THALASSA, THALASSA

I begin this last day of March with 

Malachi Mulligan chanting to Daedalus, 
thalassa, thalassa, the sea the sea, 
she is our great mother. 
The morning echoing 
the Greek winedark sea. 
We each pray in our own fashion. 
The beauty of it is that I 
can't come back to this place.
Not even twice. Not even once.

3/31 1996

MIRRORED WRITING

Books, too often, 

are written out of other books. 

Poems, out of other poems. 

Progeny responding to itself 

like a profusion of warped mirrors, 

reflecting only what is already known. 

Go directly to the source, 

and don't trust the poem 

begotten of other poems, 

with no prima materia 

to distinguish it from the complacency 

of what is already recorded.

3/31/1996

Thalatta! the comet's tail

I begin this last day of March with Malachi Buck Mulligan chanting Thálatta! Thálatta, the sea, she is our great mother. The morning echoing of the Greek-tight sea.

We each prey on her in our own fashion.
That's the beauty of the slime. The snot-green sea.
Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, 
fretted his heart. Ate at his soul.
The scrotumtightening sea.Where is Dedalus when you need him?

The last time I read these lines, I was alone in a Hawaii hotel room, broiled lobster-red by the sun, angered by my pale Irish skin on a beach where generals one stood directing war traffic in the place of many springs, Waikiki. They dispatched the warriors that never returned home.

Thálatta! the snot of the sea. Stromatolites, blue-green algae are the first sex.

Olamphalos. The comet has business in another sector of the universe. 

We are measuring the age of the universe by the age of water evaporating from the comet's tail. Spit in the ocean. Measure the relative age of spirit and the ocean. Thálatta! The sea is our mother. That comet is avoiding its solar orbit.
The mother of water in its tail, the origin of life as we know it, is gathered from the depths of deep space; 4.25 billion years worth of water vaporing across our sky each night. Thálatta! The sea is our mother.

3/31/1996
added & rev. 11/17

CPITS reading, San Rafael

CPITS meeting at the Falkirk Center. We're reading at Open Secret in San Rafael, Steve Garber, Toby Kaplan, Arthur Dawson, and myself read to an audience of four in the temple room, a wild and wonderful room with Ganesh and Buddha, and hundreds of Tibetan singing bowls.

Steve's wife was there with their daughter and though he occasionally philanders through the ranks of CPITS poets, Toby says they remain committed to the relationship because of the child. 

I look at the little girl, she's beautiful and looks Irish, I say to Steve, We are mostly Irish, especially when we fight, said Steve. Funny, I resemble that. I could tell instantly that she was Irish. Why is it that we Irish can spot each other so easily? 

Of course, no one can tell that I'm Irish. I tease Susan Wooldridge about being Jewish when she, Steve and Tobey all look at each other. Susan saying to Tobey and Steve: I didn't know you were Jewish! We laugh. Their blue eyes dancing, I laugh, saying, Everyone thinks I'm Jewish, and I'm 100% Irish. Susan instructs me to turn around, and slaps my butt, and says, Yup you're Jewish. 

Thursday night I'm going over to Tobey's for Passover. Someone asks, how do you get invited? and the tradition of the CPITS poets Passover dinner is born.

ON THE DEATH OF MARAT SADE XXX errors in text

Marat asleep, or murdered in the bath,
it makes no difference.
JL David's classical references were made,
upheld, perspective upheld perspective,
keeping us all in our places.
We are invited to view him, like voyeurs,
but are not allowed in. The painting is a wall.

The viewer is held in lower esteem than the artist.
The hierarchical distancing of art
that instructs, rather than just is. Or is-be in Irish.

Is it true Saint Augustine was the first writer
to scribe from the point of view of self question mark,
the "I am" that we are so eagerly following 1500 years later?
Is there nothing beyond this I am?
To think I blamed this Descartes
for moving us into the realm
where we separate ourselves from nature,
when, in reality, it began at the fall of Rome
eleven centuries of civilization
disappearing in a generation.
It might as well of been an afternoon
on the other side of the Empire.

Was the empire staring back like a temporal wormhole,
the proverbial eyes of the wolf both suckling and on suckled?
Remus and Romulus practicing cross speculation.
Milk mother who was Rome of the seven hills.
There are different opinions of course,
the window of the eye, nonetheless myopic hidden agendas
coloring the perspective of the victor
in a fit of self-aggrandizement, calling it history.

Such is the story of the Celts,
always on the wrong side of history.
And the civilized world can't understand
the anger of our politics,
why the Sinn Fein, forced into a bed, not of our own choosing.  
or the political annihilation and trivialization of our culture,
except on St. Patrick's Day, then everyone's Irish.
We've even lost Halloween to the great galaxies of culture.
On the other side of our belief exists Oisín, and Tír-na-n´Og,
land of the eternally young, on these clement shores.
But age finds its way into my mirror,
reminding me of how worship is limited and ageist.

At 70, Tony Curtis quips,
can you imagine being with a woman
old enough to be my wife?
As long as they're combined age
doesn't equal hundred
they can hold onto the illusion of youth
in the land of youth.

Jack is wearing a Guinness shirt. It's in Gaelic.
I can make out a few words. Darkness. St. James Gate.
He says clearly it is another onomatopoetic word,
the sound of a gate latch closing.
I tell him of my letter to Dear Abby
who claimed Saint Patrick was both Roman and English.
Someone says he was Welsh,
Britt, Breton or Welsh he was still a Celt.
The darkness sliding down the tongue
to the gateway of the word cock.
Words unloosing from the tongue agitate the air
until the darkness capitulate and we find ourselves
circling the the molten eddy of meaning.
Simultaneous worlds collide encircling us
between their parameters leaving me to wonder what if.

If what if, meaning if only we had met sooner,
but the XXX would have the positions would've been different.
The gate would've been locked
our hosts are on what's print something  XXXX
safe from each other's words.

ASCII hell struck with this piece, this is what I was able to rescue. Third page of notes is missing

THE OTHER SIDE

On the other side of my heart 

there's a riverbed that lost its way,

seeking egress while I sleep. 

I wake exhausted, drowning in unborn images,

seeking a perfection of words 

in a translated world of incomplete thought

littered with random meaningless things.

The gypsy guitar is more articulate 

than all the imprisoned pens 

in yuppie briefcases, 

but this is the age of laptops.

I too have been guilty 

of keeping company 

with my warm PowerBook, 

displacing the fireside cat, 

we can no longer can afford 

the luxury of fireplaces,

trading them for thermostats 

and controlled environments. 

No time to get close to the elements.

I've never told anyone how I 

once dragged my computer to the hot tub,

despite the fear of electrocution 

or peacock feathers sprouting from my screen.

This wounded lover lost in fruitless daydreaming. 

I felt like Marat Sade composing in his bath, 

you know that painting by Jacques Louis David, 

where he's frozen in that moment in time.

Where we see him naked, and forever dead.

27 March 1996
Alexander Valley School
slightly revised for clarity 12/16

AT THE DANCING GOAT CAFÉ

At the Dancing Goat Café 

I suck my cappuccino down 

and write these lines.
The fan is mirrored in

the thick bottom of the glass
like an angry river with nowhere to go,
these words burst the dam.
I tell my students how I'm writing a long poem
that won't finish itself and so,
writer's block finishes my thoughts
before they take shape,
allowing no prisoners.

It's been a year and a day,
time for the enchantment end.
I've taken to find finished
finding my orphaned words
loose in coffee shops:
familiarity breeds contempt.

Someone asked how long is it?
I answer 36 pages, after Hiroshige—
he made 36 views of Mount Fuji.
There is there is an audible gasp
but they think one pages long.
We talk about the importance of poetry,
how poets are renegade philosophers.
The philosopher's camera needs no film,
no silver nitrate no, no digital chip,
no darkroom, only the prima materia of the universe
to tear down the walls that separate us
from ourselves and from each other.
The notes of malaguena rains down upon our ears
creating a scaffold for the ear
to climb to the fan circling the room.

27 March 1996
Alexander Valley School

GRAVE MARKERS

How come no one ever writes about
the roadside grave markers,
places where people have departed
to that undiscovered country
marked by crosses and plastic wreaths
in case they might want to return.
This place of death, more equivalent
than the place of birth, to memorialize.
There are too many markers
on my favorite stretches of road,
a sobering reminder of the temporality of life.

How come there are no words in English
for these places of personal departure?
Is there a word in Spanish? Liminal?
How come no one ever sees the family
of the dearly departedm planting marigolds there,
refreshing them each Dia de los Muertos,
drawing from the tradition of the Celts
and the Indian together
in their current memorization of death's doors.

Do we go on to another existence
or is there nothing but nothingness?
The denial of departure spawning
eternal generations of ghosts and philosophers
baling forever to their point of departure.

It makes me think of geometric progression
and the diminishing planes of perspective,
seemingly coming to a finite point
but always fooling the eye,
like a long hard road in the desert.
Seemingly vanishing into a lake of the sky,
only to go on and on like infinity itself,
until the edge of the continent ,
makes it define its boundaries.
Marigolds and skulls made of sugar for the dead.

I've never written about the elemental reduction
of my mother into bleached coral reefs
aligning the beaches of paradise.
How my mother wanted the ocean
to be her last road, but I've kept her in a box
all these years, a prisoner of my own inability
to articulate grief, while my father is moldering
in a lead-lined casket in the city of the dead.
Even if I could pour some whiskey over his bones,
the lead denies his egress
into where we come from,
our mother, the earth.

I think of Carolyn Kizer's mother
lost in the closet full of size 11 shoes
for a small eternity. Banishment
takes such a strange forms.
My mother lounges in a cardboard box,
and easy prison to break out of
for the more sentient inhabitants
of that room.

27 March 1996
Alexander Valley School

WHY I WRITE

Because these words find me wanting,

a place real in the eye of the beholder,

I imagine landscapes filled with flowers, 

with names known only in books.,

Places that seem so real
I revisit them in dreams.

They might exist between
the pages of a book, 

or suspended midway between
the lips of a lover, leading me
to real places in the world.

The intersection of my wanderlust 

is in memory of my grandmother's
unexpressed desires.

She, who raised eight children, 

had no life other than squalling babies 

crawling in the iron red dust, 

eating bugs and litter with impunity, 

later eating their words, and others, 

as they, and their children after them, 

practiced the hunting stance 

with well aimed arrows, and epithets,

not realizing the enemy was also within,

forgetting the thickness of blood 

in their thirst for ammunition.

27 March 1996
Alexander Valley School

BECAUSE THESE WORDS

BECAUSE THESE WORDS

Because these words find me wanting

a place real in the eye of the beholder,

an imagined landscape filled with flowers 

with names known only in books.

Places that seem so real 

I revisit them in dreams 

though they might exist only

between the pages of a book, 

or suspended in mid air 

from the lips of one to another,

leading me to real places in the world.

The intersection of my wanderlust 

is taking form in the memory
of my grandmother's unexpressed desires.

She, who raised eight children, 

had no life, other than squalling babies 

crawling in the iron rich mud,

children eating bugs with impunity,

and later eating their words 

as they, and their children after them, 

practice the hunters stance

with well aimed epithets,

forgetting that the thickness of blood 

is more holy than water.

In their thirst for ammunition, they,

not realizing the enemy was within.

I imagine the breadth of history's story 

when I came to realize the outrageous arrows 

flew unheralded through the centuries 

to find their mark within. Genetic memory.

assuaged by the knower's ink 

blossoming into words.

27 March 1996 Alexander Valley

Comet sighting

Happy Spring! Nearing midnight I immediately found it in the sky, a fuzzy light, looking a little off-center. I could really see the tail, a real comet, though it was fairly wispy. Imagine, all over the world, people are looking for the comet with an unpronounceable name: Comet Huakutake.

25 March: Last night was supposed to be the big night for viewing the comets, or should I say, comet singular, as they're exceedingly rare. It was cold yesterday as if we were having more snow. Storm clouds, and biting wind reminds me of Russia.

At the Sebastopol flea market, a Russian woman mutters something in Russian: squelca denge (how much), and yells Tree dollar! to the Mexican woman selling clothes, neither leaving the comfort of their native language. Amazingly, they seem to understand each other well enough to do business. Tree is close enough to three and, tres, and dollar, no matter how thick the accent, is an international word.

Blank verse

I keep forestalling the inevitable, writing in my new journal because a few pages were left blank in my previous journal. And so, a stalemate ensues, and there is nothing to be done, except to take the plunge. Fragmentary scratches posing as writing, an extension of thought separated by commas. A verbal shoutout at the OK Corral where the only thing left sanding are the fence rails draped with ghost words.

Presidents' Day weekend

Monday, Presidents' Day weekend, I'm in the city, staying at Jill Singer's flat with Celia Woloch and Ken Bullock. Saturday night we ate at Café Albona, one of my favorite North Beach restaurants, and last night we ate at Anchor Wat. We were ostensibly celebrating previous birthdays and missed holidays as well. I don't know if I can afford any more overlooked holidays.

Last time we ate at Café Albona was three years ago, all three of us. It was interesting to see that Celia and Ken had formed a friendship over the years that did not include me, or need me to bridge the gap—as it often is with friends and friends. They shared some wild times traveling in Eastern Europe, and they now share friends in common, whom I know only of by hearsay, or poetry. And so it goes. But I feel a little left out in the cold.

Jill is almost in the same friend category, she is a friend of Celia's, and is fast becoming a friend of ours, or Ken's, except we haven't all quite clicked yet. The enemy of your enemy is my friend sort of thing. But she's posh English so I keep my distance.

Yesterday after seeing the play, Twilight, about the LA riots, a monologue, we went to the San Francisco airport to pick Jill up from her London flight which was delayed 2 1/2 hours due to bomb scares and engine troubles. So we spent the time in the airport hotel lounge nursing bright red wine through the afternoon and evening talking of war.

Meanwhile, in Israel, they have planted trees for the man who smuggled the Chagal paintings out of Russia.

Pastel portrait, valentine (art) no date 96?

No idea when these were done, it's the mid-1990s (95-97) because they're in Forestville. That much I know. And besides, there's a floppy disk! I had won a massively huge pastel set at Riley Street and was test-driving them.

At Paul Mariah's memorial reading

At Paul Mariah's memorial reading, Jack and Adele Foley, Gene Ruggles, Mike Tuggle, Susan Kennedy, Noni Howard, Vernon Edgar, Herman Berlant, Jim Byrd, Michelle Bertrand, Earl LeClair, Leland Stoneys, Clive Matson, and Glenn Ingersoll. After the reading, we learned that Paul's archives will be sent to the University of Texas in Austin. Bob Berner's poetry workshops led to Minotaur, and ManRoot press. We head on over to Michelle's place with Mary Norbert Körte, Jim Byrd, Herman Berlandt, Vernon Edgar, and Eugene Ruggles—it's a small sendoff party. I was tired and depressed, was home by 9 PM, and asleep by 10:30 PM. I slept nearly 12 hours—like the dead, is it a residual flu, yet another confrontation with death, or the energy of too much people?

2/11 1996


Undated fragment:
Noni Howard said that I had a poem in The Parnassus of World Poets, which one? The day she told me that Paul Mariah died.

Sonoma State University Valentine art auction

At the Sonoma State University Valentine Art from the Heart art auction, I eavesdropped on people discussing my art. The woven watercolor collaged drew admiration, but no sale. The oil stick drawing sold for $55 to a Japanese man buying it for his granddaughter who chose my piece out of all the pieces in the show. 

I was amazed when she later asked, Do you know my father? pointing to Michael Schwager who runs the art gallery. Last year, his father bought my volcano collage photo as well. Michael said he gave the photo to his sister. I said Michael, Your family keeps collecting my art. But I'm pleased to know that a young girl will hang my art in her room. 

And I ran into an old College of Marin painting classmate, Joe Schmo. Joe and I were in the same painting class with Chester Arnold whose painting sold for more than $500, a sweet little piece.

I remember giving Chester a ride home once to a garage at the top of Wolfe Grade in San Rafael. Chester was extraordinarily odd even then. And I assume he's no less so now. Only now he's famous, or, at least, collectible. His weirdness now labeled as eccentricity. 

Joseph still looks the same, tall, swarthy, and handsome. I never remember his name. I see him once a year at the Sonoma State University events. He is never friendly to me but I say hello anyway. He used to live in Forest Knolls near the Manning's place, but he was always cold, even then.

Speaking of old friends, Greer Upton was saying to me tonight that the only time she ever sees me is at this event. Her friend Robin was with her. I said stuffed trout! When I first met Robin, some 15 years ago, she had printed a photo  of a fish on muslin and stuffed it. and Robin, who married someone I once knew, Riley, became a very young stepmother, but now she looks old and emaciated, and though Greer is getting heavy, she radiates a classic cherubic beauty. 

As to friends, so many people at this art show are not really my friends. Professional friends, co-workers in the arts, yes. But not friends. Unfortunately my connection with Greer and Robin is through a teaching arts organization we helped found. But the friendship never developed beyond that. She is a friend of Lee Perron's, and I've always been on the outside of that circle. Especially when I had to distance myself from Lee. My only real friend to emerge from that group is Marsha Connell who has a piece in the show as well.

20th Century Maladies

My parents didn't die of old age, but of the age of technology, hastened by alcohol and designer drugs, both prescribed, and from the street. They died of DuPont chemicals, silicone breasts, and cigarettes, heart disease, and cancer. Maladies exacerbated by the 20th century.

Full floodstage

Over 5.5 inches of rain fell yesterday, and last night the river was was at full flood stage. We've had almost 39 inches of rain and it's only the beginning of February. We had 63 inches of rain last year. Today Casadero reached 71 inches. OK so Kauaii gets 460 inches per year, but that's over a period of 365 days, not one and a half days. The river was rising at a 14 feet an hour, and crested at 39 feet.

At 43 it's amazing how limber I still am. When I stepped out of George's cabin wearing my zoris I hit a slick moss patch on the cement, coated by a water slick, and proceeded to do the splits down the stairs with left leg forward and right knee behind me, onto the ground, my big toe, right knee and left buttock coated with mud, mud trophies of where I had been. I let out a shriek as I fell, and no one came to see if I was okay as I waddled off to the bath house, coated in mud. 

It's the same spill I took at my high school school reunion with my left knee came down on some cake right in front of Broadway hoofer Joel Blum, and he thought I had done the splits in front of him on purpose. I never seem to fall on with my right leg forward because my left knee was operated on? Am I left footed, or all feet?

Flotsam and jetsam: wee no longer measure rain by the inch, but by the foot. Today as I toured the flooded Laguna and Markwest Creek, I spied red chili peppers, and yellow crookneck squash that floated in from the field down to the creek to adorn the bushes like Christmas ornaments. Wine pallets snagged atop vineyard fences, and even a wayward bathtub made its escape to the river.

Thirst

My cousin and I both bought amethyst rings on the anniversary of our father's deaths. Mine died two years ago, and hers, only one year ago. Perhaps it was the baby that brought the concept family home to us. Certainly we both put off having families, and she is 14 years my junior. I babysat her as a child. Both she and her brother David are now surrogate parents because their brother and his girlfriend both bailed on his kid. The neighbors kept opinions to themselves. It was not a lack of generosity in gray matter, it had nothing to do with quantity or quality, but our parents' prodigious appetite for alcohol left us marooned on deserted islands. We all suffered, a watershed of grief. And we wear amethyst tears the color of sorrow on our fingers. Our fathers died of thirst after all. Whiskey is an Irish word. The phone rings. No one there.

Singin' in the Rain while working on art

Today is one of those days when the storm takes front seat as I work on my Valentine for the Sonoma State University art auction. 

I'm sipping on Fox Hollow 91 cabernet, listening to the Glenn Miller movie, weeping, knowing I'm not pregnant, no need for the morning after pill. This weeping can be only one thing—PMS in full bloom. 

I am both saddened and relieved. It would be ironic to be pregnant at 43, having waited all my life for the right man to come along, with no man on the horizon, and the biological clock ticking into overdrive. 

Oh God, I am so grumpy, and nothing is going right, so I make multiple pieces for the art show. Test drive my art sticks when the collage fails. The bed is covered in a mosaic quilt of art pieces.

Here I am weeping over Glenn Miller's death as the band plays Little Brown Jug. I'm drinking wine in the rain, in a downpour. The rain is a posthaste tribute to Gene Kelly, who died two days ago, and I'm Singin' in the Rain with a deluge of empty bottles.

Dream journal: white rooms

An evening nap yields a strange series of dreams. I was with my neighbor George who said he had no place to go. And so I offered my place, puzzled as to why he didn't have a place, or why he was loaning his cabin out. He mentioned going over to Steve's place, and I offer him mine again. As we walk up the driveway, I realize I'm barely dressed. I'm wearing leggings and a short vest and my breasts are exposed. I comment on it and he says not to worry about it. We come home leading a wolf and he sits at the table. It's my dream cabin again with its white walls. This time I discover an unused living room. Even though it's late afternoon, I open the blinds to let the afternoon sun in. I'm delighted and surprised to find this new room. How could I have forgotten it?

Sometime in January 

On the death of Joseph Brodsky

Gene Ruggles called to say that Joseph Brodsky had died. The evening's libation had run dry, so he sought solace over the phone. Brodsky wasn't that old. Only 55. Heart failure, they said, but his stout heart never failed him. Sentenced to five years hard labor in Arkhangelsk for writing samizdat poetry without permission. When interrogated as to where poetry came from, Brodsky said: I thought it came from God. When I last saw Iosif at Poetry International, in Rotterdam, he seemed healthy enough, but bitter cold. His crotchety, oratory voice was like that of an impassioned preacher. Hellfire and brimstone. A dissent of the spirit, he railed against the drabness of the totalitarian state. Oleg thought the sun and moon rose over him. In NY cafes, they'd roll cigarettes, Russian style, enjoy a smoke over bitter coffee, and talk of the homeland. Exiled poets. Everything has its limit, including sorrow.

1/29/1996
added & rev. 11/17

Joseph Brodsky, Exiled Poet Who Won Nobel, Dies at 55

Judge: What is your profession?
Brodsky: Translator and poet.
Judge: Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?

Quantum poetics

Road weary, after a long weekend away from home, I slept until 9:30. I'm sure I was asleep by midnight, nine hours' sleep is atypical for me, a sign I'm truly tired, and I did not get enough sleep at the CPITS conference. I took a nap as we drove home, what funny dreams I had of Arthur Dawson, just now coming to life.

It was after the CPITS conference at Walker Creek Ranch that I first began to have prophetic dreams about him, which, to my consternation, came true as we walked up the path to the reservoir. Pieces of the puzzle fall into place, telling me that this man will have a significant impact in my life. Pay attention.

I'm still trying to sort out what he is to me besides a CPITS poet that I've trained in the 1980s. We've known each other for ages, but it wasn't until three years ago that I let down my guard, and we began to know each other personally.

The problem with my attraction is that he encompasses all my male qualifications. But he is happily married to Jill, whom I also think is terrific. So I keep my distance, afraid something may begin, that shouldn't come to be.

I remember Ken Larsen saying he didn't think that Arthur was my type, when I confessef that I had a mad crush on him three years ago. And I think he meant Arthur wasn't as strong-willed as I am. Perhaps I'd walk all over him. I don't know I haven't seen that side of him, but he is constant and determined—like water at a steadfast pace.

He keeps a light hidden under that exterior and there is a lot more there than meets the eye. You have to look closely. He doesn't brag or do the all those male things to boost his ego, and is therefore much harder to read.

Anyway we went to Sanger together, sharing the driving, and we shared a cabin, as we had arrived around midnight in the rain. We didn't talk about rooming together, it was just understood. Nothing happened and we made no passes at each other, we just couldn't stop talking, and laughing all night long.

We spent a long time downloading the personal stories. So many of our stories were based on other stories to preface it. It got to the point that I had told him so many things I couldn't remember what I'd said before. So we devised a cue, to ward ward the other off, saying Cut if we'd already heard the story. And we mostly talked about our travel adventures, and funny incidents on. And we have been to so many of the same places: an obscure lake in Ecuador, or a remote Indian village in British Columbia etc.

At one point near Los Banos, I laughed so hard, I wet my pants. I did have a full bladder at the time, and the name of the town didn't help I'm sure. I had an attack of dyslexia, incorporating odd words. I can't remember how I arrived at Robert Floss for Robert Frost. We were talking of chance, deciding which road to take, John Oliver Simon and I used to flip an old coin at the crossroads, or at the X or Y roads. And the chromosomes too.

I got a card from John from Colombia. Arthur and I discussed the difficulty of finding good traveling companions, nothing like a third wheel. How he describes most people he's met on the road. And in two years, he's done a lot of road traveling with Jill. I miss traveling with John, it's what we did best together.

I think when Arthur and I both went through our mother's deaths, I had already gone through my father's, it forged a bond, a common experience. That opened us up to all our vulnerability. He and Jill invited me to a day of the dead celebration. I didn't go, in my collective grief, I withdrew. In my vulnerability I couldn't succor comfort there.

But hey I'm getting too serious here. What I want to write about are the funny incidental events from the weekend.

Saturday night we didn't party as we were very tired poets. We read poems and then drifted off to bed. Arthur and I decided to go hot tubbing, talking up a storm as usual. I felt uncomfortably fat, so I was hiding my body. Perhaps there was a sexual awareness growing between us. Arthur tended to keep a larger distance than when we were clothed.

Naked he is very beautiful with his curls, and his Davíd mouth, and I think of the Greek statues, and how the half-life of his skin takes on the quality of polished marble. I know that my breasts are beautiful in the gloaming. And the water is too hot so we perch on the rim and chatter on.

As we make ready to leave, a deluge of rain pours from the sky. Not standing on ceremony, I grab my clothes and streak across the back patio to the main cafeteria, buck-ass naked. He has a raincoat and dresses in the rain, wrapped in the towel. Organized. I watch him stop at the gate to retrieve something, he stares at it a minute, making me curious.

We stand underneath the eaves watching the sheets of water cascade from the sky. We could be in the tropics, it has that feel to it. It's like Tikal in the rain. He hands me my underwear, saying, You might want these. I'm embarrassed. I could have sworn he had a funny look on his face. Perhaps there is the temptation there after all. Perhaps I imagined it.

We navigate our way to our cabin and the road is underwater. We skirt the issue taking the high ground and head toward the lights shining warm in the velvety darkness, like moths to the incandescent glow of skin and cabin lights.

There's a settling in, and the acceptance of a bond between us, we never name nor define it. I talk of a piece I'm writing on quantum physics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, I explain that in by the naming of a relationship, we change what it is, or what it isn't. We meddle with the outcome. The dilemma of seeking clarity, versus the acceptance of what it is, screws us up every time.

In this way I discover his father was a physicist. Los Alamos. By this time I'd confessed just about everything about Mary Walsh and the Manhattan project and he thought his dad might be able to get me information on her. In this telling of relationships and quantum metaphor, I describe my prose poem, The Arc in the Dark of the Year, but I could also be talking about relationships existing in a parallel universe.The possibility or the existence of a deeper connection on another plane of reality.

He reads me a poem on physics, it's wonderful. I reach for my poem only to find he put my bag on a chair across the room. Since I'm naked under the covers, I don't want to get up or make a mad scramble for my nightgown. We'd already gone to bed once already, and turned off the light, only to get the urge to read more poems to each other.

He says want me to get it for you? Which is ridiculous, for it's on my side of the room, and he's in his underwear. He is a little too tongue-in-cheek teasing me over my false modesty based upon shame, because I think I'm too fat (I'm not).

We are already naming things and I didn't want that to happen, not with him. I preferred the ambiguity of potential. But by teasing me, I remember three years ago, at a CPITS conference, we were dancing so hard that runnels of sweat trickled down our bodies. I'd had a migraine all day and was dressed in sweats, not intending to dance. So I fashioned a sort of halter top from my sweatshirt, with sleeves tight across my back, and the body like a bib across my breasts.

We were dancing so hard, he was spinning me like a top, our arms sliding in and in and out of knotted formations, until we were a Gordian knot. He was spinning me until my sweatshirt threatened to take flight across the room, causing a stir of excitement in the room with the men loving the potential of dancing breasts.

I was Phaedra unveiling my charms, but then shame crept in, and I struggled to be modest, which only made him spin me even harder. Was I imagining a glint in his eye? The enigmatic man had more pique then I gave him credit for. Titillation?

Again, the fear of defining it comes to mind and thus changes the reality of it. I reneged on reading my poem, rather than have him cross the room nearly naked to bring my poems to me, naked in bed, and therefore opening up that door of possibility—for that was what brought into circle, the focus that we were naked together in a bedroom, the thin distance of twin beds and the potential of two people reaching out to touch each other like God and Adam in the Sistine Chapel that spark of inspiration. Subtext and context.

Me, the older and theoretically wiser one, at 43, he's 37, six years younger than me, trying not to notice his body. Surely he sees my eyes slide over his body as we lie in our separate beds facing each other.

Do I refuse to see that his eyes slide over me and that I try to remake the intention of his glances into something asexual. That I cleanse myself of impure thoughts as if I were both the cause and the problem, with only myself to blame? I caution myself, put unchaste thoughts out of my head. And turn out the light and think about sex to the tattoo of the married rain. Is this a one-way attraction? I want to be able to deliver him home to Jill touched, untasted which I do manage to do.

Does she worry about him? I think he is a faithful man but perhaps infidelity has never arisen though they've been married for years. I detect a small glimpse of her when she touches his knee as she retrieves the phone. I make my escape, hugging him on the porch, and driving home into the night, knowing that they will make mad passionate love within the hour while I'm still driving home, and it keeps me safe to drive home like that, in the darkness, in that final darkness.

On Saturday night I told him about the prophetic dreams I had of him three years ago and how they were coming true, there were several clues this weekend. Things I couldn't dream up. The clincher was when he handed me my underwear, it was as if the gods transpired against us to break our vows.

On the way home, we stop often Isleton for a platter of crawdads and beer collecting our own On the Road memories. The waitress mistaken us for lovers, neither of us bother to correct her. It is our secret. As if we couldn't ignore what continues to stare us in the face, to tempt us.

I have trouble keeping my thoughts pure, as if he could read them. I reveal my my Catholic self, the pagan self smoldering under that brassiere, or jockstrap of faith. She hands Arthur the check in saying he wins the prize for being the best looking man in the dining room, we're alone in the dining room, and I add, And at the bar too, for that matter. It just slipped out, I hope he did not hear it.

Because we are not used to each other, we are not always in sync, but we quickly adjust our rhythms to match. It's most noticeable when we sing, and already I know the danger of singing together, for Oleg and I once poured our souls into each other until passion took root and consumed us, forbidden in the face of marriage vows. Separated wife or not. To give into something greater than the self, or to observe the rules and customs of the potential world when in reality moral valves have little to do with sexual appetites.

Steve Garber who cannot resist the siren call, has been married for years. We stopped at the Kings River on Sunday morning. Veronica Cunningham, Steve, Arthur and I stop for for lunch and goodbyes at Piedra, a crossroads on the Kings River. Steve confessed that he's often been unfaithful to his wife, as if it were something out of his control, and perhaps it is. I don't want to know this.

Over the years, I have felt his eyes slide over me, and carry on, but I am not his type, and that shields me from his sexual indiscretions, but by rejecting his amorousness, I also avoid that coldness and distance that he is capable of, which frightens me.

I am somewhat flattered by his sliding eyes and certainly have done the same to him, but I am immune to his kind of man, for our minds haven't made love. That click hasn't happened, and I feel I have to slide up and down a theoretical dance pole searching for the right notch by which to communicate. I am shy of him, and that distance is a protection.

In his confession he becomes more vulnerable, and I like him more for it. Perhaps there is a foil of antagonism between us that this allows us to become closer. I value and appreciate him but I am also afraid of him, for if he were to pursue me, could I resist him? On any or any man that I am attracted to?

Then there is the notion of attraction, containable to a degree, the flirtation a booster adding a false piquancy to our interactions the old carrot tease at the end of the donkey stick.

It's not love, but it does make us glow from within, and brings us joy. Is that such a sin? Who'd have thought that I have would have so much trouble with the ninth commandment coveting another woman's man? I guess it's something as old as humankind, this coveting thing.

All my men belong to other women Jim, Trygve, Sean, so why not Arthur? Because I know Jill, and it seems they are have a happy marriage. The others are always in a state of limbo. Jim is on-again, off-again with Nancy, Trygve, the same thing, and Sean is separated. All of them are in flawed relationships. So it's easier to pretend all of this is merely in my head, putting the blame upon myself, rather than opening up to the potential.

Besides, I think if something were to work out between us, the mutual guilt over Jill would erode and destroy what little potential for happiness we might have had as a couple, for he is the kind of man I would really fall hard for. There would be no turning back.

Could I just have a little fling with him and be satisfied? It's possible, but the seduction is in the giving of everything, and holding nothing back. With the others. it's merely transitional; we're not talking of the kind of love that requires that you give up everything. So we practice denial, and call it friendship, and let it go, until something else comes along to strip the pretense away, leaving us naked after all.

added 11/17

CPITS conference, Wonder Valley

CPITS AC conference January 26 the 28th at Wonder Valley, Sanger, California. It's raining, it's a small place. As we write poems we know that we are not alone. Snow is melting into music.

Peri Longo read some ancestor poems and asked: how come we never write about... She offers more poem ideas: in my neighborhood, was a great list poem idea. Then we laughed about language, and said if universal truths are nothing, then we end up at the end of the dream, we end up at the beginning. Begin again. Which is what we did.

The CPITS winter AC retreat and conference was almost a near miss, as too many poets couldn't make it, but despite the storm, by Saturday, our ranks swelled 13, and we got a lot done, putting aside our group hostilities, and dealing with the central office crisis, and utilizing a concrete approach to work through the conflict. 

We came away from the conference energized, with a willingness to work through the problems, and rather than dealing with them in anger. An anger that would have grown out of proportion with the series of events, an anger that would both consume and harm us, to no avail. 

We restructured the central office and the board to allay some of the problems that had arisen in the past year. The list of negatives was long and complicated. We began with what wasn't working, and arrived at the country of solutions, with love and caring for each other. 

On a sweet/sour note: Duane BigEagle apologized to both Tobey and me for attacking us so publicly. Too little, too late. I told him I didn't appreciate it, I told him what it does to me, is not useful nor is it productive. He said that I was doing a hell of a great job as Area Coordinator, going out with a bang. As an AC? or as a rural board member?

He has a nasty habit of attacking women in public. I saw him doing that to his former girlfriend, Katharine Harer, who was statewide coordinator. He sees it as his duty (for affirmative action), but I've never witnessed him flaying a man like that. I'm sorry I ever took up with him, after they broke up.

Fragments

Sunny day after such rain,
we are under the gun with commitments
and not enough time to follow through.
This is news?


The Australian aborigines understood quantum theory, dreamtime, a timeless existence, of all living things, and of the land itself. Uluru or Ayers Rock, The Olgas, the Breasts of Abo and the Simpson Gap, the oldest rocks and fossils in the world are 3.5 billion years old. Now that's old.

1/24/96 returning home from teaching

24 January

When it rains, it floods, literally. After spending the day at the Higham Family School teaching poetry to kids, and doing individual evaluations, I drove home in the pouring rain, tributaries feeding into Brush Creek, overflowing the road, new potholes since this morning.

Nearing home I think about Jim, and arrive home to find him reading in my bed. The cats are in the kitchen crunching on cat food, it's a scene of domestic bliss that I wasn't prepared for. 

But I was very happy to see Jim regardless of the fact that he and Nancy are once again on the skids. It was April when he went on the good red road, and I saw him very briefly again in August, or September. And he returned at the end of October. It's been more than six months since we spent any time together. 

I told him he's been my longest continuous lover, and we reminisced a bit, old friends and lovers since 1981. I queried him about other sex partners, and he assured me that there's been no one else except Nancy. Because he's involved with Sundance, the AIDS issue becomes more critical. The bloodletting in a community where AIDS is skyrocketing. He says he's very careful though. 

I just want to be careful who I let enter my body and Jim's been the only one inside me for more than a year except for Sean the other night. It's safe to say that since Marcel left in 1993-94, I have only fucked one man, save Sean. But if Jim is promiscuous and lying, then I'm in a precarious position. It's not his nature to lie. 

And the sex is great. I've slept with him for longer than, or as long as he's slept with his wife. At 43, it feels fine, though it's been nine days since my period. We talk about fallopian tubes, his grandson, and the eventual aging of parents and taking care of them. Looking at futures, he shattered once again by this break with Nancy, and me thinking before that, we had a little in common for a long-term relationship, and that feels different now. Wouldn't that be an odd change of events? 

I still want to check out the vibes with Edwin Drummond. I'm certainly recycling all the old lovers and friends these days. No new man on the horizon. It's amazing how once I was fully free of Sonny, how my sex life radically changed. What's different about me, besides being free, is that I'm not advertising, nor am I looking for it. 

My availability has been mysteriously transmitted to the universe and these men who in turn, called or wrote expressing interest, after many years of non-interest, equally mysterious. 

At the Calistoga Spa

Karen Faulkner and I spend the day at the Calistoga Spa on Friday planning the CPITS Area Coordinator conference. The very place where John Oliver Simon and I decided to make a go of it. She said she got a card from John from Columbia. More than I got. Who's it this time? I ask. She said, Oh talk about multiple personalities. She said her relationship with John only lasted four months while mine lasted nearly 4 years, and even that was too much.

Machu Picchu: sweat of the sun

At Machu Picchu, gold was the sweat of the sun. Hiram Bingham only spent a few hours in the city, never realizing what he had discovered. At the temple of the sun, massive peaks rose to the sky, it was an empire of the sun.

Bingham was searching for the fabled Valley of Vilcabamba, the last Incan capital, and retreat, the Espiritu papmas, the plains of ghosts. He came looking for gold, and mummies. The jungles hid hundreds of buildings he never saw. 

Bingham's exploration was eclipsed by Admussen's discovery of the South Pole. The Golden Age of Discovery was declared over. He returned in 1912 looking in vain for the gold, and the mummies, but the Incan cloaks were made of bat-skins and twilight. 

The last Sapa Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, emperor of the Incas, built the city 500 years ago as a summer palace, during a time when these mountains were gods, the thunder was their voice and the Incans were their children.

The conquest of 1532 never touched the fabled city of Machu Picchu. Why did the Incas abandon their city in the clouds? She still sleeps in the clouds, and weeps the sweat of the sun, dreaming of her children.

1/22/96

Sean Kilty

Sean Kilty came over last night to renew our friendship. I feed him dinner and we fall into bed. I was afraid because of my period. But it wasn't as bad as I remembered. He wasn't rockhard and though it's been months since I've had sex, it didn't hurt. Overfeed a man meat and potatoes, then liberally ply him with wine and he'll lose stamina. For once, that's what I wanted, I couldn't take too much.

Sean lives in Castroville, and is a PG&E meter man for Monterey Pebble Beach. So, he's living in one of the most beautiful places in the world, and lives on a horse ranch. And finally he's writing a book of poems, and a screenplay—he's leading the writer's life.

Do I imagine a life with him? I doubt it, for though we have warmth and affection, but not that burning spark. Is it something that can be rekindled? How trustworthy is passion anyway? Sex is less satisfying without it. Though this time, sex with Sean wasn't a marathon, and thank God he wasn't at full-tilt as he is the most well hung man I have ever known. It's usually painful, and a man hasn't been inside me in a very long long time.

1/15

I never finished writing about Sean Kilty who came over last Saturday enroute to Sacramento for a poetry reading. We had our first dinner together. I figure I see him on average, once every couple of years. We've been lovers for at least eight years, maybe 10. 

We're not even sure when we first met. It was in the early 80s, certainly by 1983, was when our first falling in love sequence occurred. He's been married for 12 years and has three kids. We met before the long before that, nearly running off to Mexico together, but Michael Lorraine and Luke Breit separated us. Sean was ambivalent, my feelings were hurt, and that was that. 

Sean spent the night in my tiny bed, he's at least 6 foot 4 and almost as broad. He's gotten a little beefy, but is still damned handsome for nearing 50 years of age. No gray hair yet. He looks like he could pass for his early 40s. A doppleganger for a young Anthony Quinn, who is also half-Mexican, half Irish.

Sean and I have our Irish connection going, and sometimes I'll say something to him in Spanish, but he is unprepared for an answer. I don't know anything about his Mexican side. He's so light-skinned and fair. Usually Mexicans of European descent don't come to the United States, as they already have it good in Mexico. Unless he's a Californio, and many of those of Californio descent are from the same background as the high-class Mexicans where lightness of skin is a virtue.

Now he is separated from his wife, and contemplating divorce. There's another woman he cares for. His wife found a love poem to her—no matter that it wasn't true, nor explicit. Her rival was a metaphor, and who could live with that? 

Sean doesn't even know if there's a future with the new woman, so he opens the door to me, but he was so ambivalent before, and I'm no longer passionately in love with him. To be in that kind of love requires contact and interaction, building a history together. It begins with meals and adventures. Letters and poems would help. 

It's hard to toss 12 years of marriage out the window, and there are the kids to consider. He said that he stayed in the marriage this long because of them. And he's willing to chuck it over, for what? Chalk it up to irreconcilable differences?

He has three small kids in tow, so the rest of his life will be tied up with his ex-wife and children. He's tied to a middle-class existence. Love, thy name is alimony.

1/ 22

On the eve of my 43rd birthday I get a call

On The Day Paul Mariah Died

Martin Luther King Day

Bob Flannery read a poem at Mudd's Café, that asked the most beautiful question: What is your dharma name? Then says, Bineh. Labia? He said the Nahual word for wise man or artist is Tolteca, or toltecayotl. The other night the phone rang at 3 AM. My dead mother, the artist, wanting me to read her I Ching horoscope. So I cast the bronze coins. Saw where they fell. They spoke in tongues. Noni Howard also called to say that I had a poem in the Parnassus of World Poets, which one? The day she told me was the day that Paul Mariah died. We are losing our cultural icons.

1/15/1996
added & rev. 11/17

Paul Mariah died on Friday, the 12th

Dream journal: fevered dreams of wolves, Pt. Reyes

I fell asleep for three hours, while reading Polar Star yesterday afternoon. I'm still not better if I can take a nap, and sleep like the dead, after nine hours of sleep, I must be really sick. My eyes are burning, a sign of fever. So many people of gotten pneumonia from this bug. Flu or cold? It doesn't matter in the end what you call it. Sick is the operative word.

Because of the fevers, I have wild, visual dreams. I dreamed there were wolves outside the door, but I was related to them. I was dressed in a gray suit my skirt was on backwards and some small thing scurried off with my wooden handled screwdriver. I thought it was a scorpion, but I couldn't tell in the failing light. I hitched up my skirt around the right way, and marched out into the night to reclaim my tools.

This morning I dreamt I was at the Y where you can either go out to Point Reyes or to Tomales Bay, but we were hiking on foot, not from the road. My companion wanted to know where Mount Vision was, and couldn't believe we were actually on its shoulder.

Darkness caught us there, and I suggested that we spend the night huddled together for warmth. I could see the drowned valley of Creamery Bay in front of me, reflected in the afterglow of twilight, but the entrance to the bay was on the Tomales Bay side. Which is which was really 10-mile Beach. This landscape was all convoluted and damseled about.

I watched a whale or porpoise swimming up into the estuary. I it was so beautiful, I couldn't take my eyes off it. Why did I dream of the point, the island in time on January 3? The Spanish who sailed up this coast named each point according to the calindrical saint's day. Año Nuevo equals New Year's Day, Punta de los Reyes is the three Kings of the Epiphany, January 6. But today is the 3rd.

Another earlier dream also dealt with Tomales Bay, there was a new driveway graded near Heart's Desire Beach, which had me upset. I rode up on horseback knowing that we weren't welcome, but it worked out alright anyway, because a young man who was a painter, had heard of me, and wanted me to write a brief brochure about him. A job!

There was also another dream:  something to do with occluded landownership titles. I remember looking out to where Heart's Desire Beach was. And someone had cut down all the trees, and plowed the ground down to bedrock, until there was no beach left. I was horrified, it was a mystery. I later brought a clay tablet with an inverse footprint, to the father who could read its meaning. Out of Africa.

The phone rings at 3 AM. My dead mother wanting me to read her horoscope from the I Ching to her. 

January 3

What kind of blues would a bluejay sing? (drawing)

What kind of blues would a bluejay sing

if a bluejay sang the blues?

Down home Chicago style, yeah.

A cheep one, for he was a percher

like the finch or the jay.

Laid to waste by the flu

And here I thought I'd easily finish this journal by the solstice, but I had not planned on getting so sick most of December. The earaches and another attack of the flu has left me quite exhausted.

Christmas Eve I had a fever of 102°, which lasted most of the week. I barely remember Christmas, and slept on my cousin Sinead's couch December 26. I was so shaky that by the 27th, driving home was a challenge.

I did not go to the California Museum of Art party on the 28th, as a relapse from the 27th left me flattened. I was sorry to have missed it. I ran a few end-of-year errands, went shopping, and to the movies, on the 30th and 31st; both events just wore me out. I almost didn't volunteer for the Luther Burbank Center's Johnny Otis New Year's Eve bash, but I didn't have to be there until 9:30 PM. So I rested most of the day beforehand.

Expecting to leave early, I worked hard preparing all the champagne. One complementary free drink with the ticket was the deal. I figured we'd have very little to do after 11 PM, that most people would've used up their drink tickets, but not so. We had an enormous rush right before midnight.

No time to feel weak. I was on an adrenaline adrenal rush. I was a working automaton, much more efficient than the men I was working with. Fever does that. My antique Russian red silk tunic was drenched.

I had a gas working with a man named Misha who danced with me afterwards until there was no more music left, live, or otherwise. Johnny Otis and his band were on it. His son, Nick came over to say hello, I think he's sweet on me.

My neighbor Paul Ellis commented on how he heard me wailing away in the shower house Sunday night. I was so sick. He got the flu too. The great flu of 1995 laid a lot of us to waste. To sleep, perchance to dream, but not die, was the modus operandi. 

Paul and I exchanged symptoms, like baseball trading cards. I slept more than he did. He got it for two days after Christmas. I was afraid I had given it to him. Doing a little one-up-manship jig, he said he had already been exposed to it, and yes, it was extremely bad. What a lousy way to welcome in the New Year.

Dream journal: Jane making desserts

Dreams of family: Jane was making desserts, using crushed cookies to make macaroons with egg whites, ruffled cooked potatoes with chocolate sauce. How odd. I tasted the potatoes, not very sweet. Jane said the recipe had too much sugar. I was worried that the cookies weren't good or had the dreaded hazelnuts in them (I'm allergic). She answered me that they were just almonds. She was mixing these concoctions by the laundry/utility room off the kitchen in Forest Knolls. It wasn't trashy. 

I got chocolate sauce all over my arms and my hands and my left foot. I washed my limbs in the kitchen sink. Someone was concerned that I was so showing so much thigh. So was I. She was probably grossed out by seeing my foot in the kitchen sink. It was either that, or track chocolate all through the house. 

The dining room extended to a long covered patio. It was resortlike, and it reminded me of the remodeled Rancho Nicasio. Other family members were nearby, even Grandma who no longer says anything much in my dreams anymore. Just puts in an appearance or two. Always busy with something she is. Just the sight of her always brings me comfort. I saw my aunt Toddy too, out of the corner of my eye. 

In the living room was a box of Christmas lights and small green bits of plastic like a jigsaw puzzle with no picture. I had to carry it somewhere. On my return trip, the entrance to the house moved to the south side of the dining room, and turned into a tall trellis ladder, that I had to climb. 

I was a wondering whatever happened to the Peery sisters, Sue and Jan. And on my way I passed them, they were much older, the only recognizable thing was their voices. They were well coiffured, looking very middle-class with their diamond rings. And they didn't recognize me even though I walked right beside Jan for some time. So much for old friends.

I was still carrying that box and I was miserably underdressed in rags. The trellis stairway presented a problem and I tried to tie up the box and drag it up the path but I needed to carry it. I was able to get it to the top of the trellis, and someone reach down for the box but it fell, the sides all worn, gave away. I returned it, hugged it to my chest, but then, I couldn't navigate the trellis. It was very frustrating. All those green jigsaw pieces tumbling out all over the place. 

Finally it dawned on me that there was nothing of value in the box that I was lugging around. I jettisoned it, but only after a valiant attempt to return it. 

Another scene we're returning from somewhere and someone hands me a news photo of firetrucks at the capital. My brother Guy is in one of the trucks and he's returned home. It'll be so good to see him. There's been some kind of catastrophe or emergency. He's been drafted into the fire department. He comes over looking at up about 22, he has hair, and we're thrilled to see him. It's been a long time. 

I'm standing in my strange get up, barelegged. It seems I don't get to wear any appropriate clothing in this particular dream. Maybe it was a nighty of sorts. 

My brother makes a comment about my dress and I bust his chops and said what's more important, me, or how I look? I

t seems that the party was for Guy and we all coalesced in Forest Knolls. Was that really Guy's red '57 Chevy in the driveway? 

Elements: the shoe box with Christmas garbage in it. I took from Forest Knolls into the world where the junk decreased in value. And then I got tired of carrying it and I tied it up and dragged it in the dirt. What was I supposed to do with it? By the time I got done with it, the colored Christmas lights were no more just junk. I never figured out what all those green pieces were for, they were like Legos spilling out of the box wherever I went. 

There are thousands of them even in the dream I was puzzled by them. Puzzled by pieces of the puzzle? A puzzle without a picture? Holiday garbage I picked off the living room couch that I saw some value in it until I started having to carry it around. But I didn't willingly let it go, I took it with me and I risked a fall off the trellis. If the helpful young man hadn't dropped it, I could've returned it hold back to where it belongs. It wasn't my garbage. Instead it spilled by the side of the path for everyone to see. And when I left with it, it had the semblance of value and when I returned it it was truly garbage. With bits of hay sticking to it. 

My dress fits into the same metaphor. all the rooms are public. No privacy anywhere—even for my brothers homecoming. I remember thinking it odd that Jane seem so young, she had a very slender waist, no gut and then she said something puzzling, well it's time for my abortion, and wiped her hands and left. She was joking of course, muttering that it was better than getting cancer. A Pap smear a D&C? I remember being scandalized, for she was the unmarried virgin aunt. 

Box equals room? I'm carrying around a useless box, the puzzle, DNA cells and building blocks. I've lost many of them trying to return home I've dragged it into the grass and dirt I've hoisted it up on the trellis wire trellis only to let a young man drop it. How old am I in the dream? Both Guy and Jane are in their 30s at the same time, and decades younger. Everything is all-time twisted.

Mt Diablo from Clayton, drawing

I had finished teaching art at the Montessori school in Clayton, I was so close, I was practically looking up the mountain's nostrils. I made a quick sketch on the trunk of the car as I was packing up my art supplies.

Shells, three drawings, stabillo pencil, 3/95

Though these drawings were actually dated 3/95, I'm posting them Dec. 31, 1995, so I can find them easier. In-class drawings.

Light: particle, or wave?

Light: particle, or wave? If a wave, then not instantaneous, but sequential. I will break my promise to buy Nathan's father apricot brandy this Christmas. He comments: as if he needed it. It took two years for Edison to find a lightbulb that worked. Edison tried 6000 times to find the right filament. Einstein invented a new universe relative to the young one.  Now Newton's universe is full of holes. The frame of reference was built by absorbed particles, so could particles be waves? Particles are waves. Interference waves. Heisenberg said; You can measure position on speed, but not both. The Uncertainty Principle. We can't know if light is both a particle, or a wave. You can't observe position and speed at the same time. The comfortable certainty that science provided didn't exist any more. Relativity itself is only what you say it is.

Building an Arc in the Dark of the Year

Fragments for Arc

Obler's paradox. The universe is so immature that all the starlight hasn't had time to reach us. If there are so many bright stars in the universe, why isn't the sky lit up at night?

What is the speed of water rising up a dahlias stem? 4 feet an hour. Is this true of all plants? 

The bomb Oppenheimer a blind woman saw the light and asked about it. Eoliths: dawn stones.

The Dogstar, Serius. Roman dogs were sacrificed in winter. 

Egyptians believed there was an alliance, or a dalliance between the sun and the brightest star and it caught the summers heat. The dog days of summer. 

They circle each other in a 50 year-orbit, like slow dancers sniffing each others assholes. The closest one now is -94. The dog and the dwarf always circling in a gravitational red shift.

Beautiful words in the English language cellar door, bodega dunes, bread pudding, back porch, spring training, public library, atomic bomb.

They say after the bomb went off, Oppenheimer rode into the hills with whiskey and chocolate. Was he seeking the sacred plain of Kuruksetra?

In the fall of 1992, 50 years after Oppenheimer had founded Los Alamos in a Faustian bargain, I visited the museum where forest-green casings for Fat Man and Little Boy slept.

Oppenheimer was a Bohemian scholar, a Jew, and he devoured 16th-century French poetry. He thought a bomb would make the world a better place. Quantum mechanics. Enamored by the Bhagavad Gita, he moved increasingly to the left and learned Sanskrit. The first chapter laments the consequences of war.

But Pearl Harbor led to the Manhattan Project . In the fall of 42 Los Alamos was founded. Code names: Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones. Lawrence built the bomb, and it was a place he was not allowed to name. The sudden irony of one-way tickets to a tiny station in NM. A secret lab atop a mountain, a potential of things to come a walled city. They said that worms came out of the faucets. 

Edward Teller played Beethoven late at night, disturbing everyone in the bomb town. 

Did my cousin Marie Walsh attend the parties drinking lab alcohol? I search the stills looking for a family resemblance in these 1940s women. Mary hadn't yet found us. A woman I had never met. They say I resemble her in baby photos. That she look like an angel. 

A radio station with no call letters. In 1942 there was barely enough plutonium in the world to cover a pinhead. The first atomic bomb was detonated in the Obscuro Mountains, Alamogordo, Trinity was Apache country, Jornado Del Muerto, the journey of death

The world became unnatural. GIs slaughtering wild antelope with machine guns. 

Thye say there was storm lightning that night, the night of fear, a portends of things to come it was an augur light in the desert he said, I was a different person from then on. The purple clouds, the key to the thunder reverberated, echoing back-and-forth and Oppenheimer yelling, It worked, it worked! The light of a thousand stars.

The sun was rising in the wrong direction. The blind woman saw the light and asked what it was, having no reference to it. Oppenheimer rode off into the hills carrying chocolate and whiskey to drown his sorrows. They say that the hair of cattle turned white. A black cat with white spots.

Then, Tokyo, reduced to rubble. The bomb was dropped because no one had the courage to say no. Hiroshima was a virgin city, untouched by firebombs and Frank Oppenheimer said, We hadn't thought about of all those fallen people. What have we done? It shouldn't be in anger, my brothers.

The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2: The Eternal Reality of the Soul's Immortality

Mary's death by cancer, and her cousin, my mother's breast cancer, a result of the bomb fallout.

Shoah is the Hebrew word signifying utter destruction. Holocaust. Shovah, a period of time in Japanese history. Shiva, goddess of destruction. L'shanah tovah. Cast our sins into the river. The starlight of the universe unleashed all at once. Karma, revelations of the ultimate truth. Om, shanti, om.

December,1995

Solstice Blues: the day Jerry Garcia died

I've been sleeping until 10 AM the past few days, very uncharacteristic of me. We approach the solstice at the speed of darkness while I sleep like the dead. Only with strange dreams. Do the dead still dream?

Mike Tuggle on translation and transliteration, translates a dream. I think of Peter Sellers. Mike offers advice. Do not repeat yourself, he said, repeating himself, Do not repeat yourself.

Deadheads holding long stemmed roses at sunset overlooking Bolinas Lagoon. While I was atop Mount Tam, where I was conceived, the day Jerry Garcia died, that hot August night.

They say to play the blues, a bluesman has to live the blues, he has to have lived a life of sorrow. A 10-year-old, Brody Buster, harmonica prodigy, opened for B.B. King, at age 8. We're talking dark blues clubs and alcohol. You don't really have to live the blues in order to play the blues, says Brody. Wise child. He.

12/20-21

All the Goldeneyed Birds

Yesterday Nathan and I went to see Goldeneye, the latest James Bond movie with Pierce Brosnan. He was certainly handsome, but I didn't laugh as much as I did in the old Sean Connery 007 films. The entendres were well delivered. You could see them coming, the bad girl was thoroughly bad, the Russian focus was fun—especially St. Petersburg, but having lived there, I was distracted by familiar sites, places that I had walked daily. The plaza where the blackbirds, with their golden eyes, trapped suns, strutted and cooed. I had a pang of homesickness when I saw the airport, where Valera had greeted me with carnations. A pang, because I fell out of love with him, and couldn't ever get back to that place within me. And now it seems that Sonny and I are heading towards a truce, but to what end? All the golden-eyed birds in the bottom of a shot-glass.

Giving it back to the Dead

Day three or four of earache, allergy medications don't seem to relieve the pressure. My cousin Sinead quips don't spray hairspray in your ears. I had to laugh as this was one of my mother's bizarre quirks. I put a scarab on the earring I've been wearing as a bracelet these past few months. Thinking it might help.  Yesterday, the wire broke, I lost the scarab, it was one of Mom's. I am devastated, but maybe it's time to give back the dead to the dead. We've done our year's worth of penance. For both my mom and my dad. It will be his birthday in two days. Time to move on. A cartouche of Horus the hawk. The feather of truth. The Egyptian book of the Dead comes back to haunt me, one of my mother's favorite books. Sinead's dad died on December 8. A busy month for the dead. Sinead said she smelled cigarettes in the hall, as if he was there, saying one last goodbye.

BE ONE MILE

Be one mile above your home 

dreaming of a time when childhood 

held the meaning of magic. 

Hopefully there, you'll become 

part of the memory.

Be one mile above the coastal ridges 

where you were conceived, 

on Mount Tamalpais's body at sunset, 

after the wedding. 

Remember there are no accidents.

Be one mile north of your heart.
Watch its struggle, 

necessary growth requires the shedding of pain. 

Layer by layer, 

onion tears to cleanse the wound 

of the father and the mother.

Be one mile above Forest Knolls, 

the hill your family's owned a hundred years, 

the big rock like a phallus jotting out, 

the ravines, his legs. 

your house at his feet
if Mount Tam is a woman 

then surely this ridge is a man.
This is the way of things.

Be above the road that leads you home, 

named after an English pirate.
Remember how the Estero 

uncovered the old wood, the square nails, 

and you dreamed this was part of his legacy.

Yes, the plaque was fake.
But the idea of Nova Albion 

and the ache of those white cliffs 

seeking the cadence of speech with the sea's voice.

It told you of other stories:
How the Miwoks dressed in fine embroidered silk 

and ate shellfish from the Chinese blue bowls.

When a trader ship foundered on the craggy shores, 
Point Reyes was the foggiest place in America, 
but all you can remember is the sun 
christening this island in time. 
The point of the three Kings, Little Christmas.

Be one mile above Creamery Bay and Home Bay.
Be one mile above the sunken valleys 
where you want to skim across their surface
in bidarkas. Perhaps the Russians already did this,
but where you were raised is rich in sea nurseries 
on an otherwise inhospitable coast. 

Hover above the wild purple irises in spring 
and remember you carry this place within you always, 
that it wasn't a sin to be born here, 
not knowing the concept of beauty until you left in exile,
expelled from the garden by those with more money.
For, in your dreams, beauty walks before you 
in these wild coastal hills that you call home, 
having called this place home for ages untold.

12/4/1995

Paracas, II, first draft

Paracas, II

I have stood in the deserts where it has never rained in living memory, where the ancients brought water from miles away in canals. Snowmelt from the Andes made this desert bloom a thousand years ago, but the Cordilleras grew up to the sky, taking the fertile plains with them, until the water flowed backwards. 

I have climbed the skeletons of ancient cities, on man-made mountains, where strange crows flew to the center of the labyrinth. I have hiked into the heart of the Inca Empire. 

I have been to Sacsayhuaman, the panther of the Milky Way slept there. The red ocher on the walls. I have stood on the Masada at Cerro Baul, where there was a siege of 50 days. No water forced a surrender. 

Why was Chan Chan deserted like all the other citadels along this coast? When the Spanish came? All the deserted terraces lying fallow for 500 years, the desert endures the confession of stone. 

I have carried the red rocks back from Nazca where they have lain undisturbed for centuries, staring up into that forever sky for millennia on end, while the constellations orbited into the Aquarian age. Who knows how long the erosion chewed on their rock faces, the undersides, smooth from river polishing? This place that hasn't seen a river flow in the millennia. 

Skulls and bones have lain here undisturbed for a thousand years. Llama bones and scraps of burial shrouds. The ceremonial death ritual to ensure life. 

Climbing the metal water tower on the Pan-American Highway, we view the necropolis. Chen Chen was already in decline when the Incas invaded Chimo the remains of hundreds of young women in the burial bed of the king. God Kings of Chan Chan. 

Coastal desert reed boats on the Pacific. Where do you find water in the desert where it never rains? Green jewels on cliff edges In the Moche Valley.

I stood at the top of this ancient pyramid at Huaca del Sol, abandoned canals 2500 years old. The the inter valley canal, once fed by a river 60 miles, away was built in 1100 A.D. There are hundreds of canals and river valleys here, they used the water to measure the degree of slope. I've walked down those dry canal beds, with their sophisticated hydraulics on par with the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids, as a great ancient engineering feat.

Meanwhile the land rose like a budding tooth. 

El Niño in 1983, flooded this region; 50 feet above the valley floor there is a flood line with freshly eroded bricks above it. The taxi driver tells us of the flooding of El Niño, he said that the Pan-American Highway was underwater. 

I'm reminded of the pink flamingos at Titicaca, on the altiplano, the giant Andean coots and grebes, the shell middens like giant chess figures dotted the landscape on this rapidly receding coastline where one coastal uplift of 60 feet at a time, combined with a deluge of rain, forever altered the landscape. 

The orange and red Peruvian buses with their white stripes like a reflecting mirror shining on the desert into these opposite shores. 

I've stood in dry riverbeds, and I have been the raw scarred banks, decades after the deluge. All those skulls staring out to sea, refusing to stay buried, as if the sea held all the answers.

Only now, after seven years, every cell in my body having replaced itself, but what about my hair? Surely my hair hasn't replace itself, for it is longer than seven years growth. 

On the temple of the moon above Machu Picchu I wanted to leave something of myself behind for my dead grandmother and so I cut off a chunk of my hair and left a quartz rock from home at the top of the moongate. 

December 3, 1995 (from my journal)

See Letter to Luis Kong, from the Necropolis, Paracas 1988

Folklore: Bernard Reilly vs the City of San Francisco; Seamus Mooney case

Sinead was talking to a Marin County sheriff the other day, and they got into some genealogy. He perked up at the mention of grandpa's name, saying that all officers had to learn about that case in police Academy, for he was the first to successfully sue his city and win.

My grandfather was the undersheriff of San Francisco County and he was the next in line to be promoted to high sheriff. But he was passed over due to political reasons. Someone said he was too well-liked. And so he sued for backpay, representing himself. And when he finally won the settlement, he was on his way to UC Medical Center with cancer. So it was a merely a matter of time before he died.

That case nearly broke my grandfather and made him bitter.

And aunt remarks about how Mrs. Mooney gave us the orange tablecloth after Grandpa had worked on the famous case of Seamus Mooney, who was held responsible for the death during a Longshoremen's riot. Seamus/James was convicted of murder during that labor strike and it too is a famous case taught in law school.

I'll have to dig out those letters from Mooney to my grandfather at one point. Some of this information should be available to the public, the Bancroft Library, but first it has to be put into some sort of historical context or framework.

Sinead and I seem to have the passion and interest to collect family stories, but unless we write it down, it too will dissipate. Facts will muddle even more than they already are. No one else seems to be interested.

On the eve of my 43rd birthday I get a call

I get a surprise phone call from Sean Kilty who informs me that he's separated from his wife after all these years. Am I surprised? No. And now he's calling me. He lives in Castroville, near my cousins. We'll try to connect this weekend. Tomorrow I'll be 43. 

And I keep thinking, now there's an opening on his dance card, do I want to check it out? Like with poor Hanafi who visited on Sunday, we went for a hike in the Palisades, he's smitten, but I'm ambivalent. Not worth the bother.

I've been Sean's casual lover for years. Very sporadically I might add. Once every other year for nearly a decade—we've kept it hidden from his friends. That's not enough to base a relationship on, and now I have to look at him in a whole new light. I need to find out about what exactly is going on with this separation. Do I even want to? Sideways opportunity.

He has three small kids, so the rest of his life will be tied up with her and with them for at least for the next 15 to 20 years. I would need to follow him. Do we have enough in common to make something actually work? He's tied to a middle-class existence. And here I am conjecturing, and I haven't even talked to him yet, nor have I seen him in over a year. 

Once Sean and I fell madly in love in an instant, but his sin was ambivalence. He was afraid to act and when his friends stopped us at the door as we were about to run away together going to Mexico. He gave me up—just like that. I never quite forgave Michael Larrain, Luke Breit, nor Patrick Grizell for their intervention. It wasn't divine intervention, that's for sure. What was so wrong with me to be rejected by a committee of his friends like that? 

Within that same week he met his future wife. Also a Maureen—Michael Larrain's sister. That love and passion Sean and I shared was a long time ago, and certainly I have a fondness in my heart for him, and the lust that comes and goes, is a bonus. But whether there's a grand passion there remains to be seen. 

Handsome Sean, who looks a lot like Anthony Quinn, is easy on the eyes. Then, there's the problem of his size, he's enormous all over. As in girth. I've been completely inactive for most of the year, so sleeping with him is bound to hurt. Hopefully our bodies adjust to such things. 

Then there is the desire for a child that I haven't quite gotten out of my system. He's had a vasectomy, no, make that two vasectomies, the first one didn't take. At least one kid is a post-vasectomy child. 

I let things resolve themselves via the law of entropy. I don't return the call. Tomorrow I'll be 43. 

November 23, 1995