LIVING WITH BEARS

LIVING WITH BEARS

We are all immigrants and what sustains us 

is the failure of desire and need.

Each question you resurrect from the debris of childhood

I want to believe in, but I come from a long line

of bear worshippers who survived the potato famine.

I don't eat red meat. Icons in dark niches, guttered candles, 

a menorah, and the ritual of our bodies—

there's always an ocean, a continent, or a lover in the way.

One of the wounded, you're trapped in the dark heat of the city

instead of feasting on onion domes in the Red Square with me.

I taste your words as if they were ripe

huckleberries pale with bloom in late August.

But I'm omnivorous. Did our tongues really find the faith?

We could spend a lifetime looking at the ground, or love.

The phone rings, your exlover reminds me

with silence, of what we have in common.

Kiev celebrates a millennia of civilization.

Sasha says in Russian, There is no verb to be in the present. 

It is understood. We do not live with white bears, 

tovarishchi, are you all capitalists, then?

We are the same people. We are breaking the images.

He says, Afghanistan is Russian for Vietnam,

pulling on a cigarette with his good hand.

An idea called napalm has melted his face.

An American vet trembling like a lover, offers a light, 

and touches his hand, the half-formed word brother on his lips.

The steppes have no natural boundaries.

No more bison, cossacks or mongols sweeping the open plains.

I am lost on the limitless horizon. Mnogaya leta.

Voices sing with the quality of wind on the land.

The future is no more uncertain than the past.

And yes, the failures between us are what we know best.

But even at fifty below, the arctic pools, the polinii

don't freeze over, where in winter the bears come to feed.

Within the earth, wood grows upward without haste & without rest.

Sometimes I hear it in your voice —

vulnerability slips in and we find sum totals

have nothing to do with tenderness or faith.

A brittle sheet of gold foil tremors 

the geography of who we are.

7/28/89

The Paper’s Summer arts issue: Attuned to the Land

The West County Muse

Attuned to the land

POETRY

BY SUSAN KENNEDY

Photo by Maureen Hurley

POETS AMUSING THEMSELVES at the 13th annual Hart Crane Birthday Party (Crane was born 101 years ago, July 21. Left to right: west County writers Ann Erickson, Betty Garrett, Gail King, Hunce Voelcker, Pat Nolan and Paul Mariah.

Forestville poet Maureen Hurley describes her writing as ‘Formed by the bending of land along the fault line where I’ve lived all my life, where, if you put your ribs to the ground in the yellow summer grass, you can almost hear the earth shifting.”

Maureen Hurley, Forestville ("I am a landscape poet; I paint images with words"):

IN MARY BIANCHI'S GARDEN

The Paper’s Summer arts issue: Opening the Mouth: is art relevant to the public?

The Paper’s Summer arts issue: Down the garden path with Kathleen Carr

Down the garden path with Kathleen Carr
BY MAUREEN HURLEY

I met Kathleen Carr at a five-family barn sale during a record three-digit heat wave. The day's total sales amounted to eight dollars. There were no lakers for her wedding dress or my computer.

We swapped tales about where we'd been to and photographed—Galapagos, Nazca, the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, Haleakala, Loch Ness—and had an impromptu art show. The work she showed me—both black and white and cibachrome color prints—was among the best I've seen. One photo in particular, of a forest setting, was magical.

Delicious goosebumps chilled my arms. She said it was of Findhorn. A photo of the late Joseph Campbell, mythologist, also caught my eye. I wanted to know more. And while we munched on rice cakes and nut butter in the hot sun, she told the story of how the photographs came to be.

Stranded for 36 hours at a fork in the road to Amsterdam from Paris in 1972, Kathleen Thormond Cart literally wandered down a garden path that took her from her native California to the communities of Findhom and Esalen and her life's work. Within 15 minutes of hitching on the other road to the ferry to England, she got a ride, and an afternoon visit to the Findhom community in Scotland lasted two and a half years. She never got to Amsterdam.

The Paper’s Summer arts issue: Frank Gannon: after Monet

The Paper’s Summer arts issue: mass produced art

The 69,000th "limited edition" Mass-produced "art" squeezes artists, maximizes profits
BY MAUREEN HURLEY

DIAN SHULKIN points to the high edition number on Bev Doolittle's "Sacred Grounds."
GAIL PACKER explains the finer points of printmaking techniques in her Guerneville studio.

The scenario: You've joined the rank of thousands of would-be art investors and plunked your cash into a "limited edition" Salvador Dali print instead of sinking the money into your IRA account. A few years later you try to sell the print and no one will touch it, noteven the gallery that sold it to you, because it's not worth the paper it's printed on. Your only hope is to unload it on some other unsuspecting slob.

Many gallery owners, picture framers, and artists are grumbling over the current trend of arts consumers buying mass-produced "limited edition" lithographs instead of artist-produced fine-art prints or original art. They says that "limited edition" lithographs are hotter than Sonoma County real estate and middlemen hyping the value of lithographs are making an enormous profit off both the artist and the arts consumer. Artists get cheated out of a living wage and the arts consumer gets stuck with an expensive copy of real art.

Harte Crane’s birthday party photo

Blast from the past: Hunce Voelcker's annual Hart Crane party: Ann Erickson, Betty Garrett, Gail King, Hunce Voelcker, Pat Nolan, Paul Mariah (& me behind the camera, as usual). Hart Crane was born in July 21, 1899, and it says 101 year birthday party, but Hunce died in 1990, so it’s 1989.

Press Democrat, letter to the editor, Celebrate Sonoma forgot the poets

Healdsburg Tribune, Poetry overlooked at Celebrate Sonoma

Poetry overlooked at Celebrate Sonoma

Editor; (This is an open letter to Cindy Paulos and the Celebrate Sonoma Staff): Sonoma County is home to one of the highest per capita of artists in California and the 1989 Celebrate Sonoma/Sonoma County Art Awards ceremony is a brilliant way to honor us. Thank you. I want to commend you on all your hard work on putting together this showcase but I was appalled at the blaring omission of a major fine arts category by your committee. Listed in the program were six musical, five visual artists, nine thcatrc/dancc, three literary arts -- even a restaurant, chef, and cartoon category -- but no poetry! As an active poet, past president of the Russian River Writers’ Guild, the oldest continuous reading series in northern California, and Sonoma/Napa coordinator for California Poet in the Schools with the fourth largest program in the slate, I find this oversight unacceptable. My personal credits include the 1986 San Francisco Arts Commission Bay Area Poetry Award, the 1987 San Francisco Bay Guardian Poetry Awards, the 1989 San Francisco National Poetry Week awards and seven California Arts Council Artist in Residency grants, I find it somewhat ironic my students' artwork graces the cover of the latest LBC Events magazine -- but no poetry. The National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council both support and recognize poetry as a fine arts form along with visual arts, music and performance. There arc literally hundreds of other equally and exceptionally lauded poets in Sonoma County who would have brought honor to your awards ceremony. (A long list of poets followed, edited for space) Telling us to show up at an open mike when you fail to publicly recognize our art form is both an insult and a discriminatory act. Would you expect the Santa Rosa Symphony to do likewise if it were excluded from the list? I strongly urge you to amend this glaring omis sion to one of the largest and prolific communities in northern California by including poetry as an arts category in your 1990 Sonoma Arts Awards. Only in America something base as this could happen. In most countries of the world, Chile and Russia included, poetry is the heart and the breath of culture -- people line up for blocks and for hours to hear their poets read. Without poetry there arc no lyrics, no songs, no theatre, no art! We are our country's poets and deserve to be heard and appreciated. Should you need more information, we would be glad to assist you.

Maureen Hurley, Lynn Watson, Pamela Raphael, Forestville

Petaluma Argus Courier, letter to the editor, Celebrate Sonoma

JESSE RIDING SHOTGUN DOGGEREL

JESSE RIDING SHOTGUN DOGGEREL

Doggerel, catteril, it's the same to me

whether bad verse exumes dead poets societies

or politicians show too much interest

in exposing moral pejoritives. The body pests

are in danger of becoming cockroach battilions

censoring Raid cans in the name of titillations.

Hart Crane had trouble licking

stamps underwater while picking

on suicide as a means to an end of—

Well, that part is censored verbiage—

Mapplethorp syrup under the bridge.

It's the same to me whether or not

police poets piss in the pot

or that god is dog and evil is live—

It's all done with with mirrors.

Jesse Helms has more than that in arrears.

Pass the dog bisquits, please comply.

It has everything to do with ergot on rye.

Way to go. Don't you know, Dude,

they say he feels wrong—

like a dog eating cat food.

2. You're down on your knees
trying to appease the wicked flesh.
The next time you decide to kick ass,
to lick what you see as brass fascism,
remember your kennel is made of glass.
Rescind your transgressions and your sins.
You're caught between a rock and a hard place,
it wasn't the rabbit who won the race,
with Jesse at the helm, a national disgrace.
A scandal you haven't got a handle on
for running on and on at the mouth.
You bet your sweet ass I am.

1989? 90?
Jesse Helm/NEA censorship scandal July 1989
repurposed from Doggerel

DOGGEREL

Doggerel, catteril, it's the same to me

whether bad verse exumes dead poets societies

or politicians show too much interest

in exposing moral pejoritives. The body pests

are in danger of becoming cockroach battilions

censoring Raid cans in the name of titillations.

Hart Crane had trouble licking

stamps underwater while picking

on suicide as a means to an end of—

Well, that part is censored verbiage—

Mapplethorp syrup under the bridge.

It's the same to me whether or not

police poets piss in the pot

or that god is dog and evil is live—

It's all done with with mirrors.

Jesse Helms has more than that in arrears.

Pass the dog bisquits, please comply.

It has everything to do with ergot on rye.

Way to go. Don't you know, Dude,

they say he feels wrong—

like a dog eating cat food.

1989? 

HOUSE BY THE SEA, PT. BONITA

HOUSE BY THE SEA, PT. BONITA
     From paintings by El Meyer & Gail Packer
      Heredity is nothing more than stored environment.
           —Luther Burbank

For years, the Farallones hid the mouth of the Golden Gate
from explorers bearing glass beads and small gifts of death.
The Ohlones & Miwoks thought sailing ships were white birds
rising from the bottom of the sea. So ended
ten thousand years of dancing on the brink of the world.
A carnelian tooth chews on the miniscus of the horizon.
Clouds roil and twist like whitecaps or forgotten dreams
of cypresses testing the boundaries of air.
Redwing blackbirds whistle drills in the cattails
as limed buildings edge nervously into morning.
Ghosts inhabit sheets left out overnight on the clothesline
and the grape squeezes life from red franciscan strata.
An army of geese guard the dark continent.
Steam shimmers on the mirrored beach. Rare shells.
It's a matter of degree whether faith creates
experience, the padres shrugged as Indians died
of the common cold and smallpox. And for miles
the ground was littered with their bones.

7/89

1992 So We Might See in the Desert, CPITS anthology
1990 Poet News/ Sacramento Poetry Review
1989 Green Fuse
1984 California State Poetry Society, First Prize, and Dec. 1994 "Best of the Best" published poems

Stone Soup v1, no2, MoHurley Mary Bianchi, Electric Fire, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Rosale Sorrells.Summer 1989

INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES

INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES
From an etching, After the Flood by April Gornik
There is nothing one man will not do to another.
—Carolyn Forché, from The Country Between Us

No conozco la palabra to say 
I sometimes miss you en español.
It is not malograr or fracasar or perder.
I can't find the words in my language or yours.
I keep remembering what Alberto said:
who I am is not affected by this separation
but I get tangled in painful sheets.
No es dolor, es ensensible! Nothing is exact.
The suffering is also who I am;
turning stones over and over,
trying to fathom below the surface.
If only we could move freely among molecules—
no separation between stone, water and air.
The invisible boundaries that divide us
also contain the vessels of our children—
even the ones we robbed of identity and face.
I struggle with definitions:
go deeper into the idea of word,
primal soup, blue-green algae,
the first I am the world uttered.

I've been throwing the I Ching, finding beauty
in the physical shape of language and square holes in coins.
It keeps coming up the first hexagram, six unbroken lines. 
Tian. Origin. Heaven above, heaven below. 
Pictures echo the history of words,
the name written in English is a pale shadow.
Tian, the ideograph for heaven      
made from man      and     big aspirations.
an,    mountains or a woman      
with a roof over her head
means all is in order. And the last pictograph, 
a double gate      made from the sun.     
Gate of heavenly peace. Tiananmen. 
But six dragons are let loose on the world.

So much gets lost in translation—even from English to English.
The distance between ex-lovers, tricked by language
into believing each was something the other was not.
From the Peruvian Andes to the Amazon, the Apurimac
is so many syllables falling over stone—
the apu, the Inca's holy mountain
and the rimac, the singing or talking river.
Unsatisfied with the first metaphor the world made,
we cannot even talk to each other.

Someone asks me a question in Russian, I answer in Spanish,
not my native tongue. Language dominance confusion.
When you call, I slip back down the throat of darkness.
Climbing the mountains wasn't enough. When all else failed, 
you wanted a madonna/whore to ply you with stinging whips of words
but the communion dress in my closet is brittle with age, 
the lace and horse's sweat on my thighs is caked with dust.
I learn the Russian word Mir is the same for world and peace.
Most is a bridge. What happens on the other side of the world
also affects who we are. I am making a bridge of sacred rocks 
to the cardinal directions because I was undone by the violence 
at Tiananmen Square. I am an artist first; poetry is a translation.
Sometimes, I begin to paint everything red and black
but it tricks me into sky blue and tender lavenders.
People see beauty in my work but I see only death
because I fasten my kimono from right to left,
like that of an exquisite corpse.

The birds are trying to move molecules again.
One breaks through the window screen, 
the other bounces off glass panes
like bullets riccocheting in Lima, Independence Eve.
I cannot go back to who I was and wait
for the day when it no longer matters.
Long shadows of summer solstice, your nameó
one more broken syllable the night whispers.
It's times like this I curse the limitations of gender;
to be nothing more than chattel,
without even a common language between us.
Respira hondo, my masseuse advises me,
plying the muscles of the world with sweet oil.
I give back your blue stone heart.
How easily I was replaced by the one
who wears your daughter's face.

Summer Solstice 1989

RRWG presents a CPITS reading

BUDDHA MOON

BUDDHA MOON

When Neil Armstrong first walked across the face
of the moon twenty years ago did she tremble?
When the astronaut came back from space he was a changed man.
Nothing mattered any more. After all, he'd seen the earth unveiled,
turned a little crazy, and it was like looking into the face of the gorgon.
He saw what we've done to her in the name of civilization,
making the first imprint in thick lunar dust.

In Guatemala, I held a Mayan smoking mirror in my hand,
a piece of fallen star, but you'd already planted another seed.
Did the moon shudder, the way you expect me to nowó
like Chac-mool, who ripped the heart from an unborn sonó
only to wonder why the smell of death greets us in the chaparral?
I am a vessel empty of light. I should have known better
than to trust the sun. When you walk across me,
Luna cries in a language you'll never understand.

Newton said, for every action there is a reaction.
We cannot reconstruct the past to fit our poetic needs,
nor to  ease guilt. Footprints remain after 20 years,
as if it were yesterday, or, only moments before.
Perhaps we should never have crawled out of the broth.
I want to tell the gobies and mudskippers there's been a mistake.
Go back into the ocean, your mother. We can't live on land,
nor breathe the air. In the Galápagos, evolutionary myths
crawled out of the precambrian mind of the sea.
Our lives pass before us in geometric exponentials.
Long after we've gone, life will continue;
another blastopore, in all its variations, germinating.
The goddess is made of basalt like the sea floor.

Off the coast of Japan, two rocks got married
with golden ropes, but the waves threaten to take one back.
They fortifed the islet with steel girders and concrete,
trying to halt another kind of progress.
You understand the bondage part, but not love itself.
The gods of dailiness have swept us bare.
Fallen off from ritual, who are we then?
Danger chose to walk in the form of a pigmentary default,
likening your eyes to the sky. You've found the cliff
to throw me from, and still not satisfied,
you want to barter exquisite corpses for forgiveness.
Your father is dead—his blue eyes beneath the Sea of Cortez—
tell him everything. Perhaps the sea will take you back.
No questions asked. But then, you already saw to that,
shuffling the tarot cards with a dealer's ease
from the bottom of the deck.

5/22/89

WOAD

—for my neighbor of 20 years, George Howell, 
one of the original Dharma Bums (really)

and his Romilar--swigging partner in crime,
Richard Bebe, a good lawyer who 

committed suicide after heart surgery

Wearing a sheepish grin, my neighbor
George who restores antique rugs
heads for the trash bin the back way.
Noting this, I ask, What's in the bucket, shit?
He says, Close. My friend Bebe's wife,
she quit dyeing a while back
and gave me this bucket of indigo
that Ricard had made for me.
If you know anything about indigo—
it's made with piss, fermented camel piss
and the temperature has to be exactly 83 degrees
for the best color, so I waited for the right day—
I sure as hell wasn't going to heat it on the stove—
and I'm out there dipping my wool into the dye
and waiting for it to turn blue…and waiting…
See, indigo is colorless. Only after the wool's
exposed to air for an hour does it turn blue.
Well, I waited for hours and hours.
The wool turned brown, a horrible brown, at that.
It was just a bucket of piss— all that wasted wool.
I guess Bebe had the last laugh on me after all.

revised ever so slightly 2014

WILDCAT BEACH, BELTAINE 5/5/89

Wildcat Beach, Beltaine Silk & dye.

WILDCAT BEACH, BELTAINE

                                — for my students Nat & Erik

At Wildcat Beach I fill pockets with wax opals,

agates and moonstones—pieces of the fallen moon.

Five vultures wheel in a bright sky vibrating

against ruddy cliffs. The ocean eats the strand,

the night eats the sun. We lose track of time.

I point out equus, horsetail fern, ancestor of trees

when the dinosaurs were young. I despair:

so little time to teach the children about life cycles.

I yell at those who want to quit right in the middle of the road—

Five miles is forever. I feel like an ogre yelling at them.

Coddling won't do. No, that’s not it. I was never coddled.

So I tousle their heads, repack packs, clean skinned knees,

offer advice, feed them chocolate—these children I never had—

I am mother without being mother, father without having had one.

It's always a longer walk back, no matter what they say.

I am teacher. I am poet incanting words into true air.

We make a medicine wheel, divide into the four elements,

and writie poetry to the cardinal directions.

One crow commuting up the beach nods to me in flight.

On this side of the San Andreas Fault,

I come to understand the rest is illusion:

Those old generals who set the Gulf ablaze with oil

their dreams are cursed by flames of blue eels

writhing in shallow pools. Fire over water.

I dreamed Easter Island was a mathematical equation of the mind.

Two boys and I sit on the bluffs talking of neutron stars

and the desire for a simple life filled with ritual.

We watch a bonfire blaze on the opposite shore.

Nat says everything has a spirit—even that lupine bush.

They restore my faith, like the white deer who browse

beneath the stars. Recognizing an absence of ritual

in our lives, we seek something unbidden in the moonlight,

in the water and in the ancient eyes of fish.

5/5/89

Unitarian Fellowship hosts non-sectarian poetry reading

Unitarian Fellowship hosts non-sectarian poetry reading

"A Pageant of Poetry" will be held on Saturday, May 20, from 7-10 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 3641 Stony Point Road in Santa Rosa. Sonoma County poets will be featured reading from their latest works. Admission to the event and parking arc free. Sonoma County Poets-in-the-Schools Maureen Hurley and Lynn Watson head the list of readers, which also includes local poets Doug Powell, Lin Max and storyteller Bill Wetmore. Representatives from the Russian River Writers Guild, the Sonoma State University English Department, the Sweet Life Cafe Poetry Scries, Poets in the Vineyards and the Kclmer’s ’’Brewhouse Crew” will also be contributing to the event. This is a non-sectarian event. The public is invited to a tend. Pageant organizers Barry Woelfel is a member of the U.U. Fellowship and a graduate of the SSU English Department. For more information or to volunteer to help, call Woelfel at 578-3446.

MOONSTONES

MOONSTONES

   —to my poetry students

Last night, the same crow 

was commuting up the beach 

headed north, towards wisdom, towards light. 

The idea of a waterfall at the end 

of the mind made sense. 

Lupine and mustard cloak the hillsides.

We sit in a circle, divided by the four directions. 

The sun breaks through the fog like laughter, 

a cacophany of birds. Someone smiles. 

The rocks rise like an island of thought  

shipping the darkness out to sea 

while a student takes small pieces of light—

silver oxide and shadow. 

Mirrors of ourselves on film, in the water. 

The wind fluxes the pond, knitting small ripples,  

something to wear for the day's dance.

So much water in the ocean,

in the air, in us. The sea is our mother. 

I wanted moonstones and found none. 

And then at my feet, the purest white ones I'd ever seen. 

Katie asks why they're called that. I don't know 

Maybe it's because the moon would like to visit us 

right here on this beach, t

his island commuting north to Alaska.

Where the moon feels at home, 

 where tundra flowers dance in summer breezes

where, in winter, mice tunnel under the mystery of snow, 

and darkness takes its own time being born into light.

5/5//89

Wildcat Beach, Beltaine

I accompanied Mark West school teacher, Gerry Crawford, on their annual 5th grade outdoor ed class. The poetry was flowing through me at such a rate, I could barely write it all down.

see later version

WILDCAT BEACH, BELTAINE 5/5/89

Letters to Wm Poole
(somewhere on The San Andreas Fault) May 1989

some line break chances 

ascii hell in progress

KEEPING THE DEAD IN THEIR PLACE

KEEPING THE DEAD IN THEIR PLACE


Have the dead taken Hollywood by storm?
In the Pink Section I read Night of the Living Dead
boosts Nielsen Ratings and Joyce's The Dead
is now playing at the Clay Theatre.
The city of Colma is bursting with landed celebrities:
Emperor Norton, Lefty O'Doul, Ishi, Wyatt Erp, John Doe.
The funeral parlor where we put Mary Bianchi to rest
is now the Petaluma Police station.
Have the cops taken to arresting the dead
for petty crimes against life?
Loitering in the park after curfew without a parade permit,
or driving without a vehicle while under the influence of death?
The police have trouble keeping them behind bars.
They have no fingerprints, no ID, no known address.
What of the half-dead, the brain-dead, the undead,
those dead as a door knob, or those sleeping like the dead?
The one in the White House was secretly dead
for years but he had a good make-up artist.
Soon, they will be wanting voting rights
and you know what that leads to.
Ma Bell foresees a unique eleventh-hour monopoly
on long-distance surcharges to the dead.
The IRS is interested in repossessing hell bank notes
but doesn't stand a ghost of a chance.
American Express and Club Med are working out
the details of an earlybird pre-payment plan
so those who beat the rap can have their R & R
on some island hideaway. DOA Anon has sprung up
across the country. All these perks—
too late for poor old Mary Bianchi
who was a gardener right to the very end.


5/4/89

1990 Green Fuse  or 1989?

This is what happened when I read the Sunday paper...