, 

where the vagaries of war smoldering on battlefields 

and contested borders becomes a thing of the past, 

where the politics of religion no longer divide us,

and we move free as the clouds on the horizon.

11/1/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

 (I was channeling Padraig O Tuama’s collects.)

Published in June/July 24 issue of Sonoma County Peace Press