Uvalde, TX child massacre

On Facebook there is a list posted of school massacres that begins in May 1998 with Thurston High School in Oregon (attributed to Ken Bateman). I lost track after counting more than 300 schools. I tried four times to count how many gun assaults on our nation’s children. And not just our children, we are at the epicenter of an epidemic of gun violence with more casualties than several of our recent wars combined. I despaired and could not go back and begin again. 

And now we must add Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School not only to the list, but to the list of the four worst assault atrocities in America including the mass child massacres of Columbine and Sandy Hook. I weep for those nineteen 4th graders and two teachers, on the cusp of summer vacation, gunned down by weapons of war. What has this nation come to that we mow down our children with war-grade weaponry like this? 

The girl who survived the massacre by smearing blood on herself, who draped herself over the body of a classmate, said she felt it when her friend quit breathing. Miah Cerrillo is eleven years old, she is scarred by the wounds of gun violence, and she will never get to be a child again. Ever. She was the one who dialed 911 and said, “Please come….we’re in trouble,” and then wondered why the police never came inside to rescue them. She said the gunman played loud music at the end of the carnage.

The gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a former student at Uvalde High School, bought two semi-automatic  AR-15 assault rifles (with a street value of $800 - $2500 each) and 375 rounds of ammunition for his birthday. No background check, nada. Not even a driver’s license. Or a red flag warning. Ramos wasn’t evenold enough to buy cigarettes or a six-pack of beer, but congress has deemed that Ramos was old enough to buy weapons of mass destruction. For what it’s worth, the median age of these gunmen is 18 years of age, without exception, nearly all are white—except Ramos who was of hispanic heritage.

There were warning signs. He posted on social media that he planned to first kill his grandmother, and then visit a school with premeditated murderous intent. Eight days later, he shot his grandmother in the face, who was first on his hitlist, then slaughtered a classroom of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. She survived and was able to call 911 but it was too late for the 21 victims of his misplaced rage.

According to WA Po, Ramos had a history of being bullied for his speech impediment, and attire—and he was failing, and so, dropped out of school. He had nothing left to lose. This was his payback. Surely he must have known that he would also die that day. Suicide by mass destruction. Why take out an entire 4th grade class? Why that school? What was the tipping point? How long had he been harboring that grudge, nursing it into revenge? Were there no warning signs at all?

Uvalde, hometown of actor Matthew McConaughey, whose mother was a teacher there, is a small community in the Texas hill country near San Antonio, some 50 miles from the Texas-Mexico border. About 90% of Robb ES students are Hispanic, and most come from impoverished families. The Uvalde massacre was the worst school shooting since Sandy Hook, nearly 10 years ago. 

So, where were the Uvalde police in all of this? It comes to light that they did not act immediately, rather, they prevented parents from reaching their trapped children by tackling and tasering frustrated parents, handcuffing and macing them. Despite the fact that in 2018, that the Uvalde police force were trained and fully kitted up in tactical armor, they did not do their job. They sat on their haunches and waited. 

One brave mother, Angeli Rose Gomez, was handcuffed for attempting to enter the school, was eventually released, she then breached the fence, ran to the school, and rescued her two boys, unarmed. Unarmed. Now that was a foolhardy, but brave thing to do. It took real courage. What did the Uvalde police force do? Nothing. 

Now Texas Governor Abbot obfuscates about “hardening the schools.” What does hardening actually mean? Locking people in? Locking people out? A penitentiary school is not the solution. Beto O’Rourke was a brave man when he stood up and challenged the governor for his gross inaction. Thoughts and prayers will not bring back those children. I don’t even know why we continue to iterate that phatic phrase as it does nothing to bring solace to anyone. Meanwhile, the NRA is holding their annual convention. Big business as usual.

Since Columbine, some 310,000 kids have been exposed close to a thousand incidents of gun violence on campus, from kindergarten to college level. So far, this year, there have been over 200 mass shootings in the United States — and it’s only May. Seven more months to go. In just 13 of the largest mass shootings of school children, 148 have died, 182 wounded. I can’t do the math for the 400+ schools on the list. In Desert Sheld, Desert Storm and the Iraqi wars combined, we lost 7158 soldiers.

We are the only country with more guns than people—with an estimated 4 hundred million guns. An unequal equation. Since most of us don’t even own guns, that means a small minority are stockpiling guns, for what purpose? It’s not about the Second Amendment. It’s much deeper than that.  Not protecting the vulnerable members of our society—especially young children—against gun violence is a crime against humanity. The Uvalde children were pulverized, only DNA analysis will ID them. Let that carnage sink in.  Some parents are opting for open casket funerals so that the world can see the atrocity firsthand. Memorial Day Weekend is not long enough to contain all this grief.

How is this carnage OK? “Thoughts and prayers” is empty lip service. This is domestic terrorism. We need policy change and action now. If not now, when? We need background checks AND a bipartisan ban on all assault rifles NOW, NRA & GOP. Name and ban the weapons of mass destruction, the Uzi, the AK-47,  AR-15 and its cousin, the M-16. We cannot normalize this wholesale slaughter of our fellow Americans within our borders. Ever.

Those 60 congressmen who refuse to vote for gun control legislation have a lot of blood on their hands. This “guns don’t kill people” argument is utter nonsense. Of course guns kill people. That’s what assault rifles are meant to do. They are weapons of war, not deer rifles. I think we all want to live in a country that cherishes its children more than its guns. Never forget. As Beto O’Rourke just said, “The time for us to stop another Uvalde, is now…. The lives of our kids are literally on the ballot… Action is the antidote to despair. Are you willing to act?”

This is a call to abrazoz.

CATALYST

I always imagined him hunkered down in his enclave 

between appearances, exploring remote trails,

weaving his way through deep New England woods,

observing the splendor of light among granite boulders, 

in boreal gardens of calipso orchid and ladyfern,

where wilderness and the throat of summer were untamed. 

Where intricate clouds of mayflies gathered 

over a glassine pond reflecting the sky,

broken by lucky salmon leaping skyward, 

and the concentric rings merged like Celtic knots,

an old rowboat riding low in the water,

with its tendrils of moss and pond scum

trailing like a threefold beard of wisdom,

and thunderclouds roiling on the horizon, 

promising a storm, that other ink-stained darkness, 

and something infinitely unnamable at the edges. 

Starry-eyed I admired him from afar through his poetry, 

through distances, and in workshops, something spoke 

of a kindred language we shared that went beyond the page.

Perhaps it was our Irish blood recognizing long lost kin.

Each in the other, and all in one. Cromlech and dolmen.

Out of the blue, I invited him to do a poetry reading.

I remember how he arrived on the bus on Railroad Square,

how his books and his eyeglasses headed northward

in a satchel on the Seattle-bound Greyhound, sans tickets. 

I wondered what someone would make of his poems

at the end of the line, would they toss out the books, 

try on his glasses? See the world through the poet’s lens?

As I gathered up my copies of his books for the reading 

he borrowed my car for the afternoon to visit the vineyards,

he was all elbows and knees in my old blue Bug,

that famous forelock of hair over a glacial blue eye,

He taught me to trust the veracity of Anglo-Saxon words,

that were uncomfortable in polite poetry schools, 

that poetry itself was a dangerous traverse over  “bauchy ice.” 

He said to me, Listen to the awkward music of the generations.

You can’t quit writing, ever. The becoming and the dying 

of life cycles is poetry, and the music of the poem is the poem.

I remember how he held me when I returned from the coast, 

a friend, off his medication, had plucked out his own eye.

I stumbled blind in grief, fell over a stone wall, 

how his hands held me up, and he offered solace 

and animal comfort during a time when I could not see.

That night, in the dark, we were all thumbs and elbows.

The braille light of our hands bespoke an older story, 

we had moved beyond the realm of mentor and student 

into something akin to family harboring dark secrets. 

When he returned home, his wife had enough—

a lifetime of wandering eyes, the last straw among many.

Did he return to the deep solace of the woods, 

to measure dappled light splayed among the trees?

I heard he died alone in a hospital bed in a living room,

watching the slow progression of shadows cross the ceiling,

but his mind had wandered onto other wordless shores.

5/25 Write On! Terri Glass workshop

At the bat bar

The only problem is that the lights attract bugs. So it’s like a bug smorgasburg out there. I think it’s hysterical that she’s playing classical music to the bats. They don’t seem to mind the mood music, which  was Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. Classical music was used to thwart teen vandals at shopping malls. It might just work against the teenage bats. It could be worse, it could be rap. Bottom line is the bats will win in the end. She’s trying to discourage them because they poop all over the front porch. She needs to build dedicated bat houses. And carpenter bee hotels as well. Perhaps she should play Die Fledermaus?

CPITS teaching journal, AVS

Friday the 13th. Today I taught five classes, itself, exhausting, and I read their poems, and typed some of them up. I usually type up about 10 poems per class, or a page’s worth, double column. But there were so many fantastic poems, I probably typed up 75 to 100 poems. It took me until 5:30 PM to get through all their journals, but I did it so that I could have a long break. Otherwise it’s harder to get through them all if I wait until later. Probably my personal best in terms of getting through a sheer amount of work. Usually I tank after reading two classes. TG the classes are small. But it’s still a marathon. 

I’ve sped up the entire reading/commenting/publishing process considerably by dictating kid poems to my iPad, and then emailing them to my MacBook. And the iPad dictation process to Notes really speeds things up, but makes the strangest mistakes, so extra proofreading diligence is necessary at the other end. The Apple speech to text platform is much more accurate than Facebook. But, still it’s a huge time investment. Some really strong poets, but I’ve been working with these kids since kindergarten. Such fantastic writers they are. This year’s poetry book will be extraordinary. 

The work is sometimes grueling, but so rewarding. A crazy job, who knew it would become my life’s calling, but I absolutely love doing what I do. It’s like being in the epicenter of magic. A symbiosis of creativity. I absolutely love what I do, but the prospect of financial insecurity is always looming.

I think the quality of their writing is related to how I pair and mix up the model poems. Currently I am using Dorianne Laux’ Heart poem paired with Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Ofrenda poem, the recalcitrant heart and unexpected gifts—and the synthesis produces amazingly insightful poems from 3-5th graders—in both urban and rural populations. One girl wrote a poem to her dead rabbit, and she burst into tears because she felt guilty for not being there, and I said, No, you are not to blame. Getting real. Obviously it was preying on her mind, but she had no outlet. She achieved some degree of resolution by the catharsis of writing.

I am always looking for ways to teach students to find their own authentic voices vs. parroting back the model poems. Of course, I also like to use Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the Thing with Feathers too. My current teaching trifecta. There’s a lot of improv too. For example, I threw in Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish because 3rd graders were raising steelhead trout to release into the river.

We’ve had a lot of Covid talk lately, the isolation, etc. What I’ve discovered across the board is that they’ve had no real platform to express their feelings around the isolation, and quarantine. So it arises. We keep it real. We share our stories and render it into poetry. The personal experience into the universal. At Berkeley, the next wave of Covid is rolling through the school, taking out students and teachers alike in droves. Sometimes just finding the through line becomes the lifeline. Sometimes we even find love along the way.

5/12/22 Alexander Valley School 

HEART SPEAKS ITS MIND

Heart speaks its mind, silent as snow, 

falling from cornices. 

Heart wants an eclipse in all its pocketses. 

Heart wants a dragon moon with you 

looking up at the sky,

Orion‘s Belt cinching you up to the stars, 

Betelguese sends signals to the Andromeda Galaxy 

where Jackie Gleason reruns are tumbling 

like polished stones among the stars. 

Heart wants a warm bed with flannel sheets in winter. 

Heart wants a cat curled up by the fire. 

Some say the heart is just like a wheel, or so the song goes, 

but heart is studded with rose thorns 

and weeds on the ground. Heart cries, lacrimosa,

red tears of justice measuring out the length of our days 

to the end of our death. In this we all dream 

of other places where the ties that bind us 

are made of spiderwebs and hope.

5/12

Rich Strike wins the 148th Kentucky Derby with 80 to 1 odds

Whenever I drive to Berkeley to teach kids poetry, I always drive the back way past Golden Gate Fields, just so I can see the jockeys breezing, or exercising their horses. That brief moment seeing them through the slatted fence makes for a good start to my day. At a memorial service for a friend, Maria Perrin, who died of an unexpected heart attack, the Marin Rod and Gun Club bar, was the last place I expected to encounter a glimpse of horses. We caught the tail-end broadcast of an amazing Kentucky Derby win for a last minute scratch entry horse with a longshot 80 to 1 odds to win—2nd longest odds in Derby history. And win, he did, with a deft series of maneuvers, as Rich Strike, a horse with a big heart, went from dead last out the starting gate, trailing at the tail end of the pack, to the middle of the melee where he was caught in a dangerous bottleneck traffic jam which  sometimes results in massive pile-ups. The jockey, Sonny Leon, threaded the needle when a tiny hole opened in the pack, and he deftly wove right through the tangle, and then he went on the OUTSIDE to pass on a curve, when most jockeys would’ve hugged the rail for maximum advantage. Outside means you lose valuable seconds off your racing time. Inside curve on the rail always has the winner’s advantage. Then, Rich Strike hit an extra high gear no one knew he even had, and rode for the win on the rail. Wow! Great horse, great riding, great jockey, indeed. This overhead drone shot really shows it all. And to think he was a $30,000 quick claim maiden race horse from Camulet Farms up against multimillion dollar horses. I bet they’re sorry for selling him off.  First claimed horse ever to win the Kentucky Derby! The historic Run for the Roses only allows 20 horses to compete on the field, Rich Strike was the 21st entry, rotten luck, but at the very last minute another horse dropped out—or was scratched—just as they were getting ready to leave. Quick change of plans. Time to don the racing silks. Kind of like the cinderfella stories with California Chrome, Seabiscuit, and Secretariat. The underdog won. But that’s horseracing for you. The owner definitely struck it rich with Rich Strike. Rich Strike is a fairytale horse sired by Keen Ice out of Smart Strike, whose bloodlines go back to Native Dancer (whose ggg-grandsire was Man o' War!) on both sides—aka the Gray Ghost, one of the most accomplished Thoroughbreds in racing history.  Up next, the Preakness, and maybe even the Triple Crown. However you want to say it, he’s got a big heart, and he’s in the money.

YouTube

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• Our Chromie's Wing and a Prayer to win the Belmont...
• California Chrome, a Cinderfella Horse
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  A horse & his best friend, his groom, Jerry Riley.

  
  

IMAGINARY LETTERS

Every time I slide behind the wheel, 

I find myself writing imaginary letters 

to the past, what might have been

as if the re-structuring of backroads 

and memory could change the past, 

eradicate it, enhance it, or make it so. 

Every time I slide behind the wheel, 

I am ranting, like my grandmother 

cursing Cromwell in empty rooms.

And then I wonder why we get stuck 

in this loop—call it a Möbius strip of desire 

endlessly repeating itself ad infinitem.

Call it eternity, or call it infinity 

if you want to involve math. 

But math was never my strong suit. 

When you add it all up, we are binary stars 

searching the galaxy of the past for our other halves 

embedded in the iridium dust of memory.

Paste a Forever stamp on the envelope.

The address is forthcoming. 

Return to sender.

5/4 Write On! Susie Terence 

RIP Naomi Judd

Note bene: I never know where my next writing idea will come from, where it will go, or what spawns an idea, usually it’s because of a Facebook post that serves as a trigger, I write a comment which leads to another comment, and so on. I never expected to be floored by the death of Naomi Judd, someone I didn’t even know. But there you have it. It seems Facebook style Wakes are becoming a thing. This is a developing piece based on a lot of hear-say (stet) as I only knew her on on the periphery. Call it 1° of separation if you must. So bear with me as I uncover a West Marin story.

A new Facebook friend, activist Sandra Birnhak, who grew up with Diane/Naomi in Kentucky, said she went by the name Naomi back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, so maybe she changed her name back to her given name, Diane when she was in LA, with her then husband, Michael Ciminella, before moving to Lagunitas. She was only 17 or 18  when she had her first daughter, Christine, in 1964. 

Sounds like Hollywood wasn’t kind to her—in her autobiography, River of Time, she mentions about being molested by an uncle, she abandoned by her husband, then, at 22, she was raped by an ex-con heroin addict. I don’t know how she wound up in the San Geronimo Valley, but it was a haven of single mothers. Since I only knew of her peripherally, I’m still piecing together the stories… 

Backstory: The Judds once lived in Speck McAuliff’s apartments above the post office in Lagunitas (where I once lived as a young child before my parents split up). Then they moved up the road to north a cottage on Tamal Road next to the House of Richard (a hippie store), and they also lived on Resaca Avenue as well.  

KILAUEA BLEEDING INTO THE SEA

One of the most sublime moments of my life, 

was hiking out to where the lava met the sea 

on the big island of Hawai’i. Kīlauea was weeping 

blood but the goddess Pele was asleep. 

I stood at the center of creation on newly minted land, 

listened to the roaring song of the red-hot lava 

hissing in the lava tunnel, making its way to the surf, 

and the soles of my hiking boots melted,

was a small price to pay.

4/30/22

CASUALTIES OF WAR (photos)

Mohammad Mohiedine Anis, 70, sits in his destroyed bedroom listening to music. Joseph Eid, WaPo

In that viral photo of Aleppo, from the Ides of March, 2017, an old man, Mohammad Anis, sits on the bed, the fallen headboard like the lid of a sarcophagus. He sits, with pipe in hand, he’s pushed back the bedspread covered in plaster dust to make room for his thoughts. He stares at the gramophone, the needle poised, the hand crank at the ready. He contemplates at the possibility of music during a time when the idea of home is gone,  the vinyl record is done. Only the hissing remains. The floor is strewn with rubble, jigsaw puzzles, pieces of plaster ceiling and wall have joined him. Who will find the hard edges to solve that puzzle? The man from Aleppo refuses to leave his home, the city of his ancestors. We can’t see his two cats napping in a wicker chair in a larger photo. The shutter is askew. There’s a crib in the corner by a petchka stove. A samovar. A pile of books, pages fluttering like bird wings, the window transoms are open to let the morning air in, but the glass is shattered by the impact of missiles. His collection of old cars, gone, he makes plans to rebuild for his children, children. A remnant of a lace curtain luffs in the breeze, a reminder of a gentler time. There is a lull, a momentary silence of grief embedded in the midst of this senseless jihad of a war. He raises his pipe to his mouth but the ember has gone out. He has no words left to explain this life.

Russian missile strikes a flat in northern Kharkiv, Feb 24, 2022. Sergey Bobok,Time

First Syria, and now Ukraine, we witness the handiwork of a despotic Putin intent on making war on civilians, we watch the six o’clock news, in real time, with no buffer. In Kharkiv, Ukraine, the photos of war are played out again, like a cinema trailer, only in real time, the entire body of a missile has pierced the ceiling and embedded itself in the floor like a strange pillar or plant. There is no one in the room. Only a mirror and the crucifix on the wall bearing witness. The bed is folded over into a couch. The occupant gone, but alive. Miraculously, the chandelier is intact. The table is set for breakfast, the keyboard covered in thick dust, the rubble on the floor, Soviet era concrete scours the nostrils. On the window ledge, plants in need of watering lean crazily towards the light. The computer screen and television are dressed in dust ghosts as if a child had breathed on them in order to draw a picture. There is no easy way to comprehend these civilian casualties in the midst of a senseless war. Soon the man will return to his flat to survey the damage. Kharkiv holds the line, Mariupol has fallen. My friend Miceál lands in Lviv with medical supplies and 10,000 bodybags. Meanwhile, the midst of all this chaos, a babushka, whose friends are learning the art of the sniper, is baking bread for the Ukrainian soldiers, she is offering bread and salt to welcome us to the world stage.

SURE SIGNS OF SPRING

I stood beneath the madrone tree,
alive with the buzzing of bees,

and I wondered what species? 

A voracious party of bees leaves

a lake of small white bells at my feet.

European honeybees? Carpenter bees?

Whatever the species, they begin early, 

gathering nectar at the crack of dawn. 

Small bells like drifts of snow cover the car.

The tree buzzes and drones on, 

sounding like it’s about to take off 

to join the twin propeller planes 

crossing a flawless West Marin sky.

Two drunken bumblebees fall from the tree 

and wobble onto me, piggyback.

The little furry fkrs fking on my finger!

I had no worries about being stung. 

That was the last thing on their minds.

4/23 PAD

WHEN I WAS 21

My head in the clouds, I tripped over my own feet

and took a spectacular spill down a scree slope. 

I guess the bleeding hearts wanted me to notice them. 

Or were they warning me off this newfound love?

The lover left, something to do with a seven year itch. 

When I picked myself up, I held a thick rhizome in my hand,

and so I planted it and tended to it for 40 years. It thrived.

Who knows how old it was, growing in the talus of an old roadbed.

I carried it from lover to lover, delighting in the showy hearts.

But its demise was a casualty of a relationship that ended 

abruptly, after 21 years, leaving me bereft and homeless.

I learned you can’t save everything, when your heart's broken.

Not even bleeding hearts.

4/23 NaPoWriMo

AT THE LAGUNA DE SANTA ROSA

The drained lakebed, 

long since converted to vines and crops,

as if remembering its ancient shoreline, 

fills the basin with tule fog,

water seeking its own spirit level.

4/21 NaPoWriMo

INTERGALACTIC FRIENDS

When Barbara, a neighbor from my childhood, 

asked me to put a lifetime of artwork online, 

I had no words, the sheer volume of her need 

to express herself in music and poetry, 

coupled with her many breaks from reality,

filled every nook and cornice of the old trailer.

Some poems were scribed in a secret language. 

The idea of a universal tongue to unite us all. 

I humored her, scanning boxes of artwork,

everything in triptych, a gathering of the tribes

of music, art and poetry.The mystic Indo European three. 

I leaned on the impromptu desk like a chanteuse, 

a sleek baby grand piano filled the living room, 

as she tamed a half-lifetime of work into submission, 

the urge to preserve posterity, the urgency for audience

taking precedence over everything, even eating.

For months we sorted art. It morphed into shared meals, 

then cleaning the house as her eyesight was dimming.

She couldn’t see the grime in the kitchen or bathroom. 

Sometimes she’d stop to read a poem aloud. And cackle.

Each piece triggering a memory, windows to the past.

She rendered her artistic life into an endgame 

for her children who didn’t want this crazy old lady 

as the idea of mother. Yet she nurtured us, it was in her nature.

And she waited for her intergalactic friends—who were coming. 

Why didn’t I believe, she asked, in a querulous voice,

bitter with the suppressed rage of years of living alone, 

and familial neglect, and the purgatorial isolation of Covid.

As she read poems, it hit me, her invented language was phonetic. 

Her intergalactic friends were coming, she again assured me. 

She left manifestos on the counter as if to convince me, 

So like my own crazy mother, I thought. The same vision.

A distant shore of a country I would never set foot upon.

And then one day there was a bilingual sign taped

on the sliding glass door bidding her friends welcome. 

I never saw her again, the family closed ranks. Held vigil.

L. said she couldn’t get out of bed, she didn’t want to linger 

not like her bedridden mother who lingered decades, she said. 

So Barb, who didn’t want to be a burden in her old age,

simply quit eating, she turned her head to the wall, and died.

All this, I found out later, when I saw her blue sofa 

beached like flotsam by the side of the road.

4/21 Write On! Susie Terence

PORTRAIT OF JACK MICHELINE IN NORTH BEACH

We were gathered in a North Beach café after a reading.
I remember the black-and-white linoleum tile floors,
sand and grit from our boots scryed under terrazzo tables,
how the cane chairs scudded and groaned beneath our weight.
I remember it was late afternoon, how the slanted sunlight
streamed in long shards through high warped windows.
I’ve idea who was there, was I with a boyfriend,
or maybe it was Herman Berlandt, as I was his wheels.
But I was the only woman there, both visible and unseen,
circling the table with my old Pentax camera, 

paying homage to light and shadow, the ocular distance 

of lens and the alchemy of silver nitrate etched on film

was both a wall and a passport that gained entry to the club.
I was chronicler and eavesdropper, voyeur and witness.
I was new to poetry, but I was all in. I had found my tribe.
I still can’t find the negatives or remember what was said,

but I have an indelible memory, an image of that day,

with Jack Micheline holding court, leaning back in a chair,
black leather jacket creaking, leonine head thrown back, laughing.
I remember a half dozen poets crowded around the table,
drinking, conversing with myriad knees nearly touching.
But not what was said. Sometimes being there was enough.

4/18

Four quick paintings

Thinking my painting for the SGV Spring Art Show was due on Tax Day, and wanting to test run my newish Gamblin oil paints, I banged out four quick canvases sitting in my car. They were wet when I took the photos. Mt. St Helena from Sonoma Mountain is glistening, it's so wet. I haven't touched oil paints in 50 years, an allergy to turpentine made it impossible to breathe. Now there's Gamsol, a mineral oil opens up possibilities. Larry Rippe said no, you have two weeks. Reprieve. Sneaky Larry. I'm always late turning in my assignments.

MISSING THE BOAT

1. We never expected to find ourselves stranded 

in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean right after 9/11, 

but my aunt was on pilgrimage. Matters of the heart. 

Her late husband. Even a new pacemaker didn’t deter her.

I said surely we won’t go, her heart. The operation.

Surely we won’t go, the plane ticket will be canceled, 

but there we were, running the gauntlet through a security flank.

Soldiers with Uzis at the bombed airport, looking grim.

It all began as a lark, we said, sure we’d love to go with her

to the Azores, never dreaming the world would fall apart. 

Thinking we were safe on an island in the middle of nowhere, 

we said sure, but we didn’t know we were on a US military base, 

also a staging ground for Kuwait. Cargo plane after plane 

landing in succession like clockwork on the hour,

refueling for home—Langley AFB, where myriad pontoons 

waited for transport to the front lines, all this was before

we knew that we were gearing up for war with Iraq.

2. My cousin asked, what does sexto mean? 

I was writing in my journal and didn’t want to be bothered.

It means sixth. She asked again, what does sexto mean? 

I repeated myself. Then we heard the sound of the ferry horn 

as it left the dock. The penny dropped, sexto, the sixth day. 

Saturday. We ran to the dock as the last ferry of the season 

disappeared into the marine mist. A cascade of missed flights.

We were stranded on an alien shore, an island 

in the middle of nowhere, without a common language, 

and no way to get to the mainland, or back home.

3. Having missed the ferry, and our flight,

I ran to a taxi driver parked near the empty resort, 

all the tourists had left for the season, saying

ayudame, ayudame, a universal call for help.

I was thankful for the linguistic continuum 

that allowed us to somehow communicate— 

with enough arm waving to fuel a windmill, 

or to become Italian. He took us to the tiny airport 

where they said no more tickets, none. End of season.

He persevered, an opening to Lisbon, business class? 

She said impossible, no tickets for tourists. None.

He explained we were stranded, we had tickets, see?

She nodded, but slapped on a penalty, 40,000 eschudos.

This was on top of our plane tickets. More money 

than our entire flight from San Francisco to the Azores.

He argued, they have family here, she relented.

By this time, the taxi driver was an uncle.

We hugged him goodbye, boarded the plane, 

not knowing how we would get from Lisbon to home.

That ship had already sailed.

4/13 Write On! workshop with Terri Glass

HOW TO PROCRASTINATE DURING TAX SEASON

Clearly my 144 Pilot flare tip pens in a vase 

needed to be arranged by the color spectrum
a rosette, with dark colors rimming the outside, 
pale hues in the center. Then onto my art supplies.
OCD much? The desk drawer was duly inspected 

and found wanting. Clippies arranged by size and color.
Then, onto a mending pile, at this point, several years old,
was of burning interest. No matter that
I no longer fit into those crimson corduroy pants.
The need to go through all my toiletries
was a siren call, especially travel kits still in baggies,
but I wound up keeping most of it anyway. Stet.
Medications to alphabetize and categorize by want 

and by need, and makeup, too, not that I ever wear it.

In this reordering, I come to realize I’m a talented hoarder.
The giveaway clothes pile grows tall as a mountain,

then subducts, and rises like a continental shelf again

as I change minds one more time. Because I can.

I think of plate tectonics and the dire arrangement of faults,

as I resurrect clothes, dust off last century’s shoes.

I organize random piles of paper, and teaching notes,
I even manage to bang out a few new lesson plans,

plus edit several month's worth of photos, thus avoiding 

beginning the new artwork due at the gallery on Tax Day.

Meanwhile, that bag of receipts and bank statements

are fighting the angle of repose and the ravages of gravity,

as they patiently wait for my grand obsession to coalesce 
during tax season. Some things never change.

4/13 PAD tho I didn’t write from a prompt, it fits.

GARTERSNAKES

I swerve to avoid the wedding carcasses
of small snakes in the middle of the road.
Tiny garter snakes looking for love
in all the wrong places discover

too late that the open road
is also the end of the road.

4/11

Blackbird and crow

In the sky, a blackbird dives and pecks at a crow flying too close for comfort. Tiny speck, like a period at the end of the sentence, the blackbird harries the tail of that interloper in his airspace. With this airshow, we begin to understand the fable of how the wren became the king of all birds by hitchhiking on the back of an eagle to see who could fly the highest. That little bird, well out of his comfort zone, dived and swooped in the air like an acrobat, leaving the crow so perplexed, he headed for safer skies.

Wild grasses

There is that moment of utter beauty, when the non-native grasses grow tall enough to ripple in the wind with a certain sheen like watered silk on the hills embroidered with deer trails. In the scars of old edifices, and in a field, a compass of native willows covers the bowl, the lowest place were water collects, not quite a stream, but groundwater. I realized suddenly, all those trees were one organism. One willow that lost its branches and fell making new life again and again and again. And I wondered, how long that grove of willows had stood there? Very much like the Panto alders of Colorado, maybe they are not clonal bodies, of course they’re clonal. The branches fall off, maybe they’re not joined at the hip or root, but they are all one organism. I repeat it many times over like a stutter, Water willow, water willow yellow willow pussy willow pussy willow, say it say it again say it. Laugh, say it again.

Drought journal

I awoke this morning to the unfamiliar sound of rain falling on the roof, the wind picked up, and the pine needles danced on the tin roof like a downpour. A sonorous lullaby, and I drifted back to sleep. What is it about the rain falling on the roof that suits us so? God knows we need rain. We’ve had almost none this year. Sure, we had a deluge in October. Luckily it filled the lakes in Marin County and other stockponds, but most of the state did not get rain. Southern California has gotten more rain this year than we have. 

Another drought year coming up, I post online. Someone says no, another drought decade. And I think of all the decades that we have been in this drought. My neighbor dropped off a logged tree. I counted the rings and you could see for the first 35 years of its life, the tree got plenty of water. But then the rings towards the outer bark were packed in so tight that you cannot count them. These rings our drought journal, the real drought journal.

All in a day’s work

It seems a poet’s work is never done. Poets are always analyzing everything, searching for the exact right word or phrase to describe things. For example, driving down the road this blustery morning, I saw something luff and waft in the breeze. Thinking it was a bird, I slowed down, only to realize it was a branch, but it wasn’t a branch, it was the tip of a branch. And in that moment I realized how much we keep searching to get closer and closer to that moment when we have the aha, the moment of Epiphany. That moment when you know that you have chosen the exact right word to describe what it is you’re seeing or feeling. Or include the philosophical level when you go back to layer or imbue a poem with meaning. But you can’t kill the baby in the process. 

Sometimes, stacking image after image after image creates meaning in the reader, but other times we have to strife with, or settle for artifice to ensure that it is understood by all. Well not maybe by all, but by the reader—whoever the reader is. Take care of the reader. Something I always tell my students. It was so funny to hear one student saying it back to me when I was teaching. If we get a new student in the classroom, I will sometimes have students catch the other students up by explaining what it is we do. In this way I can tell if I am reaching the students and if they are retaining the information. 

It is rare that I get a chance to dictate to my iPad. Because usually I do not have the clarity of mind to focus in that way. And I think of how poetry has a home in my brain making it much more pliable, making it possible for me to talk to a machine, in order to write a poem. Truly, poetry is the mother of all arts. And then some.

Back in October, 2017 while driving to Sonoma County to meet or friend, Kathleen Carr, I was broadsided by a jumble of words tumbling fourth, and having no paper and having no iPad, I grabbed a marker and on the side of a zucchini box, I scrawled the poem as it came, fast and furious. But I waited too long to transcribe it, and couldn’t read some of it. The juxtaposition, the leap from idea to idea is interesting. I have no idea what the poem was about, or what prompted it. I just know that sometimes when driving down wild backroads, words speak through me. And I am merely the scribe.

I scribe, scribble, scribe. A scribe rights, a child scribbles, scrawls poems.

THE GOOD DOCTOR POET

      —with thanks to William Carlos Williams

So, we were at this boring party deep in a dull suburb,
much to our surprise, we met an aviator in the atrium—so much

depends upon casual connections, conversations drift and float
upon a sea of ambient noise, the generic hubbub fueled by

a mix of alcohol and angst, the party fizzled, it was a case of nature

red in tooth and claw, soon drunks would be carted off in red

wheelbarrows, our New Jersey pilot was out of his depth, his face

glazed with boredom, he told us a story of scars when he was five,

without preamble, he rolled up his pants, to show us his knee, his eyes
watered, a yawn, he fell out of an apple tree, the poet-doctor stood

beside him, and stitched him up. We leaned forward in unison, was
the name Williams? He said, yes how did you know? We were

white-knuckled with anticipation. We cackled like triumphant
chickens, high-fiving each other, and said, because we’re poets.

4/11 NaPoWriMo 

CLEAR CUT

When I was a child, our neighbor, 

Lucien Vincilione—his name, a clue—

in an attempt to establish a preordained
sense of order in a fecund wilderness,
vigorously cleared manzanita and coyotebush,
to let the land breathe. He sawed and whacked
and sprayed the brambles with a vengeance,
leveling with impunity the berries and wild roses,
eradicating the snowberry and the pipevine—
what we called the greeny Dutchman’s pipe,
never learning the names of those wild plants
that survived for eons in that unkept garden.
Still not content, he torched the honeybee nest
in the bay tree down by the creek, he
felled the venerable crabapple in the gulley
all for the idea of order, and a good riddance,
he said, having abolished the slovenly wilderness
for a sterile landscape of non-native grasses.
First to go were the shooting stars, then the creamcups,

then the larkspur, and the tiny wild strawberries,

the death-knell of the blue-eyed-grass and hounds-tongue 

and the dainty iris. Only the death camas survived.

Of course we were unaware of the role of symbiosis,
an interdependent dance of host plant and insect.
And for all his efforts, for decades there was no longer 

a verdant wildflower carpet to greet us,

nor a crown of black pipevine swallowtails
with luminous indigo and russet eye patches
swooping around our heads in spring.
No accounting for taste, my grandmother said.
Not even the small birds could survive 

that onslaught of progress.

4/10 PAD

Persian door, Aleke and Kobe

Southern Iran or North Kurdistan. From Hawraman, Facebook

The hen contemplates the day, standing on the lintel hovering between inside and outside, the enticing odor of green grass, an oasis, as she can’t fathom the distant lake or the the dark mountains, or gender; her world is contained within the twin cerulean doors opening inward spilling the memory of sky inward onto the dung walls of a room with a flagstone floor, a curved mosaic bowl worn down by time, and the secret whisperings of the past. The hen stands on the women’s side of the doors. They each have their own gendered story of segregated entrances. The verdigris brass aleke, a delicate wing, or more often, a finger-shaped knocker for the women to gently tap, was on the right side, and the thick kobe fist, in the shape of a lionhead or a hand for the men to bang upon the door was on the left. The pitch of the knock, a code, so that the inhabitants each knew how to answer the door. Women answered to the tap and men answered the more robust knock. But in order to close the door, both halves are needed—you can’t have one without the other.

4/9 PAD. Aleke and kobe

ON THE KLEE WYCK TRAIL

Raven, Gene Tagaban at Xunaa Shula Hit; Kenneth Grant video

I once witnessed a Kwakiutl raven dance, 

in the wayback days of youth, in some longhouse,
when we made summer sojourns to the Pacific Northwest.
Tricksters, and creators of light, those long summer nights
when I was but half-formed and didn’t know the confines of shadows.

Seeking fish wisdom, we ate salmon sizzling from the campfire,

under faint stars, the feathered cloak of night tucking us in.
Perhaps this is why I talk to those ravens canted against the sky.
They always seem to circle back and listen, tilting their heads 
to gaze upon me with dark eyes as if to understand each nuance.
Unfortunately I always talk to them as if they were cats
or killer whales. As if expecting answers. Maybe a warble or two.
Don’t they know that all cats, and ravens, by extension,
are black at night, which is probably a good thing
they can’t decipher anything I say.

4/9 NaPoWriMo

Day jobs

No one ever told me that I’d be come a jack of all trades and master of none, if I became an artist. That my life would be filled with myriad meaningless day jobs. They said get a real job. I didn’t listen. I danced from job to job. I began young following my passion, supporting hopeless causes. To support my horse rescued from the glue factory, I was a babysitter, gardener, errand runner, stall shoveler, horse exerciser, salad girl. When she died, there were more horses and ponies to support, I was a stray equine magnet perennially in debt to my vet. In my Junior year, I sold off the last of the ponies and became a waitress in Switzerland, to see the Alps. I got stranded there when the airlines went belly up. To put myself through college, I was a small tarot press manager (where I became pen pals with Ken Kesey), a housemaid, a house cleaner, au pair for the rockstars and the rich (wi’ a cuppa tae in me hond with Fleetwood Mac)—and that was all before I hung my artist hat up and took up the mantle of poetry. Somewhere along the way there was love. And travel.  I’ve been a caterer, server, bartender (don’t talk to me about slippery nipples), an independent newspaper paste-up and layout troglodyte (we worked all night), a darkroom film developer, photographer and writer (I met lots of famous people while wearing my ace cub reporter hat, not to mention my usher duds), a graphic artist and calligrapher, an Elderhostel lecturer on local history and geography, arts facilitator and presenter, seller of Dish satellite TV antennae (apparently I was good, I won a Mickey Mouse watch, but watches don’t like me). I’ve even been an extra in movies (with Brian Cox, and a glaring Faye Dunaway), and TV series—a face-to-face with Cheech, where I played a reporter—and I’ve never seen any of those clips. I’ve been a madcap storyteller for school literacy programs. Before the pandemic I was an intreprid traveler, a petsitter, a housesitter, a Living History silk artist teacher/storyteller, and a whisky wench for Highland Gameses, educator-trainer, artist in the schools, both poetry and art, I am still hard at it, still waltzing, though I approach my 70th year filled with curiosity and trepidation that I made it this far without ever having held down a real job. Well, unless you count that stint at Trader Joe’s where I learned the rules of commerce, and became their top cheesemonger, but it was a place where the customer is always right, and haughtier than hell, and more than willing to take you to the cleaners for the most minor of infractions. What can I say, my face was an open book. I didn't have to practice my fuckyouverymuch smile. It came naturally. But that’s where I met Rita Moreno and we danced in the aisles after her hip surgery. Oh, how we danced. And laughed. Poetry was my beacon, my true north. I’ll dance to it. I only just now learned the full phrase is “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” Hear, hear.

What were some of your day jobs to support your habit?

4/9 PAD

RIP Vito Orlando

 I have not taken the time to properly mourn the death of an old friend. One of the fallouts when you break up with someone, is that you lose a whole circle of friends. Vito was part of my support system for nearly 22 years. And then, because I felt I couldn’t revisit my friends for fear that Neil would find me, I hid out, laying low since that cataclysmic blowup that left me unhomed in September of 2018. Then the pandemic. Diana died soon after, we were unable to mourn. Shiva died durimg the pandemic. We were unable to mourn. Then Vito, I was unable to mourn. When I left Neil, I left everything behind. My known world, my friends. A death of sorts to a significant part of my life. Vito was one of those casualties of failed relationships. But every time I drive down 580 towards the Richmond Bridge, I have imaginary conversations with Vito. The one-way conversation begins at the Center Street offramp where Costco is, and ends at the Richmond toll booth. Mostly I wish him love. Life is like that, I told him. I was not invited to the memorial service. This photo was stolen from my ex’s wall.

MAKING A BREAK FOR IT

It feels weird doesn’t it, to make a break for it,
go out into the world for nonessential things.
By that, I mean things you don’t need to do
or need to have in order to survive.
By that, I mean all the things that we let go of
during the pandemic, By that I mean how
we sequestered ourselves from everything,
until toilet paper became essential,
then paper towels, then alcohol.
Now poetry.

4/9 PAD

WAR PROFITEERS

WAR PROFITEERS

With the price of gas, nothing could move

me off this hill except sour

milk, big oil barons raking 

it in, hand over fist,

with windfall profits

enough to sour

anyone’s 

milk gone 

rogue.

Which begs the question: is sour two

syllables or one, ditto that

with oil? I guess it depends

upon where you live and

how you speak to dogs

and horses, no

mistresses

to speak

of.

4/9 NaPoWriMo

 TODAY

I wrote two nonets, one about milk

and the price of gas but Blogger 

erased it, the other too,

now I can’t remember—

something about fugues

of dailiness,

the weekend

still in-

tact.

4/9 NaPoWriMow

ALL THAT BLUE IN THE FIELDS

 ALL THAT BLUE IN THE FIELDS

When I was a child, our lower field was blanketed 

with myriad cornflowers in late summer. 

I marveled at their variety and depth of color. 

Indigo and woad. I coveted the ones with the purple hearts, 

of course, as purple was color of forgiveness, 

something I was always in short supply of.

When I went to the Ukraine in late summer, 

I was surprised by cornflowers, blue eyes in the wheat. 

And there you have the the colors of the Ukrainian flag. 

The wheat and the sunflowers, and the cornflowers and sky.

And sometimes there were wind poppies 

remembrance for all the blood that was shed.

4/7 PAD

MORNING TEA RITUAL

Morning officially begins after that 2nd cup of tea 

in a blue mug, the color of flawless summer skies. 

In the half-light of dawn, 

the neon blue light of the electric kettle 

is as mesmerizing as a bug zapper. 

Or a Blue Light Special on Aisle Three.

I try not to circle its aura, like moth to flame,

but I’m helpless in its neon wake, 

the silver bubbles roil to the surface, 

seeking the solace of gravity in jetstreams.

I pour boiling water into the flask. 

Two Red Roses, one Barry’s, to be exact.

Replicating my grandmother’s favorite blend, 

only it was McGrath’s—long gone now, like all the rest. 

Like sneaking into the closet to try on on her Sunday shoes, 

carved and etched by bonespurs and bunions.

And I dole out a jamspoon of sugar from a crystal bowl, 

it could’ve been hers, but it was a thrift store find 

that rings true to the past, like the knell of a church bell,

when I strike it with her silver scalloped jamspoon 

that doubles as part clapper and part shovel. 

Only then can I survey the wreckage of morning, 

composed, girding my loins, ready to face this day.

4/6 Write On! workshop with Terri Glass

AEOLIAN DREAMS

In Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah, an alien throne
awaits the song of the rogue wind
in the heart of the iron-stained hoodoos —
nestled deep in the Valley of Dreams
where rests the fossilized remains
of the five-horned pentaceretops.
Let misfortune and sleeping fossils lie.

4/5 PAD

Lost Time

Catch up, catch up, always out of breath,  it seems that I am always running  from one appointment to another, like Alice’s white rabbit who was, and who always will be late, late, for a very important date, as he said, anxiously checking his pocket watch for the umteenth time, having misplaced both gloves and fan. Clearly, he has never heard of Ram Dass, who famously said Be here now. Lord knows, we’ve been trying ever since. Do we ever really catch up with ourselves, once we’re out of synch? Doesn’t he know that no one knows when to arrive for the Queen of Hearts? It is always noon at the gates of the garden. But we all know how Alice fell down the rabbit hole. The real question is, why is the Cheshire Cat always smiling? 

4/4 PAD

DEMI-GLOSA AFTER RILKE’S AUTUMN

      a glosa after Rainer Maria Rilke’s Autumn 

Yes, of course, the leaves all fell, and of course, 

as they fell, they wept to the winds as if the orchards 

were stealing their stuffing from the dark clouds. 

Each leaf, a poem waiting for the right words to find it. 

It was a time of burning tears and the earth hesitated on its axis, 

it took Ithuriel a moment to take stock in the orbit of the stars, 

they were drowning in their serene loneliness in the vacuum of space. 

And there is always some wayward angel waiting in the wings, 

who thinks he is a demagogue, waiting to ambush you, pick you up 

and throw you over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes after the fall.

4/3 NaPoWriMo

I have some questions for the geologists:

I have some questions for the geologists: I absolutely cannot remember the eras of the geologic calendar. I got the seasonal epochs down, PMC, but those little leapy subfloor eras trip me every time. Is the glass of geologic time filled with Pliny the Elder? Or was it Pliny the Younger? What happens when it’s half filled; is it not-only-but-also half empty? I never remember who observed what. What about PtheE’s little blue rowboatie in the Bay of Naples, giving him a ringside seat, when Vesuvius erupted in 79AD? Did Pliny, who identified and named hops, Lupus salictarius, aka Humulus lupulus, drink and dream a little wolfdream before he died of ash / smoke inhalation? Not to mention those clinkers falling from the sky. Did you know that the alcoholic content of Pliny the Elder XX Imperial IPA- is 8% ABV. His nephew Pliny the Younger is XXX-rated and clocks in at 10.5%. Would that help me  to remember?

Lou Lambert’s Rockpile Ranch, Sonoma County, drawing 6x9”

Lou Lambert’s Rockpile Ranch, Sonoma County

Obscure words and poem fragments

Obscure words lifted from @Haggard Hawks

§

Take the Greek word for running, 

drumos, and we are off to the races. 

The hippodrome is for horses, of course, 

not for hippos, those ill-tempered water horses.

Imagine dromedary camels or dromedary dates

racing a mirage of lost palindromes in the desert. 

A man, a plan, a canal, Suez. 

§

Wielding my pen like a ski pole, 

I am torn asunder by a pain in my shoulder, 

My shoulder sundered, separated, an old wound, 

a bad spill on the last run of the last day of the ski year. 

Don’t worry, a torn rotator cuff and a separated shoulder

are enough to keep a firm grip on my imagination.  

TO A BULLFINCH

 TO A BULLFINCH

The Manx word for bullfinch is roo ruy. 

Embedded in its branches, the Irish rí ruadh hidden within. 

The roots of the teanga, destroyed when the English bearla 

was used to capture a dying language. Hurrah for John Bull.

The red lord of the trees sits high upon his branch,

heralding spring with his red breast so like that

of Cock Robin, anglicized from the Welsh, coch rhi ben, 

Lugh’s little red lordling with his breast made of sunset.

A brû-dearg or spideóg with messages from the Otherworld.

Who killed Cock Robin? I did, said the sparrow.

He was having an affair with Jenny Wren, the dreolín.

And who remembers the crime that traitorous bird committed?

Who tolled the bell? I did, said the bullfinch

as he hung the sparrow for his well-placed arrow.

You’d think that the arrow maker, the fetcher did the deed.

There was a goldfinch, a chaffinch, all manner of finches 

and sundry birds who attended Cock Robin’s funeral.

But only the dove truly mourned for him. 

The story got truncated along the way to a bull.

I have never seen a bull with his hangman’s noose 

sitting in a tree, nor a bullfinch, for that matter.

4/2/22 NaPoWriMo.  variants of Cock Robin here 

Obscure words lifted from @Haggard Hawks

Harmonic Convergences

After Robert Hass’ Story About a Body

How we define Eros, the breast becomes the talisman, she said. I gave them back when I was done with them, she said. Mother Earth was there to greet her when that too failed. She was cleansed by fire, she became ash and bone, and carried on with the harmonics of the universe. I have outlived my mother by five years, I am ready to give back my breasts, but it may be too late, as I watch my left breast turn its eye ever inward. Things are what they seem, angry wasps inside my breast seek an escape from the confines of the body.

4/1/22 NaPoWriMo

(I’ve been haunted by this image ever since Bob tried it out on us during a workshop at a Napa Poetry Conference in the early 1980s. I never knew the title.)

FULMINATING OVER FOOD

As a child, I was a finicky eater, figuring that if 

I forsook all responsibility for my foolish dislikes,

I could get a leg up. A leg up. Over what, I’ve no idea. 

Forsooth, I said, fulminating over the likes of frumenty to fungi.

Who knows that the letter F was once a rake to furrow the land,

to grow the grain, to finish the job. We rake ideas over coals, 

avoiding food groups, in search of the secret elixir to longevity.

4/1/22 PAD brought to you by the letter F.

April Poem a Day and NaPoWriMo prompts

Robert Brewer’s Poem a Day Challenge and NaPoWriMo poem a day challenge writing prompts (Blogger helpfully removes the links and renders them useless, so you will need to visit their websites.)

TO BEE A FLOWER

To be a flower is a profound responsibility. 

So much depends upon whether or not one has already gone to seed, 

or set seed, even if the bees forgot to visit. It’s one big sex race. 

Finally, I’m old enough to let today be today and not be tomorrow,

or let memory attempt to set back the clock of regret. 

4/1/22 NaPoWriMo

DEMI-GLOSA AFTER A FEW FRAGMENTS OF EMILY’S

Glosa after Emily‘s elliptical lines

So Emily once said forever might be short
and since I’ve been short forever, barely reaching 

my own lofty height, proscribed or otherwise. 

And if to be an elder means pain, I am old enough today.
I’ve got the pain part down cold after a shovel incident,
I eat CBDs and sleep on a heating pad of misplaced desire.

And, I think I’ve got the old part down as well, as I’m pushing 70.
Emily said, the second half of joy is always shorter than the first—
by far, because you already know what to expect, don’t you?

3/31/22 NaPoWriMo

BETWEEN WORLDS

1. The day dawned, smoky and sultry, 

as I prepared for a poetry reading, 

As I stepped over the lintel, I heard the news… 

The sky stopped, my hand froze on the doorknob. 

I was halfway between worlds, 

a liminal portal, a threshold. A day where 

we could never go back to who or where we were. 

Our days were spent in speechless horror 

as we watched one atrocity after another unfold

again and again on phosphor screens the world over. 

The images, indelibly etched on our retinas, 

of people falling falling from the sky, afire,

an image I would revisit again in my mind’s eye. 

Strangers holding hands as they fell that morning. 

All that blue sky above them like a flawless quilt. 

The thick dust settling like a blanket over them. 

My heart in my throat, the vertigo that followed. 

I was never so afraid of heights 

until that moment frozen in time.

2. To this day I cannot shake the image 

of those random couples falling from the sky, 

holding hands, as they plummeted from great heights, 

as there was nowhere else left for them to go. 

So they plummeted like birds of prey 

toward the solace of the ground.

Sometimes I imagine 

that we have wings inside our bodies, 

held prisoner by a cage of ribs and viscera.

Late afternoon we visited a woman 

in the Berkeley Hills who was at Ground Zero. 

The afternoon light flooded the room 

and the piano keys glistened and smiled, 

a melody that fell silent so many years ago. 

Later, I heard how she had died, 

having inhaled too much death that day. 

It came back to claim her. 

Those interior wings of desire.

3. Sometimes when I am at great heights, 

I imagine wings transporting me 

across a great chasm, like that thin landbridge 

on the crest between Mount Whitney and King’s Canyon. 

I peered down into forever, watched carrion birds 

circling the updraft with wingspans taller than me, 

the feathers of my inner wings 

tickling the back of my throat until I coughed 

and spluttered, gasping for breath, 

those wings that kept me aloft.

4. The sisters separated us in church 

to keep us from disrupting the mass, 

saying that we needed to leave enough room 

for our personal guardian angels. 

I thought it grandiose but I became obsessed 

with the spaces between us, not knowing 

which side s/he sat on, and did that mean 

we needed to leave enough room 

for two angels to sit side by side? Were they hes or shes?

Suddenly the sparsely populated pew seemed overcrowded.

Parishioners glared at us for taking up so much space.

And then I began to worry about how much room 

they needed for their wings and could they even sit?

Could their wings even be folded back to fit the pew? 

Or were they relegated to a life of standing around 

watching snotnosed brats rather than soaring the skies

or taking up dancing on the heads of pins?

5. How far have I fallen? The mighty Mo, 

having tumbled from great heights, she, 

having dangled her legs from great precipices, 

contemplates the fall from youth into old age. 

The time my horse took the bit in her teeth

as we barreled up the fire road, her head in my lap, 

flecks of saliva, foam and blood covering me 

as the bit cut deep into her tongue. 

My penance, to cleanse the stickers from her tongue 

cauterizing it was silver nitrate. 

The cost of speed, asking a racehorse to run, 

 not being able to control her, the blood lust was up 

and the adrenaline pummeled her heart 

so she felt no pain that day and the wind had wings 

but the crash landing brought us back to earth. 

The overwhelming guilt and grief. 

6. The mezzanine is a midway place between below and above. 

A kind of purgatory of our own choosing.

7. We had climbed an old oak overhanging the creek, 

my aunt walked out the mossy limb. 

I stood to follow, but I was four and lost my footing. 

The rocks in the gorge below gnashed their teeth. 

She grabbed me by the arms, hauled me over the rough bark 

like a sack of potatoes to the safety of the branch. 

My armpits were bleeding. My granny treated my wounds 

with zinc oxide and the cats were terribly interested. 

Afterwards, at Speck’s Bar, a stranger tried to pick me up 

to raise me up to his eye level, but I screamed and screamed. 

The man startled, dropped me, until my aunt explained. 

The Shirley Temples used to assuage my pain 

were as crimson as blood of Christ. 

Where was my guardian angel that day when I needed her? 

Was she more earthbound, or did she merely abandon me?

And what about my aunt saving me from the rocks below?

3/30/22 Write On! workshop with Terri Glass

DITHEROTOMY

He drove his Honda Odyssey so slowly
thru the Fairfax intersection,
it was as if he was taking pious instruction
from a page of the Book of Ditherotomy.

AN OFFERING

    —after Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Ofrenda

        For John Oliver Simon

I offer you these two scarred hands,

palms up, holding the sign of the letter K,

cupped hands to drink from the spring.

Or a gift of letters etched on the farthest shore.

I have nothing to give but these empty shells

of words, unvarnished, dressed in sheepskin 

and stardust at twilight. A distant congress 

of ravens deep in primeval forests, where 

forgotten totems still dream of the ancestors.

Te amo, he once said, long ago.

If I could, I would offer you these old hiking boots 

& socks, once shot through with silver and dawn light,

that once took us to the heights of Machu Picchu.

We’d go back to the lowest place on this continent, 

to where the pupfish still swim in Salt Creek.

We’d revisit the umbligo of Death Valley, where the spirit level 

seeks equilibrium with the lofty heights, that wilderness

of spires that puncture the blueness of the sky.

Yo también, I answered.

In this wilderness where we are only visitors, 

where life is insignificant, a sliver of the past,

where memory sleeps, then reinvents itself

when we scry our unborn poems on the lake

that offers them up to the wind. Small sacrifices.

I have nothing left to give you except these worn words, 

so like hummingbirds building nests of spiderwebs,

hope, and thistle-down over Palo Verde Creek.

These words still seeking an audience with your ear. 

Remember, 

I will always love you, said the darkness.

Te amo, mi amor, I said.

MORNING AUBADE

Outside the window of the old house, 

slumped glass distorts the morning light 

that illumines the matins of the buckeye buds,

like a rippled Monet painting of water lilies. 

The stippled grass and filtered light is painted

with myriad strokes of unmeasurable greenness—

no wonder my grandmother loved this place 

of bright spring grass, flanked by meadow and gully,

a reminder of home, in another country, 

of what was lost, the idea of homeland, 

a country she could never return to, 

not even as she worked the garden, now unkempt,

a place carved deep in the thickets of the heart.

3/23/22 CPITS Write On! with Terri Glass

BUCKEYE BUDS UNDER AN OPEN SKY

BUCKEYE BUDS UNDER AN OPEN SKY

Each spring I await the opening 

of the first buckeye leaves. Palmate 

fists stretch and unfurl their buds 

as if in supplication, 

that greeny prayer to the turning of the year. 

Palms together, they pray to the sky 

and to the returning light. 

Then, as the days grow longer, 

they begin to unfurl, 

offering small green hands, palms up, 

as if a gift to the sky and air, 

opening up into starfish promises 

until the trees are filled with offerings. 

Then, the formation of small buds, 

becoming vestal tapers to light the way

to the impossible blue vault of sky, 

redolent with the sweet narcotic scent 

the delicate blossoms, ladened with pale hues,

blooms no less complicated than orchids, 

their stamens like curious whiskers 

entice the honeybees in to drink deep, 

only to die from that fatal ambrosia,

the mad honey’s revenge 

on the footsoldiers of the hives. 

A case where unexpected death occurs 

when two incompatible systems collide.

Not so much for the native bumblebees 

who sip and suck the buckeye with delight, 

their sonorous song, a drone that fills the air

with the returning victory of spring.

& again, we are on the brink of yet another war.

3/16/22 CPITS Write On class, with Susie Terence