Poetry Flash: Napa Poetry Conference (front page photo of Carolyn Forché & Gerald Stern)

SE ME CAYO

SE ME CAYO

On the Avenida de Reforma

in Teotihuacan's quaking bed,

cracked pavement—terremoto.

An abundance of funereal flowers

once again bloom in hanging gardens
in Xioxicalco, where tall hotels swayed 

like tall reeds and snapped off at the base
to fall in the concrete garden of chaos.

date? 1985, or 1986?

FALLING TO SEA LEVEL

FALLING TO SEA LEVEL

              Yo no lo conocÌa, pero aveces

              me entero de uno que otro detalle.

              —Monica Mansour

                               —para John Oliver Simon

Late in the season, small avalanches begin

where our boots break a trail.

I place my feet carefully in each milk-blue hollow

and learn the distance of your stride.

We crawl up the crevice toward the sky.

Rocks tumble into the deep valley

and the space between worlds widens.

We rush to fill it with our hands, lichen & stone.

In the thin blue air above timberline

a cornice of snow gives under our weight.

We imagine it to sweep us up like swimmers

at the crest of a wave.  Wind, uncoded

from fingerprints fluxes the surface

of the lake.  The patterns carried

within us makes us recount the myths.

What passes for human

fallen off from ritual

urges us to jump.

We see beyond each mountain, a cloud;

beyond each cloud, another mountain.

By climbing on all fours, we learn to trust our hands.

Slowly, our hands lead us back to our hearts.

Our hands become small commas to separate sky from world

& the mountain watches them paying out shapes to the wind.

Clouds on the horizon have escaped us this time.

The dark thing that chased us from sleep

today, is a pale witness in snow.

Tracks of a mountain lion take on a new shape

separated from night.

We trace the origin of tracks

to a hollow beneath the last vertical face

of the mountain.

We drink from the same water

and leave rock cairns to mark a trail

no one else will follow.

Perhaps, in the future other climbers

will puzzle over this.

Hold in your hand this poem without words;

a white reminder of what we've lost.

Fur trappings slide from bare shoulders.

Glaciers scrub stones smooth again.

At sea level, the cave fire retreats

to its proper place in time.

I say, what civilized us

was the donning of clothes.

You say, No, language separated us.

And your tongue fills my mouth.

The temptation would be to stay in these mountains

and dress language in lichen & stone for vows,

but at sea level, the gods of dailiness

sweep through us and our grasp upon sky,

stones & skin loosens.  One misstep;

a false handhold could throw us back into air.

The next snowfall would bury our tracks.

When spring comes again,

they will sink back into the earth

without a trace.

The years are turning colder, I said.

There are other witnesses, you said,

The mountain lion and us.

Blue Canyon, Sonora Pass
Rosh Hoshana
Fall 9/17/1985

1986-88 Falling to Sea Level

1988 Women's Voices

1987 Creative Discourse

           Marin Poetry Center
           Poet News/ Sacramento Literary Review

CAYENDO AL NIVEL DEL MAR/FALLING TO SEA LEVEL
      Yo no lo conocía; pero a veces
      me entero de uno que otro detalle.
                        —Monica Mansour

Tarde por la estación, las avalanchas empiezan  
donde nuestras botas hacen un sendero  
en el empinado campo de nieve.  
Pongo los pies con cuidado en cada hueco  
color de leche azulado y aprendo la distancia de tu paso.  
Reptamos por la grieta hacia el cielo.  
Las rocas se derrumban en la valle profunda  
y se ensancha el espacio entre los mundos.  
Precipitamos para llenarlo con 
Las manos, los liquenas v la piedra.

En el aire azul y fino de las montañas  
luna cornisa de nieve se desploma bajo nuestro peso.  
Imaginamos que nos arrasta como nadadores  
en la cresta de una ola. El viento, descifrado  
de las huellas digitales funde el superficie  
del lago. La forma llevada  
adentro nos hace recontar los mitos.  
Lo que pasa para lo humano  
caído rel rito, nos urge saltar.  
Vemos más alla de cada montañ a, una nube;  
más allá de cada nube, otra montaña.  
Subiendo a gatas, aprendemos a confiar en las manos.  
Despacio, nuestras manos nos llevan a los corazones.  
Las manos nos hace pequeñas comas para separar cielo y mundo  
y la montaña las mira arriando formas al viento.  
Las nubes en el horizonte nos escaparon esta vez.

La cosa oscura que nos cazó del sueño  
hoy es un testigo pálido en la nieve.  
Las huellos de una pantera toman una nueva forma  
separadas de la noche.  
Trazamos el origen de huellas  
hacia un hueco abajo de la última cara vertical de la montaña.  
Bebemos de la rnisma agua  
dejamos montones de piedras para marcar un sendero  
que nadie va seguir.  
Quizás en el futuro  
otros alpinistas se preguntarán sobre esto.

Toma en la mano este poema sin palabras;  
un recuerdo blanco de lo que hemos perdido.  
Atavios de pelos nos deslizan de los hombros.  
Los glaciares suavizan las piedras otra vez.  
Al nivel del mar, la hoguera de la caverna retrocede  
         hacia su lugar apropriado en el tiempo.  
Digo, lo que nos civilizó fue la ropa.  
Dices que no, el lenguaje nos separó  
y tu lengua me llena la boca.  
La tentación sería quedarnos en las montanãs  
y vestir el lenguaje en líquenas y piedras para votos,  
pero al nivel del mar, los dioses cotidianos  
nos arrastran y nuestro asimiento en el cielo,  
las piedras, la piel relaja. Un tropezón,  
un asidero falso podria tirarnos  
en el aire. La próxima caida de nieve  
enterraría nuestras huellas.  
Cuando la primavera viene otra vez,  
hundirán en la tierra sin rastro.  
Los años se enfrían, dije.  
Hay otros testigos, dijiste,  
la pantera y nosotros.  

9/1986

1986, 87, 88 Falling to Sea Level

Long Distance Relationship

     —for John Oliver Simon

What can I say? When my breast brush my nightgown, a feeling of pain and pleasure, a pulse of electricity runs through me and I am careful about how I move. Your touch lingers long after you've gone, like wild hands rubbing my body and I have to sleep it off.

How soon we traveled that journey from the hot pools, where, like fish we plunged, like a submarine you slipped through my legs. You said a ritual courtship, and I feel sad for all the ones who have left, always with regret with an air of finality. Leaving me empty, and it is hard to think of starting over.

At dinner, you write a poem to me, of fear, and then you hold my hand. I tell you a dirty joke, you say the word cunt. Diners next to us pause, a still moment, as the word, like a slow trajectory cuts through the momentary silence that sometimes occurs within hubbub of crowds. The laws of public chatter.  And surcease. A dite. My neck reddens. I think I am too jaded to feel the awkwardness of beginnings. But I'm wrong.

We eat raspberries and eclairs and I think of nipples. After you kiss my breasts, you say the word, raspberries. We stay in bed for days and tell each other stories. I tell you how the snake on the hill shook his rattle and how I leapt backwards into space falling, it seemed as if forever through the slowness of air. Like now. I am leaping. No safety net.

Looking up into that exact blueness of sky, I say, I begin to understand the how the theory of time and space continuum began. You say the word, Anadrio, an invented name for a new color for joy. You tell me of a Mexican poet, Otto-Raúl González, who invented ten new colors and you said Anadrio is the color of joy and of good luck.

We walk in the afternoon down the road, no longer the main road. The dotted line no longer divides the streams of cars flowing in opposite directions on River Road. We pick fruit, pears, blackberries and quince.

You say the word for quince in Spanish before we make a fat meal of garden corn and flank steak with shallots. Zinfandel and brie, the Sonoma palate. A cornucopia harvest. We are harvesting glances in each others eyes.

Others begin to notice. I think no, this is not happening again. It's an early fall this year. When I fall in love, it is always in late summer. I count my years by the men I have loved, not counting, but resignedly accepting another one each year. Harvest an endless procession marching through my body, this is how I am counting the years.

The years begin to scare me. You tell me how the thought of getting me with child excites you. We make more wild love. And then you tell me you don't want more children and have plans for a vasectomy. I think of all the men who at first want to impregnate me, but as reality takes its tolls, soon there will be letters of regret. It is another form of domination.

Like two drugged animals we cling to this opiate, knowing it will lift, clinging to it, we know there is more than a few lost days to it.  It is growing exponentially. You call, long-distance, and say you feel a little lost, a little sad, and want to crawl back into my arms. But you made an appointment saying, they want my balls too. I murmur cojones and I feel yet another door slam shut after this one just opened.

You talk of long distance relationships, saying you want your cake too. And all I can hear is the scissor-snipping of bluejay voices cutting through the empty air as if the scalpel had already begun its job in a closed room. What is the color of distance? And futures?

Tuesday, 10 September, 1985
added 2/18, after JOS's death.
minor revisions

CPITS benefit reading Obligatory Hug (is missing) Sept. 1985, Burbank Activity Center, Sebastopol

Obligatory Hug (is missing) Sept. 1985, Burbank Activity Center, Sebastopol
Eva Poole-Gilson, Frances Gallegos, John Alkire, Justin Forsythe, Maureen Hurley, Mike Tuggle, Susan Kennedy, Taya Castel, Tobey Kaplan

RRWG reading at the Burbank Activity Center with Maureen Hurley

 

Performance-Events Prose and Poetry Reading Series, sponsored by Russian river Writers Guild featuring Maureen Hurleyand fellow member in Poets in the Schools. Burbank Activity Center, 167 No. High St. in Sebastopol. 7:30 p.m. open mike; 8 p.m. readings. $2. 887-2046.

CAC AIR grants awarded to Maureen Hurley, Marsha Connell, Daniel Oberti

VOTIVE OFFERINGS

Votive offerings

     —from a photo by Jean Mohr

1. I grew up with the habit of leaving the window open.

By the time he arrived, my hands and cheeks were numb.

I kept back to the shadows, not wanting to be seen.

How could I explain this? That there was something
so private about the way he walked alongside his bicycle,
as if there were a secret they both shared.

I think of horses in the rain
with water drizzling down damp forelocks,
leaving pockmarks in the dry dust inside the stable.

The clatter of boots, the purring of cogs.

The wind rubs the lace curtain like silk velvet.

Mixed with snow, the mud made a chocolate slurry
of the photographic image of winter.

What interested me most was the way the eyes appeared first
on exposed white paper in the developing tray,
under the darkroom red light.

Sometimes, I just went in there to look at them and stare.

I forgot what happened next.

It was 1946. I remember,
because there were dark uniforms everywhere.

When we walked, the frozen mud beneath our feet
cracked like distant gunshots.

2. He pushed his bicycle across cobblestones;
the clatter of boots and the purr from the spokes of his cycle
ricocheted from stone slate to plaster walls.

Leaves under the tree gathered cups of snow.
His hobnail boots announced him like a lone horse.

The road winds to a field where a girl with loaves of soggy bread
waits as a rail thin cat weaves its damp fur between her legs.

The forgotten are remembered – pressed between glass,
on silvered paper.

3. Will she still be waiting? The fields will be wet.

Wire spokes ticking off time like a clock.

Late. Late. Walk the bike through town.

Don't attract attention.

Dark clouds. More snow in the air.
How far can one ride to snow on a bicycle?
Tracks draw less attention than two sets of prints in the snow.

4. You there! Always behind that curtain.

What are you looking at? Stealing pictures again?

Don't you think I know about you?

Tomorrow, you'll notice when I don't come by
but that is tomorrow, not today.

5. I see the hood of his long jacket thrown back
as he holds something small in his hand.
I see the warm breath hanging about his face like a cloud.

I see the glistening street through the spokes of his cycle
and the reflection sharply in focus with the muddy spray of water
flips up on the back of the tire.

In the thin snow, faint circular tracks from other riders.

6. Clutter clatter of boots, purring of cogs.

The wool of her scarf, like wet sheep.

A windblown curtain.

In wet fields, by granite slabs,
the forgotten are remembered.

Photographs, silver – a metallic weight
around the eyes, under glass.

Votive offerings.

date?  8/1985?  Possibly 1987.
Added 11/16

MERWIN'S INLET

MERWIN'S INLET
   I want to find the inlet
   where rocks rub thighs
   with the shore.

In the mango forest, small red flowers

the color of chickenblood

splatter against damp limed walls

& pulse against the shadowed green.

White veranda, gardenias, bleached shells

in black volcanic soil.

I check papayas for ripeness,

avoid stepping on the toad in the shower

& watch out for banana spiders.

As I dig the earth, my breath

says roshi roshi roshi.

Geckos chuckle in white-limed rooms

& swallow moths whole.

Last night I dreamed of lizards

eating the bark from trees.

Below the clearing, the sounds of the creek

are swallowed by the jungle.

Density & decay

the progression of desire.

Haiku, Maui 1985?
the experience was from 5/26/83; did I have another draft? I sometimes took poems that needed work to Napa for revision. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it was published enough times, so I put it to bed.

1991 Poet Magazine
1990 Poetry USA
1989 Chaminade Literary Review
1988 Women's Voices
1987 Electrum

CHICKEN SOUP

draft

    —for Ruth Stone

1. With my hands full of the dilemma unborn chicks

ready, but too weak to escape their smooth white prisons,

I have trouble undoing the henhouse gate—

itís like convoluted love mounting in the afternoon hammock

where the intensity of sex was equal the heat of the argument

and blinding orgasms forestalled the inevitable equation

leaving me to count days and eggs with an exhausted passion.

Seeking solace in the henhouse,

Iím confronted with the argument head-on.

Details become significant: minute pinfeathers,

like venial sins, fringe the broody hen's eyelids.

She croons; the chicks gather up courage from under her wings

to answer the four hatchlings I attempt to rescue.

With the precision of a surgeon, I carefully tweeze

a piece of shell from the membrane of a half-born chick,

a bright ruby wells up over wet yellow feathers.

I remember how Binty stood on her colt's umbilical cord

to stop the bleeding. The belabored desire of my breasts and belly

swell and point accusingly at the parched earth, wanting

to masturbate with death in the chickencoop.

I mid-wife the second embryo: a miracle—

a neck, longer than what I think is possible

uncoils snakelike, from the opened shell.

With trembling haunches and sealed eyelids,

the chick blindly slides from the shell into my hand.

A pale necklace of pinfeathers ring the tiny winglets.

I move the chick closer to the brood;

its loud call doesn't rouse the maternal instinct of the hen;

she distractedly pecks at it, and tramples it

in her hasty mothering to protect the others.

Poultry yard facts are not news,

but cruelly catches me by surprise anyway.

2. In restaurants, heat lamps to keep the chicken warm

reminded me too much of Mary Bianchi's incubator:

a fortress of blue doors and windows.

Easter: I crawled through fields of yellow chicks

blooming furiously at the speed of light under 30-watt bulbs

to find just the right one. Under the miracle of chickens,

unnamed possibility opened up like infinity.

I was so angry when my grandmother simply said No,

and the dream quietly closed in on itself;

a small child covered in sawdust

fiercely clutching a downy chick to her breast.

From the poultry yard we learned uneasy truths—

suicidal stampedes in pens with lethal corners,

pecking order, what blood-smell was capable of rousing.

We taught the survivors how to drink,

clipped beaks and wings. We learned euphemisms,

practiced what we learned in the school yard.

I took a squeamish clinical interest

in deveining drumsticks during Sunday dinners.

When things got tough, I retreated to the sanctity of illness.

Feeding me chicken soup, Grandma always explained,

You've got to boil it until the bone-jelly comes out.

Was it really the bones of the chicken

that healed us when we were sick?

3. As I struggle to save the final chicks,

you say to me, I believe in letting nature take its course.

The dog loves the ones that don't hatch out.

So, I place the tiny ember back in its nest

The wind to catch this spark will not blow.

Long shadows crawl over yellow madrone leaves

toward the empty hammock supplicated by the evening breeze.

I fishtail down the valley; my rage and headlights flirt and neck

with the center line of the long highway toward home:

how many accidents are born in the aftermath of lover's quarrels?

This time we were lucky (or, unlucky, as it seems).

4. Your postcard arrives: Another chick hatched out;

it made me think of you. We shouldn't make a go of it.

I think of how cold bone-jelly quivered like a wild trout

in my grandmother's capable hands.

You didn't see how the chickís blood rusted

like a stigmata on my palms and thighs

during the hot summer heat.

1985?

rev. 8/13/ 87 rev. 2/ 93  still not there...
Humboldt County
& Napa
another version was published in Kamel Klaxon 1985
the first draft may have been written in 1984.

BANTU RHYTHMS: MOONDUST

 BANTU RHYTHMS: MOONDUST

How deep
did the astronaut's feet
sink into moondust?

Someone's father said
Never plant potatoes
when the price is up.


8/13/1985
Napa
published in the Kamel Klaxon

SIXTH OF AUGUST

SIXTH OF AUGUST

The personality of the dead woman in the storage room escapes
from boxes of silk scarves, photographs, letters
cellulose toys, yellow mother of pearl buttons and cloth scraps.
Inside her white plastic purse;
a checkbook, unclaimed raffle tickets,
a tiny snapshot of a girl who still sends her love;
an envelope dated 1937,
some eight-cent stamps and a life insurance policy.

On this 40th anniversary of Light,
I pull stamps of Einstein and Eisenhower apart.
Glued on top of a glib Eisenhauer grinning seven times
a haunted Einstein broods in purple; the color of mourning.
Beneath them, postage stamps of Apollo on the moon,
black-wreathed earth against the sun;
the birth of Man in space.

When I was three, the linoleum to cover the stairs
was put in the storage room to change it from green to red,
my uncle told me. And so it did.
I admired the miracles that happened in darkness.
In that same darkness, copper pennies
dropped into the piggybank turned into steel.
Dressed in khaki-green, my uncle tossed me into the air
and the known world spun past my forehead.
He held a suitcase of darkness in his hand.

Now, I've gone and brought the dead woman's things into light.
A photograph of her husband holding a silver-plated trophy
by the tall grey horse at Longacre track:
He stares at me with such frankness, that with his passing
I feel the loss of an intimate stranger.
The bent and tarnished trophy rests in thick dust.

When I wear the clothing of the dead,
they see glimpses of light again.
The poet's shirt gives me strange dreams
but I forget the words by morning.

Rotted with age, the boxes of yarn
in this half-light makes tufts like the manes
of cloth horses I ride in my dreams
where the landscape grows wilder with each visit.

August 6, 1985
rev. 1986

1987 San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2nd Place
         Thread Winding the Loom, CPITS anthology
         The Paper
 1995 Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, ( version 2, below)

 see my post,  Atomic Ghost

Maureen Hurley & Jessamyn West, Napa Poetry Conference, 1985

             Maureen Hurley & Jessamyn West, Napa Poetry Conference, ©1985 Kathleen Lynch

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. —Jessamyn West

added 4/24/2016 

Letter to Seamus Heaney (NEED HIS REPLY)

 

The red tide ate the sun (garbled text)

The red tide ate the sun Cessation, surcease
Civil war breaks out the dunes,
Opium poppies. 

And in the room.
This white splash against shadows
Afternoon solitude in the mall
Long shadows across our feet
The bottom of my shoes stick to the floor.
Rivers of heat rise from the black ribbon
Sacrosanct. 

Red hibiscus
 the size of your face and gladiolus
Funerary memories on the stock

and stained the water red
heavy breathing from within 
the shell of your ears 
I travel through meadows 
under a cloud of smoke. 
Isadora laughs as her car 
roared through the streets of Paris

This leavening inbred rises
like ghostly intuition 
loosened at night from the sea
Soft blues of flowered curtains.

 July 10, 1985

David Bromige, Paul Mariah, Allen Ginsberg, photo

This was from the Helen Luster memorial at the Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa

HIGH WATER MARK

I could just see you

the day you decide what poetry is.

These things, these shapes, these flowers

a partial memory to orchestrate

an arbitrary collection,

a miracle at the end of purpose.

We are ready.

Hass says Milosz is listed in the phone book.

Look for a pattern of three instances of ambiguity.

While you were wandering

telephone poles carried countless messages

across the land.

Even the hills show marks of obscure water.

You stand lost in thought

your feet together

and the road is long.

7/85

CAMBRIAN AIR

1. I was conceived on Mt. Tamalpais,

so my mother says, but she says many things.

My aunt hints of some hidden love,

and my father briefly enters little into the picture.

This piece of Precambrian coral once buried

in alluvial mud of shallow eurekan seas

with its fossilized quartz heart

is more accessible than their stories.

2. When we made love

this free haploid DNA

climbed helical staircases

and the code of our lives unwound.

This is how the sea must have looked

to the sky when free-swimming coral

contracted its soft body & fought gravity;

now the corals are mysteriously dying

and no one knows why
the hole in the ozone layer is growing.

7/85

Early memory, Point Reyes

The hillsides were more open. The brush hadn't yet advanced into the meadows. Deer crossed the fields intermittently. In the forested valleys, on foggy days, they came down to the creek to drink. On the other days, they waited for the safety of dusk.

When it rains too much, water comes spouting out from the gopher holes that drain the water from the higher hillsides. A good place to find quartz crystals, swept up from the bowels of the earth. Once I found rendered fat in one of the holes. Tiny globules waxing my wrinkled fingers.

My pants of gray and blue woven cotton, made from a remnant my grandmother bought at the Lagunitas church bazaar, were laden with rain, and they hung low on my hips. The chocolate mud bordering the cuffs calligraphed the earth.

And my tennis shoes make squelching sounds as I walk down the path, now a runnel from the runoff. I leave my clothes on the newspaper sheets spread in front of the door to catch the winter's mud. I shed my clothes like the hide of a beast —too much of a hurry, I dry off and sit by the fire.

But it is a landscape of wet and cold that doesn't willingly leave you. My grandmother talks of catching bronchitis and the tiny tubules that everyone in our family seems to have.

In the night I begin to cough, and it goes on and on. We hitch a ride out to the doctor. His office is in Point Reyes Station. It's a long winding road right through Camp Taylor where the redwoods crown the sky, and it is always dusk. 

Over Olema hill, near the crest, there's one small curve, where you get the first glimpse of Tomales Bay. On the flats, we pass drowned artichoke fields, and the old caboose, an abandoned railroad car that still proclaims it is the Point Reyes Library, though the only books it holds are written by the wind whistling through broken windows.

The caboose shares a pasture with a donkey and a goose. The goose is swimming in the volunteer lake at the lower end of the pasture. The donkey's ears are splayed at 30° angles as he huddles next to the caboose wall for shelter. He doesn't understand why his friend seeks out water on a day like today.

The doctor's office smells of alcohol and Pine-Sol. Thick coating on my tongue, dark breath. and roaring ears. I am burning. He says 104°. And the doctor gives me orange-flavored syrup. For years after, I will hate the taste taste of oranges.

I remember Tomales was foggy that day. Trees dripped steadily as condensed fog fell to the ground. I looked up a raindrop on the edge of a leaf, the quavering edge reminded me of a wintergreen potato chip.

Last summer, at Heart's Desire Beach, I kept looking for the secret heart. I thought maybe the inlet was heart-shaped, but no, it was an inlet like any other. Not understanding the metaphor, I wondered what shape did it desire to take on?

A stingray gracefully slid across the shallows of the small lagoon and then settled under the mud, using its wings to sift the mud over its body. Only its pale blue eyes were visible, like two tiny pearls fallen from the sky.

When the sun comes out, the water is like dark forests. It's more like a lake than a bay. But periodic shark reports keep it honest. My eyes are like sharkskin, the color of water on a foggy day.

6/1985
added, rev. 2/18

My breath, uneven

My breath comes in uneven, first, it's a series of shallow breaths, then a ragged sigh, and a big gulp that fills the rib cage. I realize I've been holding my breath again because it helps to hold in all that grief, I have a double lump at the back of the throat.

The doctor said Alice was holding in her grief, and that's why Montezuma's revenge was so complete.

When Jim left, I remembered it was at Christmas, I thought my bowels had found the deepest ends of the earth. I watched the skin loosen, the clothes hanging over the bones and still I didn't let go of the breath.

Maybe I hold onto it because I'd rather die than than let it go as I have grown used to holding it like a familiar, and like a mother I'm afraid to let it out of my sight.

It is difficult to sing when I'm tired. I'm beginning to discover how this tiredness is deceptively masking. The lump in my throat.

I remember Mom saying, don't pout. It makes you ugly. Couldn't she see it was facial muscles straining to keep control, and to keep back the tears? I hum a low tune under my breath. She says, don't hum under your breath. Either sing it out or don't sing at all.

I get back at her. For months I don't sing a thing. But in spite of my resolve, I begin singing again, experimenting singing aloud. Singing, singing. My joy is singing.

Years later Carolyn Couls and I go backpacking in the Sierras and she belts out, the hills are alive with the sound of music, and I drop my trailmix on the ground by the meadow stream. A family comes around the bend and the man says, if you can't let it out here, then you can't do it anywhere at all.

6/28/1985
with Mike Tuggle
CPITS workshop?

RANDOM IMAGES



The inlet wraps around the hills,
like a sweet tongue.

Garlands of oranges on either side.


A bear walks across a landscape
of sunglasses, Coke bottles,
tennis shoes, and popcorn.


The referee holds up
challenging hands
in the winner's corner,
he gives us a kiss hello,
and a kiss goodbye.


A woman in a bathrobe
feeds a cockatiel oranges.
The walls and the couch
are the color of water.


6/1985
probably from CPITS workshop
added 2/18

PATHFINDER

PATHFINDER

Clothed in the rainbow scales of morning
I make sure the paths are kept open
that no errant weeds have choked the pathways
during the night, claiming dominion over my paths.
You see, it is everything for me
to keep these paths of men
and the paths of deer, or even mice, open.
It is my job to help them remember the way
because more than one darkness comes
and the forests and fields eagerly
swallow all traces of trails.
But the soles of the feet remember.
I can hear them coming through the tall grass
like a cipher writing out lost history.
See how they bend in the savanna winds?
So many have already walked
until their souls bled in the snow.

5/31/1985 (in my journal as 6/85)
CPITS with Susan Kennedy & Mike Tuggle

I AM poem, after Amergin

I am listless in the fog that turns green 

as if it were liquid dripping off from the trees. 

I am the pungent breath of hot summer.
I am whispering in the shadows, 

telling everyone’s story to the wind. 

I am bright, green and tender in spring. 

Animals come to my green fingers, 

after a long winter, soft white birds 

binds me towards their mouths.

I am a roaring inferno, an explosion under fire. 

I am the feathers of gray doves, 

drifting and settling on the earth. 

I am dark, the dark comfort of soil, 

which regenerates new growth.

I am the tears of sorrow

pressed into the deep bosom of the earth. 

I am the liquid sun, frozen sun, 

the eyes of tigers, of shadows, 

and bees hide within me.

I am amber worn around the neck of a woman.
I nestle in the darkness, thick dust settles 

until I can no longer see. 

6/85

Susan Kennedy Workshop, Mark West School

this seems like a new poem…

I am the cleaner of artist brushes, 

I am varnish, I am turpentine. 

I am amber resin. I am pine, 

I am forests kneeling before the fire.

6/85

Susan Kennedy Workshop, Mark West School

This was notes from a workshop on Amergin that Susan Kennedy taught at my school, it was either May 84 or June 85. I have a whole bunch of other poems and fragments from June 85, so I’m not sure what year this was written—but they were all written in the same purple ink. This was buried deep in my teaching notes. untranscribed, though all the other ones were in my journal. So it was a surprise to find it. (This is why I have to go through every single piece of paper in my teaching journals). I had money from my CAC grant to bring in guest artists, and both Susan and Mike Tuggle were my guest artist for the year. —MH added 2/24

NAMING MYSELF

NAMING MYSELF

Lost in memory, 
I wander in the jungle 
like Eve in the garden, 
green tendrils caress my ankles. 
Plumaria, fragrant blossoms  
beneath my heel. 
The essence of honey and lemon, 
sweet frangipani.
Parrot feathers in the air, 
raucous blooms in the jungle.

6/1985 
Mike Tuggle CPITS workshop
Mark West School

IN AN OPEN BOAT

IN AN OPEN BOAT

These days just keep going on with no end. 
I keep waiting for the tide to come in. 
and contemplate the deep ripples in the mud. 
Deeper rifts in the Atlantic. The tropics. 
Steam off the surface of the sea at dawn. 
Fish dreams. I awoke, thinking of Gary's
strong arms rowing against a cellophane sea. 
And how we talked of Stephen Crane's story, 
The Open Boat, we were caught in a riptide,
talking of fear and of starvation. 
There is a self-consciousness in fear. 
I kept looking for shark fins 
in his beguiling blue eyes.

6/1985
freewrite
added 2/18
slightly rev.

SPEED OF LIGHT

SPEED OF LIGHT

On blank paper, elephantine themes

walk blind through the night.

Is there a reason for poetry?

Ask Einstein about the relative value

of  daydreaming and he will tell you

the sun’s middle name is water.

Mice, afraid of the light

scatter like dark stars.

I try to decipher the messages

left by their feet in wet snow.

  6/85

NAMELESS IN THE DARK

NAMELESS IN THE DARK

            Poetry is the music of what happens.   

                           —Seamus Heaney

We are nameless in the dark.

I imagine myself as a stalk of asparagus.

Wild sparrows come to feed on my red berries

and weave between the green pillars in the garden.

Parthenogenesis, apartheid, Parthenon.

Gods come to live here in the mud

to separate fact from reality.

What did we cross over to become human?

Here in this room where our hearts

write about what passes,

nonsense is a kind of sense after all.

Cool-headed poets walk

with smoke rising from their feet.

Who slept in the depths of the deep night

whispering, whispering until my eyes were heavy

as gravel beneath the foot of the elephant?

A steady stream of students grab paper

as the words flow like run-off after the storm

Chairs squeak to the counter rhythm

of scraping pencils.

6/85

from a CPITS workshop with Mike Tuggle and Susan Kennedy