Harvest Moon

Teardrops of the moon watered the dry furrows. Beyond my shoulder, this harvest of light is waiting for the sky to lean down and offer up the stars. Ithuriel's spears watered heaven with their tears.

William Blake climbed up an apple tree at the age of four and saw God in the branches. Blame his Irish parents. The fey words climbed aboard in their baggage to take root in Blakes orchard. Orchard. Orchard. Orchard.

The first apples. Yablika in Russian, Apfel in German, Avalon in Welsh, silver apples of the moon on the isle of Anglesey. The Druids would be busy during the equinox moon, Lugnasa, Lugh's moon but Claudius put an end to that until Blake climbed up that tree. There were no apples in Eden. Blame the monks for adding apples to the cart.

I visit the upper orchard in September. Under a full moon, I'm picking apples, their perfume bringing tears to my eyes, exquisite odor and promise. The secret whispering of leaves as if gossip and full moons weren't enough to worry about.

Something is creeping through the underbrush, a displaced bird or a rat? I love that absolute serenity of the orchard. The cockleburs in my socks will require days of patient plucking, my fingers will be lacerated, but the siren call of the orchard under moonlight is too powerful to resist.

The cats are excited by the offering of this nocturnal stroll, it's right up their alley, so to speak. They can't believe their luck. Pure cat joy. We are part of their pride and they are a part of ours. We reenact something special without meaning to, beneath the full September moon.

The Equinox, and today is my mother's birthday this harvest moon, and the October moon. Hunters moon my granny called it. My two favorite moons. She told me how, in Bantry after the hay was cut, how they worked and how they turned and turned the hay until it was dry and then they danced under the full moon, drunk on moonlight. They packed the hay ricks to the sky, until the stars watered heaven with their tears. But my mother won't live to see that harvest moon.

9/20-22/02
added 9/17

Two poems, CAVE OF THE CATS, COUNTY ROSCOMMON, and UAIGH na g CAT (Owenynagat)

                                      —for Seamus Brennan
In County Roscommon
in a vaulted cavern.
is the Cave of the Cats,
where the three-headed cat lived.
A racial memory 3,00 years old
begins at the end of the Bronze Age
where base dirt was transformed 

into alchemical iron
and weapons took in a new edge
shifting the balance of power.
The monster roused from sleep
by the cry of the red yew psalter
began to stalk warriors returning 

home on the long boreens.
For was that not the tree of death?
What monster stirs in these deserts
where base oil is transformed into greed?

9/19/2002- rev.06

UAIGH na g CAT—CAVE OF THE CATS
    There are chests of gold within the burial mounds
    but mind the cats that guard them.
      —Old Irish Proverb
    For ethno-musician, Simon O'Dwyer

In County Roscommom, in a vaulted cavern,
is Owenygat, the lair of the Cave of the Cats,
where they say the three-headed saber cat 

guarded the gates of hell.

Was it a fragment of a racial memory, 

born at the eve of the Bronze Age
at a time when the Goibniu 

transformed base dirt into alchemical iron
and weapons took on a new edge 

thus shifting the balance of power?

At Rath Croghan, the epicenter 

where Ireland’s Inanna, the Iron Age warrior,

Queen Medbh of Connaght, 

the white mare whose honeyed thighs drowned 

and crowned sovereignty onto Kings

by a ritual of intoxication,

the meade-mad Queen Medbh
whose lust launched the famed cattle raid, 

“Táin Bó Cuailnge”, a war 

that brought an empire to its knees,

is an old myth.

But at the fissure of Owenygat, 

the locals still recount how the goddess Medbh 

opened wider still to let the demons into her
and she kept the gateway to the Otherworld 

clenched tight, in order to save humanity 

from the tyrranny of ravenous beasts.

Inscribed in Ogham above the lintel 

"Hellmouth Door of Ireland,"
it says Medbh’s son and daughter,
Fróech and Finnabhair, sacred twins

were born at the limnal entrance to the Cave 

where she herself was born and buried.

Some say Medbh shape-shifted 

into the The Mórrígan, the goddess of war.
Others say that the Mórrígan was 

the blood-red Crogderg, her mother-sister.

They say, whenever a crow lands, 

the threefold Mórrígu, are stirring.
They say they take the spirits home

"in the belly of a black-winged bird"
because who reopened the gates of hell?
The Mórrígan’s errant red calf 

is bellowing in the plain of Cruachan.
You know what that leads to. 

 

The Daghda’s cauldron is churning

and rebirthing military fodder.
There have been sightings of crows 

and talk of the flaming red birds 

that wither everything their beaks touch.

The monster roused from sleep 

by the hue and cry of the red yew psalters
began to stalk lone warriors 

returning home on the boreens
for was that not the yew, 

the arrow and the tree of death?

What monster hunts by darkness 

on the plains of the Fertile Crescent
What gates to the Otherworld opened,

the crows circling the battlefield
where base oil is sucked up 

and transformed into greed?

9/19/2002

Rev: 3/17 2006 (the Iraqi war); and 2/2/2008 (Imbolc). I wish I had kept a copy of the original poem.

House of Blue Leaves” Response Paper

“HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES” RESPONSE PAPER

In a 1991 interview in “The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists”, playwright John Guare said, that if you’re going to be in the theatre, “you only get to be a virgin once.” (Breyer, p. 74). He said that you have to be either naive or primitive, or know as much as you can. In one sense, I wish I was still a virgin when I saw “House of Blue Leaves” staged by the Berkeley Rep. By having studied Guare’s play beforehand, I knew too little or too much and like every audience that lip-synchs Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, I found myself anticipating the plot of the play instead of being surprised and delighted by it. I was jealous of the elderly couple sitting behind me who were confused by the structure of the play, thinking it was over at intermission. And by their delight that it wasn’t over yet. The fat lady had yet to sing.

There is an adage that good art should both surprise and delight the senses. Though much of the surprise was in the actual staging and juxtaposition of character’s dialogues, where delight was most evident was seeing how the director interpreted Guare’s exacting technical and stage directions. The craft and juxtaposition of lines and actions was something that I had trouble with visualizing on the page.

Guare states, “a play isn’t complete until it’s staged. You’ve got to see everything....” (Breyer, p. 81). The play was much funnier live than I had anticipated. Guare, a consummate craftsman, asks: “How do we find the music of the play, so that the audience has...the same response every night?” Guare, whose family heritage includes staunch vaudvillian roots, has the precision of an atomic clock when it comes to timing. Forget Timex. He states that even 30 seconds to change a scene is an eternity in a farce...quick entrances and exits are crucial in order to be able to “deal with the rigors of farce.” (Breyer, p. 75).

Guare is a prankster who affirms that creating a play is to have a relationship with the audience. Though our graying Berkeley audience was far too tame for Artie Shaunessey’s prologue cabaret scene—Artie scolds an already obedient audience—pre-taped chatter conveys the feeling of dis-ease, successfully setting the audience off on the wrong foot for the opening scene I would’ve loved experiencing that broken fourth wall joke first hand, instead of already being queued up for it.

In Guare’s introduction for “Six Degrees of Separation”, he mused over the proximity of a 1986 audience to “The House of Blue Leaves” first premiered in 1965, asking what “made the characters seem even more hungry? Their desperation was the same; [but] the audience’s reaction was more direct.” (“Six Degrees..” p.x). By 1986, Guare considered HBL very much a period piece, revived some 20 years later. World circumstances had changed. Another pope, a very real assassination attempt.—life imitating art. I wondered what to make of the audience’s reception to the play’s 2002 resurrection: does the audience still respond in the same manner?

I would venture that our 2002 audience was a little more reticent in general which could be explained away by a midweek performance, early in the run but the actors also seemed a little low in energy. Jarion Munroe as Artie, a fine, capable actor, seemed a little flat and Rebecca Wisocky did not push the character Bananas to her full potential. She was played a little too realistically for a farce.

There are some brilliant bits and character role reversals in HBL. Bananas, who is clearly intelligent and insane, is the only character who is aware of the truth but is unable to piece it together—except when she realizes Artie’s been stealing melodies.

Bunny, who’s never held a job longer than a season, is sublimely stupid—the pot busily calling every kettle black. I hadn’t anticipated Bunny as voyeur in the apartment, a clever scene. Bananas thinks she’s hearing voices. Banana’s one wish is to be allowed to have an emotion. And feckless untalented, sentimental Artie is incapable of deep emotion—except at the end when he kills Bananas.

I was particularly intrigued with minor character the deaf starlet Corrina in that deafness is a metaphor for the play in that all the characters are deaf to each other anyway. And this is what drives the play. Guare writes: “I like Bunny because she moves the plot, ...you can rely on her to...cut to the chase. I like characters that help the plot along and keep it moving and let us know where we are. “ (Brier, p.84). Not only does Bunny move the plot, but she opportunistically moves on with Billy without batting an eyelash.

When Billy turned out to be real (if shallow as a toilet bowl) in Act Two, I was surprised as the characters’ veracity had been seriously compromised in Act One. I found the transition to Act Two to be a rough transition but Mamet-like, it cuts to the chase. Guare wrote the first scene of HBL in 1965, and in 1966, he read it at the O’Neill Theatre in Connecticut, but he said it took him five years to write the second act. Nine drafts later Guare felt he had develop his craft and work out the logistics of moving nine people around the stage.

However it was clearly a case of Dux et machina to blow up Corinna (and the nuns) like that. (But the offstage Pope was as well...) I loved the parallel structure of how Corinna lost her hearing on the se when a bomb went off. And I loved the way each character broke the fourth wall early on. Everyone wants to be a star. Ronnie’s desire to be the film star Huckleberry Finn, but mistaken for a moron by Billy was classic. Artie’s inappropriate responses when Billy asks for teabags for his eyes, underscores the inappropriate responses throughout the play. Guare is a master in misdirection. And the tidbit we’re left with at the end of the play, Ronnie sent to Rome. I wonder if he’ll succeed?

Guare writes: “the theatre is someplace you go for some degree of truth” (Bryer, p. 83).

Guare emphasized that a play should work on dialogue, not props. Creating a play is a relationship with an audience. Guare said “you’ve got to be aware of everything on that stage, because everything on that stage is going to be called playwriting. ‘ (Breyer, p. 81).

In his preface to “Six Degrees of Separation”, Guare stated: “I realized if I was going to be a writer, I must first trust this unknown work process that goes on within and realize my job as a writer {is to protect} it....writing down everything...[but] cut brutally when you’re working.... It’s not playwrite but playwright—wright as in wheelwright...wright refers to the craft...the method we use to make a new map of the unconscious. (“Six Degrees..” p.5).

Guare knew that playwriting was rightfully his craft from the age of eleven “...so there was always this sense that...it was possible; the theatre was something every possible.” (Breyer, p.71).Guare likens the process of playwriting to piecing together pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls—fragment by fragment. Guare’s muse opens a vein and spills “Black-heart’s truth. ...that’s what the plays are. Insurance that the original wound never goes away, that the original crime is never forgiven, is always about to be performed, and is always in the present tense.” (“Six Degrees..” p.xiii). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Breyer, Jackson R., “The Playwright’s Art” John Guare interview, Rutgers Univ. Press, 1995. 
Guare, John, “The House of Blue Leaves,” (with new preface: Plume Edition), Penguin, 1987. 
Guare, John, “Six Degrees of Separation”, Drapmatists Play Service, Inc. 1992. 

CW 810, #2
Sept. 17, 2002 

9/11 Redux

If poetry is news which stays news as Ezra Pound said, then the anniversary of September 11 is poetry at creation, too raw to be crafted into words. On the anniversary of September 11, we sit around the table celebrating a birthday. How last year, a relative sipped coffee from the 109th floor—just two days before. Kismet. Windows on the World, the dizzying flight of birds, a portent of things to come. In the space of time it took God to make the world, the towers returned to primordial dust and stone, taking with them the slender thread of hope from the new millennium.

She came to visit at summer’s end, evoking a gentler time when there was time enough to vacation with families, when summer meant a change of residence. Or of mind. That ritual of return from Long Island to the workaday world. A book out of childhood, or a Frank Capra movie in black and white, starring James Stewart, where another idea of America existed in literature and culture, though not part of my existence on this narrow sleeve of coast where we’re west of the West. Tir na nÓg! my grandmother called it, the land of youth, or was it the land of death? More like Elysian fields—I long for the return to the city from an alien seaboard, from an eastern summer to an America we never saw, only seen in movies or read about in books.

We stood silent on the Fields of Mars in Leningrad before the Fall, the purity of snow hid and nourished the imagination. My translator Oleg told me stories of the 900-day siege, how starving Soviets stripped canvasses from frames to save paintings from Hitler’s advance. Da Vinci’s Madonna and Carravagio’s food rolled up like holy scrolls stored in empty cupboards awaiting liberation. A piece of art was saved for each death. Sacrifice for three million. Enough art to feed the eye.

At the Hermitage, a madman confronted Picasso’s blue period every day at closing time. For seven days I watched him as Matisse’s dancers dizzied me into their arms. I was drawn to that pure flame of Impressionist light because I was haunted by all the dead underfoot, the fluttering wing and crunch of snow hiding a multitude of sins. Oleg led me across the square snow-blind, during the Thaw, we were blue spots dancing between line and vision. Ash and dust chased him through the canyons of Manhattan. He ran and ran and ran from a horror more grisly and real than anything he imagined in the USSR—even Siberia. There’s nothing to ease his burden. The guilt of surviving haunts this man I held as the myth of communism unwound—as he held me when the myth of America began to unravel.

No that’s not true. Another man sits beside me monopolizing the conversation in abstractions. We change partners with the seasons. When the world fell apart he didn’t hold me, his arms were filled with his own darkness. But in the mirror I heard other words like whispering metal hangers in a closet violently opened into unexpected light. He brushed them aside as if they were the strings of an Aeolian harp as he searched for a ritual icon of well being. But I am trapped by a need to translate urgent closet whispering into prose.

Roads almost taken. Whose footprint in the ashes and dust? Like the dust of the moon. One small step. That raw poetry of creation. What we expect to see greets us, not how others see us. In the mirror, that was America burning the retina. Too blind to see, I weep unexpectedly at found art: the image of shoes, a twisted fire engine door, a contorted girder of steel becoming a companion piece to image of Brancusi’s birds bursting into flight.

As we celebrate another anniversary, time greets us with our mother’s eyes, our grandfather’s chin, a hint of dewlaps to soften the resolve and clean sweep of jawline, the tiny advance of crowsfeet. My eyes weep in a dry season, Indian summer. As I approach my own half-life mark, I am mute. What is the point of examining the soul in a time of fire? The only thing I know how to do well has abandoned me at the altar. I am both jilted bride and groom, priest and witness. Scrivener of raw news, not poetry. I am raw at creation. The woman keeps replaying the view out that window from the 109th floor in slo-mo while others debate what to do with the hole in the ground.

At Ground Zero, we are of two minds envisioning both monument and building rising from sacred ground, because the land is too valuable for sentiment alone. Traditionalists and modernists argue over what kind of art to chose. A melted steel girder evokes support for abstract images of Brancusi’s birds alighting towards that moment of flight. Between wars, his mythic Maiastrae deconstructed into golden phoenixes and steel birds in space—essence of flight without benefit of wings or feathers. Ascension of flight. Ezra Pound worshipped Brancusi’s flight of perfection insisting it could only be understood in aesthetic absolutes divorced from the mediocrity of daily life.

Dali said while we are asleep in this world we are awake in another. Dreaming he was a bird, da Vinci drew a diagram of flight. But it took ages before the Wright boys would awaken it. The two brothers plotted against gravity to conquer the wind from the seat of a bicycle. They never dreamed of weapons such as these as they ran across meadows of Kitty Hawk with wings made from sails attached to their arms—modern day Icaruses seeking the eye of the sun while Dedalus hugged the coastline of tradition. In that 12-second flight that changed the world, they flew the distance of half a wingspan of a Boeing 747. Faced with the ability to sail beyond the sunset, the idea of distant worlds shrank to a pinhead.

On the anniversary of September 11, the sky was strangely silent. A pause of flight. A dite of sky angels passing. Old myths resurrect themselves to sustain our flight across the metaphor of time. We filled glass jars with momentos, cantos and thousands of origami birds like at Nagasaki, to send to the World Trade Center, the personal experience transcending pain, becoming universal poetry, raw at creation. Images of planes and fiery towers burned on the retina transformed into thousands of origami birds fluttering like snow to the streets below. On their wings they carry messages and stories toward the next world into a chrysalis of light.

9/11/2002

Roy Conboy's MFA class

Raw at Creation

As we celebrate another anniversary, old myths resurrect themselves to sustain our passage across the sky.


If poetry is news which stays news, as Ezra Pound said, then September 11 is poetry at creation, too raw to be crafted into words. On the anniversary of 9/11, we sit around the table celebrating a birthday, a relative describing how she sipped coffee from the 109th floor -- just two days before. Kismet. Windows on the World, the dizzying flight of birds, a portent of things to come. In the space of time it took God to make the world, the towers returned to primordial dust and stone, taking with them the slender thread of hope from the new millennium.

She came to visit at summer’s end, evoking a gentler time when there was time enough to vacation with families, when summer meant a change of residence. Or of mind. That ritual of return from Long Island to the workaday world. A book out of childhood, or a Frank Capra movie in black and white, starring James Stewart, where another idea of America existed in literature and culture. Tir na nóg! my grandmother called it, the land of youth, or was it the land of death? More like Elysian fields.

We stood silent on the Fields of Mars in Leningrad before the Fall, the purity of snow hid and nourished the imagination. My translator Oleg told me stories of the 900-day siege, how starving Soviets stripped canvasses from frames to save paintings from Hitler’s advance. Da Vinci’s Madonna and Carravagio’s food rolled up like holy scrolls stored in empty cupboards awaiting liberation. A piece of art was saved for each death. Sacrifice for three million. Enough art to feed the eye.

At the Hermitage, a madman confronted Picasso’s blue period every day at closing time. For seven days I watched him as Matisse’s dancers dizzied me into their arms. I was drawn to that pure flame of Impressionist light because I was haunted by all the dead underfoot, the fluttering wing and crunch of snow hiding a multitude of sins. Oleg led me across the square snow-blind, during the Thaw, we were blue spots dancing between line and vision. Later, ash and dust chased him through the canyons of Manhattan. He ran and ran and ran from a horror more grisly and real than anything he imagined in the USSR -- even Siberia. There’s nothing to ease his burden. The guilt of surviving haunts this man I held in my arms as the myth of communism unwound -- just as he held me when the myth of America began to unravel.

We change partners with the seasons. Another man sits beside me. When the world fell apart he didn’t hold me, his arms were filled with his own darkness. But in the mirror, I heard words like whispering metal hangers in a closet violently opened into unexpected light. He brushed them aside as if they were the strings of an Aeolian harp. I am trapped by a need to translate urgent closet whispering into prose. I weep unexpectedly at found art: the image of shoes, a twisted fire engine door, a contorted girder of steel becoming a companion piece to image of Brancusi’s birds bursting into flight.

As we celebrate another anniversary, time greets us with our mother’s eyes, our grandfather’s chin, a hint of dewlaps to soften the resolve and clean sweep of jawline, the tiny advance of crow’s feet. As I approach my own half-life mark, I am mute. What is the point of examining the soul in a time of fire? The only thing I know how to do well has abandoned me at the altar. I am both jilted bride and groom, priest and witness. Scrivener of raw news, not poetry. I am raw at creation.

At Ground Zero, we are of two minds, envisioning both monument and building rising from sacred ground, because the land is too valuable for sentiment alone. Traditionalists and modernists argue over what kind of art to choose. A melted steel girder evokes support for abstract images of Brancusi’s birds alighting towards that moment of flight. Between wars, his mythic Maiastrae deconstructed into golden phoenixes and steel birds in space -- essence of flight without benefit of wings or feathers. Ascension of flight. Ezra Pound worshipped Brancusi’s flight of perfection, insisting it could only be understood in aesthetic absolutes divorced from the mediocrity of daily life.

Dali said while we are asleep in this world we are awake in another. Dreaming he was a bird, da Vinci drew a diagram of flight. But it took ages before the Wright boys would awaken it. The two brothers plotted against gravity to conquer the wind from the seat of a bicycle. They never dreamed of weapons such as these as they ran across meadows of Kitty Hawk with wings made from sails attached to their arms -- modern day Icaruses seeking the eye of the sun while Dedalus hugged the coastline of tradition. In that 12-second flight that changed the world, they flew the distance of half a wingspan of a Boeing 747. Faced with the ability to sail beyond the sunset, the idea of distant worlds shrank to a pinhead.

On the anniversary of September 11th, the sky was strangely silent. A pause of flight. A dite of sky angels passing. Old myths resurrect themselves to sustain our passage across the metaphor of time. We filled glass jars with mementos, cantos, and thousands of origami birds like at Nagasaki, to send to the World Trade Center, the personal experience transcending pain, becoming universal poetry. Images of planes and fiery towers burned on the retina transformed into thousands of paper birds fluttering like snow to the streets below. On their wings they carry messages and stories toward the next world in a chrysalis of light.


© 2002 Maureen Hurley Reprinted from Killing the Buddha Raw at Creation

My Most Significant Theatrical Experiences

MY MOST SIGNIFICANT THEATRICAL EXPERIENCES
(Or What Passes for Shameless Name-Dropping)

I never gave it much thought, but I do have a significant theatrical heritage I’ve never acknowledged—until now as I pursue my MFA: by default playwriting became my correlative areas of study. Now I’m hooked. Perhaps some of my crazy stories will find their way into a theater piece, that is, if I ever learn to tell a story. I’m a poet and though good at creating anecdotes & images, I find it difficult to find the storyline, or through line. Why I am interested in taking this class is to learn how to craft my literary flotsam onto a solid skeletal structure of playwriting.

When I was seven years old, my mother took me to see the Children’s Matinee “Hansel and Gretel” at the Gate Playhouse Theater, a W.W.II Quonset hut in downtown Sausalito. She was in the cast and though I was a bit scared sitting by myself in the audience, I was so proud that it was my mother up there on stage I wanted to shout it out. I loved watching the transformation from mother to actress. I could see both simultaneously, and at times I forgot she was my mother. I was transported into the fairy tale. I loved the costuming, and the set which she’d also designed. And the story, how the clever Hansel substituted a chicken bone for a finger to trick the witch into thinking they weren’t fat enough to eat.

After the performance, it was a Gate Playhouse tradition to invite the birthday kids of the month up on stage along with the cast for a photo shoot and birthday cake. I must’ve been a little slow at climbing up onto the stage after the performance—the risers were huge—she came out from behind the wings to lift me up onto the stage. But as I was hoisted into place, absolute bedlam broke out as all the other kids stampeded off the stage screaming, because my mom was still in costume—as the witch. Take five. Their fear of being eaten meant that I had the birthday cake all to myself.

I often accompanied my mother to rehearsals. During performances, my babysitters at Tiki Junction were actors including Tommy Smothers who was pretty funny even to a seven-year-old. That same year, by default I was cast in a local historical play “San Geronimo!” written by New York playwright Stu (Stuart) Rasmussen. I was the female lead, Julia Dollar, a rancher’s daughter of Anglo settlers in the San Geronimo Valley in West Marin. The leading man, my beau, Richmond Young, was cast because of his height but he was unpopular—kids made cruel fun of him (God rest his soul—they could sense his queerness even then).

I don’t know why Stu’s son Mark wasn’t cast. He was a natural lead, maybe he thought it was sissy. But Richmond was OK, I liked him well enough. He was always kind to me even if he was from Woodacre, the rich end of the Valley and Protestant-DAR to boot. When I say rich, everything was relative. We were from Lagunitas, the Catholic end of the Valley. In the larger scale of things we were all living in the poverty belt. Of course, a popular girl from Woodacre was originally cast as the leading lady but when she was about to deliver her lines to Richmond, she made a fatal mistake, shrinking away from him, making a waspish comment about cooties. Stu, exasperated with her silliness, yanked her off the stage and grabbed another child for the role.

My mom was an actress, she shoved me forward, I was a pro, I went right up to Richmond and batted my eyes cow-like, drawling Southern style, “The Jerseys. Ah just love the Jerseys, their big soft brown eyes...” I got the part. (The popular girls spit like cats and never forgave me for the next six years—it was a small school.) My mom ran me through my lines ad nauseam, I hardly remember the play, just the line about the Jerseys...but it must’ve left a bitter taste in my mouth because I never expressed any interest in being in the theater afterwards. My mom’s going crazy probably had something to do with it—fear of my mother’s footsteps, but I was also extremely shy and had trouble memorizing things. Turned out, I had dyslexia, probably the real reason why I chose to become an artist in college.

One summer when I was around 10 or 11, my mom was costuming for a live televised theater variety show in Sacramento circa 1960. We drove up in a big white convertible to a real motel with a kidney-sized swimming pool with pink flamingos and it was magical. All white and turquoise and pink, the water winking like diamonds in sunlight. I thought it was part and parcel of the world of theater. I loved rehearsals—the theater, a cool round darkness, respite from the searing midday heat. The empty hushed whispering of plush seats, belayed voices emanating from the stage. The set, a revolving black stage. The big red eye of the cameras on cranes hidden behind purple netting draped from the ceiling like Spanish moss meant you had to be absolutely silent. A ballet in progress: Swan Lake. I don’t remember the play. Maybe “Pipedream.” I remember asking what it meant, not realizing we were living a pipedream

I loved the emcee, my mother’s friend who gave me a trinket, a crystal star necklace with secret rainbows trapped inside. Caged stardust. I wore it around my neck even in the pool. The emcee/actor would sit me on his knee and say, “I got a daughter your age” and introduced me to his two boys who were up visiting. But I was far too shy to play with Beau and Jeff. After that summer, I watched every episode of “Sea Hunt” at my friend’s house (we didn’t have a TV) just so I could see him. I loved watching that slow ballet of divers underwater on the black and white TV. And the man who swung me up to the rafters until I screamed. That summer I learned to fly. I was the ballerina in the wings. I was devastated when the crystal star slipped down a crack in the back seat of my neighbor’s Chrysler, she wouldn’t help me get it. Said it wasn’t there. She loved her bourbon first thing in the morning, too drunk to see, more like it. She had a TV too but she never let me watch “Sea Hunt.” Maybe she was jealous of Lloyd Bridges’ small gift.

My next theater experiences were when I got my AA in Art at College of Marin. I needed units outside my field so I took a costuming class. My mom (whom designer Ruben Panis married for his Green Card), had me costuming at an early age (one hot summer in the Hollywood hills I was stuck sewing sequins, pearls and rhinestones on Miss Korea’s costume (while the kids in the pool next door never invited me over for a swim. Poor Panis later drowned in his own blood, stabbed by a jealous gay lover).

Many of my classmates were in the Theater Department: Stu Rasmussen’s son, Mark (Marin’s quintessential hot tub guy in “The Serial”), hoofer/singer Joel Blum (Tony nominee in The Music Man), and musician Mark Adler (his moniker is on movie scores). Besides, there was someone I was sweet on in the Theater Department. I’d follow him across campus because he was a real-life scene stealer. Dadaesque Living Theater in motion. One time this merry prankster streaked across campus in green gym shorts and a lady’s swim cap with chin strap dangling; the next time, he pretended he was blind, asking for help from strangers, then groping them, or picking their pockets.

We designed costumes for “The Importance of Being Ernest,” “Lower Depths” and several Shakespeare plays directed by James Dunn. A seminal line in “Ernest” was “A handbag?” I don’t know why it stuck...perhaps the absurdity of finding an orphan in a purse. We play-read Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” I was confused but intrigued by the play, as with “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds.” I didn’t know what to make of them, but they mesmerized me as did Beckett’s “Play” of three talking heads in garbage cans. I think the music of language was beginning to settle in my ears.

My singlemost seminal theater experience was watching Robin play Malvolio in “Twelfth Night.” Robin outrageously built upon cliché and nuance upon nuance from performance to performance—I knew I was in the presence of absolute genius. It wasn’t what he said, the lines stayed the same, but what he did with the part. He stole the show (and my heart). Ya had to be there to see it. Besides, as he reputedly said, “if you remember the ’60s (OK, so make it the ’70s), you weren’t really there.” But we were there all right— stardust was in our eyes. Our brightest young stars, Mark and Joel and Robin, they all took Julliard by storm. But only Robin William’s small starfish hands were immortalized in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on the Avenue of the Stars.

While I was at Sonoma State University finishing up my BA in Art, I created a theater project at my old grade school for the bicentennial festivities. We resurrected and updated Stu Rasmussen’s “San Geronimo!” with the kids at Lagunitas School. This time I was co-producer, set designer, choreographer/dancer and Jill of all trades. I made a herd of enormous paper-mache head/body masks of Jersey cows which later hung surrealistically on fence posts in my granny’s lower garden to our neighbors’ dismay. One of my classmates at SSU, Fred Curchak, directed Aristophanes “The Birds” and a friend made huge bird masks for the play. I loved the intersection of art and theater. But I stayed on the periphery and became a performance poet instead.

How many kids could claim a theatrical legacy that included a mad-hatterly mother who was an extra in ”It’s a Mad Mad Mad World,” who really went crazy while making costumes for Sinatra in Las Vegas? Or that my cousin’s Nicasio cottage was in a bad remake of “The Village of the Damned”? Why I came so late back to the theater and to playwriting has to do with overcoming the transgressions of childhood by means of story. I’ve lived in the periphery of a life resembling a character out of Faulkner or Williams. I consider playwriting to be a legacy of my second childhood as I’m now officially an orphan. Now I can say what I want. Embellish even!

In retrospect, I think I didn’t want to compete with my mother. Now that she’s dead, the stories resurface. It was fitting that at her memorial service where she dedicated her eyes to Stevie Wonder, there was a huge forest fire raging so most the guests couldn’t come. So we watched a movie shoot in progress—a big truck with cameramen perched on the hood filming cowboys inside the cab, the big rig circling Nicasio square like a wagon train. We were the Indians sitting it out on the front steps of St. Mary’s, ashes drifting down, waiting for the guests to arrive. I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all. She would’ve appreciated it, her wake upstaged by Hollywood. “Take five,” she would’ve said. And so we did. The guests eventually arrived and we sent her of—Hollywood style.

9/10/2002
CW 810, Plays/viewing
Brian Thorstenson
Assignment 1

FERAL CAT

Evening bells echo as we write.
A white cat pines for love on the doorstep. 
The fan turns slowly in the room. We are writing.
He's singing kitty arias of loneliness on the stoop. 
Shall we let him in, or try to get through it?
Not my cat, Vito says. A stray. Nobody's pet.
It's Friday night. Parents are out playing. Not the cat.
Now he's moaning and hanging on the screen door. 
Arms splayed in cruciform. Forgive them, he yowls.
Neighbors are out on the randan, it's Friday night. 
Feral cat on our doorstep, pining for love, 
interrupts the shape of our circle as we write.
Our words stray as he sings of his longing.
All the neighbors are out on the town tonight.

But not the tomcat. He wants in. He wants in.

9/2/2002
Vito's place, Richmond
rev. 10/17/2015

Moving On (freewrite)

Moving on by the light of the silvery moon. I don't even like musicals and I'm singing: tonight won't be like any other night. I'm feeling giddy, because everything reminds me of song. Laureen's poison oak has me singing about potions of calamine lotion. Po SHUNS of calaMINE loSHUN!

Say lotion, say it again, that is an l lying offshore with the ocean, it's a lazy river, malaise and mood. Moving on by the light.... Shortest poem in English is Lighgt! Aram Saroyan kept elongating that word on the typewriter. It must've been an electric typewriter with repeating keys that clicked until infinity got weary and said, oh okay you can have your Lighght anyway you want to spell it. Either that, or it was a carriage return. Ding!

All those silent gh'es to ease the way for light or become a breath of inspiration. Inspire as to breathe into, as in Godhead. The ticking of the hourglass sand, the syrup curling, a fan spinning in an empty room. 

The rhythmic hypnotist of hot summer, the way the sun sets, something by the fire crackling, and a lost kitten, or searching for tribes. Sometimes we resist moving on. All right we always resist, stubborn cahoots that we are, but life has a way of moving on around us, with or without us. Tricking us into action, closing off all retreats, so that the only way out is through. Or in. Or out. On out, said Lew Welch.

I used to think of life as a series of plateaus, tableland mesas like in the Southwest. (Yes, I know that's redundant.) When you've outgrown one level, you have to build up your stamina in order to climb up to the next level. 

Now I see the mesas as floating islands, sometimes the cliff dissolves faster than we can move, and we are frantically moving on to the next place, because to stand still, is to sink into the abyss. 

My eyes are all out of breath, and I'm on a weird race ever onward to the next plateau, the dust of the last one curling up behind us, reminding us that the standing still is an illusion, everything is an illusion. Everything.

9/2/2002

Labor Day Monologue

Did you see that? I can’t believe they lost the damned flag. It says right here they lost the flag from Ground Zero. What they gonna do for a flag? They gotta have a flag for the ceremony. It’s nearly upon us, the anniversary. I bet someone took it as a souvenir or something. How they gonna commemorate it?

Seems like we got two Memorial Day weekends now. One in May and another one in September. Some people still got their flags up from last year. Like ragged birds. Well, Labor Day’s pretty much lost itself in the hubbub of time anyways. I mean, now, everybody goes back to school BEFORE Labor Day Weekend. Used to be the end of summer. Labor Day. Last fling of summer. Last chance at a holiday before the old salt grind begins again.

Labor Day belongs to the past. Back then when things had proper beginnings middles and ends. Not like today where everything slides into each other so fast you don’t hardly know where you stand. Now folks are putting Christmas ornaments up right after Halloween. In my day at least they used to wait till after Thanksgiving.

Most folks are too busy shopping to notice how they’ve already forgotten what Labor Day stands for anyway—other than a big sales weekend. Like Memorial Day. I hear it’s gonna be made into a flag holiday, You know, the clerk at the mall said things were pretty slow on account of 9-11, but just you wait, soon it will be a shopping holiday like all the rest. The malls will be packed. They oughta just call them mallidays. Tht’s what it’s about. Buy, buy buy. They say that was what was buggin’ the Muslims. All that buying. I think they’re just jealous.

What’s the point of still having Labor Day Weekend? They oughta just knock it right off the calendar. It’s just cluttering up another one of those little squares and we need to make more room on it. Besides, at the schools, the teachers don’t even come back from their holidays early but they send some poor lackey in to hold court. No matter that the students had to cut short their holidays in order to get to first day of class or lose their places. Some jackassin the University miscounted and we got 2000 extra students with no place to go. No room at the inn. All fighting for classes. Talk about labor!

No, Labor Day will slide right into 9-11 and soon we’ll forget it ever existed. We already lost May Day. Who knows what IWW stands for anymore? Buncha Commies and Wobblies. And the real May Day with its Maypole and May baskets was a rival of my affections for Easter. But the Christians got upset over that. Said it was Pagan. What was so pagan about bringing your teacher a basket of flowers?

Me, I never been to New York. But I think Labor Day is quintessentially New York. Don’t ask why. It’s just a feeling I get inside. Labor Day always makes me think of the East Coast. Long Island. Places like that. Back when people had summer houses and got away from the city. Guess that always meant New York. Seems like everybody who could, got outa New York in summer. Too hot in the kitchen.

Yeah, it makes me think of the days when people had a proper sense of time. Respect for things. Like sitting down to Sunday dinner. Chicken every Sunday was something to look forward to. It meant something. Now everybody eats on their own schedule. Out of boxes you zap in the microwave. NO more home-cooked meals. No sir. That’s a thing of the past. An artifact I say.

Did you know the Smithsonian is having an exhibit on stuff saved from the Towers? They got a whole fire engine door from Brooklyn. All red, white and blue like the flag. Only it’s got a yellow stripe in it too. But those firemen weren’t yellow, no sir!. They was brave. Real heroes. I always wave to firemen now ‘cause I get all choked up and teary-eyed inside. Never forget. That’s what my Irish granny always said about the English, you know. Never forget. Or history repeats itself.

They found some guy’s camera all melted in the rubble. The guy had no more need of his cameras. But what was weird was that the camera was OK. I saw a picture he took before the North Tower collapsed on him. I swear there were ghost shadows rising up from the towers. Like those pictures of Dresden after the bombing. And I thought of all those ghosts having to learn how to fly. It was plumes of smoke and dust from the towers. I remember seeing a picture where people’s shadows were burned into walls at Nagasaki like indelible angels.

And now everybody is asking each other: How did you witness 9-11. It’s like the day Kennedy was shot. An event for the next generation to pinpoint in time. Some things are indelibly burned into the retina like film in a camera.

They have this section of a steel girder in the exhibit that’s twisted like a negative image of Brancusi’s sculpture of birds. You know that one you always see in all the art history books? It always caught my eye. At first I didn’t get it, a column of steel rising up—how could it be birds? But then something happened, one day I didn’t look at it head-on, but from the side, and I swear I saw the steel was like a mass of birds rising up to the sky like a plume of smoke. Like angels bearing flags.

©2002 Maureen Hurley

AFTER READING BROWNING’S SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

AFTER READING BROWNING’S SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Like most of her generation,

she was in love with the idea of death

and in so loving death,

she loved the muse with a pale fragile beauty

hidden in the sepulcher of the Victorian heart.

Only the cliché of roses, abandoned

seven years in a drawer, moved me

and I wondered where the real Elizabeth

had hidden herself among the ruins of antiquity

and whether flesh and blood ever fed on

the passion of her soul?

Where are the hoarse-voiced harridans

rasping the edges of night into dawn?

Or the jilted prayer of garbage in back alleys?

In the streets of Lisbon,

the men are at their port—

after a long day’s fishing for commerce—

while the pious kneel their way

down the long mile to Fatima’s portcullis—

bloodied knees washed clean in the downpour.

Where is the Portugal where faith

drives the engine of the heart

out of the body into the realm of forgotten sky,

where indifferent saints from another era,

who were men once, complained about the good old days

and how even the faithful don’t know the first thing about it.

8/4/02

Fatima Notes

After reading Elizabeth Brownings sonnets from the Portuguese, I discovered there is no Portuguese. She was in love with death and in so loving death she loved love with a pale fragile beauty from the safe sepulcher of the Victorian heart. Only the rose, seven years in a drawer, moved me, and I wondered where the real Elizabeth had hidden herself among the ruins of antiquity. And whether flash and blood ever fed on the passions of her soul. Where are the horsey voices of the harridans rasping at dawn in Lisbon? Where are the men at the airport after a long days fishing for commerce, and port? Or the pious pilgrims at the plow, kneeling their way down the long mile to the altar of Fatima in the pouring rain, where faith drives the engine of the heart. Out of the body and into the realm of another, the forgotten sky where the saints from another era who were once men, (except Fatima, of course, but she was a girl, not a woman), they complain about the good old days and how even the faithful don't know the first thing about faith.

Portugal notes, not sure when this was written. Aug 9? That's what it says in journal but poem that follows was written Aug 4. Of course I could've misread the date. But I also like this as a prose piece as well. The immediacy, perhaps.



See poem

AFTER READING BROWNING’S SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Bobby Kennedy Lives (monologue)

Scene I, opening: Black curtain backdrop. Downstage left: podium lectern fitted with four microphones of the major networks: CBS, ABC, and NBC. Opening sequence: sound of loud electronic humming.

Segue into the voice of a TV anchor announcing Kennedy’s arrival and pre-speech at the Ambassador Hotel in LA. (taped segment). Tape is interrupted by four gunshots. Two are real and two are stylized—they echo and fade.

Bobby Kennedy staggers through curtains onto stage. His shirt is bloodstained. He grabs one curtain, tearing it down behind him. Audience sees taped TV segments playing on screen behind the torn curtain.

Bobby Kennedy collapses downstage right, slumps onto the floor clutching his neck.

Mortally wounded, he mumbles the name of his wife. He screams…


Bobby Kennedy speaks: Ethel!

(Sound falls away. Silence. Screen behind torn curtain goes black like an old B&W TV with white spot in the middle, resembling a bullet, then fades back. Through Bobby’s dying sequence, a tape of the shooting with people screaming and newscasters describing the scene. Spot light on him lying on the floor; the spotlight shrinking down and fading as he dies—until there’s only darkness at the moment of death.

Segue music from Camelot.

Bobby slowly awakens, comes to consciousness. He shakily arises to his feet and begins to realize what’s happened. He’s dead but is still present. He begins to realize the ramifications of his death—to his wife, his children and others. Talks with himself. He’s omniscient.)


Bobby Kennedy speaks: Ethel. Migod! What happened?

(Looking up at God, a blazing white spotlight, he asks himself) My speech; I can’t remember it… what was I saying? Wait! I remember. That’s it: the crowd was getting unruly… someone said, “Out the back way, Bobby,” … Why am I here? … and the busboy in the kitchen, I turned to shake his hand, and… and… it was all blinding chrome and steel and lightning … as if… as if… (he recites to himself) Something about stars… no, that was for Jack… It is not the end of violence… No, that was for King. (He shakes his head, no, no in disbelief.) God! What have they done?

(He hears a voice in his head: GOD: “It’s nearly time. Let’s get on with it.”) What do you mean?

(Bobby notices the podium (downstage left), wonders why it is there, then he slowly walks towards it. He hears the sound of a faint question which is coming from a reporter. He’s stumbled into a press conference. The questions are understood by the answers.)

Now gentlemen, I’ll field your questions all in good time. Why did I go into politics? Pop always said we could get a crack at the elephant’s back. Jack & I, we had a dream that we could take this great country in a new direction…. A dynasty? I guess you could call it that.

(Shielding his eyes with his hand, he addresses the reporters) It’s hot as hell in here, could you turn down the lights? … Thank you. At first, it was an accidental confluence of politics… We believed in those words. Civil rights is what this nation was founded on. We believed in them with all our hearts.

We … (pause) I still believe in them. (He realizes how much he cares.)

Jack was right: we were confronted with a moral issue. Here we were, spending 75 billion on armaments when we needed to take a stand right here in America on the War on Poverty. When I saw those children in Mississippi, I was outraged, and I asked myself: how could we let it happen in a country like this? This richest country in the world...

What am I going to do now? Why have I come back? I don’t know. (He contemplates.) No. I’ wasn’t afraid to speak the truth. When I was Attorney General... (Asks the press: What year is it?… Responds: 1968.)

Geez, I’m starting to forget things... I don’t think I have much time left, gentlemen... After Jack’s death (God rest his soul), they said I was a carpetbagger, but the people, they all turned out for me…. Not to oppose any other man but to oppose policy… In the last analysis… I beleive we can work together…

After Jack’s death, when the Canadians asked me to climb that mountain with Jim Whittaker, it was a first ascent, and no one knew how afraid of heights I was. How could I say no? What would Jack have said? I’d never live that one down. Believe me. The Kennedys don’t show fear. All that blinding snow.

When we got to the summit, Jim stopped me and he said, “You go first,” with tears in his eyes, and I planted the Kennedy banner in that snow…. Press planes, they were circling like vultures… if they only knew I was shaking down in my shoes, like now…

Jesus! I too want to know why I lived, did it matter? (Angry.) Why the hell are all of you here?

(Responds to hounding of the press:) Isn’t that rather begging the question, sir? I championed the cause of civil rights all my life…

Please, please, gentlemen, I’ll take the questions one at a time. I was his brother first, then I was campaign manager. No, I was Attorney General first, I was his brother second. No, I was not a zealot, but I believe in justice. It was a heaven and hell world... Prosecuting the mob bosses. Johnson didn’t want me as VP on account of civil rights.

And there was Vietnam…. Jack, I… I… yes I admit we made a mistake there. Yes. I regret Vietnam but we believed a tough stance was necessary. I admit I was wrong there. It still bothers me. War is not just a nation’s responsibility, it’s ours, we are all part of it… And when Johnson escalated the war…well….

Yes, well… (chuckling) Advice I'd give? Never let your mother introduce you at the podium… I’m telling you. Imagine her telling the entire world she spanked me with a ruler when I didn’t measure up. I could’ve died of shame. Embarrassing but effective; it got me the tea party votes.

See, we didn’t have time to build the campaign engine. Pop—he was our big publicity gun but after the stroke… He just hung his head down whether in shame or in sorrow—I couldn't tell—when I told him I was running. I was the third sun.

Hey! Could someone please turn those lights down? It's hot in here (he makes as if to unfasten his tie).

They say the nation was a court looking for a king. But the king is dead. Long live the king…. God bless Jack. When he shall die, cut him out into stars…. Is that what I am now? Kennedys don’t cry… no losers around here, Pop always said: It’s not what you are, it’s what people think you are.

Yes, that is correct. What did I read? Not that I had much spare time. The existentialists, the heroic writers, you know, the Greeks, the poets, Tennyson, Idylls of the King. Yes, well, the symphony… but I also enjoy country and western music.

Can I put a question to you?

What happens when you play a country & western song backwards? Give up?

Well, you get your truck back, you ger your wife back, you get your kids back, you get your job back…. (He’s laughing) That’s great…. Do you think you can play that campaign song backwards? Geez, I wish I had my wife and kids back (He shields his face with his hand, like Rodin’s “Thinker, to hide the fact that he’s grieving.)


OPTIONAL QUESTIONS: (Insert taped questions relevant for Bobby to ad-lib on) i.e.: Is it true you’ve had extramarital affairs? It’s been suggested Marilyn Monroe has been part of your life. Can you confirm or deny this statement, sir?


Stop!!! … What have we here, wolves at lambing time? I’m only human. You don’t know what it’s like to be a public servant. The press always on you, always after you, watching your every move. Me? I’m just a man. And…

I’m sorry. There are things I would do again differently. (Turns on the press maliciously and recites to himself) But I served you! You, the opinion makers…. Aww for chrissake….lighten up! Judge not lest you be judged.

(Stares at his feet in shame.) Honey, Ethel, honey, I do love you. God, I love my kids. (He lists them.) Other women? Marilyn? If there is one among you who is without sin, let him cast the first stone…

Now? But I need more time. I’ve only just begun. (Turns to leave, realizing his time’s up. He steps back to the podium.) Is there one final thing you’d like to say to the people, to your fellow man?

Tell Teddy: I am a part that all that I have met… Much abides in heroic hearts…Yes, to seek and to find and not to yield… Hope still lives on in the dream and the dream shall never die…

And tell him to lay off the drink. Yeah, there is. Well, I’ve lived and I guess from the look of it, I’ve died. The one thing I do know for certain is that the opposite of love is not hate. It’s too easy to hate. It’s not about being black or white. The opposite of love is indifference and ambivalence. Care for your fellow man.

Ask not what your . . Ah, shit. To hell with it… it's an undiscovered country from which no man returns, isn't it?

(Turns to walk off. Exits through the backdrop curtain.Two loud stylized gunshots ring out and merge into a drum tattoo. Lights down. Tin whistle of Minstrel Boy.)




© 2002 Maureen Hurley for Roy Conboy's MFA monologue class.

The genesis for this piece was based on a skeletal rough sketch for a collaboration I worked on with Neil O’Neill and Gary Mullan, from an outline which Neil wrote for Gary, an Irish actor whose resemblance to Bobby Kennedy is uncanny. My model was a poem by Adam Zagewski, an interview with composer Franz Schubert, who died young and in despair. You learn about his life only through his answers, not the questions.

Intangible Take 2

I never wanted the plane to land, but the Andes rose like a white dream puncturing the sky. All the blue leaked into the eyes of mestizos. Time flowed backward, lined up like basureños in shacks along the Apurimac. Lined up like the locked eyes of death on several continents. The snake dancer from the selva cursed me. I was banished from the garden. The bridge at San Luis Rey failed me. The six-legged nightmare rode on the smoke. Ask me what this means, I can’t read your history written in the smoke of the victor. The garua fog hid our feet. A gorge divides water from water, brings it together again. Except the L.A. river. What leads us on? A child’s face buried in the moon’s path.

She stored apples under her bed. She said she was afraid of time. The teeth of graveyards. Riderless horses. Fear of Eden. Fear of the scent of money, fear of poverty. Fear of the telephone in the dead of night. I said I stayed in my dreams. Memorized floor patterns, but specific moments never came. The desire to return was embedded in the fear of fear. But I said there are many fears to choose from. Fear of not growing up. Fear of control. Of growing up and not being in control. Or of growing up and being in control. What if I ran away and no one stopped me? That moment of star-crossed thresholds. Not saying, Now I lay me down to sleep. Saying, I see my future as nothing, becoming nothing. The thrones of angels. Fish with the hearts of men. Each belabored breath blinded by the light, I opened my eyes. Looking forward, looking back. My dreams littered with scorpions. Descend with eyes open wide, like Beatrice.

Do you remember when we danced face-to-face? Your mouth opened into my darkness. We swam to the ceiling. You flew into the light, grew fins. We needed to rearrange definitions of speech, of the forgotten rain. Kiss me while the bones of humanity learn to sleep in doorways, and eyes learn not to see. They bathe in the streets where privacy is closest held, yet farthest away. To suckle memory. Whose tongue in my mouth? Por el loro, he said. Van Gogh’s sunflowers weren’t gold enough in the city of bankers. Raucous words flock to the trees like wild parrots. The computer is the 13th muse.

Fear of your thoughts. A code trickling down my thigh. What I ought to have said. Or, if I said too much. Fear of my thoughts. The audience dreaming of an audience dreaming. On bulkheads facing the sea, and in stairwells facing dark alleys, fear the semen trapped or not trapped in translucent orbs, a tangible sign on all the continents. The bridge becomes a flamenco skirt for the moon. Who wears the moon’s mask? The lover’s hand under the dress. No mermaid’s tail. When I said love, I got religious. Learned to walk, then crawl. Post-modern love deconstructing beneath city clocks without hands. Orgasm is closest to art. I didn’t mention syringes or T-cells.

What are we willing to accept? Kennedy shot again and again. And now this. Everything post-catastrophe. The TV channel-surfing in an empty room. Think of random blue noise as a way of life. Intangible instructions. When will blood learn to become stone? Was it better than anything, walking on the moon? Were we ever in the garden? One thing is certain: Night is neither noble nor sacred; her indifferent legs are open wide.

See also

© 2002 Maureen Hurley

MARIN POETRY CENTER SUMMER TRAVELING SHOW

LITERARY GUIDE
June 30, 2002 | San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Page: 5 | Section: SUNDAY REVIEW | Column: LITERARY GUIDE 

MARIN POETRY CENTER SUMMER TRAVELING SHOW: With Joy Maulitz, Dale Biron, Robin Lee, Alden Reed, Maureen Hurley and Carl Macki. Marin County Fairgrounds.

On Writing & Dreams

Have you ever had the experience of making mental notes to say this or that to someone, something terribly important (or at least half-way intelligible) and in their presence, despite best intentions, you turn featherbrained on yourself, betrayed by a cheesecloth-that-stands-for memory/mind: whatever thoughts you had, driven clean out of your head, only to re-emerge at the oddest hours—say, at 5 AM, in a strange flat (and country) not your own—even the cats have deserted you because your tossing and turning like a crazed narwhal reminds them of the bilious sea, and water is not their favorite subject, unless fish are involved.

(As the actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time it reached the sanitized public, it was "piss" versus "fuck". As if piss were preferable to fucking. Tell me why San Francisco society was not ready for that Anglo-Saxon word. My first and only opera I attended, there she was in a peacock sequined gown, Tallulah brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, speaking in a sotto voice that carried across the marble lobby and into the streets. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)

This mental indulgence exacerbated by bad cramps tempered with aspirin, cognac—one gets these images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind, ends up having entire one-sided conversations that never actually reach their intended victims. I’m a lousy correspondent—either dead silence for years, or a series of volumous ramblings like this one. Nocturnal epistolic documents, personal essays produced under duress by the obsessive urge to write. An unwillingness to let go.

Ah, one could say, self-indulgence is a fine thing, as long as it goes no farther than the page but essays demand an audience, that’s the other half of the Faustian pact. The monks had it right: indulgences. These, my indulgences—not poems (too self-absorbed and convoluted), but poet’s work.

Practice for scholarly glosses in the margins of what may later become a poem (if one is lucky).

I like Brodsky’s attitude on writing and the personal essay: A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking. He elaborates that a writer is caught up by the relentless centrifugal nature of language. . . . where . . . ambivalence and open-endedness as the essence of [the poets’] endeavor.

This of verbal excess began in earnest when I had a Ukrainian boyfriend. Suffice to say, in 1989 letters rarely reached their intended destination, the KGB (or NKVD or NVKD—they were forever changing their acronym every decade or so, but not their technique, their headquarters, the Lubiyanka, cold solemn stone fortress/oubliette in the krasnaya heart of Moscow) working overtime to intercept love letters complicated by poetry between the sheets of Soviets and Americans.

So we wrote everything in a gonzo journalistic fashion, in triplicate, mailing one copy, sending the others via “couriers.” (Yes, our mail was opened.) I met many Russian couriers traveling to the USA, I received mail postmarked from all the cities of the free world, or got late night calls from homesick Russian friends of friends wanting to talk with someone—anyone who'd been there—a sort of sympathetic magic. The friends system was amazingly good.

Luckily, there were many Russian delegations traveling back and forth because of the efforts of people like William Mandel, a NPR radio commentator, Armand Hammer, the baking soda king, and the stuffed toy animal king, Henry Daiken. They all were couriers for me, they allowed me to stay in touch, to communicate with my Soviet lover—who now lives in New York and shared afternoon coffees with Josip Brodsky—who gave his Nobel money away to struggling Russians.

Strange offerings I received from people I didn't even know from Mother Russia—pre-revolutionary peasant dresses, coral & amber necklaces, USSR army watches, belts and pins. The Russians sent things of value to the west to raise valuta to buy an airline ticket out, or to pay for delivering packets and letters.

Once I flew back from St. Petersburg smuggling out dozens of letters, lacy silver spoons and tea glass holders, and more US currency than I arrived with, I was afraid I would get caught red-handed, so to speak. A counter-counter-revolutionary of sorts, I said No when they handed me an old icon. Ironically, I’d smuggled in as much money from Russians working in California for their families to live on; a thousand dollars was worth more than a year’s salary in Russia.

I chased elusive dreams to distant countries specifically because they were off limits, I purposefully slept with the enemy because in 5th grade I learned of a mythical Russia with troikas in the snow, in love with horses, I couldn’t let go of the image, and little did I know it was somehow tied to the frozen canals of Holland—Hans Brinker’s mythical silver skates—

I lived in St. Petersburg one winter, small patches of ice-free water beneath the bridges relentlessly patrolled by the ducks who knew: to let go of the open pond was to die. Friends are everything in Russia; without them survival is impossible. On the Field of Mars I stood overlooking the converted palaces, children sledding down the steps, and really, it was no different than here in Amsterdam.

Only later I learned Tzar Peter modeled St. Petersburg after this city we now inhabit. That inhabits us and our writing. Czaar Peterstraat and the birth of the Russian Navy. Amsterdam was his window to the west.

Of course, I’d be sentenced to spend time here looking out these windows, letting go of the myths, only to reinvent them in the poem. I perversely learn history through the back door, as a traveler in search of some elusive mystery. For what reason? Why do we write, and who for?

I need that reassurance of the personal conviction as testimonial. For poetry makes us whores— it is a relentless, unforgiving mistress. I’ve found myself in unusual circumstances for the sake of poetry. I’m merely the scribe.

And this Celtic insensibility—of course I skirt the issues, isn’t that Celtic nature, the Gordian knot? The muse comes in strange forms I no longer question. And so dawn nudges the trams into play, here, as in Russia, still I can’t sleep, but soon oblivion will find me like all the rest.

The cats are semi colons at the foot of my bed: I dream of people before I meet them. Crazy? A good Cartesian response to the unmeasurable. I know craziness second-hand, my mother’s indulgements influenced by the drug-induced ’60s & ’70s.

Then, my grandmother spent her free time wandered about the house muttering Cromwell; the Anglo Saxons & Jutes. The sassanach, she spat. When I was a child, I thought they were swearwords. I knew they were bad, very bad, that I mustn’t forget my history. And so when I recognize “kin” so far from home, I am overwhelmed. There’s a word for it: anim chara (soul/heart friend).

I don’t want to “make” precognitive dreams come true. Once I went to great lengths to try to change them. To my horror, the circumlocutions were also part of the dreaming cycle. If anything, I err in being too passive, waiting for them to unfold, & then wonder what the (fuck the) significance is. It’s not like a storyline, it’s a series of isolated moments, that upon waking, I sometimes mistakenly string them together into a narrative thus confusing the picture.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine:
people live in one another’s shadows.

I didn’t get a chance to tell you I dreamed I had to memorise 5 lines in Welsh—it was all a jumble of sounds, with no images to hang onto. I no sooner got one line down when it forced out the one preceding it, and so on through the night. I can’t even begin to pronounce the Welsh, I barely know the rules of Irish. I awoke with the cadence.

Pay attention to the rhythms. Teachers come in the most surprising forms. Poetry is a two-way mirror. The inside looking out. The outside looking in. You have to be ready to reassemble the pieces, wrote David Meltzer.

Once Vins and I went to Louven in Belgium where he went to University to study philosophy. Wandering the city, we stumbled upon an arch with Old Irish enscribed on the lintel. To my surprise, I was able to decipher it. . . perhaps one of the few visitors able to do so in the past several hundred years. A college founded by Irish monks in the so-called Dark Ages. And here we are, archaic sentinels from a culture (and languages) on the verge of extinction for nearly as many centuries. And we’ve so rudely taken a long time dyin’ at that.

How does one come to terms with: Cenedl heb raith; cenedl heb galon (a nation without a language; a nation without a heart).

I prefer phrases like Tá grá agam ort or Yr wyf yn du garu to the names of war.

Glamour, corrupted from grammar, this rough magic by which we strike. It’s in the blood. The dark, threatening sky. Again.

As I watched the stairs, I remembered subject/ object/ verb, but not the details—like inside vs. outside. I got to WH Smith bookstore 10 minutes early, I went downstairs 5 or 10 after 3, but didn’t think to go outside, and there he was out there all the time standing in the rain. I sat in the bay window, the rain falling, thinking Paul had gone home first, and got caught up in something. The story of star crossed lovers stood up by a miscommunication, the clock kept chiming the quarter hours with a vengeance.

What I recall of Ted Hughes’ animal poems in Thought Fox, I liked very much—especially the one about the horses. I need recommendations to “get” a particular poet. Maybe it’s because I’ve never “gotten” his voice in the small bits of anthologised poetry I’ve read in Norton, etc.

Of course, at the time (early 1980s), feminists were blaming him for Sylvia’s death. . . I was still new to poetry. So much to learn. . . In context to Ted’s poems, Heaney’s seemed a bit flat, but I was already familiar with many of the poems.

Some poems take their own time coming in.



© Maureen Hurley 2002. A shorter version/ variation of this piece, Anim Chara, takes the form of the epistilary letter—actually a confluence of two posts to Walo Rojas, Chilean poet, and to Paul Evans, Welsh poet and translator. The original piece dates back to 1996 when I was living in Amsterdam, after participating in the Poetry International festival. Amsterdam is very much a dreamlike city. For years, I repeatedly dreamed of the canals of Amsterdam, long before I ever went there. It was already part of my dream psyche, only I always thought the shining city of light was San Francisco with weird mantle clock houses. I was shocked to recognize the place of my dreams in Amsterdam.

POEM FOR SEAMUS

Seamus’ palms are pale suns
as he points to his dance trophies
but his body turned against him
and when he danced his swollen liver rebelled.
He recites an alphabetic litany of letters for hepatitis
says D&E, F&G are twin diseases
he recites a litany of drugs that keep him on this earthly plain

They say the guard assigned to Evita Peron went crazy
looking at her gold hair spread out like a sun
and he took her as she lay in the sarcophagus

Bingham thought he found
the lost Inca city of the virgins of the sun
I waited three hours to wait for the mist to clear
before entering the sacred city
so that the gates would open.

On top of a mountain in northern China, a monk Wu Sha
was gilded by fellow monks for what transgression
or enlightenment, the story is lost, only the verb remains.
At the hitching post of the sun
he pointed to the four sacred mountains.

In the Atacama desert I stood in a sandy trough
holding pot shards in one hand
and what I thought was an animal jaw
in the other hand, was human
and I looked at those teeth
grinning at me and waiting…


2002/06

Letter to Roy Conboy

Roy,

Did you say to write a ten minute piece, or a ten page piece? Yipes! I did ten pages, then I got into it so much that I wrote another piece to go with it that's 5 pages long, since I owe you a coupla more pieces anyway, I hope you don't mind...otherwise I'll have to toss out every other word....who knows, it might be more interesting that way...

I tried to salvage my Sept 11 dialog...that I was too shy to turn in as I thought it was a buncha crap...and it ain't improving with tinkering....I think I can only write about what really happens to me...in mea maximum culprit confessional mode... that's why I love this monologue process.

It's just hard trying to find a venue where I can develop multiple voices outside of myself...(other than becoming schizophrenic or a Gemini, that is). Any suggestions on who to read? I've a few playwritng books I'm looking at. I think I'm panicking over structure here. I know how to do it in a poem, which is organic—it just happens, but it seems dialogues need another approach. More distant, more removed, more LOGICAL! (My brain rebels...)

But what really moves me are those quirky, if sometimes historical monologues. I love anything from Billy the Kid (Oandatje)—the cannibal spaniels, or the monologue from the Long Day's Journey (O'Neill) where the character gets hypnotized by the sea and discovers God and everything enroute to Buenos Aires, and the one from East (Osbourne?) where the penny drops and the character realizes he gets what he deserves, the scrubbers, not the bird he's clocking. Or Maureen's speech in the Beauty Queen of Lenane..when she's crossed over reason after murdering her mother...It's not like I haven't been exposed to the theatre...

Maybe it's the epiphany of self-realization that moves me, I think, but it seems I have to blunder up onto it, which means going back to the piece again and again until I discover what it is I want to say as I'm usually the last to know. Ah well...


Maureen

DRIVING LESSONS

DRIVING LESSONS                                                              

West county back roads 45 minutes from anywhere gives you time to think.

Behind the wheel since I was 13, w/o a license, pedal to the metal, swinging my rear end

around curves with a permit for black ice & road rash, it goes with the territory.

I get some real writing done on back roads. A friend kept driving cross-country,

it was the only way she could write novels. Gas was cheaper than rent.

Busted by the CHP at 17, it was a matter of pride to see how far I could get w/o a license.

Before that, it was the horses I was addicted to at an early age.

Never did learn to ride a bike but my quarter horse, she was fast,

a Three Bars mare, from a long line of Preakness and Derby winners.

She was the fastest animal on four legs except maybe a cheetah,

not many cheetahs in west Marin, it’s a veldt thing.

Once I saw a servil in a dumpster—escaped from a wildlife preserve.

Poor thing was declawed and defanged, and surviving on garbage.

I thought I was having a flashback on account of being up so early.

But it was sitting on that garbage heap with tufted ears the size of a jackals’

like an Egyptian god greeting the dawn, thin and long as a journey.

That’s how I knew it wasn’t a bobcat mutating in the imagination.

For starters, it didn’t have spots. I’ve seen bobcats and mountain lions a plenty.

I kept looking around to see if I was on Candid Camera or Publisher’s Clearing House,

or something like that. Not likely living out in the sticks.

Big cats. One time I saw a lion drag a deer across old man Schivo’s meadow.

The doe outweighed me, with only a barb-wire fence and a walnut orchard between us. . .

And a black catamount used to patrol the ridge. Terrified, we thought it was a jaguar.

Just melanistic. Someone shot it, I guess. We watched a cougar drag cubs to a new den

on Mt. Barnabee. Never could get the binoculars to work, a big hairy eye in the middle.

The servil made Eye Witness News. Guess I was the last one to see it alive, poor thing.

Seems like I’m always catching the tail end of things, as if I was born stradding eras.

Coming home from grade school, we had the afternoon session

on account of Lagunitas School being so crowded and all—

There were no other little kids on my road, so the bus dropped me off on the highway

at the bottom of the hill. I had to walk that mile fast to make it home before dark

as it was mid-winter. Up the canyon, under the canopy of trees,

fallen trunks glowed with a ghostly phosphorescent in the leaf mold—

I told Billy Joe—he was in high school. I told him they were silver snakes or fairy paths.

Anyway, as I was saying, my horse was the fastest in the valley at the quarter-mile.

Fast as my math teacher, Archie Williams who shook Hitler’s hand at the Olympics.

We used to race along the old railroad bed that ran through Taylor Park

and slalom through ravines so fast, no one could catch us, not the ranchers,

or even a cheetah, not that there were cheetahs in west Marin.

Once a cougar leaped in front of Mr. Lindsey’s palomino, Lady, she did the splits

never having seen a lion before; it’s not exactly something you can train for.

Our ponies were Sherman tanks, no fire road or gate was safe from us.

I used to win armloads of blue ribbons and cheesy trophies on Gymkhana Day.

I always took the dollar race, the bill clamped nicely between thigh and horse.
I come from a long line of horse whisperers. It’s in the family. So’s wanderlust.

My great-grandfather had a brute of a red mare—red as Peig’s hair.

She (the horse) was sweet as could be to him and he did well by her at the races.

But she reared up and took a chunk out of my granny’s arm for no reason at all—

that’s why she’s so afraid of horses. But I’m getting off track.

My truck is older than most of the kids I go to school with.

I call it Blue Lazarus because it just keeps on truckin’.

The odometer is approaching the 300,000 mile marker,

most of those miles spent between Bolinas and Fort Bragg.

I’m thinking of throwing a party for it, now that it’s old enough to drink.

My uncle used to have us kids breathe into the breathalyzer lock

attached to his ignition so he could start the car.

A proper drunk knows all the back roads home.

When I was 18, my dad—he was an ex cop—looked me up to see how I turned out.

He let me drive his sports car and here I was, heel-toeing the gas & brake

double-clutching, double shifting the curves down Highway One.

He wanted to know who taught me to drive. Boyfriend? No.

Said, that’s the way he drove the race car. In the blood, I guess.

Remember when personalized license plates came in in the ‘70s? when Nixon got impeached?

I was driving over Waldo Grade and the car in front of me said “FCK NXN”

and so I decided to customize my mthers’s license plate. She had this old Rambler

that said 456 SEK; well, with a little paint, I modified the K into an X

and she got great mileage out of it—until the cops pullede her over and said it was stolen.

She said the cop who took down the plate, he shaking his head.

Couldn’t believe that one got by the censor board. I don’t think he wanted to bust her

but the car got impounded. She said it was junk anyway. She was pretty cool. You know, turned on?

It really bugs me the way people drive in this city, they’re always lost

head up their ass in a nicotine cloud, brain dead, or worse—on their cell phones,

always picking their noses and generally wasting time lollygagging.

I’m stuck half-way between gears like a buggery turd, lugging it.

All this open road going to waste and they’re guarding their lanes

like jealous dogs worrying a bone, not about to let anyone else take up the slack.

One time I crammed the gear shift to get around some cow hogging the road,

and it just came off in my hand. I was in third gear, a steep grade ahead,

I’m holding the stick shift like a cattle prod, wondering what the fuck to do next,

and the whanker ahead of me, oblivious to the world, was prospecting

his nostrils like he just struck a rich vein in the Sierra Madre.

People tell me to slow down. Stress kills. They equate it with speed.

I consider it a dance. Following some whank stresses me out.

I grew up on roads with dangerous curves, it was a matter of pride

to see how fast we could take Dead Man’s Curve or White’s Hill.

Fast women in loose cars, we out-raced the cops on Lucas Valley Road

trimming curves like a seamstress shortening the distance between two points.

It comes down to this: some are born to burn up the miles, living

in the fast lane, others hug the slow lane, afraid of commitment.

Like the man I’m currently involved with, or not involved with,

depending on who’s asking. He’s so afraid of love, he straddles

the white shoulder line as if his sanity depended upon it.

I once had a boyfriend who spent a lot of time on the road

and I kept finding these dirty rolled up socks in the van.

I couldn’t figure out why they were falling out of the laundry basket

and then he finally spilled the truth, he was whacking off on the road.

Should’ve seen the writing on the wall: when sex goes, it’s a matter of time.

Bases loaded and the fat lady singing. Only I couldn’t make out the words.

Hey, you got a license for that thing? That I was the one with the seven-year-itch

is beside the point. Back when we were dharma bumming it on the road,

I used to come down on him on those long empty highways.

It was a matter of pride to see how far we could go.

My neighbor George, this cat, he really was a dharma bum.

I can’t remember his name in the book. Something like Jep,

but that was Gary Snyder’s literary name. You know, Kerouac?

Anyway he and Janis, yes, THAT Janis, were in the back seat balling.

What a word, that really dates me, doesn’t it? He was just in it for the drugs.

When we used to walk home from school she’d be waking up—

Big Brother and the Holding Company took over Barbano’s summer camp

after old man Barbano shot himself. I saw them take him away.

Seems he couldn’t bear to live after his daughter was murdered.

It was in all the magazines and newspapers. But we were the last to know.

Janis was burning the candle pretty hot at both ends by then

and she’d get up around 4 PM and crank up the amps.

We’d hear her crooning to herself between sips of Southern Comfort.

Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends. . .

My best friend was a groupie and we used to score from the musicians.

But my horse would throw a tizzy every time we rode past Jefferson Starship’s place.

They had this toy twin prop biplane in the oak tree that spun like a hornet.

You know, the one on the album cover? Rock musicians moved to the valley en masse.

We were outside civilization—the suburbs and the city were far away.

One day my little cousin wandered into Jerry Garcia’s house on Resaca Ave.

to play doctor, and she took all the pills in the medicine cabinet.

God only knows what was in his cabinet. He sure as hell didn’t.

We had to get her stomach pumped. Jerry never really left the valley.

He died trying to kick the habit at the Gregg’s old summer camp.

Linda Gregg became a poet, her old man challenged Jack Gilbert’s manhood

and handed him a chainsaw; Jack climbed the Doug fir, the tree snapped his back.

She drove that wheelchair of his as far away as she could from that valley.

Sweet old Bob, you know, the guy who had a thing for his socks?

Yeah him & my cat! He used to drag me to all these Beat readings in the City.

I heard this cat Gary Snyder’s poem about my valley and said: I can do that!

I didn’t know I was in for a life sentence. I took up writing, but the SOB

said I needed a poetic license, then wondered why I ran off with the poet

who said some pretty fast words in my slow lane. It was an easy conquest:

four on the floor, we tailgated on soft shoulders and dangerous curves.

I yielded to oncoming traffic. I let him look under my hood, but the poet

got cold feet at the bridge. Here I was, knocked up, and no place to go. . .

So I slept in the back seat of a VW bug in Safeway parking lots—made me feel safe.

The words, they just kept coming down the line. I never thought to look back.