We have seven types of scorpions in the Bay Area. Woodies (Uroctonus mordax) have the biggest claws.
Today was one of those days when a rare black swallowtail butterfly decided to cross my path, and flit in front of my car bearing down at 40 miles an hour. Nothing to be done, I saw it flutter to the road and I thought of how not only did I strike down a rare butterfly, I killed the only pollinator of an even rarer plant, the pipevine plant. Both, indelible images from the landscape of my childhood. The carrion-scented pipevine, or Dutchman’s pipe, with its heart-shaped leaves, is the only foodsource of the butterfly, the butterfly, its only pollinator. Their age-old dance is a deep symbiosis that I cannot even begin to fathom.
When I went to pick up my friend for his appointment, another black swallowtail fluttered overhead. I felt that for a moment, that maybe I was forgiven. I drove slowly along the road looking for the one I had struck down, thinking I could at least photograph it in death. A memento mori. But it was gone, like the shadow of a leaf in the wind. California pipevine swallowtails are melanistic, and in the right light, their sooty wings are fringed with indigo jewels. In many cultures a black butterfly is a symbol of transition, renewal, or rebirth.
To ameliorate that sense of loss, call it unnamed grief, having an hour to kill, I hiked up the fireroad to the ridge above Terra Linda while my friend was in the hospital getting a procedure done. Lately, I’ve been keeping the doldrums at bay with routine and projects. It sneaks in when the pattern is broken. An old friend, Katelin died, and from that, there is no recovery. I walked along the ridge line, gazed back at the iconic shape of Mount Tam, and then north to the broad expanse of Loma Alta Ridge, Sleepy Hollow below me. I dawdled, and took photos of wildflowers and rock outcroppings of Franciscan strata, ribbon chert, and stray blueschist knockers.
It wasn’t until when I was leaving, that unexpected stop after what you think is your final stop—I doubled back to see the place where an old house once stood on the ridgeline. Near where the front door might’ve stood, a liminal boundary to the east, there were two clumps of white freesias in the grass, that heavenly narcotic scent taking me back to another time, another place, when life was not as painful. Someone once said, let grief come in, and then let it go out again. I have not seen the ocean for over a year. Cease, surcease.
Still feeling blue, I headed back north to prepare for a Sierra Poetry Festival poetry reading for the California Fire & Water anthology reading with Molly Fisk. I joined a little late because I stopped off at Hick’s Valley to feed the Dolcini horses some apples, it was a necessary stop, if only for their soothing animal kindness, and gentle presence, as they snuffed and whuffled, and begged me to itch that one unattainable spot high on their necks for just a little bit longer.
We breathed in each other’s breath in greeting. Theirs smelled of spring grass, and summer lawns. Mine, of coffee. Their soft eyes, like the deep lakes of the wings of those butterflies, held no judgement, no expectation, other than that of animal companionship. They crowded in, glad for the distraction. Sometimes I forget that deep connection with horses. The unexpected stop made me a little late for the reading, but was necessary for peace of mind.
Some 50 of us poets were electronically joined at the hip via Zoom. We read for the children, we read for the planet we read for the jetstream—that it might find its way back home; we prepare for what is to come. This year, the fire season will arrive too soon and already the hills are losing their greenery. As I listened to the poems, I was lifted out of the doldrums. After the reading, the blues slammed back in, wanting its due—that pound of flesh. But there are indigo skies on the horizon. It is all part of the dance.
There is always tomorrow for the reboot.
Weave and Mend
Old woman is watching, watching over you
In the darkness of the storm, she is watching
She is weaving, mending, gathering the colors
She is watching over you.
Chorus:
So, weave and mend
Weave and mend
Gather the fragments safe
And win the sacred circle,
Sisters, weave and mend,
Weave and mend,
Oh women, weave and mend
Old woman is weaving, gathering the threads
Her bones become the loom she is weaving,
She is watching, weaving, gathering the colors
She is watching over you.
Chorus:
For years I’ve been watching, waiting for old woman
Feeling lost and so alone, I’ve been watching.
Now I find her weaving, gathe ring the colors
Now I find her in myself.
And another version on the Black Brothers Band webpage.
(It took me a while (a year and a half) but I finally got around to recording the song for Carol Hoorn, replete with a cat who was concerned about me. Link.) |
| Two trilliums. yes, there was a third. Green Hill Rd., Sebastopol. |
They talked of their community work, and how their anthologies came into being—a reaction to what was happening to our state (of mind). Diversity. They read selected poems from their anthologies. Lucille talks about bio-regions and fire ecology, she reads a poem about about the evolution of redwood seed cones, and a ladybug poem from Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California.
I think: Ladybugs fly hundreds of miles to mate and congregate in my grandmother’s old bedroom, why that place, who knows? Every year they come, and cover the walls. A living mosaic flickering like fire. My childhood room. We haven’t the heart to fix the windows. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, and your children do roam. Oh, the pheromones of home.
Ruth Nolan talks about the drought and her experiences being a firefighter during the 1980s. She lives in a cabin in the Mojave desert. I keep thinking of fire, fire is always on my mind, but then I am born under a fire sign. Mend and weave. Fill the word basket with fire words. A song fragment is stuck in my head. Old Woman, Weave and Mend. In the darkness of the storm she is watching. Gathering the fragments. This becomes my backdrop. My ear worm.
Molly Fisk reads selections from California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. She talks about the program, and how CPITS poets taught residencies to kids about how to deal with climate crisis. She shares that she came to poetry via personal crisis. How, through that experience, teaching poetry became her life’s work. She asks us, how can poetry help people to heal? An old woman is weaving, her bones become the loom.
I think: The fire season came early this year, it’s a drought year, too soon. Too soon. Poetry is the language of emotion. It is the perfect vehicle to understanding the problem. It is the way to heal. She says, if you can’t understand something or you can’t put it into words, put it into the third person and then write about what didn’t happen.
I think: Poems are like baskets holding the past. Poets see things differently, we have acutely honed observation skills, we are the watchers. This is why I like to watch murder mysteries. Honing my skills. Looking for clues, the divine mystery. We are gathering the fragments. The old woman, she is weaving the sacred circle, gathering in the colors, she is watching over you. Oh, sisters, weave and mend.
We are spreading the word, we are saving all we can save. It turns out everything burns—asphalt becomes a molten river. I remember how last year, during the wildfire, we were under evacuation alert mode, how the ghost leaves drifted across the valley, and fell, glowing like fireflies on the wind. Leaves drifting like snowflakes, like feather down. Such hot kisses. A torch song. On warm days, the attic still remembers the acrid odor of wildfire smoke. A constant reminder of the past, and what is to come. Oh women, weave and mend.
Can poetry change the world? Its narrative is where things begin. Jamie FitzGerald says, We need to change the narrative. How do we go about teaching in a time of crisis? Working with landpaths and creating eco-poetry. Call it passing the baton of social awareness to the next generation. Oh, Sisters, weave and mend.
Jamie said, During the Covid crisis, the penny dropped, the disparate pieces of climate change became a puzzle, the picture came into focus. How do we name it, this thing called climate change, without distancing from it? Oh, women weave and mend.
Molly says type up lines from poems and put them under windshield wipers at night when no one is looking. I like the idea of guerilla poetry for April Poetry Month. The tapestry we weave with our words. Grandmother Spider. The song, what does it want? So insistent.
We talk about Carolyn Forché’s latest book, Against Forgetting, the role of the poet. This is how we bring about change. Bearing witness. Never forget.
And finally the song’s earworm message is revealed. I look it up. The Elderwomen of Nanaimo, a place lately on my mind. Songs and poems work in funny ways, an undercurrent below the conscious level of the psyche. The elders are speaking to me through the song:
For years I’ve been watching, waiting for Old Woman,
From Robert Lee Brewer: Here we are with the first day of the 2021 April Poem-A-Day Challenge! Each day, I'll provide a poetry prompt and a poem to get things started. You can secretly poem along at home, or you can share your poem in the comments below. Catalogue here.
The 2021 PAD line up Last year, someone on Facebook suggested I start the daily prompting and poeming earlier than usual, since so many people were self-quarantining and social distancing at the moment in the United States and elsewhere around the world. And it was a great call. (That was me! —MH)
The minus PaD countdown began March 22. -10. Begin a poem with Let’s. -9. Write a cause and effect poem. -8. Write a fantasy poem. -7. Take a song title, change a word, make the new title the title of your poem, and write your poem. -6. Write an invention poem.-5. write a MacGuffin poem. A MacGuffin is an object (living or nonliving) necessary for the plot but has no greater value to the story. A good example is The Maltese Falcon. -4. Write a universal poem, a universal truth, experience, or a film from Universal Pictures. -3. Write a "spirit of the stairs" poem. that moment when you come up with all the things you should've said AFTER the moment has passed. Hence, you're on the stairs. -2. Take the phrase "Almost (blank)," replace it with a new word or phrase, make it the title of your poem. -1. Write a warm up poem. It could be related to sports, before a baseball game or track race. Or it could be about a computer warming up, the weather, or even a relationship.
Day 1. For today's prompt, write an introduction poem. Introduce yourself, introduce a friend, or introduce a stranger. If you don't wish to introduce yourself, consider writing a persona poem (a poem in which you write from someone else's point of view like Emily Dickinson or a bumblebee). Of course, you could also introduce a problem, solution, or just a situation. Have fun with it! Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.
Allow me to introduce myself, |
| His Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I, aka Joshua A Norton |
The first real transbay proposal was submitted by the builder of the Panama Canal in 1920—essentially the same plan that BART used to build the world's longest and deepest sunken tunnel (in 1965-69, it opened in 1973). The tunnel, technically a tube, as it lies along the bottom of the bay like a snake, withstood the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake which destroyed sections of the Bay Bridge. It seemed like a crazy idea at the time, to tunnel under the bay, but Norton thought of it first. As well as a bridge. I guess he didn’t like ferries.
But I digress. Definitely canals were invoked. Perhaps not the famous palindrome: a man, a plan, a canal—Panama! In my case, it was ear canals. Stuffed ones. I don’t recommend taking BART under the bay with a headcold. Thinking of Norton, I practiced snorkel snorts both descending to the bottom of the bay floor and ascending to the SF Embarcadero stop. The pain was excruciating. The trick is to know when to blow—too much pressure and you'll damage your eardrum. And maybe find your brain splatted against the far wall. In my case, that might have been a mixed blessing.
What lies below, and so, above. There have been several unsuccessful attempts to name all, or parts of the Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton—another one of his alleged brainchildren. It didn’t take. But one can hope. No one can agree as to when when Norton was actually born, which made it rather tricky to celebrate his centennial birthday. Norton was born in England circa 1814 to 1818, wait, 1819? (maybe it was a long, protracted birth), but we do know that he spent his childhood in South Africa. After his parents died, he sailed to San Francisco in 1849—right in time for the gold rush.
Day 8 kid poetry class, introducing art, I used my iPad as a 2nd Zoom camera. I was gobsmacked! A mother-of-invention kind of moment. After two hours of teaching, it was like a wall of exhaustion descending. The challenge of teaching poetry for two hours straight to 4th graders (with a 15-minute break) plus the added impromptu bonus of teaching a visual arts component nearly capsized my boat. That little iPad “accident” saved me some dough. Not to mention some sanity. I nearly bought one of those stand-alone book scanners that you can use as a zoom camera to project images. But somehow we managed.
These were notes to a certain Lùthais MacGriogair, certified boor, and an administrator in a prominent Celtic Languages Facebook group who was always questioning my linguistic background, assuming that I had no right, or scholarly training to make or post comments, that I didn’t have a linguistic leg to stand on. That got me in a lather. My reply grew by leaps and bounds as I hosed him down. I eventually grew weary of his overprivileged snottiness, and left the group, as he was only interested in linguistic slogging matches. I have little patience for the pejorative male ego. So much for having fun in a Facebook group, gawdforbid!
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| The Salton Sea & Laguna Salada basins (bottom) from an altitude of about 62 miles. |
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| Lake Cahuilla 1731–1733 (Lake A); 1618–1636 (Lake B); 1486–1503 (Lake C); 1118–1165 or 1192–1241 (Lake D); 1007–1070 (Lake E); 930–966 (Lake F); and 612–5 BCE (Lake G) Science Direct. |
Jeanne D’Orge, neé Lena, or Emma Yates, was born in Cheshire, England in 1887 (or 1877). When her father, a seed merchant, deserted the family, she and her mother moved to the outskirts of Edinburgh.
Lena moved back to England and published her first poems at 20, and wrote a series of children's books on animal fables under the pen name of Lena Dalkeith—playing on a combination of her birthname, Lena, and the quaint Midlothian village of Dalkeith, near Edinburgh, where she was raised. Thus was the beginning of a woman of many identities.
While on a walking holiday in France in 1906, Lena was swept off her feet by geographer and engineer, widower Alfred Burton (dean of M.I.T.) who was perhaps 22 (another account says 30) years her senior. Lena and her mother joined Burton and his two sons in Newton Grange, Massachusetts where she and Alfred were married.
A pioneering modernist poet, Lena became involved with The Others, a poetry group that included Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens; she began publishing her work in literary magazines including Others, Scribners, and Poetry. Some of her prose poems were published under the name Lena Dalkeith Burton.
Suffering from poor health, and a profound dislike of east coast weather (and chilly New England mores), Lena fled to sunny San Diego, then up the coast to Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1920 with her 3 children in tow—where she built a Craftsman style house. Her husband retired from M.I.T, and joined her a year later. (But they were divorced in 1925, according to one source). They were active in community theater, with Dr. Burton building sets and acting in Forest Theater productions. Lena wrote and produced a series of Commedia dell’ Arte styled plays, including Crazy Ann, under the penname of Lena Burton.
In 1928 Lena created a scandal when she left her children with her (ex-)husband to live with the Forest Theater lighting technician, and M.I.T. graduate, Carl Cherry, some 20 years her junior. They converted his mother’s old Queen Anne cottage, a wedding gift (they were married in 1930), into an art studio for Lena, and a workshop for Cherry.
During the lean years, they lived off canned tuna and coffee. She began painting in earnest in 1937, and Carl Cherry struck paydirt when one of his inventions, the one-sided blind rivet, revolutionized airplane and shipbuilding construction during the war years. Lena took up her artist name Jeanne D'Orge, after a river in France, having shed all vestiges of her past lives. For D'Orge painting embodied the intangible moods of form, color, and feelings that cannot be expressed in poetry or music.
The Cherrys carried on as before, living a simple lifestyle, but used their newfound fortune to establish the philanthropic Cherry Foundation to "further the culture of America by sponsoring experimental fine arts, sciences and education." The foundation underwrote arts events, concerts, plays, lectures and seminars often featuring world class lecturers and performers.
She became fast friends with Robinson Jeffers and Edward Weston, and wrote plays under the pseudonym of Juniper Green, after a neighboring village near Edinburgh.
After her husband Carl Cherry died of cancer in 1947, D'Orge continued to run the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, and "often appeared on the streets of Carmel wearing a big pink hat, ankle length Chinese robes and paint-stained tennis shoes." She died in 1964. Her former home, now an art center, houses over 1200 pieces of her art, plus letters, books, manuscripts, photos and memorabilia, as well as an extensive library.
—Maureen Hurley, Vernal Equinox 2021
I published this in Facebook’s California History page, it garnered 322 likes and was shared 80 times. a runaway success story in the tiny realm of publishing that I’m most familiar with. I originally published a version of this embedded with my 1998 Pat Wall posts, more here. But his stands alone as a post as well.
OK, so the intense monologues are tedious, I want to beat up the character for being twits and twats, but the storyline is also hypnotically poetic in the vein of The Time Traveler’s Wife. But back to the rude interjection of the folksong. I really don’t think the miller did it, and Johnny was a schmuck.
Just listened to Girl by Edna O’Brien. Devastating. Does anyone know of a cheap way to get used CD audiobooks? I’m on my last one. I listen to them in my car when I’m driving. James Patterson, Lee Child, Robert Grisham, Jonathan Kellerman, Kathy Reich, Philip Dick, etc.
I’m working my way through the oeuvre of John Grisham: I loved Jake Brigance in The Client. looking for part two, Sycamore Row. There were four CD books in one, and now I can’t remember them all. Ak! The Firm, Client, Summons, and? Long ago I read The Pelican Brief, but I don’t remember it. Or the movie. Maybe I need to begin at the beginning.
Listening to books on tape with my iPad versus the car stereo is not great, but it will do in a pinch. No aux port. Using the empty FM channel device is useless but it does give me a USB port so I can keep my iPad charged.
2022 A recap: last year, I discovered that through Libby and Hoopla, that I could download audiobooks to my iPad. A game changer. You can also download e-books too, but I found during sequestration, I had the mental acuity of a newt, or maybe a frog, and I could not concentrate.
I normally hated audiobooks. I hated being read to. So the voiceover actor who reads the stories aloud is as important as the author. I can safely say that a bad reader can ruin a good author’s story.
I have gone through the entire catalog of Alexander McCall Smith and James Lee Burke, as well as many other crime writers. Libby carries titles that Hoopla doesn’t, so you should have both apps. And also when you run out of monthly download credits on Hoopla, you can switch over to Libby.
The more library cards you have, the more books you can download in a given month. Definitely a case of the more, the merrier. Library card wealth is a thing. Also, one county library system may not have all the titles of the given author, but you can mix and match with various library systems. Thank you Glenn Ingersoll for cluing me in.
Day five, hump week. It’s four weeks until spring break. We chitchat and discuss the origin of April Fool’s Day, it falls on a Thursday. Ms. Loser tells us a story of how she once sent a memo out to her colleagues saying that there was no school on April Fools’ Day, and because they didn’t read to the end of the letter that said April Fool’s! everybody believed her and didn’t come to school. And then someone piped up, Don’t you have to wear green on April Fools’ Day? That made me laugh and then that was my entrance que, as I was waiting in the wings. I said you have to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. It represents freedom. It would be fun to do something with customs and aphorisms. I say, Thank you Connor, for the poetry lesson idea. He chuffs.
We go over last week’s work which were based on acrostics, and India reads a poem about a sparrow. Because I can see the document on the screen, I say make it look like a poem too. And so we add commas and line breaks. Atziri read a poem about sunflowers. Some of her lines are very long and we talk about indenting three spaces, or using the tab key when a line continues past the confines of the page.
Today is a little bit more shoptalk, we are delving further into the revisioning and editing process. We focus on how to make it look like a poem. And whether or not it needs punctuation and/or commas. I say one line, one idea. I often make line breaks at commas. I say, one unit of breath, one idea. We talk of personal choices whether or not to punctuate. I mention that like with Emily Dickinson changing the face of poetry, e.e. cummings, who eschewed capitalization and punctuation, also changed the shape of poetry.
Emily reads a poem from last week, then Natalie—her ocean poem has a lot of potential. I tell her, make it also look like a poem. Again, we reiterate the process of line breaks. We also discuss using strong verbs versus weak verbs. I tell her that I cannot see the word fun. I cannot see the word get. I cannot see the word go. Are there stronger verbs we can use to make our poems really sing? We look at the worksheets, lists of verbs and feelings, words for invoking the senses. I tell them, these worksheets in your Google folder are resources for you to use when you get stuck.
Freewrite time—we can revisit old poetry lessons, or write new work. The only thing I am looking for are comparisons. I make the comparison sign—two fists, or two ideas, crashing headlong into each other to create similes and metaphors.
We breathe deep, we make vroom vroom noises, we shake out our hands, we become race cars, we grab the proverbial steering wheel, and screech out, making our words fly across the page. We drive them around dangerous curves, not braking for what lies ahead. It’s all out, flat out, drag racing through the back roads of memory. Dead man’s curve coming up, the twists and turns in the road become sinuous as snakes. We don’t know where we’re going, or where we’ll end up, but we’re going there, fast as we can, pedal to the metal, across the finish line. But a writer’s work is never done.
Meanwhile, the chickens were already up and crowing. No hope of retrieving lost sleep. Whenever the chickens see me near my car they come galumphing, listing from side to side like drunken sots, especially if I melodiously croon Chickens! and say BuckBucks. Because, well, food. Handsome Pele and his girls. Alpha flock. Except for the dingbat silkie who doesn’t know the front end of the chicken from the back end. No danger there of him passing on his genes.
A lot of people were up at 3 AM, it was a virtual Facebook pajama party. Gary Glazner, Margaret Maughan, and on the other side of the world, my Irish cousins were even chiming in. It was quite the night. Meanwhile Ken Bullock was also up, but then, he’s my resident nightowl, and we were trading Cornish insults as our wont because it was, and still is St. Piran’s Day. Gool Piran da dheugh why oll!
I also I had a long, if busy, day yesterday. I edited several month’s worth of photos, and then made small photo albums for the California Native Plant Society, with several needing IDs from its sister group, California Invasive Plants. So my mind was going like a race car. My daffodil post came from this planty intersection, as did the pond turtle story. I thought I was done for the day. But like Steve Jobs saying, wait, there’s one more thing....
The most astonishing post of all was of some mistletoe I had taken a photo of, still attached to a branch with leaves, and a Cazadero biologist was more interested in the attached oak leaves than the mistletoe. He said the oak was a hybrid, an Oracle oak.
Unfortunately some mistletoe was an invasive legacy introduced by Luther Burbank. But I was gobsmacked. Hybrid oracle oaks are rare, and are usually not a coastal phenomenon.
Suddenly I cold actually see what he was talking about—the leaves were hybrid, not deeply lobed like a black oak, but with little spines like a live oak, but the leaf was not cupped or curled like a live oak Why didn’t I notice this when I first found the mistletoe? I was too busy looking at the mistletoe and not the oak. Well, it was December.
Understand that I am a ballpark amateur in the realm of native plant ID. I can a get close ID, but I can’t tell the difference between subspecies. I can’t really hone in like the pros. Why I joined the group in the first place was to learn. I was expecting a simple answer. The universe did not comply.
Once I was content with knowing if an oak tree was a Coast Live Oak, or if it was a deciduous one. My mind stopped there. End of story. Sure I could say valley oak, or black oak, and I knew that there are nine kinds of oak trees in California—but did I know the difference? Not really. I barely knew all the interior oaks.
Well, this has certainly been an interesting and productive twinned goosechase, curtesy of Luther Burbank, and apparently, the wind. Expecting a simple ID, I got way more than I bargained for. Steep learning curves. And I guess I needed to post my mistletoe find under invasive plants vs native ones. interior live oak.
And suddenly I’ve entered the realm of multitudes of oaks that can hybridize with each other. My mind is reeling. My grandmother once told me that the word for door comes from the Irish duire, simultaneously meaning both door and druid, aka fios, or knowledge. You can’t ever shut that door once it opens.
And Geoffrey Davis, also enter into this conversation, obliquely, for he was always pointing out the black oaks in the valley...whereas I was only aware of our coast live oak, because that was the extent of my entire ecosystem on Arroyo Road. I think of him each time I pass a stand of black oaks. Then, of course, there was the Black Oak restaurant...
I can see where this is going....
