Fall colors freewrite

The fire in the throat of the wind, the way it flickers and lickshas me worried. There is an inferno combusting in the trees. The leaves gathered in the sunlight all summer long and at the first cold wind, they dream in sun colors, and let go. Soon the leaves will give away all the pieces of summer to that tramp of a wind that licks at the eddies and crevices until the trees stand bare in naked skeletal splendor. A branch rubs against a windowpane, a street light flickers like distant fire, and all the stops are pulled out. An aura of wind, water and earth. Fire in the hole. Incongruously, I think, is that a canary in your mind shaft?

9/23/2005 Writers’ Group

Autumn Equinox freewrite

The turning of the seasons, looking back over the shoulder, eyes cast on the remnants of summer, with one foot stepping towards winter, the other leaving spring. Equinox. But the nights are growing in sooner, no dog days, no halcyon days of Indian summer to carry us across the threshold of the year. A cold wind nipping at our heels, so uncharacteristic of September. The cold seeps into the bones, it creeps under the open corridors of loose shirts, and preternaturally dwells in the psyche. The cat wants in. He’s bracing himself against the cold, he wants in, he wants shelter from the storm. As do we all. And has Dylan finally cashed in the cow during the September of his years? We listen to his lyrics sell, sell, sell And now Scorsese has made a film of him. What happens when the idols become the icons? It’s Equinox, but where? Surely, not here, maybe at the equator where the nights and days are always equal. No cold nights to remind you of winter’s frailty. Meanwhile another hurricane pounds the Gulf, and the homeless living in tents, in sthe weltering heat, still have warm summer nights. No pestilence infested night to contend with. Yet, I bet they’d happily trade places with us, even with the cat.

9/23/2005 Writers’ Group

Huckleberrying with Bears

SUE: How’s it over there?

BOB: Pretty good.

DAVE: I found a really good patch. Handfuls of berries. Big ones too. Blues.

SUE: Really? Where are you?

DAVE: To your right. More. A little more.

SUE: Keep on talking. I still can’t see you.

DAVE: I’ll rattle the bushes, OK?

BOY: Aooooo!

LORA: What was that?

SUE: It’s just the boy.

LORA: Are there any bears here?

DAVE: Naw, not yet.

BOY: Aooooo!

LORA: Whaddya mean, not yet?

DAVE: Not bad, kid. Scared the shit outta me. They're working their way down the coast. Already got ‘em in Sonoma County.

SUE: I still can’t see any of you. Rattle the bush again. Thanks.

BOY: Aooooo!

DAVE: Wait. I didn’t rattle any bush. Did you? Mmmm, these berries are good. Sweet too. I’m coming over. Quit playing around, now Boy. Won’t be long now. Grrrr! Where are you?

BOY: Grrrr!

SUE: Over here. Are you moving around? How come you rattled it from a different place? You're freaking me out. You trying to get me lost or something?

DAVE: But I didn’t move. And look at the bushes. Can you see them? Do it again.

SUE: Do it again Dave, I missed it. Man this wood’s thick. A fire waiting to happen like Inverness Ridge.

DAVE: Hey, I'm talking. Ya find it?

LORA: Think he was guilty?

DAVE: Who?

LORA: OJ Simpson, of course.

DAVE: What brought that one on?

LORA: The fire. It was during the trial. We were stuck a week in this camp and the only news we got was the fire and the trial. Yeah, I was stuck a whole at Camp Mendocino Woodlands. Not bad. Hey, has anyone heard Bob lately?

BOB: I can’t get through. The brush is way too thick. I gotta go around. Dang! I lost my watch. You gotta watch out for sinkholes too. Next time bring a machete, will ya? We gotts ta head back, it’s nearly sunset. I'll catch up with you at the car. Everyone move west, towards the light. Stay in pairs, OK? See you on the other side.

 DAVE: Bob? Bob?

(this piece was a victim of epic ASCII fail....I was only able to resurrect fragments of it.)

INDIAN SUMMER haiku

INDIAN SUMMER

Fall slaps us surely
in the face, shaping us up
for coming winter.

8/26/05

Summer's End Galore

Plenty, and good enough, my grannie would always say. I grew up tin-eared to so many of her odd turns of phrase. I was too easily tortured by schoolmates because my English was lilted. Pure Bantry Bay it was, and I fought my tongue's inclination.  I ruthlessly stripped those phrases from my speech the way a gardener tackles spring weeds in a no-nonsense sort of way while I became mute, lacking for words, between languages, I was. English to English. The ancestral tongue structuring a bearla and nearly a half a century later, I can still hear the Irish word go leor (galore), that meant plenty and enough.  My grannie was keeping the old tongue alive in a transplanted language. How many centuries were those words passed down, an unconscious act, a weed in the garden. English flourishing, despite England's best effort to strip Ireland of its Gaelic. She always said that the Irish beat the English at their own game when they took to writing. Revenge is the best sword. Drop the s and the word becomes the last word. there was nothing left for me to do but pick up the pen, a gauntlet thrown down in the grass. Ten paces at dawn. Summer's end, the end of innocence. Galore. Good enough, she'd say.

8/26/05 This was from my Writers' Group. I wrote little poetry but the prose went deep enough.

Roadside Weeds

Deep summer. Weeds by the side of the road, fallen pieces of the sky. Won't do any good to pluck them. All that periwinkle blue going to waste. A blue blur I acknowledge at 70 mph, as I careen north, crossing the Russian River, muddy, churning. Late rains have confused the flowers. First, the yellow flowers, then the poppies, followed by lupine and chickory. There's an order to the blooming of flowers. As if there was a grand scheme of color opposites at work. Yellow / blue. Orange / purple. The mallows and clarkia have little competition, it's magenta all the way, baby. No complement of color, unless you count the grass, but it's gone tawny as a lion, despite the late rains. All next year's seeds will germinate, only to sizzle under August's hot anvil. Dog days of summer. In my Elderwriting memoir group, Catherine says it's because the dogs always go a little crazy for lack of water. People too. The discussion circles the phrase, hackles raised, a low growl at the back of the throat. What does it mean: end of summer? The threat of disease. Lael says Rabies. A farmer's daughter would think of that. A neighbor lost his cattle when an august dog hankered after a shank of beef. Afraid to drink at the trough, bright green algae curls amid fish and cress. In a fit of domesticity, and brandishing a green thumb, when the mesclun lettuce had roots, I planted a few seeds in the herb box: arugula, and raduccio, not knowing its ancestry. But the lettuce bolted in the heat, reaching for that shiny patch of sky, it flowered and opened its blue hands. Chickory weed by any other name, by the roadside, a weed in my salad bowl, I garnish with sun-ripened tomatoes and basil. I am rabid with desire, all that red and blue and green and purple in my bowl. A bouquet for the dog days, and for what is to come. Sharp tang of fall in the air, knocking on the door of the sky.

8/26/05 Writers' Group

Novato woman found dead in pool, Verona Seiter

August 5, 2005 | Marin Independent Journal (San Rafael, CA)Author: Gary Klien | Section: Marin Independent Journal 

A 68-year-old Novato woman was found dead of an apparent drowning yesterday in her neighborhood pool, police said.
Verona Seiter, a longtime resident of the Crossroads area in southern Novato, was found around 5:30 p.m., when a neighbor saw her face-down in the deep end, said Novato fire Battalion Chief Mark Heine.

The neighbor called 911, and two Novato police officers arriving at the scene jumped into the pool and brought her to the surface.

"Initial rescue efforts were attempted, but she died at the scene," Heine said.

Police and the coroner's office are still investigating Seiter's death, but Novato police Lt. Tim Christensen said it does not appear suspicious. An autopsy is planned for today.

It was not immediately known how long Seiter was in the pool, but it might have been a relatively short period of time. A longtime companion, Herman Berlandt of San Francisco, was scheduled to meet her yesterday afternoon but his bus was delayed in traffic. Seiter left a note at her Cheda Lane residence for Berlandt to meet her at the pool.

When Berlandt arrived, police were already there with the bad news.

Berlandt, a poet and theatrical director, said he had known Seiter, an actress, for 30 years. He first met her when she auditioned for a Maxwell Anderson play he was producing.

"We became inseparable friends," said Berlandt, founder and director of the International Poetry Museum in San Francisco.

Neighbors and associates described Seiter as an irrepressible character - active, free-spirited and bold. She was known in the neighborhood both for her distinctive English accent and her penchant for sunbathing openly in the nude.

"She was very theatrical," said Mary Van Muckey, a neighbor.

Residents said Seiter performed regularly as an actress and also did voice-over work. Her recent productions included Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days," "Footfalls" and "All That Fall" at the EXIT Stage Left theater in San Francisco.

"Verona was a delight," said San Francisco director Ugo Baldassari, who directed Seiter in "Happy Days" in 2001. "She was a free spirit, an imp and a very dear old soul. It was a pleasure for me to have worked with her."

Seiter had spent the last several years battling bone cancer, enduring repeated chemotherapy and radiation treatments, neighbors said. Still, she remained active, swimming regularly and traveling. She had returned earlier this week from a trip to Europe.

"She's gone through it all and keeps coming back," Van Muckey said. "She was such a fighter."

Funeral arrangements are pending.

Goodbye God, Gone to Bodie (Monologue)

Jim Cain's house, Bodie used by permission @Allen Saywer

"Winter is here—the snow part at least.  A nice little cabin on Wood Street.  A winter's supply of grub; a few books, including a pack of cards; and—half a barrel of whiskey will carry a person through until spring." —Free Press, Nov, 1881

James "Jim" Caine and Joe Maguire got themselves a nice little grubstake saved up after shipping all that lumber up to Bodie, and they became partners. Imagine a Scotsman and a Mick pairing up like that.

Stranger bedfellows have been made. But in Ireland the Catholic & Proddies are oil and water with a little fire and brimstone all mixed together in a strange baptism. Now, that was a long-standing taste of hell if ever I saw it. See, they had to come to the New World to put aside their differences.

At nearly 8200 feet straight up from the bosom of the sea, it was damned cold at night. Bodie had the worst climate out of doors, save Alaska. Up on the plateau, it was exposed as an ass in the outhouse, and cold as a witches' tit. Shaving water froze in the cup. And when the winds blew at 100 miles-per-hour off the mountains, it was the banshees straight from hell singing a funeral dirge with your name on it.

Joe Maguire said Potato Peak was wearin' a snow jacket again. And here it was, mid-August. He missed the sweet taste of new potatoes roasted in their jackets in the embers, all slathered with butter and salt, he missed it more than the Emerald Isle itself. About the only other thing that would willfully grow in Bodie was the hops plant in front of the Donnelly house. Handy for making beer.

All this brown and dust and sage, sometimes if you didn’t look at the long narrow valley head on, and sort of blur your side- vision, it does look a bit like Ireland with all that green growing in the crevices and the wild irises nodding their dainty purple heads.

A pity about old Waterman (William) Bodey dying in that freak blizzard in '59 and all, he never even saw his namesake town. He would've been real proud. Just look at it now. That's B-O-D-E-Y, not I-E; some illiterate sign-painter got it wrong. Said it looked more refined that way.

They say Bill Bodey got caught short in an unexpected storm while making a supply trip to Monoville. November. Shoulda been fine. Some say it was the Bodie Curse, he took some ore with him. Bodie's mighty protective of its sugar quartz, there's always the risk. 

Bill was the first one to find the placer gold, you see. Sparked off the biggest gold rush in the west, he did.  Would you believe that 20 years later, they dug his body up and reburied it again just to celebrate him with a big bash. We were waking the dead twice.

Joe Maguire came up from 'Frisco with Johnny and Tom Parr. Joe was Bill Irwin's foreman at Standard, and Johnny was foreman of the Syndicate Mill. Irwin put a donkey hoist on one of the shafts and did right well, indeed. That's when they called themselves the Standard Mine and built a 20-stamp mill. That's what kick-started the town of Bodie.

They say in '77, the boomtown's population swelled from 20 lost souls, to 7,000, then by '79, to 10,000 headless, bedless, and souless grubbers and claim jumpers that kept streaming in from all four corners of the globe—and hell and highwater all that summer long in search of gold. The dividends alone sent a thrill throughout the world.

Bodie has better climate than Rhyolite or Furnace Creek, a lot prettier too. Funny, how some folks believed that hell was hot when Joe knew firsthand that hell was cold as a frigid hoor on a Bodie winter's night.

Well, then, when the news got out in '77, all the boarding houses were busting at the seams. Men bunking down with their mules and hunkering down with all forms of whatnot for warmth. Every imaginable shed & sty & stable turned into bunks...a whole lot of housing was needed—and pronto.  

It was the worst winter on record, to boot—20 below zero and thousands were dying of pneumonia. Why they stayed on through the winter was foolish. No food, no place to sleep, but still they trudged up the mountain to Bodie. With stardust in their eyes. Only the town Madam, Rosa May, braved the cold to minister to the sick and dying. Lord knows how many she saved, and later, the church wouldn't even give her a Christian burial when her time came.

No wood was to be had for miles around, see? Bodie was above the treeline. That's where Jim came in, he transported timber for the mines, and the steam engines. Then he had so much gold, he opened up a bank, and well, the rest is history. He built himself an empire, he did.

What few newspaper to be had were pressed into service insulating thin walls against the cold, if it was rescued from the outhouses in time. The valley was filled with 10,000 illiterate asses up to no good. Couldn't read a newspaper sideways and certainly not with their backsides. Staking and jumping claims like rabbits, they were. And we had two rival newspapers, we did. 

And we had a lawyer too. Patrick Reddy was his name, and boy was he was ready for anything. Maybe for a piece of the pie as bail for the "guests" was $5. As Johnny Parr said, It was dangerous to run a bluff on a gun play in Bodie. There was an open season on killing but it didn't last long. Eventually law and order prevailed. But we ran Sheriff Davis out of town when he got too trigger happy. We took care of bidniss ourselves.

Imagine milling all that wood and barging it across that hellish alkalai sea, what do they call it? Mono Lake, yeah—hauling timber 2000 feet straight up Coyote Creek Canyon. That's just what Jim and Joe did. Sweet smell of Jeffrey pine, like vanilla shortbread cakes. And sweat of salt mixed with success. Eventually they got some track laid out for a train, but most supplies arrived by stage.

They made plans to lease out the old Bunker Hill Mine claim, I mean, the Standard Mine. At the time, it wasn't paying out much, hardly worth keeping it open. But as luck would have it, danged if they didn’t have a cave in (they didn't properly shore up the roof—wood was so scarce) and uncovered a rich quartz ledge right before the lease went through: they hit paydirt indeed! 

Some $90,000 worth of gold in 90 days! That was over $1000 a day between them. They went wild with joy. Luck of the Irish haltered to the business wagon of the Scots and several fortunes were in the making. Not just theirs.

Luck must've rubbed off on the neighboring hills too because suddenly there were claims everywhere: in one month, the Syndicate Mill and Mine produced more gold that most of the claims in California and Nevada combined. The engine and boiler were said to have come 'round Cape Horn.

Here was Joe, at 25, filthy rich beyond his wildest dreams. Jim already had a taste of the fine life. It was all imported cigars and quail in aspic every night at the Hotel Maison Doree. A rich, fine ash, indeed. He began to buy up the town.

No more ready-made sandwiches from the Philly Bar Depot for Joe, though he had to admit it was right handy, with its pool table and roulette being open 24 hours and all. Someone was always willing to lose a little goldust over a bad hand of cards. Like Wild Bill Walsh. Sold his own wagon in Ione for a good hand of cards and a barrel of whiskey. Joe was no stranger at the poker table. No siree!

Big Black Bill's cook crew still made the best grub. Bodie attracted men from far and wide. Uncle Bill was a South African, with an Irish name—O'Hara. Figure that one out. He must've come from the Cape with the mining equipment. Everybody called him Uncle in reverence.

Fortunes were routinely traded every night in the 65 saloons lining Main Street. You could drink in a different saloon every week and still have a baker's dozen extra to spare for emergencies in case you needed to double up your drinking routine. That’s where the real money was to be had, in the transaction process.  Not the town bank. The straw bosses knew that much. 

It kept the mortuary in business too. Not that it needed help where murder was a daily event. Caskets had spring-loaded false bottoms to keep up with the burial demands. Stagecoach robberies, to shootouts, Bodie was one wild and lawless boomtown, second-to-none in wickedness and sin. 

Jim began to dream about his future. A man need a family. He was a Stuart. Substance. Put down some roots. A son and a daughter. A mail-order bride, say, a sweetbud of age 14, not like the bloozy "Ladies" on Maiden Lane at the north end of town—that was the ticket. 

No more riding into Carson City or Aurora, no more Lottie Johl or Madame Mushtache with the wooden leg for him! He'd dance with his pure flower of a bride at the Fireman's Ball in the Miners' Union Hall, he would.

He'd move his new bride into his new house sporting the only glassed-in front porch in Bodie. Glass was damned hard to get up the mountain in one piece. Hardly worth the bother seeing as it would crack in the cold, come winter, if the transport mules didn't get to it first. But she’d keep him warm. Yesiree indeed!

He'd put some real kimberly glass on her finger, he would. Get married in Carson City. No churches in Bodie, see. Saloons was our religion. Sweet little Martha. So young. So trusting. He'd change his evil ways, he would. Yep. No more Rosa May with the wild eyes and windblown hair for him either. No sirree! 

Would the little mite come up the mountain? But if you were sick, or got the lung disease, or having a baby, you sure wanted Rosa May on your side, she had the healer's touch. She did.

I can't help but think of that little girl who wrote the last entry in her diary, "Goodbye God. I'm going to Bodie," she probably wound up working the pox-infected cribs as Cain pondered popping the question. 

Lottie Johl gave up her wicked ways and took up painting, she was purty good at it too. Never knew whatever happened to Joe. Some say he went to San Francisco, some say he went back to Ireland, but I think it was the mountain that called him home with a good hand of cards, and a six-gun.

© Maureen Hurley
6/2005, 2008, 2009

Bodie, Jon Sullivan photo—Wikipedia

Gone to Bodie, v. 3

GONE TO BODIE v. 3

After Jim Caine and Joe Maguire got a nice little grubstake saved up after shipping all that lumber to Bodie, they became partners. Imagine a Scotsman and a Mick pairing up like that. Stranger bedfellows have been made. But in Ireland the Catholic & Proddies are oil and water and fire all mixed together. Now that was a long standing taste of hell.

At nearly 9000 feet, it was damned cold at night. Shaving water froze in the cup. Joe said Potato Peak was wearin' a snow jacket again. He missed the sweet taste of new potatoes roasted in their jackets in the embers, all slathered with butter and salt, he missed it more than home itself. All this brown and dust, sometimes if you didn’t look at the long narrow valley head on, and sort of blurred your side vision, it did look a bit like Ireland with all that green growing in the crevices and the wild irises nodding their dainty heads.

A pity about old W.S. Bodey dying in that blizzard in '56 and all, he never even saw his namesake town. Just look at it. They say in '77, the boomtown's population swelled from 20 lost souls, to 7,000 bedless and souless grubbers that kept streaming in from all four corners of the globe all that summer long in search of gold. Better climate than Rhyolite or Furnace Creek too. Funny how some folks believed that hell was hot when he knew firsthand that hell was cold as a frigid hoor on a Bodie night

All the boarding houses were busting at the seams. Men bunking down with their mules and hunkering down with all forms of whatnot for warmth. Every imaginable shed & sty turned into bunks...a whole lot of housing was needed—pronto. Imagine milling all that wood and barging it across Mono Lake, 2000 feet straight up Coyote Creek Canyon? That's just what they did. Sweet smell of Jeffrey pine, like vanilla cakes. And sweat of salt mixed with success.

They made plans to lease out the old Standard Mine, it wasn't paying out much, hardly worth keeping it open. But as luck would have it, danged if they didn’t hit a quartz ledge right before the lease went through: paydirt indeed! Some $90,000 worth of gold in 90 days! That was over $1000 a day between them. They went wild with joy.

Here he was, at 25, filthy rich beyond his wildest dreams. It was imported cigars and quail in aspic every night at the Hotel Maison Doree. No more sandwiches from the Philly Bar Depot, though it was handy, with its pool table and roulette being open 24 hours and all, someone was always willing to lose some goldust over a bad hand of cards. Fortunes were routinely traded every night. That’s where the real money was to be had, in the transaction process. The straw bosses knew that much.

Joe began to dream about his future. A man need a family. A mail order bride, say, age 14, not like the bloozy "Ladies" on Maiden Lane--that was the ticket. No more riding into Carson City or Aurora, no more Madame Mushtache for him! Move his new little bride into his new house sporting the only glassed in porch in Bodie. Glass was damned hard to get up the mountain in one piece. Hardly worth the bother seeing as it would crack in the cold, come winter. But she’d keep him warm.

He'd put some real glass on her finger, he would. Sweet little Martha. So young. So trusting. He'd change his evil ways, he would. No more Rosa May for him either. No siree! But would she come? The little girl who wrote the last entry in her diary, "Goodbye God. I'm going to Bodie," was probably working the pox infected cribs as he pondered the question.

6/2005

Steadfastness

I am uncertain of this new writing system I feel a little uneasy as I don’t like contemplative states—at least not for art or writing. But they're all big meditators. I have issues with most conceptual nouns. Image/comparisons: That’s my wicket. But the steadfastness of writing puts me on an even keel. That’s something I can do. My meditative world. But I can’t help but enter the visual world too. 

There’s a name for the roots of kelp, standfast. Stand/stead share the same etymological root. Or call it a holdfast. I am visualizing afternoon light in a kelp forest. Filtered green, suspended plankton and debris, small glistening bubbles escaping from below. And that snapping sound in the ears. I think it’s krill snapping their claws, or the waves retreating. 

I don’t care to name it, but, to experience it. I love that buoyancy as we hover, suspended between worlds: air and water—male and female. Once in the Galápagos, I was snorkeling in the cold water off Bartolomé Island and an equatorial penguin buzzed me, zipping up from under me, swimming upside down, so he could see me better. We stared at each other for a split second but in a flash, he flipped over and took off so fast, I could’ve imagined it all, except that I got so excited I screamed and my snorkel filled with sea water and I nearly drowned. Silvery bubbles like shooting stars trailing from her body.

OK that three-minute pause definitely intruded and interrupted my train of thought. the train has left the station. no one aboard. So now I can’t pick up the penguin line, or rather the feeling of awe. I was reliving the moment. Perhaps that’s the key to good writing is to relive the moment. 

Last Sunday as I read my poems with pianist Kirk Whipple and Marilyn Morales I read a piece I had never read before in public to the woman for whom the Nocturnes were written. Ilá, dressed in white, danced a fluid tai chi movement as I read my poem. 

The audience were strangers to poetry—which requires another kind of steadfastness, an anchor, in order to hear it. And so I filled the auditorium with my intention and my voice, wrapping it around the backs of chairs, and sending it to every corner. But I was chained to the microphone and I couldn’t pace. I was anchored to the floor as surely as the kelp and all I could do was to sway with the words. Believe in them again, truly a re:vision as I find tuned an updated version of the words to fit this millennium. I was the sea. the sea, thalatta, thalatta. The sea.

52/2/06 Writers' Group

MAYDAY: HOLDING VIGIL FOR SINEAD

The sun is shining,
and the sky is that incredible cerulean
I stare straight up at infinite blueness,
and forget everything for a moment
only to have an egret enroute to the lake
cross my trajectory and I remember
we're in the city after all:
that distant pounding of surf:
really cars on the freeway
I hold vigil for my cousin in NICU,
a victim of that same stretch of road.
Hit and run. who could do that to another?
With shaking hands, I paint three silk scarves,
the gutta, forgiving. I painted beauty:
Roses, egrets, orchids,
and the sky emerges from void.
We wait for a pattern to emerge from the catscan.
Any sign of recognition will do.

5/2005






Where the sun is shining, and the sky is that incredible cerulean when you stare straight up at its infinite blueness, and you forget everything only to have an egret enroute to the lake cross your trajectory and you remember it's in the city after all: the distant pounding of surf, the cars on the freeway while I hold vigil for my cousin in hospital, a victim of that same stretch of road. With shaking hands, I made three silk scarves, the gutta forgiving. Roses, egrets, orchids, sky emerge from the void.

Confessions of an iPod Roadie

CONFESSIONS OF AN IPOD ROADIE:

FROM CLASSIC LEGACY TO THE OS X GENERATION

Our peculiar form of iPod madness began last June in conjunction with my partner Neil’s Big Five-Oh birthday. For months, I’d been fretting over what to get him. Something special, something interactive that would involve all his friends for such a momentous occasion, but what?

I needed a happening, but I kept drawing a blank. Zip, zilch, nada. Neil had just been laid off his teaching job and he was not going gentle toward the half-century milestone. More like kicking and screaming. Fifty body blows to the psyche. The bases were loaded. No way to ease his pain as the dreaded birthdate inexorably drew nearer.

Pondering that notion, I found the answer at the bottom of a bright yellow MacWorld Expo bag, a poster. I unrolled it. I was gazing at Apple’s 20th anniversary “Think Different” commemorative poster of that amazing 1984 TV commercial of the woman runner—who so famously interrupted half-time and changed computing history as we know it.

For the 20th anniversary poster, the jogger is updated with an iPod. Very cool. Synchronicity struck with the force of a sledge hammer. Give him an iPod to ease his pain!

We decided to update Neil O’Neill (who is a musician, actor and teacher) with an iPod for his 50th birthday. He was constantly losing CDs and his CD player was acting strange. Via clandestine emails, I tapped some 50 friends to fork over some music and dough for an iPod and accessories galore.

When I had collected enough moolah to buy a plane ticket to Tahiti, I ordered an iPod, an iTunes music store gift certificate and chotchkies from Apple’s red tag store and it arrived the next day!

Now, I had a an elderly cobbled together Mac PPC 9600—someone’s obsolescent technology was my ticket to paradise (alas, no firewire; OS 8.6), so I couldn’t upload music onto the iPod even if I knew how to do it, which I didn’t.

I smuggled the iPod off with a bunch of Neil’s favorite CDs (Beatles, Van Morrison, the Corries, Bob Dylan—Neil shook Bob’s hand, and wouldn’t wash it for a week! But that’s another story). I took the iPod to a friend with an iBook to DJ it up. (Friends also gave him a favorite CD to download special songs into the iPod.)

During the party, while Neil, now officially 50 and loaded, was jamming with Mike Husser on the base guitar, I ushered everyone into the back room where they signed the 20th anniversary “Think Different” poster. It was a cool sacrilege.

Neil was pretty blown away when the iPod was presented to him hidden inside the poster—after he blew out all 50 candles that melted the frosting, singed his hair and nearly set the deck afire. We all ate cake with wax, jammed on, and a good time was had by all. A real 49er send-off. Hello 50, the last good decade to be middle-aged. Time to hit the road, Jack. Have to pack our things and go.

We took off on vacation and shared earbuds as the new iPod sweetly serenaded us with a little Ray(ban) Charles at 40,000 feet, on a series of rather hellish plane rides with far too many layovers (and 12 hours of no food) from Oakland to Florida. Most fellow travelers will whip out pictures of their kids faster than pistols at the OK Corral, so we retaliated, we drew out our iPod and fired back a tune or two.

The iPod did famously at Miami’s “unconservatory“ school of music; most folks we met had never seen an iPod in the flesh—er—chrome and Lucite. The musicians loved it. Everyone oohed and ahhed—especially over the accessories. It had a stereo adapter? a FM and a car cassette converter? a microphone? Hook it up to MIDI and digitally record with it? Use it as a jump drive? You could see their (click) wheels spinning.

The iPod was such a cross-cultural smash success, even our friends’ Cubans relatives all wanted an iPod too. No translation needed. I think I must’ve “sold” a few dozen virtual iPods while in Miami.

I didn’t know a thing about downloading music into iPods or how to use iTunes, neither did anyone else. Hot Miami nights, no AC in the practice studio, plenty mosquitoes and geckoes galore. While the musicians jammed on Calle Ocho (a kilted Neil in a Cuban guayabera playing “Those Were the Days” to a frenzied Cuban audience is another wild cojone story), While a former Californian, composer and world class pianist, Kirk Whipple, and Neil were in the studio talking shop, I was figuring out how to use iTunes, and the iPod on a borrowed iBook with OS X. Baptism by fire.

I was a classic OS 8.6 California girl mesmerized by an OS X world. Luckily, MacWorld’s Mac 911 guru, Christopher Breen, graciously came to my virtual rescue; he was my sweet email roadie guide; he told me how to upload tunes (you need to be online to get the titles? I’d typed in about 50 titles), and how to make playlists. I uploaded a little Margaritaville (Jimmy Buffet), Gypsy Kings, Celia Cruz, and Kirk Whipple & Marilyn Morales’ nocturnes, “Elemental Portraits,” (for which I’d written a suite of poems in collaboration) and we were good to go on a little road trip of our own.

After our unconservatory gigs were over, we took off for a little snorkel trip down to the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas—until three whopping hurricanes chased us home. We shared the iPod with musicians in Key Largo, we listened to the iPod as we drove across the Seven Mile Bridge to the old bridge at Pigeon Key—that’s Flagler’s Folly, Key West railroad bridge for the Havana-bound gamblers during the Depression. The bridge was featured in “Key Largo” with Bogie and Bacall, and again in “True Lies” with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.

We put our lips together and blew a few sultry tunes to the iPod as we kayaked and snorkeled (it stayed on the boat, alas no wetsuit, but Chris Breen assured me even that was possible) we saw manatees in the mangroves, swam with sea turtles, and dolphins. We even took our iPod on those famous Key West sunset cruises (their music seriously sucked.)

It’s a long way to the Dry Tortugas, a civil war fortress a tiny coral atoll in the middle of the Caribbean, several hours from Cuba, Cancun or Key West by fast boat. You have to want to go there. Samuel Mudd (John Wilkes Booth’s doctor) was incarcerated there, and Ernest Hemingway was shipwrecked there after a hurricane engulfed the atoll.

When the coffee and booze ran out, Hemingway fashioned a raft and made for Key West, 70 miles back to civilization to write “For Whom the Bell Tolls” before Cuba beckoned for good.

Our boat ride back to Key West was hellish, with pitching indigo-black seas, frothed with 10-15 foot swells, lightning striking the water. The first of four storms, Hurricane Bonnie, was brewing. Oblivious to the storm, Neil was in the cabin happily iPodding it with a little Led Zepplin while I rode shotgun outside to avoid mal de mer. I was distracted by dolphins and flying fish off the bow, a wayward barracuda miscalculated a wave and nearly jumped into my arms. Finding or losing Nemo?

Everything was going swimmingly until we got home and decided to upload more songs. We were getting a little tired of what was on the iPod and wanted a sea change. Change is good. But we had very little spare change and an elder Mac, a PPC/9600/200MHz. No USB, no firewire.

So I snagged a beige G3 mini-tower off of Craigslist. Dangerous learning curves ahead. I learned to swap parts, I put in USB and firewire PCI cards, rearranged a few ATA and SCSI hard drives, haphazardly flipped SCSI ID switches until I got everything to load.

I replaced the wonky modem, loaded OS 9.2.2 so we could use iTunes and download music from the iTunes music store. (The USB card is not OS 9.2.2 friendly; it only works under OS 8.6; I’ve tried various combos of USB drivers. No luck, To use my jump drive or download pictures, I have to load OS 8.6).

I added more memory, a 500 MHz Sonnet chip to speed the Gossamer G3 up, but we still couldn’t use the danged iPod, other than as a hard drive. I was able to load an old version of iTunes under OS 9.2.2. But it didn’t recognize the iPod. We’ve got great playlists, with some PC speakers, our G3 is a really great juke box. Neil rarely uses the analog stereo or the PC anymore. Well, I gutted the PC, so he couldn't use it anyway—even if I wanted to get it up and running again.

Back to the drawing board. It turns out, this particular iPod needs OS X. Well, I found out that first generation G3s (ROM v.1) are not happy with OS X, especially with a 500 MHz Sonnet card.

(I won’t mention the Superdrive (v. 105) I installed, that needed serious convoluted software patches under OS 9.2.2 because Apple doesn’t have a DVD Player driver in classic mode (not an issue under OS X. No media/video card meant the Superdrive was merely a hood ornament/CD -R burner. DVD files show up but DVD Player won’t load. Alas, no Nemo screensaver for us. But at least we could burn CDs of our growing iTunes collection).

I loaded OS X (10.1.3) onto an auxiliary hard drive, and it worked for a while. I loaded iTunes 4.6 needed for this third generation iPod, only to find out that it in turn, needed OS 10.1.5. ARGHHHH! It actually worked for a while. The IPod showed up in iTunes! We were good to go. Not.

Meanwhile, all manner of strange things happened, mainly Siberian-sized freezes; I was eventually able to jumpstart the G3 off an OS 9 formatted hard drive after hitting every panic button I could think of, but the OS X christened hard drive became a shy truant, it quit showing up to work on the desktop altogether. So we’re back to using OS 9.2.2, and using friends’ Macs to load new music.

I am at present cobbling together yet another beige G3 (ROM v.2) with OS X (10.2.8) to tide me over the next few weeks (or months) until I cobble together a blue and white G3, or maybe even a G4 (but I can’t use my Sonnet card in a G4-and all the G4s at 300 MHz are slower than molasses: 500 MHz is bare minimum requirement). I need a Mac with SCSI PCI card slots & serial adapters so I can still use my legacy SCSI & serial stuff.

If money were no issue, horses were wishes and pigs could fly, I would’ve bought an iMac last summer, and a Mac Mini, last Fall. But hey, I wouldn’t have learned all this obsolete Mac technology. I can now rebuild damn near any PPC you put my way.

The lucky recipients of my rebuilt PPCs are the public schools where I work as an artist in residence through non-profits, Young Audiences and California Poets in the Schools. A Title 1 (poor) school, Golden Gate Academy, in the Western Edition got a carload of  my 75xx series PPCs.

I believe in the Apple credo to think differently empowers us, it changes people’s lives. It changed my life. As a practicing dyslexic, I could not use computers, it was their way or the highway. With Mac, I can problem solve in any manner of ways. If one way doesn’t work, at least I can fix it. I discovered too, along the way, that I could strip & rebuild a PC too if needs be...I ripped wires and hard drive out of our dead PC to fix up the G3—Neil was once a confirmed PC junkie but he's since seen the light.

As soon as I get a new Mac, I’m fixing up all the old G3s I have lying around (3) for Cabrillo School in Fremont. Meanwhile I’m waiting for my ship to come in, onboard is a Mac Mini and a Powerbook. And maybe an iMac with Airport Extreme while we’re at it. It looks nice coordinated with the iPod. maybe a buddy, an iPod Photo would be nice too so a California girl can dream big. Maybe take a few pictures, play a few tunes of her own.

• Hurricane Charley, Mile Zero, Highway One (photos)

Enough Rain

California has enough water – after years of rain, after years of drought, there's plenty more rain where that came from. Call it El Niño. Laden skies—even the Central Coast is still green, no tawny cat hills slumbering before the fire, yet. Lupines painting the hills with deft strokes. Monet, Pissarro in the rain, in muted greens, shapeshifting into dark trees, keeping the best secrets, counting their ages within each ring, diligently measuring times of rain and drought. General Sherman, a redwood dating back to the migrations that spurred the rise of the Roman Empire against the Barbarians, faithfully recorded each season—wet or dry—until some numbskull who couldn't stand the idea of something so old, cut it down with one of those big push/pull saws. They began counting the rings, never expecting to work past the birth of Christ, but count back they did. They were preoccupied with European data, the Magna Carta, the birth of Christ, Hannibal crossing the Alps, the burning of Carthage. But the trees recorded another kind of history, of weather, and drought, and rain. We are so newly come to this place, we speak of variables as if they were constants. California has enough, or not enough rain, depending on the need—but the redwood that framed this coast have measured time in eons—this last fragile ring of green we follow from the Ice Age to time-present. This time, this rain, this abundance, where everything is rainbow rainbow rainbow —to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop's silvered fish carrying God's flooded promise forth unto greener pastures.

Tsunami Dreams

After the first blush, dreams invade the psyche, but I can't remember them any more, or I don't want to remember them, but sometimes one slips through to haunt my waking hours and I am trapped between worlds, neither fully in either realm. It's times like this I worry about my driving, afraid of continental drift, merging into someone else as we barrel down asphalt ribbons hell-bent on destination with little thought to those dotted white lines—place holders, your space, my space. We fleetingly occupy a revolving ribbon of turf, calling it our own for a breathless second or two, before we move onto the next bit of road. Hopefully the guy next to me in the oversized truck isn't too preoccupied with his cellular dream, that he won't merge to my little red crackerjack of a car built during a time when we lived in a kinder, gentler nation, and we actually had the time to dream. In those days, I awoke each morning in a small cabin under a vast live oak tree and dutifully recorded my dreams. Some were prophetic, some were erotic, most were laden with metaphor—the stuff of poetry, and I filled journal after journal. My dream life was as active and rich as my waking hours, but I left that cabin in the meadow for Oakland's identity crisis; there is no there here, as Gertrude Stein penned, and I and discovered there was also little here for my dreams too. Just a longing for a home, for a nonexistent place, my dream cabin having grown many rooms, stairwells, balconies, porches, until it resembled the Winchester Mystery House—the old lady kept building building building to keep death at bay. I know that one all to well.

Food is life freewrite

It’s those damn kiwis, the fruit, not the Islanders, that puts my tongue all in a twist. I love their burlap exterior against a jade green mandala, and that aroma, almost strawberry, almost passionfruit, but my tongue objects, turns into an object de art, swollen along the taste buds, inflamed. Bitter and salty buds objecting to the acrid tang of the kiwi from down under. Call them Chinese gooseberries if you want, but but they are more like burlap testicles hanging from the vine. Who would've guessed all that greenness hid beneath that all that burlap? A neighbor I worked for, Alice Kent ,delighted in the rare and the unusual. One of my jobs was to check on the progress of the kiwi vine spanning the trellis. I delighted in the creamy blossoms, a cross between a blackberry and a magnolia, all porcelain and cream. Strange progeny of fruit to follow left the tomatoes girlishly gasping at the stud fruit hanging from the trellis. The roses got all huffy and pulled up their stocks and took to the road, unable to cope with that upstart vine from down under. I remember one full moon, the siren call of the garden led me down to the pond barefoot where the water iris had open their triumvirate arms to the moon. I was so mesmerized, I stumbled into the pond to pluck that alabaster light from the stems. My bare arms were calyxes beneath the moonlight. Having no knife and their resistance to plucking got the better of me, so my teeth severed blossom from the stem, sweet juice like corn on the husk, this food of life for the soul, for the tongue, for Isis.

2/18/2005 Writers’ Group

Exorcism, or what am I afraid of?

What am I afraid of? Let me count the ways. Where is Emily when we need her? All hummingbird and rose wings in the garden. Neighbors dropping in for tea. The world came to her, our Emily. What was she afraid of: does it matter? Post mortems on writers long dead, butterfly wings resurrected and reincarnated too many times for the counting. Maybe some of those molecules made it to this coast from Amherst. Maybe they’re in the room right now as we write. Maybe a molecule or two found Its way into the first strawberries of the season. Unlike Emily, we no longer know the origin, the natal land of the food we eat. They say all molecules are recycled and so we eat dust of the stars. radium, butterfly wings, and yes and bits of Emily too. What am I afraid of? The void, like everyone else. That final answer where consciousness and corporeal body are seven at the naval and all that’s left is the umbilicus of faith, any faith, it doesn’t matter. Port in a storm. What we cling to, our egos building fortresses of thought to sustain us, to offer us hope, but it’s all Maya Maya Maya in the end. Therein lies the fear. The question: what if… yes, if, if, if. And not preposition but question, that is, interrogatories of unimagined futures or will versus shall and all that it conveys. The future is always in the imperfect tense, whether declarative or not, and wishes are horses riding that which never comes and is always too late. Regret is the other name of fear, a complex soup of what if, and should have—that is where fear lies.

2/18/2005 Writers' Group

Age has no mercy tonight or, freewrite

Age has no mercy tonight or, or any other night for that matter. In my latest poetry class a student uncharacteristically asked me how old I was and I said Older than dirt, which drew a few titters. Age has never been much of an issue with me. As the saying goes, You're only as old as you feel. But yesterday I was using a handout I had made on how to teach calligraphy dated from 1980, and then it hit me—these kids' parents hadn't yet been born. I had scribed out the alphabetic family of shapes from my cabin under the live oak in Sonoma County. What meadow, what age? I was not yet 30, negotiating a tricky Saturn Return cycle and poetry was my consolation prize. I was given a bottomless suitcases of muses' words, their glad rags, their hand-me-downs. Today I listened to young girls read their newly minted poems about the goddess within. Amazingly, they were so unselfconscious as they incanted their poems to the four directions. We made something come alive today in that dreamy classroom. So what if Tom Hanks went to school there, it's a dungeon, no monk's cell of arcane learning. But somehow we circumnavigated our surroundings and suddenly we were all of one age, one mind, scribing the words on the water, deep in the well, slaking a thirst we didn't know was there, pondering the ages of Man.

2/4/2005 Writers' Group

What I saw in the garden freewrite

What I saw in the garden was barely there as if an angel breathed, and the leaves shivered as if someone had walked on their grave. Is it spring or is it winter? Flowers make a run for the border and bloom in a fit of passion all at once—just in case winter should return, which it usually does. According to the marmot, it will indeed return for six more weeks. Meanwhile, I haul out last summer's clothes that I never quite got around to packing away, but the edges of shadows say it's not spring, though the jonquils and narcissi madly nod their perfumed heads in the breeze. Spring! Spring! they gleefully announce with their yellow splendor. Yeah, right, the shadows still converse with winter. Angelino Bernini, the old black cat takes a power nap on the stoop, his dark coat is so warm, it's like an electric blanket, sparks fly as I pet him. He looks up suddenly, as if contented, as if to say, aren't I responsible for the nice weather? I envy him soaking up all that joy and radiant heat. But he's no angel, he drools and feebly attempts to take down the more careless birds. But he's just a fat black cat living out the end of his years dreaming in the garden. That's what I saw.

2/4/2005 Writers' Group

How big is the heart?

Big enough, she said, to hold the universe, but not a singularity. A multiverse in verse, the pattern. Systole, diastole. The drum inside the drum, keeping time with the shore. The earth is our mother, the sea is our blood. How big? Big enough. There is so much to contain that the vessel capsized on a lonely shore. Enough to carry it across to the other side. Remember to bring honey cakes and coins, the river is asleep. Charon’s heart beating once every millennium, how big is his heart? The seas rose and no one remembered the honey cakes. The sea took her due. The river inside each of us carves a shore of grief and tears—the same as the ocean or blood. Can you cry underwater? Someone asks. Better to leave the unanswered questions for the city of the dead. They have time enough. They say the earth is resonating like a bell. Systole/diastole; Charon’s heart is beating a drum song, a tattoo of rhythm, life compressed, lived between the two beats of a wave. How big is the heart? Big enough. The elders are closer to hearing it, one step closer…they tell stories of when they were young. First job, first love. Their days carry the rhythm still. There is such a sweetness in the the room after they tell the stories and this room is filled with hearts so big the universe can’t contain them. So we write in verse, multiverse to Sinatra’s Very good year. And now that is enough to hold the world. Do we choose the size of our hearts? How do we measure the size of the heart. A beating heart.

1/21/2005 Writers’ Group

The last of the...

Wine? She asked, serving the guest of honor first. He gazed at her with his hooded cobra eyes, she forgot the other guests, the hangers on, the ones who came under pretext or another when the word leaked out, thrusting their foot into the the jamb of the open door, wedging their way in with tissue-thin excuses. Everyone wanting their brush with fame at any cost. Manners flew out the window, in this ex-pat town, where everyone was purveyor of everyone else’s business. The wine gurgled, cleared its throat in t the neck of the bottle, and then sang in the glass. A ray of sunlight caught the cornice and everyone was transfixed by that trapped rainbow. Then the utter stillness that followed. She too was trapped inside his gaze, like cat and mouse, the white wine trembled as if distant tremors struck the earth. It was possible the islands were restless. Sharp tang of resin, then, the sea. This is a defined moment when nothing happens, but within that moment, from the first restless tapping of the wine against the green well, to the final aria in the glass, an epoch had passed. It was as if all the ages of man were trapped in that bottle, and time itself ended when she poured the last of the wine. Soon, they would be reading about themselves thinly disguised as themselves in yet another novel. They would argue, and disagree as to who was who, never realizing that the wine had been poured and consumed long ago.

1/21/2005 Writers' Group

Memoir

At Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's Books, Sharon Doubiago says she's writing a 900-page single space memoir and I'm afraid of anything longer than a thousand words. She wears golden butterflies on her ankles—curious signs of slavery and freedom. She's living in Berkeley now. Three weeks. It must be a record. But the road is an old lover.

1/9/05
added,rev. 9/17

Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's 1/9/2005

Celia opens her reading at Cody's Bookstore, as an homage to Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country. She read a poem called Late, she says she undressing the idea of choosing to be lovely by wearing an earring as a talisman.

She reads a pantoum about being bareback and how the woods were on fire we rode towards the flame with the sky and our mouths close to that danger, a list poem. She read My Mother's Birds. Sucha was a nickname, she raised chickens. Chocka was the sound of chickens and also the sound of the ax falling. She said, We could escape unlike the chickens.

Blink a child's tattered self-image: being called wool-lock, chink-eye, Saint Cecilia, here is how the world turns on itself, a girl...

Apres la Luna Miel, a love poem the, moon of honey, the sky of milk. Naming the hypothetical children and escaping from them. She does a play on slow children at play, a dyslexic moment, something I know too well. 

Another poem The Passionate Suitcase, for her Gypsy sisters. I believe the moon blink, the traffic of leaving then the night slams shut. Don't look back.

She reads from Tsigani, a book-length poem. My friend Ken Bullock and Celia took another epic Budapest train ride, which led to the poem I knew snippets of the story, then I hear the Gypsy history interpliced. The what if poem… what if I had no documents, no country… While waking into the dream of Budapest, my name in his throat like a jewel. 

Dien dobre, Polish for good morning. Celia told a story of how she was robbed, no passport. Someone said something about selling her to the gypsies, with no proof of country. I had grown thin on a diet of grief, consonants lost between languages. The neighbor, worn as a blade, eggs in his hands. Djen—day: eat what is offered in that light.

Proposals: Happy Independence Day another list poem. I don't know who'd who they think I am dressed in rags of wind with eyes of green fire.

Doren Robins says there's a tenuousness in Celia's poetry. Segue to Sholeh Wolpe, born in Persia, who said who said 10% of the people will never kill, 10% will always kill, the rest of us who will go either way. Then a reference to Hotel Rwanda, the idea of distancing oneself from the current governments of the oppressive. What one man will do to another. 

The Persian culture is now flourishing. But women get the raw end of the deal. They serve men. Condoleezza Rice is a two-man army on her own. In their writing and art they continue to serve men. Bomblets, not leisure, but sperm. Muslim fighters are given a key to heaven to paradise. The idea of the virgin paradise is sewn into his father's pants. Words have no need for light, they shine on their own. 

Afterwards we all go out for a meal at an Ethiopian restaurant and talk until the restaurant closes. The foggy night tightens its prison issue blanket about our shoulders.

One heart

One heart beating, two hearts drumming, the little boy who lost his one heart’s delight, bearing a drum to the silken sea who took his heart and then spat it back each morning with bleached shells. The new shorelines were surprised to find themselves front and center as beachfront. They tried on their new coral sand gowns as the sea lapped at the hem of the coastline, mirroring their frothy beauty. The little boy couldn’t stop drumming. Each morning the reporter found him playing his solo concert to the sea.soon he noticed that the sea answered the little drummer with a cease-surcease. The boy was so absorbed he forgot about the pain in his heart. He drummed and the sea answered. There was a strange beauty to the sea, and the color of sky, so blue, but something more. He drummed for the mother who came down to the strand each morning to collect the gift of children’s shoes the sea had returned in the night. He drummed for the toothless old man hunkered down on his haunches, collecting shells and broken bits of coral. The boy couldn’t believe his sister and mother were gone in a heartbeat. Not until his father took him to their graves. But they were empty, so he still held out hope. He gathered the piles of shells and coral the old man had left behind and outlined their graves in the shape of one heart. They said that two sisters were buried in the same coffin, and his mother in another. He outlined their empty graves in the shape of one heart. Like after 9/11, everything was post 9/11. After the tsunami, everything is post tsunami. Gaia, Gaia, Gaia. The one heart of the earth beating to the drum line.

1/7/2005 Writers’ Group

Chichi-jima & Haha-jima

 Obviously the two rocks had to get married, living next to each other like that for so long. The sea was their witness. The fisherman finished tying the knot on the silken rope, the same knot he used to mend his nets. That will hold them for an eternity, he thought. But the sea was jealous, and pushed its waves between them, widening the distance between them until they were bowed, the lovers’ knot holding them true. The sea grew angry and threw up a wave so huge it lost its balance and stumbled. The ocean floor shifted and dropped. Too late, the sea tried to call back its wave but the anger had spread to distant rocks, more distant shores. Islands moved 60 feet, coastlines sank. The sea stared into the aftermath of flotsam and jetsam and strange fish, like the fisherman, sank to the sea floor—as if to mend the rift in her heart. The sea cried, her heart wept molten rock, a new island arose from the gaping wound of her grief, but it was alone, not another rock to marry. But the sea wasn’t about to give birth again so soon. She crept back to the two rocks that the fisherman had married but it was obvious he was gone along with the other strange fish on the bottom of the sea.

1/7/2005 Writers’ Group

Art from the Heart 2005, oil pastel, poster paint

Art from the Heart, 2005, oil pastel

Happiness setpoint freewrite

The bar for the happiness setpoint is ever raising for those without joy. No sooner do they reach the pinnacle where happiness, like a lenticular cloud hovers over the summit like a flying saucer up in its own weather system, blithely incarnating folklore about the Lemurians and Proto Atlanteans. Notice, how all the cool guys are from another planet. Not like Jesus, who was born within the midst. That’s mist with a D, folks. The idea being that a savior should come from within the throngs, the brainwashed hordes, not the elites. No matter that the couple was enroute to a census. Stand up and be counted. 

And the Bible belters of Jesusland are cheering on the war in Iraq, they rejoice when another tree falls, when Armageddon comes. The sooner the better, where they will be saved. Imagine their happiness: the end is nigh. They rejoice and sing modern day timbrels to the Lord in the street, sawhetting across the face of mother earth in the commute lane of exponential catastrophe.

It reminds me of the politician, who said. When you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all. And ketchup is a vegetable. And that other wonder that burning bush in the White House who today declared $250,000 plates to eat an inaugural dinner with the president, wanting a ceiling on the price of a plate so that school teachers and bus drivers could afford to attend the inauguration. There are happiness setpoints considerably lower than a quarter of million. 

But look, all the stars are ablaze in the heavens, only in America where happiness is legislated. But the Bible thumpers say the end is nigh. The world will end on December 31. The rapture is nigh. God bless America. 

12/10/2004. Writers’ Group

Candlelight freewrite

A slender finger of light dances in the breeze, Shiva’s nail scratching the darkness. A cat lies in the sun, sharpens, her claws, stretches, yawns, her become jewels in the night. Phosphor fire. Either fear or science will make an excuse for her eyes. Retinal mirror scrying the soul. 

Have you ever looked at house windows and seen them as eyes following you as you walk down and unfamiliar street at night? What thoughts arise? But look, a light in the window, harkening back to centuries before. Someone placed a candle in the window, so that the dearly departed could find their way back home. 

Candlelight in each window, the flickering pupil, sentient, ever watching. The hurricane lamp from the turret for sailors coming in from the sea. Bonfires on the hill. Markers of time. Names for surcease, for that dark moment when lights no longer drink in the darkness. 

That solstice when the sun sleeps, when we light the candles, and the moths circling the fire, confuse them for the stars. The odor of wings like burning hair, angel hair, when the rain comes when we’re weaned from the electric grid, freed from the tyranny of Edison’s light dream, the candle becomes a ritual for dinner, reduced to romantic interludes or for religious reasons. 

Or birthdays, marking the passage of time, or the big bang. Dangerous candles, soaring light tapers for the church, split an atom, a sesame seed of blue light, a seed pearl at the center of everything. Imagine a flashlight as a placeholder in its stead. Imagine the inventor of the candle. What did he use for wicks dipped in tallow and honey. 

12/10/2004 Writers’ Group

FOUND POETRY: VICODAN

thought weather trouble
blue house stand fast
last luck lord engaged
wife, she remained
respect finished
they point
surely part class drop
likely raised offer
fancy share afterwards
stayed period

TURKEY BIRTHDAZE

TURKEY BIRTHDAZE

’T’was the day before Thanksgiving

and all through the houses

plump turkeys were thawing, not petit grouses!

Though the cupboards were groaning

all the tables were laid bare. What? No carousing?

My birthday comes but once a year.

"We forgot," cried relatives and spouses

to friends and neighbors moaning in thin air.

They scolded their watches & their PDAs too,

"it's not that we don't care. Really, we do.

Forgive us. We really forgot. It wasn't a plot.

Forgive us, our memory's got dry rot. Or ergot.

We'll make it up to you at Christmas. Never fear."

Lest I complain, "let them eat crow," (or cake)

one year, even my mom forgot, alas, heartbreak!

I don't hold my breath lightly, nor do I lend an ear,

for tomorrow will come when pigs learn to fly

by all those pumpkin and mince pies in the sky

without gobbling them up, none for the throngs.

So much for the promises of yesteryear—

or even next year. Now, don't get me wrong.

Indeed I long for that glutton of a beast

with all the trimmings of a glorious feast.

I dispense fowl blessings reiterated with grace.

Hope springs eternal, so I save a small place

for dessert — because it might be a bit of cake.

OK, I’m quirky if I confuse turkeys with candles.

And tomorrow when we dismantle the big bird

I’ll blow out the drumstick with a wing and a prayer.

I won’t let this bailiwick of a pilgrim’s parlance,

betrayer of fowlish deeds, with dissonance absurd

occlude my birthday with a yam dance. Not a chance!

Conclude your fawning and hemming and hawing.

Pass the blasted dressing. For next year, never fear

my birthday will reappear on Thanksgiving Day. OK?

Pity my poor cousin born on Christmas Eve

and not to grieve on such a moveable feast.

11/24/2004

In North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle

11/17/ 2004  We’re in Myles O'Reilly's pub at 622 Green St. in North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle. Ha, ha, ha, we're all drinking somebody's open swill – Pinot Noir for breakfast. Ugh. I was hoping for food. It’s Myles’s birthday. The jazz club band brings us in with a little swing, some Maria Callas, and the Tarantella and the Godfather meets the Irish in North Beach.

Nearly an hour later, Roddy Doyle saunters in and steps up to the microphone, taps it thunderously, and says he's now a Yank, having been in nine cities in 10 days. We laugh.

Doyle is bald as a skinhead, it takes some getting used to. He read from Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and a small bit on Henry Smart, an IRA volunteer, from A Star Called Henry, and some stray bits from a play he's been working on, and then he thanked Elgie Gillespie for making this so. There is a River of free flowing booze. By this point, we're all fairly toasted.

Neil Jordan, steps up, looking upscale and fashionably thuggish, wearing shades, having just returned from a TV interview, he's a rare bit of gloom, despite it being sunny, midday. Maybe the alcohol's wearing off. 

He begins with: I know when I died, May 1950. It was a rare whinge, the perspective is written from that woman. He ended on an upbeat note: George killed me... He reads from The Dream of a Beast, with a segue into Interview with the Vampire.

After they were finished reading, there was a Q&A. Someone asks: Would you like to write The Commitments today?

Roddy Doyle said, Well, I'd need to express the conditions along similar lines. The Irish, the blacks of Europe would figure into it.

Jordan said the USA has been good to me, re: The Crying Game. 

Phoenix rising freewrite (drawing)

A phoenix rises from the ashes, is it Ash Wednesday, or resurrection, or soot from the chimney, midwinter, a creosote threat, sparks climbing the night sky, seeking distant cousins. The Perseids and Leonids flash, Astro fire, cat’s-eyes glowing. The phoenix lust, and foxfire, the moon, hidden behind clouds, bows at the torii gate. Heaven and earth. Wind and sky. Fire in the head. 

I am the word of science, the song of Amergen, as he set forth upon the land of Ireland for the first time. I am the fire in the head, I am a work of art rising from the ashes. Bone ash, white, hot, bonfires to couch, the sun, to bring it back after the darkness. 

My great grandfather drove cattle between two bonfires, their mad eyes glowing as they charged forth. Holy smoke anointed the sky and settled down, phoenix, rising. The tears of the phoenix will heal the mortally wounded. But after hearing one truth but she waited so long. When the bird lands, the land, the air is transform by fire. Flight and wings of ash falling down to earth nourishing it. 

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group

In the rain without an umbrella, freewrite (Merrill Gardens journal)

Singing, dancing in the rain, the world is transformed, even the gutters lose distinction with the sidewalks and curbstones. The rain pounds the pavement with such vigor that the streets are transformed into vast, gray trampolines, and the Magritte’s Golconda jumpers are falling from the clouds. Not to mention the cats and dogs. The rain bounces up and blurs that distinction between street and curb, ocean and sky. 

Today, in my Elder writing group at Merrill Gardens, one old woman from the northern provinces, tried to reconstruct images of home. She wanted to become a phoenix and rise up from her own ashes in another country. She studied hard to be a doctor. Tomorrow I’ll be 88, she said. I have not thought about China for many years. She is beginning to remember after forgetting the atrocities of the past for so many years.

She said, Once it was raining in her village, the Japanese had invaded, so she walked to school in the rain without an umbrella. She needed to be the strong one, she didn’t let go of her young cousin’s hand, not even when the rain beat down with such force, that their legs turned yellow from the mud. She tells me that the Yangtze means yellow river.

Rivulets made their way to the ocean, to the China Sea, and the school became a raft across the sea to Africa, to the Sahara, and then to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, the place of flowers, where she made her escape and met her husband in transit, waiting there for years as he perfected his surgery on the open heart. 

The breakthrough operation was the first of its kind in a country of parched thirst, under siege, in a drought. She wears an umbrella for the sun. She is waiting for her people to go to Cold Mountain, where she watched her first movie of a man with an umbrella, singing and dancing in the rain, and his heart was full. He was dancing with an open heart. The rain rose up, like a flock of phoenixes, seeking the eye of the sun.

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group

Total eclipse of the moon, freewrite

We watched a total eclipse of the moon from Treasure Island. The moon was like a Oreo cookie. The moon dangled over the Bay bridge, and the shadows nibbled with a dark hunger, until only the Sea of Tranquility was visible. I don’t know if it really is the sea, a swirling land formation at the top of the moon was more visible than normal. Hunters moon, being eaten by its prey and Samhain on its heels.

Time to remember the dead and offer their names up for the end of the year. That tradition got thoroughly bungled and swallowed in the Christian struggle against paganism, it got mired down and mixed up a couple of months. And everybody thinking January is the new year but it’s really November 1, All Saints’ Day. Then the second holiday was needed for all the souls who didn’t quite make it to heaven because they needed more time to work off their sins—as if they were on the moon, swallowed by the light by the shadow. Obscure and unseen. 

The Chinese said the red moon was a Dragon’s blood moon. A baleful red eye in the sky, watching all the people lined up in city canyons to peer through telescopes, as the moon verged on red, as if balancing atop the Transamerica building. Some said the red moon was bad luck, but red is the color of good fortune, the color of brides and the color of wealth.  

The bride of a moon peeking out from behind the earths’s shadow is shedding a wealth of light on us, no red moon of war. Everyone out on the streets is a little bit crazy and pointing at the moon, checking up on it, as if it wasn’t to be believed, or trusted and wondering where the man in the moon went. Full moon over Geary Street and a baleful dragon’s eye, bloodshot and drunk on all the smog.

10/29/04 Writers’ Group

What was in the attic? freewrite

God only knows what was up in the attic. It sounded like chains being dragged across the two by fours, someone shuffling convict chains, but we were far from the south, or the old world. This house is too new for ancient shenanigans a la Lady Rochester. Wrong continent, wrong coast for this sort of thing. An occasional thump punctuated each step as if someone were dragging a body down the back stairs, the head banging on each step. Only thing is, we don’t have a back stairs coming down from the attic, only a trap door, but I kept my eye on it just in case. 

The stove pipe was an echo chamber. I could hear the sporadic barking of a lazy watchdog, who felt obligated to bark a staccato at specific intervals. An owl practiced his calls. There was a faint SSS sound swishing—was it trees or bats or rain falling? A musty, damp smell as if from the grave, but then the attic grew ominously quiet. I didn’t know what was worse the noise, or the silence. 

Grandma told me ghost stories about how the dead preferred glamorous castles to a lone farmhouse in the country. The sound of something coming closer was directly overhead now. What could it be? A raccoon? My grandmother rose from the couch to refill her cup of tea in the kitchen. The ceiling bulged and groaned, and the sheetrock gave way. An avalanche of water and plaster cascaded down onto the couch where she was sitting just minutes before.

10/29/2004 Writers’ Group

Indiana Review Collaboration/Collage project Elemental Portraits

The Indiana Review
Collaboration/Collage 

Ballantine Hall 465
1020 E. Kirkwood Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103

THE COLLABORATION/COLLAGE PROCESS:

Poet Maureen Hurley and pianist-composer Kirk Whipple first met during a series of Soviet-American cultural exchange programs in the USSR and the USA. Whipple, who studied at the Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts, performed in the 1990 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, Moscow, U.S.S.R., while Hurley was giving poetry readings and facilitating poetry and art exchanges in Moscow, Leningrad, and Cherkassy, a city near Kiev.

Hurley and Whipple performed together for Sister City cultural events in Sonoma County, California. During a series of benefit concerts, Hurley wrote several poems based on Kirk Whipple’s performances which won several awards and fellowships. Whipple approached Hurley with the idea to collaborate from the ground floor: to create poems as he was developing and composing a series of nocturnes for two pianos, compositions inspired by Chopin’s set of nocturnes for solo piano. Whipple is executive director, and co-founder with wife, Marilyn Morales, of the Unconservatory, Inc. (1988). Each of the individual pieces from Elemental Portraits were inspired by people very close to the composer or who were affiliated with the Unconservatory.

Hurley and Whipple met during 1992-1996 to collaborate on the musical compositions. First, Whipple played a piece in progress and Hurley freewrote to it. She interviewed him where he shared his musical composition book of dreams, conversations, observations, songlines, and musical phrases… She then interviewed the people who inspired each of the eleven Nocturnes. When the pieces were completed, she wove together a collage of the three strands of storyline, observation and impression.

In 1995, Whipple, Morales and Hurley premiered five of the nocturnes. In 1996, during the debut of the complete set of the eleven nocturnes, Hurley was in a serious accident, and was unable to perform, so Whipple and Morales debuted the entire set without her, and later recorded the nocturnes in 1999 at the University of Miami. In 2002, the duo, Whipple, & Morales, released their first commercially available recording of Elemental Portraits. Between 2002 and 2004, the groundwork was laid for a premier performance of the collaboration which took place in Miami, Florida, during May of 2004. A live presentation featuring the spoken poetry and performances of the nocturnes which were performed at concert halls, universities, schools, and television studios throughout southwest Florida. We were featured artists on PBS/WLRN’s “ArtStreet” with Marilyn Porte, which aired in June, 2004.

To Whom it May Concern:
Enclosed please find:
Poems “Elemental Portraits”
by Maureen Hurley

First page of sheet music for each piece
by Kirk Whipple, composer
8035 SW 26th Street
Miami, FL 33155
pianistas2@aol.com
(305) 266-9673

CD Music recording
CD jacket & postcard flyer
of “Elemental Portraits:
Nocturnes for Two Pianos”
performed by Kirk Whipple
and Marilyn Morales, Duo Pianists

STATISTICAL STASIS

Well, it’s come to this:

flip a coin when stasis sets in.

John the Ambiguous was always 

a great one for a coin toss to decide fate

like to have a kid, break up, or to get married.

So whatever flummoxed him was always reduced to

a 50/50 chance, & the odds were always in his favor

because that way he didn't actually have to choose.

A good thing coins aren’t like dice cubes.

It would have increased the odds.

We were a gamble anyway.

9/29/04

rev 1/2/14

WITH THE PROGRAM

He’s been around so long 

he’s bypassed his own due date. 

He returns to his natal grounds, 

naming schools and streets. 

This hindsight into the past. 

We visit Frick junior high, 

were the dead across the street 

sometimes wander over 

from the cemetery to write 

a little poetry with us.

9/24/2004 Writers’ Group

Permaculture, freewrite

That which shifts down into the substrate, is permaculture, soil, rocks and bones… What we’re not aware of is what defines us, it is our secret garden. What we do without knowing why we do or say it. Our secret harvest, what we take for granted. Sometimes permaculture gets separated from the source and we’re left wondering why this or that action was required, and for a moment we’re left outside our skins, as if having gotten up, dressed all wrong. Who remembers that first day of school. A reoccurring dream: I took off my red princess coat only to discover I was dressed in my underwear. I forgot to put on my outer clothing. The shame and humiliation was too much for a first grader to bear, defrocked and dethroned all at once. I was too young to know about, Freud or symbolism or dreams. But that was permaculture. Something in the frozen tundra of self, thawing, leaving us vulnerable and lost. But wait as I bend down to touch the lichen, a miniature garden with willows no higher than my thumb, tiny lingonberries and bogberries ripening under the summer sun, small, red eyes, sweet and tart on the tongue. Substrate permeating up into awareness, into loam. 

9/24/2004 Writers’ Group

The lake so smooth, not a report on the water, freewrite

Mornings were best, the drive to Sonoma State on backroads, I cherished beauty, the way the fog wrapped itself around the hills, like a bride‘s négligée with emu, feathers. And they would hug the hills, cling to them, so that the lake, so smooth, not a ripple on the water, was like glass. And the world was one vast mirror of hill, fog and sky.

It took me years to grasp what beauty was, having grown up inside of beauty, I had no eyes to see. I had to go away way in order to return. Prodigal beauty was a jail sentence. Me, peeking out from inside the word, holding the iron bars, wondering what all the fuss was about. 

But this lake, though man-made, reflects the fog and sky—beauty’s cnstant mirror, and I was a dust mote rising only to fall into that surface were sky in fog and water one thing—primordial—existing without my presence or witness. But beauty came dressed in fog to shroud the hills and the lake stood its ground, an eye of the sky watching me. 

A fish rises and mouths a speck, concentric ripples, spreading out, catching me and its stare. First day of fall.

9/24/2004 writers group.