On the Gringo Trail, The Paper, May 10, 1990

LARGO DESOLATO

LARGO DESOLATO

While drying my face in the shower mirror 

I cursed you because each time the phone rings 

that click severs me like stilettos

Maybe it isn't your X who hangs up each time;

but once she screamed how you beat her

and was I satisfied? As if I had done the act.

Once you and I licked sweet poems,

anchoring them firmly with stamps,

pony-expressing our hearts with postage due.

Damned if I didn't curse you  

and the mirror fell off the wall

dividing my face like the San Andreas Fault.

And I don't know if it's you or me

who is destined to serve time.

Blame it on a bad crop of chardonnay,

unseasonable rain, a ruined harvest—

but life is like that.

We're experiencing a drought

and no one is conserving water,
 not even the moon.

When my mother's lover died

I hated him in the way only a 12-year-old 

who saw the ugly evidence, could.

The way he used her, unforgivable even in death. 

But I had to allow my mother a refuge of memory 

resurrected in her fulcrum time of need.

Grief polishes the facts until they outshine themselves. 

But silver tarnishes in sunlight,

in drawers and in the cavities of desire.

5/9/90

line breaks

Mark West Student Art Show at the California Museum of Art

Stacking Wood for Celia

This room, with its indirect morning light is a permeable membrane. We bring with us the burden from earlier fire unwrap genetic coals.  A place-holder for an idea we can't quite let go of. Late at night, with little else to sustain us, words burn across the page. Thoughts pour down the arm to flood the pages. The extension of a tongue, of mind.  Boundaries of skin translate the air with origins.

Michaelangelo must have laughed as he lay on his back staring at the stucco vault of the Sistine Chapel. Adam reclined as God pointed the finger at him in the act of inspiration. 

How many times has someone fingered another with this simple gesture? 

Not a judaskiss, but of open betrayal. Contemplate the blank page, fill it with fingers pointing accusingly in every direction begging for perfection, or for some form of enlightenment.  The page kindles memory of the first fires.  What did they call those who kept the hearth fires lit? Words blossom tenderly.  Small bison thundering to the edge of the precipice.

The distance between love and death is life.  This casual stacking of words forms a nucleus to spend a lifetime decoding.  Something preternatural about the fall, the quickened night brings the idea of order, and stacks them like wood against the shed for the coming winter. Leaves of so many books, unwritten, trees have achieved the purest state, waiting to combust the stories of the sun when it forgets to return from that longest night. They burn steadily, singing a lifetime of cycles. This final combustion arcs across our eyes and glows under the skin.

In front of the bricked-up fireplace, Celia keeps a branch of long-needled pine from the mountains. Without flame, each night, as she writes, the branch inches steadily towards completion. The burden of self, in all its variations, seeks the next unbearable plateau.  Nothing is permanent or written in stone.  Rocks have been known to immolate. Ancient Anasazi petroglyphs of the sun spiral westward on the tufa cliff. Mount St. Helens rained down for weeks after, the gentle rain of ash, a cowl covering the cars. The urge for purification takes the form of silica: Trees, rock, this window.

My fingers found the hearts of sea anemones blossoming in the tidal zone. The soft pleasure of their tug, spicules made of silica. I stuck my tongue into their mouths, felt them prey upon my nipples.  My hand, shot through with light, pointed accusingly at the page (or was it the other way around?).  Darkness defined itself in the form of transparent hunger.  This room, a hunger.  Mitochondria haploiding in the mother ocean trapped within the cell. This room is a net, the nascent ear of a shell dervishing the stories.  Our job begins.  Late at night Celia writes: a candle, a cigarette, the glass of wine, the illusion of red.

In the larger rooms of angels, the new and old worlds are no different than the moon.  Stories leak from the cupboards of the mind and stain the page. The paper knife left a halo on Father Connery's deskblotter.  The knife resembled the one in the Sacred Heart—disembodied, floating through religion like a sword.  I was wounded the way cousins are when they finger and stroke the swelling edges of taboo. The "S," a betrayal of the word:

He loved death more than me, slipped back into the bosom of the sea. The cold rain of memory crests each wave of thought .The half-life of yesterday approaches the gardens of sleep, takes root, finds the fertile fields of imagination lonely for the dream’s embrace. I had no reason to face the dawn, my prince of tides returned to the sea. My legs ached as I crossed the floor, though I cried, no fins appeared. Reality bent itself toward sleep. Small mermaid, I carried the burden of that night home to the dream’s final sea.

The partnership of ink and paper is a kind of love.  Sometimes peace defines itself in the steadying rhythm of someone sleeping in the next room late at night.  Walls can't contain these words, a release from the prison of dailiness.  We harvest them. The herders and the hunters tending the flock, dressed in the skins of both the wolf and the sheep.  That tension urges us onward.

Mules in love with the idea of cliff trust the small blind eyes in their hooves.  In the jungle, the eyes on my shoulder blades opened for the first time.  The guerrilla slipped from tree to tree.  The hairs on the back of my neck pointed accusing fingers.  The eye on top of our heads takes dictation from the sky.  Locked in rooms, transparent, wall-less, but within walls, we, the keepers of tribal memory.  The air, a tangible weight of limbs pressing down. I climbed the temples of the new and the old world.  Others have punished stones into the air in order to write upon the sky.

Does the plant by the sealed fireplace despair, the evidence of its evolvement—a dead pine bough? Does it give up the struggle, cease to produce chlorophyll because everything dies?  Transmutation is too close to mutilation and mute.  Throw white stones onto the hardwood floor. Study the patterns.  Do it again on grass, on sand, on the Persian carpet The Sistine chapel rose up in mute attestation toward God. The underbellies of stones are secretive, full of promise.

No idea, ca 1990? 92?  Prosepoem 86-90

CPITS reading and art exhibit at Barnes & Noble

RRWG reading, Burbank Activity Center

RRWG reading at the Burbank Activity Center, Elizabeth Herron, Lynn Watson, Maureen Hurley

Computer Special, The Paper, Mar 22, 1990

12th Annual Slugfest!

That's me with the camera making a face.

 

TWENTY YEARS AGO

TWENTY YEARS AGO
       —to William T. Wiley

You made a small watercolor sketch
of my grandmother's house
from the ridge, canted chimney,
red walls against the green valley
and I wanted it for her
but the child riding a red horse
past your house each afternoon,
too shy to knock at the door,
is gone now, like all the rest.
Today it is raining, it could be any day.
Exhile is a sleek river, and this poem,
a small, nagging seasonal thirst.

3/14/90

Petaluma School District inservice

USSR journal, home again

Jan 28. When I returned home, I feasted most delicately on salmon flambéed with Madeira, garlic and soy, with sautéed red bell peppers, mushrooms, and crisp baby asparagus, washed down with a new Chardonnay. I finished my meal with Russian cognac spiked with Ukrainian cherries—the ones Dr. Shpak’s wife sent me. I was the unfortunate American who was so ill with the Moscow grippe while in Cherkassy, I need shoring up to build up my fortitude. She sent me remnants of deep summer locked in a jar.

I wear an antique embroidered Ukrainian linen dress, freshly laundered, and bleached, the pre-revolutionary stains of age give it character. In this case, it means the bloody revolutionary history of 1917. Coral beads about my neck, and Russian gold hearts on chains in my ears. You can feel spring in the air. And the end of an era.

I’m watching Rumpole of the Bailey on PBS, eating chocolate-filled biscuits, I wonder how soon Oleg would adapt to this lifestyle, this veritable harvest, so easily obtained from the local supermarket where I just had a ridiculous joust with the young greengrocer, asking him when’s the last time he had a real food fight. He said, many years.

The conversation must have released some latent teenage impulse in him because the overripe avocado I handed to him, he lobbed at the poor woman who bakes the breads and cakes I eat. She takes it all in stride. This hijinks. I don’t think she’s had a good food fight in years either. We all laugh. Lob grapes. We Americans are like spoiled children. We easily find mirth in the oddest of circumstances.

In my shopping cart, the evidence of tonight’s meal. I utterly splurged, I was a decadent westerner, and bought $91 worth of food with my valuta, my hard currency—more than what I spent during an entire month in the USSR. I’m in shell shock looking at all the bounty— after a month of deprivation during the darkest time of the year, I want to eat everything. My greed is insatiable and knows no bounds.

USSR journal, at the Hermitage

21 Jan. The dancers floating in blue air. The musicians on the opposite wall play panpipes and violins while a woman arranges fruit. Fruit trees in full blossom, pears, apples, a wicker-bottom chair. The dancers hide behind each painting. I can’t believe I’m standing in a room with all these Gauguins. A young girl with the basket on her hip, another playing the flute. Islands floating in a vermilion sea. An orange mongrel by the copra jar pricks up his ears, as if listening to the music. An axe by the man’s leg, like a bone. The trees are dancing, supple arms across the distant verdure. A man drinks from a half coconut. In the background, a woman squeezes fruit into her mouth, but she is fully clothed, lying back. Sunset in candy pink and pale chrome greens. How lovely the faces of the women by the cross. Vermilion leaves, breadfruit like large breasts. A woman eating a mango, juice runs down her chin. Lilies like strange goblets, red water lilies drifting in the pond. A child is playing in the blue canoe. One red leaf quivers in the shade, such Tahitian Pastorales. Nature is just a decoration for the painting to exist. I break my reverie, take in the incredible room. This palace. People lived here too. Outside the warped window, falling snow on the winter palace of Leningrad. It fell then, when Peter the Great stood in this room overlooking the Neva River. It’s falling now.

USSR journal, at the Pushkin Museum

20 Jan. At the Pushkin Museum, I gaze upon Matisse’s still life with a goldfish and I burst into tears. I want to be alone with all that color and eat it from a spoon, midwinter in Moscow where everything is dirty. White and grey. A goldfish mouthing pure color. Goosebumps on my arms, the wash of green philodendron, and that wicker chair. I swoon. Nothing can prepare me for this raw gorgeousness, and the tangerine fish.

Nasturtiums and the dance, the magenta and all that blue, the shadows of dancers on the wall, dancers floating, floating world, the chair knows no other life. Rosseau’s jaguar is still attacking the horse, white blossoms a trinity of birds, and the knowledge of blood. So much for the peaceable kingdom.

I feel like I have found old friends, Matisse, Renoir, Monet. I gaze upon seagulls, a sketch of the Houses of Parliament, Rouan Cathedral. Luncheon in the Open Air.  But I love the approximations of  the titles—translation from English into Russian and back into English. Sometimes I have to guess what the title is in English. Dégas—Rehearsal of the Ballet but they spell it Rechursal. Cezanne’s colors are so bright, peaches and pears abundance. Mt. St. Vittoria. .

Picasso’s a violin and a Spanish woman from Madrid. They embrace. Matisse’s fabric, the children stare at the artist’s studio. Because it was so blue. Maybe Pablo could only afford one color plus black and white. And the wandering acrobats. Zorah on the terrace with the fish, and a pair of slippers.

Matisse’s color palette. Again. Entering into the casbah, ghost figures and all the lights of Morocco is loosened at once on the unsuspecting eye. All that blue. I imagine they will have an after hours party when we are all gone for the night.

Vincent Van Gogh View of Arles after rain. Those red vineyards at Arles, and then Lautrec. Notice details I have never noticed before. Venus is missing her left nipple. Her skin is etched, she has a headache. Why doesn’t she smile? Even her eyebrows are drooping.

Gauguin’s What, are you jealous? A breast raises to the sun. Perhaps the air is cold. On the tree, a carved heart and arrow, A whippet looks around, two bottles, on the eaves, a man leans towards two women. Yes? I begin to understand why the Russians all ran off to Paris and to the south of France—the light, the inescapable light is like a character in a novel.

USSR journal, Moscow

Jan 20. Moscow. We rise late, talking all hours, two curious creatures. Sasha Karpenko‘s apartment with its tall ceilings, white lace curtains, is a place out of time, and outside large snowflakes feathering Moscow, and all of the Russias, is equally unreal.

It’s been days since I’ve written in my journal. As usual, there is never enough time. We have a stolen week together, living like a couple, and he puts his arm around me on the metro, strong, and sure like I had imagined, so the fairytale comes through.

Oleg discusses plans with Sasha who has a performance tonight at the Ministry of Culture. Today we will go to museums. Then to Sasha’s performance. Late start it’s nearly 1 PM but we awoke at 11:30. In winter we are bears under the covers, the animal comfort of bodies touching. We are different together, alone —no Nadia hovering over us. Cherkassy seems so far away indeed.

He gets up to find a phone number, familiar footsteps. We settle down quickly to the business of living. It’s so easy, as if we’ve done it all our lives. I wonder where the lines of division will fall as they always do. Where will the small irritating instances arise? Human nature being what it is. What will make us cross with each other?

I don’t want a relationship like he has with Nadia. I don’t think it’s possible. We were never fall into the same traps. How angry he was when she started treating him like dirt again. I don’t understand the relationship at all. And neither does he. How she alternately hates him than his affectionate it doesn’t make sense.

As Oleg and Sasha talk, I can understand enough Russian to know what they’re saying. Yesterday we went to AlphaGraphics to Xerox some poems. They were Macs and LaserWriter and faxes there. I was in hog heaven. Yesterday was an electronic day. Before that, we went into the  offices of SF/MT to pick up email. We met the general director who assured us we could hook the US Robotics modem up in a couple of weeks—yeah, maybe. Nothing ever works out how you plan it in the Soviet Union.

Jana Janus gave me the phone number of a publisher in Leningrad. Tonight we catch the train to that fabled city. The only way to get things done around here is to go in person, it seems, and it always helps to have a bribe on hand. But never called it a bribe. It’s a gratis gift. Paying it forward as it were.

We wait around for hours in Sasha’s apartment. I finally threw a fit before we can escape to the Pushkin Museum. I did not come all this way to hang out in his apartment. I feel badly, throwing a fit, but because I’m being too polite, and compliant, I get myself into these jams. And then I’m fit to be tied. I hate it when other people control my time. I thought I was going to blow a gasket.

Half the day is gone, and then Sasha wants me to come to an Afghani veterans poetry performance afterwards. My day has been inefficiently planned by someone else. We did manage to get to the Pushkin Museum, and to also attend Sasha’s event. I’m glad we did because it was big deal—a massive hall filled with adulation. For poetry! Sasha is like a rock star. I had no idea.

USSR journal, setting up the modem

12 Jan. The children woke up quarreling today, it’s drizzling, I’m drenched in sweat from the night before. I stayed up late reading and woke early. My back is unstable and keeps popping was it when the chiropractor came over and threw me about like a sack of potatoes. And I feel rotten. Oleg fries eggs and kilbasa each morning for breakfast—it makes me nauseous.

When I was showing Oleg how to use the modem, Nadia came in and was hanging all over him. And he was translating everything I said to him, how it worked, etc., and I was getting furious. I was having a hard enough time showing him, remembering all the steps, and it was a distraction that I didn’t need.

She sensed my anger and left. I felt badly, and explained that when I’m giving technical information I can’t handle a three-way conversation—especially a bilingual one. He apologized kissed my hand. He’s very sick, chills, but we go downtown to make phone calls.

Finally we get through to Pan Am to change my airline tickets to the 26th. Now we have to deal with visas all over again. Verlinski won’t give me the Leningrad visa, or is just seriously stalling, saying if I were here on a personal invitation I could easily get a visa. I’m going insane from all this bureaucracy.

When we finally get through to SF/MT, the original number I had, no one answers. Oleg tries the Institute for audio information and gets the number. We get another bureaucratic run around in supreme Soviet style. I am ready to thrash someone, threatening to make trouble on both sides of the ocean. But getting sick take some of the piss and vinegar out of me.

I manage to write the modem article for Rotor. The photos I wanted to use didn’t come out. I could’ve done more, but being sick definitely cramps my style.

USSR journal, National Writers’ Union, Cherkassy

11 Jan. We are being taped for a radio show on the importance of cultural dialect and my impressions of the Ukraine. Only two men seem interested in our poetry project, both, Jewish. Oleg complains that the average age when someone joins the Writers’ Union is about 45. Most men are in their 60s. Almost no women, so I’m an odd duck here.

Dr. Shpak introduces us. For some reason he’s adopted me. The only thing is, Oleg  knows more about the project than he does, and I am uninspired. How to handle this so that Oleg interprets without offending anyone. And Dr. Shpak seems to draw considerable respect here. I am drained, feeling off. I didn’t bring my poetry or translations with me.

12 Jan. On Thursday we went to Dr. Shpak‘s for dinner and I threw up the next morning—a combination of alcohol, and the beginnings of a cold but I didn’t know that yet. I thought I was just sore from the chiropractor/surgeon who threw me around the room like a sack of potatoes.

14 Jan. My general low energy has finally declared itself in the form of a cold. La grippe, as they call it. Dr. Shpak came over yesterday with a doctor, armed with a huge Ukrainian care package, pickled watermelon, pears, summer cherries, and raspberry jam for my tea. The local cure.

I ached so much yesterday, there was no relief, and my temperature was way below normal. Turns out Oleg’s cold is bronchitis. The doorbell is always ringing. And I’ve been too tired, too lethargic to record my dreams, but yesterday I woke up to the Andean melody I had heard so much in Cusco, and then I knew I’d come full circle.

When the doctor entered, small pieces of a dream fell into place. And we were talking about the analgesic she had left me and I wanted to know why all these people crowded around the bed, the dream was all coming true, but I was too sick to remember much more. The strange ritual of cupping—glass bubbles are heated with a candle and placed on my back—seems to help ease the congestion. Soviets take illness very seriously here. It’s a matter of life and death.

USSR journal, Coup in Baku?

We barter Pepsi for vodka, for lack of hard currency, we barter Marlboro cigarettes for taxis, and hotel rooms. The Soviet Union is in crisis. The newspaper is on strike. From crisis comes new solutions. Five years of political reform. Power translates from the state to the populace. When will people take responsibility? Gorbachev introduces a multiparty system. Ideas, not solutions. Political and economic change is in the air. Someone tells me that Gorbachev is another Abraham Lincoln. Another asks if he will be shot for his beliefs? Each day, so much tension, each day, a blessing. Unrest in Azerbaijan and Armenia. So many dead. A coup in Baku?

USSR journal, Lost in translation

10 January, Igor asks what about money for poetry? He says he needs more Sonoma County poems to translate. He wants a penpal. I think he thinks he’s going to strike it rich with us. Rotor magazine said it will donate a computer to Igor for this project. His self-importance needs no translation.

The club is busy with translating sci-fi stories. Famous people like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke. I tell them that I can publish their Soviet poems translated into English in Green Fuse, Poetry USA and feature their work on KPFA, in a radio review. There is no money in it for them. I tell them that we need 17 to 20 poems that will represent Cherkassy. Everybody is sitting back on their laurels. Rotor promises that it will make a Cherkassy equivalent of Poetry USA, publishing California poets in translation.

Igor’s mother hands him a jar, he fills with piss as they discuss the problems of publishing. I’m so frustrated, I want to scream, and quit the program. His loving parents remove the jar of piss, don’t know what to make of that. Try not to think of it. But it is an apt metaphor.

We drink thick marsala and coffee, eat awful Soviet chocolate and discuss poetry. Oleg calls Professor Shpak who translated Thomas McGrath into Russian, to say that we’re running late. I’ve been a crab all day, snapping at everyone. The doctor who adjusted my back, threw me across the bed as if I were a sack of potatoes. I hurt more now than I did before. We are at loggerheads with so many different systems colluding.

His mother, in a blue house dress, sits on the floor next to the Cyrillic typewriter. I think she thinks she’s his agent. How to explain to them that we poets don’t have groups, we don’t have sponsors, and bank accounts. We poets work alone, without pay. Without censorship. Someone mentions Jesse Helms. I have to convince them that this is an altruistic cultural exchange.

Earlier, Oleg and I worked on a poem. The problems of translation make themselves apparent. I understand a few words like dollar, Marina, conversation. The nuances of language I understand, please—everyone is talking all at once. Everything takes longer than expected. The autonomy of two separate groups standing on a 70-year-old cultural bridge that cannot be crossed. Window to the west, indeed.

I leave Igor’s, dissatisfied. So little was accomplished. They are too afraid to publish our poems for fear of censorship, they become their own worst enemies, censoring themselves. How the hell is perestroika supposed to work if everyone is so timid? What next? I need a publisher here as well, apparently. I’m a little annoyed—getting work published here isn’t my responsibility, it’s their’s.

We are running late for every meeting, getting nowhere fast, we are more and more off schedule. Oleg says it’s fine, we’re on Soviet time. Dr. Shpak is next. Perhaps we will do better with him. We need several pans in the fire to accomplish anything at all which only leads to more confusion.

When John Masura told me about Dr. Shpak it sounded like a good connection. Oleg made a face and suggested that Dr. Shpak was a little bit crazy. Called me a proletariat a American poet, and mentions his book. What the hell is a proletariat American poet anyway?

Maybe Dr. Shpak is crazy, but he did translate Thomas McGrath‘s Letter to an Imaginary Friend, into Ukrainian, which sold a whopping 50,000 copies. That’s not slouching, and he has been working on an anthology, Istoriya Amerikanskoy poesii XX stolitia (1912-1945).

Vetted writers like Whitman, Twain, Frost, and London are accepted in the USSR—McGrath is neither mainstream nor safe. The common denominator is love of land, I think. And Marxism. McGrath was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.Valery mentions an essay of his, A Soviet View on McGrath, published in the North Dakota Quarterly. Tells me to contact Fred Whitehead in Kansas City.

But he is also querying me on the American poets of the 1980s. I share what books I brought, an armload from City Lights, and Zeitgeist Press, including David Eggars. Mostly Beat or street poets vs. the academic, mainstream, or Iowa workshoup poets. Apparently the Beats are contraband.

Later, Oleg realized that Dr. Valery Shpak is OK. And I make a mental note that I mustn’t trust his judgment of people so implicitly. He’s not always right— even if he lives here. Old habits die hard.

(Later they will translate one of my “proletariat American” poems into Ukrainian. I have no idea if it was ever published.)

USSR journal, Russian New Year’s, Eve, Scrying the future

Scrying In the mirror at midnight I am waiting for the future to arrive but I don’t know when midnight is. Oleg and Nadja practice traditional witchcraft in the middle of the Ukraine. I light candles and study my face and eyes in the mirror, black as midnight, I’m dressed in Ukrainian clothing.

Midnight eases past us. I see nothing in the mirror except myself. They tell me to look deeper. I am on my own future. This comes as no surprise. Even at 37. Why did I almost write 38? I am beautiful. Age is a transitory process. We are all tunnels of wind embodied into the future.

Oleg comes in. Is he my future? With the camera he records the past – a red light. Power, slow shutter speed. And I am writing sweet nothings, red cheeked. I give him instructions on how to use the camera. It is customary to take a bath at midnight. The only thing moving is this pen. Stillness in the air. Oleg admonishes, never sit with your back to the window, like the advice aJapanese woman once gave me – never sleep with your head at the foot of the bed. Luck is related to good health.

Nadja turns on the TV, hard rock and roll, the ghostly glow of the TV, spirits imprisoned in the past, travel through galaxies. Russian TV, American TV, the plethora of languages equates the soul of space. Andromeda watches this small patch of community via the electromagnetic spectrum. But Oleg came into the room after midnight, so is he Nadja’s future instead?

I am a little drunk, but I spent the morning crying, feeling sorry for myself, and feel I deserve at least this much. We drink cognac and eat German chocolate, telling fortunes. It’s too close for comfort. Sorrow, yes that stuff that epics are made of. Who am I here, again in Russia, in the Ukraine, an Irish-American woman writing small nothings in a journal in red ink at midnight. Bell, book, and candle.

Not sure of the date, Jan 9? 11?

• USSR journal: Frankfurt to Moscow, after the solstice
• Divided Christendom Comes Together for Christmas, ...
• USSR journal, home again
• USSR journal, at the Hermitage
• USSR journal, at the Pushkin Museum
• USSR journal, Moscow
• USSR journal, setting up the modem
• USSR journal, National Writers’ Union, Cherkassy
• USSR journal, Coup in Baku?
• USSR journal, Lost in translation
• USSR journal, Russian New Year’s, Eve, Scrying the...

TWO FRAGMENTS

DREAM FRAGMENT

After dark, the plans of thieves are revealed.

Who is the redheaded man tracking me in sleep?

He says, From the back of the moon I've come

to see the unholy light in your eye. My eye?

Besides these words, what beast has escaped

to wrap me in Mobius strips of time?

1990

When I think of life, I think of light.

The I Ching warns: at the solstice,

unexpected darkness returns.

It tells me begin anew at every ending,

to respond to his influence like ripened fruit.

Those who are meant for him come of their own accord.

1990

Sonoma County Community Foundation Literary Fellowship winners

Sonoma County Community Foundation Literary Fellowship winners:  Barbara Foote, Mikle Tuggle, Pat Nolan, Maureen Hurley and Marianne Ware.

I was awarded two SCCF writer's fellowships in 1990 and 1992. Not too sure which one this is. I think it's 1990.

USSR journal, New Year’s Day, 1990

I promised myself I would write in my journal every day – so much has happened, it’s hard to write about life when you’re preoccupied with living it. Pigeons peck at the small curtains of snow. The woman stops to watch, children follow their teacher down the street. Snow falling in large constellations, drifts across uneven pavement, eddies and swirls. In the corrugated iron troughs of roofs, the liberation of snow is an illusion through lace curtains. Cut somewhere between the intersection of prose and poetry, I too am held captive by glass, by my own choosing. Nadja puts her head in her hands, her glasses utter a sharp staccato. I cannot even ask her what is wrong because the man we share has gone off to work. I’m going as stir crazy as she is. His hand, a silk cup thirsty beneath my nightgown. Desperation has developed tiny claws and like burs we transport it from room to room until there is nowhere left to go. Even inside this house, snow collects, migrating slowly towards death. The sugar in my coffee harbors an eventual madness, measured in small increments and hoarded like the coffee, long invisible lines are waiting at our door. Who lined up all the birds in the sky? The dead pigeon on Arbat, feet up, a dark question in the snow. People wander in clusters, shapeless bundles of darkness, mammalian consequences. My camera can only witness so much. The thirsty, dry dust will not drink again until the next fall. The snow cannot enter the heart of winter, indifferent. Snow gathers in the gutter like cottonwood down back home in spring, but I am always comparing one thing to another—even the soft cheese they eat with sugar reminds me of snow.

Cherkassy, Ukraine

• USSR journal: Frankfurt to Moscow, after the solstice

SALVAGE JOB

Another page falls from the calendar.

My ex-lover writes he named the unborn son Isaac.I fall for another man named Isaacson
and dream of a boychild with one arm missing.
During the steep night, owls shift seasons
with the moon. No secrets kept from stones.

When a student asks: do you know Dr. Whitte, the poet?
I'm stunned: a hole slowly fills in on itself.
From that spring visit to his table a half-life time ago,  
small venial stars festered in my womb.
Nearly dying, I've long since paid for my sins.
I no longer trust the sun; we've killed the earth with love.

...missing text

My dreams tell me to dig deeper into the earth 
as if my life depended upon it. I am carnelian & lapis.
Beneath the bridge I find jasper and rare shells.
Tremulous mudflats, every inch alive with invertebrates.
Though no longer in love with the idea of love
I still crave chocolate in late afternoon.


I cannot see ahead, but I remember the past.
I comb the wind with fingers of the dead.
I cannot see the past, but I remember the future.
Is there a reality, and who is to answer?
Seeking islands of refuge, we bleed back into the sea.
Tidal interstice, seasons drift, clouds hold no answers.


This time, I won't open like a flower.
This time, I will endure blossoming stones.


1989/1990
rev. 1992

FIRE POET OF SPACE

FIRE POET OF SPACE

I am sure of the inner fire burning 

always among the embers of night.

Longing for the clear water of reason,

I migrate upstream, a salmon 

under the moon of the dark sea.

I move among the fury of ideas with the ease of light.

Only I know the meaning of smoke, of asteroids,

of black origins, the honeyed death of topaz,

the first "I am" life uttered from the promordial soup.

No one can diminish me for I am more than

the archer who shoots the flame,

the fire in the head, the saggita

galloping through forests

like an eagle hurling from the east

with eyes of bitter yellow

illuminating the darkness

though the path is not marked.

89?

Nick Valentine, Zoe Griffith-Jone The Paper (photos) no date

Sketches for Talking Leaves poem poster

Talking Leaves poem here

Outakes from Country of Origin, etc., to recycle

Press Democrat shoutout Some of the most interesting writers...

Apparently I got a Press Democrat shoutout, and never even knew it. “Some of the most interesting writers in the Press Democrat aren’t in the newspaper business.” The double truck spread ran from Dec. 28, 1989, to Jan 4, 1990

USSR journal: Frankfurt to Moscow, after the solstice

12/28? Gray sky follows us halfway around the world, a light snow falls in Frankfurt. Women are dressed in furs, the real stuff. At the Moscow airport we circle, see the sunset again and again and again. Two animated things frantically move like oil derricks, or wiggling dogs in red and white. Sudden realization of manic radars scanning the airwaves.

A light burns a field of snow. White trunks of birches at twilight, like ghosts. What was it that haunted me so as a child? Why was I so filled with such fear by the ghostly apparitions of tree trunks, otherworldly glowing wood phosphor?

I land in the heart of the beast again, I’m in Russia, twice in a lifetime. I expected nothing. Do I go on to meet a lover, or is that too, something in the past? Everything is gray as the Berlin Wall.

A woman from Poland talks to me about being a stranger in her own native land after a year in America. She has mixed feelings about returning to the land of bears—as do I. The runways shine like glass, shifting snow, directional wins. It’s five below zero, the captain says. Am I really inside the heart of the beast again?

Reading a spy book about Moscow, I arrive properly steeped in myth/truth, Pravda. I’m here on a business visa this time. Did I write that Sasha Karpenko went with us to the Soviet Embassy on Christmas morning? It was a poet who got us our visas— he helped to sway the Ukrainian with puppy dog eyes, he was 6 foot 6, whose last name Suchkov, Sasha translates as a bundle of twigs or switches.

I buy cigarettes to bribe taxis and I write in red ink. Everything here is called krashnaya this or that, which means red and beautiful. It means nothing if everything is red.

The rings of Moscow. Bull’s-eyes. Many American students arriving to Moscow. I want to know how come they’re all here now? John Masura is being enigmatic, he’s depressed perhaps. It’s more than a lack of sleep, there’s a wall between us. Perhaps we got too close.

When we enter into the Moscow airport we are shepherded into a long circular corridor lined with glass. Circular like the outer wings of Moscow. A babushka mutters a few words. We wait in line with documenti. The lines in Russia or as ubiquitous as birches in winter. I can’t help but think of Zhivago’s Peredelkino, a place where I’ve never been. This country that reveres its poets but muzzles them into silence. Tavarichi, the announcer says. The communist term, though officially not in use, is common.

The land of sable hats and defecting spies. The businessman behind me pulls out a flask of vodka from his coat and transfers into an inside pocket with practiced indifference—it is a movement most familiar to him. His posters are wrapped in newspaper from Beijing. Flying east after the solstice, the night is a hungry tiger that follows us down, and sunset follows us in rapid sequence. No white nights here. And I’ve had no sleep for 24 hours or more.

12/29  Small sparrows huddle on the Kremlin wall. Misha said, when I was four, I asked Breszhnev’s guard if he was a sparrow. My mother was paralyzed with fear. A sparrow is an informer. The banks of the Moscow River are made of the bones of the worker, he says. Now, Sakharov is considered a God. You have to die first, then you’ll be famous at 95.

We passed a dead pigeon in the snow on Arabat Street. Marina Tsarina’s sister sits on a bench reading poetry. Pigeons gather at her feet. Near Gorky Street, a woman is carrying a mesh bag of potatoes—survival food. When you have friends, you have everything. We have what is called the Bears gift. Sometimes we call it wooden rubles. For example, we supply Cuba with snow removal equipment. And we send cars with heaters to the desert. Vessels without refrigeration to Saudi Arabia.

Misha introduces us to a philosopher friend from Azerbaijan. He lives in a writers’ cooperative. He says everything is free of charge here, but you have to pay for it. Red carnations under glass by the street corner heated by votive lights to keep from freezing. Socialist altars. We’re watching Soviet  TV, counting the Rumanian dead. Real candles lit on the tree. The last three months of the decade, the most fantastic. We are sentenced to understand each other, he says. Nosdrovia, and drinks another shot of vodka.

Divided Christendom Comes Together for Christmas, Russia, The Paper, Dec 21, 1989

Press Democrat, Gaye LeBaron, USSR, Sasha Karpenko, Maureen Hurley

I never even knew that I made a dubious honorable mention in Gaye LeBaron’s Notebook, a Press Democrat column on my dealings in the USSR, an event with Sasha Karpenko at The Sweet Life Cafe.

Getting a Christmas Tree in Sonoma County, long version, no tear sheet

SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

One Christmas we had two trees. At the tender age of five, I was scandalized when my grandmother brought home a madrone tree instead of the usual Christmas tree.

Already on shaky ground with the concept of Santa Claus not fitting down the stovepipe, I was convinced it was an unwritten sin NOT to have an evergreen tree.

I wasn't prepared to let go of the Christmas Tree symbol, so I trudged up the hill and dragged home a spindly Douglas fir that was more seedling than tree.

The two trees stood side by side, my tree too weak to hold ornaments or lights, and the red skinned bare-branched madrone aglow with silver glass balls and birds.

I begrudgingly admit her tree was beautiful but it just didn't feel right--like a dog eating cat food.

If you're wondering why the tradition of Christmas trees arose, it's a remnant of a pre-Christian symbol, like Easter eggs and Hallowe'en.

In the Nordic countries of Europe, when a house was built, a pine tree was tied to the eaves or chimney to ensure good luck. In the Ukraine and many parts of Russia, the fir tree, covered in red bows, was used for wedding processions and festivities.

During the mid-winter holidays, pine and fir boughs were spread on the floors and other evergreen plants wreathed around each window-—perhaps to remind the sun that even in the midst of darkness, life flourished—though the rest of the ground be barren.

My Victorian grandmother said Christmas trees didn't exist in Ireland and England until recently, but evergreens were traditionally brought into the house--especially the holly, the ivy and the mistletoe.

The ballad, "A Wassail Song" claims the wassail cup is made of the rosemary tree.

"Here we go a wassailing among the leaves so green."

Wassail, in Old Scandinavian means to "be well."

And of course, there's the Yule Log, usually a pine log decorated with evergreens and berries that Good King Wenceslaus warmed his feet by.

The Oxford English Dictionary claims a recent adoption of the custom of the Christmas tree during the early reign of Queen Victoria. The Christmas custom of the small fir tree decorated with candles, ribbons and presents probably originated in Germany.

I found an early reference in 1789, from a Mrs. Papendick's journal, "Mr. Papendick proposed an illuminated tree according to the German fashion."

According to Hazlett Brand's "Popular Antiquities" published in 1870:

"[T]he Christmas tree...came to us from Germany directly...and is still (1869) a flourishing institution among us."

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaun
Wie treu sind diente Blatter!
Not only green in Summer's heat
But also winter's snow and sleet,
Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree
With faithful leaves unchanging
...hope and love and faithfulness
Are precious things I can possess.
Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree,
Your leaves will teach me also.

And Christmas trees are still a flourishing institution among us.

Christmas The Paper, 11/22/89 (tearsheet)

Black Bart; Get along, little doggerel, The Paper, Nov 22, 1989 (tearsheet)

Press Democrat, Poets with the Write Stuff, David Bromidge, Elizabeth Herron, Maureen Hurley,

David Eisner on Mapplethorpe NEA and censorship

Yesterday, at the California Confederation of the Arts conference in San Jose, I was taking photos of David Eisner on the NEA panel on censorship and controversy, and he was so insidiously sweet—almost primping for the camera. I wanted an engaged photo and when he refused to answer a question—how much does the government spend on art versus the military budget—like a good politician, he prevaricated. So I yelled at him to answer the question—and then I took his photo. He and I had a stare-off. I got the enemy to drop his cute little mask just for a second. Unveiled, he glared at me with pure venom when I flashed the photo.

Eisner was steadfastly ignoring me as many people do, assuming the photographer is a non-entity, or a non-person. Brainless. He looked at me is if I were violating some unwritten code of conduct. Maybe I was. Ken Larsen said a good photographer will engage his or her quarry anyway he or she can. He wasn’t concerned, and noted that Eisner wouldn’t address any of my questions. Eleanor, from Artists in Corrections said, oh, you were editorializing a bit there. But she and I have jumped into many of fracas when no one else would, so it was more of a pat on the back than a reprimand.

When they opened up the panel for questions from the audience, there was a stampede to the open mic. Many angry artists and arts administrators vented. Portent of things to come. All this because of the Mappletorpe controversy.

When Eisner got graphic, describing the photos in detail, someone yelled, You really like those photos don’t you? Homoerotic phobia. Jackie Baas of the U. C. Art Gallery, said, you have to see the work in perspective, 150 photos, it’s a retrospective. These so-called offensive photos amount to less than 10% of the exhibit.

Eisner’s hard line was that there should be no NEA funding at all for art. He said, let artist just do what they want (no censorship) on their own dime. Does the public taxpayer have the right to dictate what is art? What qualifies John Q. Public, or Jesse Helms, for that matter, to dictate what is art? We are about to lose what few rights we have when these insidious bills get passed. 

Over and over, the CCA panelists Pat Daverra and Chuck Mark said, don’t let them put language into your mouth. They’ve won the battle. It goes back to definition. The outcome depends upon some concerted fighting from the arts communities.

I brought 30 copies of my article on the Rohnert Park gallery censorship of a photo of a young naked child in a meadow—a photo taken by her mother—which quickly disappeared. It was too bad that I didn’t have copies to give to the panelists, Pat Daverra and Chuck Mark, and Charles Christopher did receive copies. When censorship begins, it knows no limits, and erodes our freedoms. If this takes a hold, where will it stop?

Keynote speaker, Isabella Allende said, the moral majority has burned books just as the Nazis did in Germany. Books don’t burn easily. It takes them a very long time to die.

11/19

• Censorship; Art or Obscenity, The Paper

Isabel Allende

Isabel is holding our chapbook, Falling to Sea Level.

George Howell's Magic Carpet Repair Shop, The Paper, Nov 16, 1989

Journal entry, John Oliver Simon review of what became Lord of the House of Dawn

Reading, skimming John’s poems, I came away with a sensation that he is/was incapable of truly loving anyone but himself. It was obvious to me that I have tried to make a silk purse from a sow’s testicle, and since sows don’t technically have any, you can see the dilemma it caused.

Two end poems seem to be a half-hearted attempt at revenge, or perhaps in answer to my manuscript. Hard to say which – the very last poem, it’s definitely a stab at me, but what did I expect,? So few poems about me, per se—is telling. Guilt. An obvious S&M section for KT, his former student, oh, how cute. I only hope no one will mistaken me for her.

And all those poems to the other women—it could be me. It could be someone he has not yet met. He’s able to get graphic, his poems to her, so full of S&M, and I am not turned on at all by them. I find it in incomprehensible that one human being would willingly torture another soul in the name of love, or lust. I feel like I need a shower, and to put out a disclaimer, I am not Katie! I am not the woman between the lines. He is so full of himself, there is a little room for love. 

I can see the difference between men’s writing and women’s writing. He makes pretty connections and observations—maybe a line here and there, but he doesn’t stay with the metaphor behind the poem for any length of time. He’s too busy being intellectual and smarty-assed. The feelings are very shallow. He gushes, but has trouble emoting. The emptiness within him, filled with seductive images and clever ideas. 

I come away feeling like he never got it. About depth, or who I was. All that registered was anger, fear, and revenge. What is missing is the tenderness, the love – except maybe for the one about Romeo and Juliet. But even that is tinged with the Big No on the lack of commitment. 

Why oh why didn’t I see that the clay was no longer malleable? That he was so empty, after all? Friends tried to tell me but I wouldn’t listen. This incredible hindsight does a little good now. The a-ha! I’ve learned a lesson of emptiness in a full bowl Thank you Michael Daley. 

And I am experiencing anger anew, seeing the final insomnia poem, he was planning to leave me in August and I was the last to know. I had to find out through the grapevine. It was a set up, his glib cowardice, his feet his fear of facing himself – all along he was posturing and that’s the violation, the treachery. He was using me to hide from himself. I was a pawn, a victim and he doesn’t like my anger—because it’s too honest. 

I’m surprised there really aren’t any poems about our breaking up, at least not a poem where the relationship is central to the poem. All is periphery, a glistening sleight of hand. It’s another layer, a maya veil tossed into the poem. Of course he may have others and they were no good, but he is so self-indulgent, he would’ve put them in, so it’s safe to surmise that there are no new surprises, no poems to me, because he never wrote them.

My poems about him are definitely much more blunt and angry. I don’t think I’ll have much more to say about him in the future, that anger is well spent, and I don’t want to re-introduce new dialogue. Let him publish his vainglorious poems, and my name will fall into obscurity in his circles, until it stands alone, no association with Tragasol, or is it Tragaluz?

Maybe, in this light, it is better to let Falling to Sea Level fall and drown—no matter how good the poems are. No need to resurrect the dead. How different we are as poets, what different voices. I will not glean his poetry for ideas and lines, the way he did mine, to throw back lines at him, like undersized fish, nor will I reclaim my stolen images. Let him keep them all. 

Once I was flattered he stole my spontaneous images and recorded them in his journals. He has made them his, and he sinks beneath the weight of theft. Vain man. He assumed my poems were to him rather than others, as if there were no other man in my life.

Now I see him how the women who came before before me saw him. The before and after photo—not a pretty sight. Beware of the waiting room! Any last regrets must be put aside now, because, on some level, he will always be waiting for me—and not necessarily as a lover. There is an unbreakable bond between us. Like that final executioner, not content with my life, he wanted my death, not content with my death, he tried to resurrect me, but I am stubborn, even in death. Transformation.

He keeps talking of what a good friend Barbie is, whoever she is—probably one of Katie‘s friends. Or should I say KT, daughter of cannibals. He wrote poems to her the way I wanted him to write poems to me. Particulars, not generic ideas. Ugh I’m still disturbed by the sex slave stuff all that leather and blood. Where is the loving in all of this?

Some  of the poems in the MS became the basis for Lord of the House of Dawn (Bombshelter Press, 1991).

1115

Journal entry, surprise visit from JOS

A half-hour visit from an ex-lover. I’m strangely calm, unemotive, which means I’m still not OK about it, but it least that part is over with. The meet-n-greet. I have finally seen him face to face after all this time, and I am relieved that I feel nothing for him. Nothing at all. My heart hurts, not because I have feelings for him, but because there is so much water under the bridge, and we can never go back to who we were.

At the end, he said, I’d better leave before I get maudlin. And, outside, he made a move as if to hug me, and I backed off, saying no. That was a trespass. In that split second, I realized he was prevaricating. But I was resolute. We stuck to safe subjects. When he asked if he could show me his paintings, I said no. I am protecting myself as best I can. His stiffness makes me stiff too. Wooden figurines.

He brought me a gift from Mexico, a ceramic burnished black-ware box. I made no effort to give him anything at all from the USSR, because it didn’t seem right. Still, I am unwilling to share anything of myself with him. I thought he looked awful, today’s stubble, and no mustache. I decided I don’t like how he looks without a mustache, there’s an ugliness and callousness around his mouth that the mustache hid. Telling. Though, with a headache, and desperately needing sleep, I wasn’t in the finest shape either.

I hid my truck, parking it at Laurie’s, down the street. I don’t want him to know what I am driving. I got rid of my Bug because I want to have some anonymity when I drive in Berkeley in case I need to sneak up on him, to drop something off. We talked about his car briefly. I made little attempt to be vivacious or friendly. I wasn’t unfriendly, I was a non-person, unwilling to unveil my inner self to him. The doors are closed. He has no right to my inner self. I will always be guarded around him.

He said Mike Tuggle and Susan Kennedy had hoped that I would be friends again with them in the future. I said it would be hard to do that. So much has happened. So, the unsaid betrayal is out in the open. They know that I’m angry with them because they bumped me for the Cazadero reading. I never asked them to take sides, but their meddling, even though it was meant as kindness, is what I have trouble forgiving. 

It must have been bizarre for John to come up to Sonoma and not come to my cabin. Or maybe not, he’s had lots of practice going back to where all his ex-girlfriends’ haunts.

He said he has been running around with the younger generation and was dearly sick of it—not having anyone to sharpen his intellect with. We were good together. Intellectual sparring partners. He talked also about being stuck, and about having to grow. I said, when you finish with one problem, another one always crops up and if you don’t pass the test the first time, you are condemned to repeat it again until you’re ready to go onto the next phase. I was speaking generally, and he was all l/me, responding personally.

We are on such different wavelengths now. He is still so self-absorbed with his problems. New labels and concepts, but has he changed? He always was good at saying with his problems were. Once I believe that by stating one’s problems meant that they were on the way to being resolved, not true. So I am a wary beast while he is a clumsy mammal. 

I didn’t ask him about reprinting Falling to Sea Level. I think he was surprised that I gave a copy of it to Isabel Allende, and to Steve Wozniak, when I told him about Etel Adnan wanting a copy for her radio show, his face showed genuine surprise. On the other hand, I was refusing to make eye contact, so it was hard making the connection.

I’m very sleepy. Not at my best. I also feel a sense of relief. Now, that’s over. I can get on with my life. I was actually feeling much friendlier than I let on, part of my coolness had to do with a profound lack of sleep.

Also, the hermetic sealing off of pain leads to abscesses later. I hope I haven’t done this, and if so, perhaps my wounds will reopen and I will heal again from the inside. I was very aware of how alone each of us truly is. Not even love itself could save us. 

He wants me to read his poetry manuscript, and a translation manuscript. Why? Why does this even matter to him? I am not willing to be his Frida to my Diego. I say, I can read them, or not, in the end, it’s ultimately my choice. He said the translations are fairly safe, but warned me that his poems may bring up some sore points. I’m tempted to read them now and get it over with, and to also ignore them. Always the one to jump into a fracas, I know which I will choose. It’s only fair.

One Sunday he finds my poems on his doorstep, the next, I have two of his manuscripts on my doorstep. Tradeoff. No incantations of love. Climbing the mountains wasn’t enough after all. This opiate, this brain residue, the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. No joy. Only a garden of silence. All my sadness. 

And now, he’s gone safely south. I don’t have to worry. I’ve done it. Seeing him. I looked into the face of fear and emotional abuse, and found it was easy to not let it in, easy to turn my back on it and him, easy to let him go, because he can no longer get to me. I’m no longer his victim, nor am I my own.

Nov 12, or 13? 1989