Remembering The Buk

(Beat poet Al Winans posted a photo of Charles Bukowski on Facebook, with an amazing letter from the Buk for Al’s 50th birthday. I liked the letter (see below) which shed some light on his bad behavior, and with that, came understanding. But so much faux idolatry emanated from that post it made me gag as my reaction to meeting Bukowski was decidedly different. So I posted my own not-so-pretty two-cents-worth. And, thanks for the unexpected writing prompt, Al!)

I met Charles Bukowski around 1982, when he was crashing on a friend’s sagging couch in a farmhouse perched by the railroad tracks in Cotati. My friend wanted me to meet him to organize a reading at Sonoma State. So, Becca (Rebecca Clintron Osvald) took me over to her friend Ricky Appelbaum’s old white farmhouse over by the trailer court to meet the Buk.

Ricky‘s house was a crash pad for thespians, artists, and wandering poets. The rent was dirt cheap. Every time a freight train rumbled by, the house shook, we’d all scream Stella! like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, because Ricky was playing the lead at a local theater. 

Unfortunately, Charles Bukowski was dead drunk by early afternoon, nursing a gallon of cheap Red Mountain wine. He had been at it for a while as empty wine jugs circled the perimeter of the couch. The Buk was also in audition-mode on Ricky’s chintzy couch, already in training for his semi-autobiographical screenplay, Barfly. 

I guess by that point, the Buk had already thoroughly burned his bridges with his sole poetry publisher, my friend, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, who wouldn’t let him crash at his place up in Healdsburg anymore. John, who had founded a successful office supply business in LA, hunted Bukowski down in 1966, and found him working as a letter clerk in a post office. 

In 1969, John sold his collection of DH Lawrence first editions to fund his Black Sparrow Press. And then he made an offer that Bukowski couldn’t refuse, $100 a month to write full time. A month later, Bukowski submitted his first novel, Post Office. John made Bukowski famous again—as a poet—after he had burnt his literary bridges as a writer with a 35-year-long drunken binge which led to a hiatus from the publishing world. 

Bukowski‘s myriad poetry books put the fledgling Black Sparrow Press on the literary roadmap. John, whose first words when he finally met Bukowski, were, “I worship you,” Buk’s reply was “That’s nice, you wanna beer?” But this time John was done with the Buk. (Note to self, need to find Barnes & Noble PR on John.)

I introduced myself. The grizzled, greasy-haired poet, enveloped in a thick grey cowl of cigarette smoke, didn’t even get up off the couch, but he grabbed my proffered hand, said something rather nasal, and then tried to drag me down to his level on the couch. 

Because I was living out of my car, I was rather formally dressed for the times, kitted out in a retro 1940s long teal pencil skirt, and my Irish grandmother’s peach-colored lace insert crepe silk blouse with a maroon leotard beneath. So you couldn’t exactly blame my demure wardrobe for his dirty old man social malfunction. 

I fought like a banshee, red lacquered claws extended, and I had some pithy words to say. I hissed like a car, escaped unscathed, but I was so furious, I was shaking. He was so lecherous that he literally had me puking, Though I was attractive, men rarely hit on me. Ricky used to call me the China doll because I was so pale and wan. It was my anorexic phase (I’d lost a lot of blood from an abortion), so I was fey, not quite of this world.

To be fair, Bukowski tried to call me back after my dramatic rebuke, quite possibly to apologize, but I was gone. I remember running out of the house, and throwing up in the rosebushes, tripping over an orange tomcat desperately weaving around my ankles. all I could think of was handcuffs. I sped off in my old rustbucket of a VW bug, a trail of gravel spluttering behind me. I never talked Charles Bukowski again.

I never could read Bukowski’s work after that. I was running a poetry series at Sonoma State. Ironically, all he wanted was a reading, but he thoroughly burned his bridges with me. Having growing up with far too many alcoholics in the family, I had zero tolerance or coping skills for that kind of behavior. You might say my judgment was colored by the deep well of the alcohol school. 

I ran into Bukowski later in 1984, he was celebrating the sale of his screenplay to Hollywood at the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati. It was drinks all around the house. A deep well at the bar. Needless to say, I gave him a wide berth. He never saw me leaving.

Years later, in an Amsterdam bookshop, circa 1992, I discovered I liked his work. He was wildly popular in Europe. People were amazed that I was probably the only person that ever refused to give the infamous Charles Bukowski a poetry reading. Sure, on some level I regret it. It would’ve been a booking coup. But between The Buk and Gene Ruggles, I was so fed up with the bad behavior of macho male alcoholic poets with flagging egos, I didn’t want to babysit them.

I did produce a couple of disastrous readings for Gene. Unfortunately, he was alway falling down drunk. I was humiliated and horrified. I had known Gene since I was a child, he was a friend of my mother’s, so I couldn’t say no. Only two people would call me up at 3 AM for crazy drunken phone calls in the middle of the night: Gene and my mom. I guess it was a good thing that the Buk did not have my phone number.

AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT

I don’t know why I’m charmed by that synthetic borderline 

between this day and the next, a fixed point on the clock, 

on the calendar, an arbitrary measuring of time. 

We take it for granted, and it exists within our minds, 

but not in the minds of all those other beings. 

Does the cat care for the stroke of midnight? 

No, it only cares for the staccato of kibble in the bowl. 

Fairytales began at midnight. Cinderella, for example. 

And in Brittany, one night a year, the old rocks at the River Ys 

come down to the banks at midnight to slake their thirst. 

I remember how we waited for Midnight Mass to end 

so that we could feast on ham, and unwrap our presents. 

It was a witching hour that lasted until dawn, 

the bird chorus echoing our own arias as we waded 

through the flotsam of tinseled madness.

And at the stroke of midnight, India became a nation, 

shaking off neo-colonial shackles, slaking its thirst for freedom. 

My grandfather, an Irish gunrunner who also sent arms to India, 

invited to the midnight gala where they danced beneath jeweled stars 

in New Delhi & San Francisco until dawn sent them all to bed.

Then the real work began, building a nation out of hope.

It was a time between times where anything was possible.

At the Exploratorium, I was mesmerized by greeny mirrors

endlessly gazing into each other’s sublime faces, 

reflecting themselves and their endless visages, 

where suspended time traveled at the speed of light.

7/26/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

THE SONG OF BARBED WIRE

The song of barbed wire, strung taut on old posts, 

the way my grandfather labored on the steep hillside, 

the horizon distracting him as he wiped sweat from his brow.

Already the siren call of the deep valley below the mountain

will lead his children astray, the long arm of the known world 

promising so much and yet offering little in return.

A torrent of syllables and fragments slipping over rocks 

among the old bones, in the creekbed in deep summer. 

The body’s doubt, and the knowledge of regret holding us back. 

7/19/23

STAND UP COMEDIAN

It is curious how memory is embedded 

in things ordinary, how it arises like a dust storm

as you unravel the past, packing up for yet another move. 

An old sequined dress in the back of the closet 

promised much more than it delivered. 

Yet you kept it anyway. For no real reason. 

At least it still fits, so much for small victories.

And remember your grandmother’s old fur coat, 

someone said pony hair so you never wore it again. 

You heard the hooves following you in dreams.

Then there’s curious sensation when memory 

coalesces like blood as you relive a day in the life of… 

The unanswerable: why did that particular moment arise? 

And where did all that sequestered time go anyway? 

Especially those moments when you weren’t paying 

attention and forgot about the grind of dailiness. 

The box of broken earrings stashed under the bed

is whispering again of the not-so-good good old days. 

You know, those inconsequential moments, 

surfacing like a gateway drug in need of a fix. 

None of it is real. Curious how we define ourselves 

with detritus of the past. So much treasured junk.

You’d think by now, we’d know better. 

Memory is a standup comedian: 

part paper, part animal, part rock 

as you snip snip snip away at the past, 

trimming the split ends with dull nail scissors, 

the hinge protesting the conversion 

with a song of rust and regret. 

I want to say to my younger self, regret not the past 

because it is all but a trick of memory. 

Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle made of clouds

with pieces missing.

7/19/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

Moonstones

I still have some moon-snails, still looking for my moonstones.

When I was young and foolish, I once hiked out to Arch Rock, or was it Double Point, I don’t remember which, I was hiking south along the deserted shore below Alamere Falls, when I came to a rocky outcrop and I couldn’t get to the other side. So I climbed up it and there was a big sinkhole down to the beach, and the arch looking out to sea—Double Point, I assumed. There are several arches along that part of the seashore. 

So I jumped down into the sinkhole to the beach below and went out the second arch and continued on exploring the isolated southern strand. Moonstones and moon shells galore. A treasure trove. By the time I returned at sunset, the tide was coming in and time was running out. What I hadn’t planned on, was the problem of climbing back up out of the concave walls of hole. For a while there I thought I was a goner.

Luckily when I jumped up I could just reach the lip overhang of the sinkhole with my hands, I held on for dear life, but I was sweating it trying to gain purchase on the eroded, not to mention slippery, concave walls of that sinkhole. A vertical wall would’ve been a piece of cake. I hadn’t counted on the curved walls. 

I utilized all my gymnastic moves and rock climbing skills, with a lot of adrenaline—which helped. I pulled myself up via a chin-up and hoisted an elbow over the edge. Victory. But getting my much heavier legs up to rim level without anything to use as leverage was much harder. As I flailed my legs, I thought for sure I was a goner. 

And yes, I was a little more than a teenager, so I guess we could blame my prefrontal lobes. Luckily, I had massive upper body strength, and I didn’t weigh very much. I pretended the cave lip was a horse, and eventually got a leg up and wriggled myself to the top. I was more than a bit shaken. I lay facedown on the rock counting my lucky stars. 

I remember the utter thrill of jumping down from the cliff into the sand. I felt like an intrepid explorer on an adventure. I never once thought about my personal safety. I’m sure there were moonstones in the sand egging me on as I was collecting them at the time. I felt invincible, it was a real Robinson Crusoe moment. Until I had to return the same way I came. Oops! Then, the long hike back along the Palomarin Trail to Highway One in the dusk.

THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE

THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE

So much language is lost in the labyrinth of the throat. 

The face you see in sleep, iridescent in the air 

like the memoirs of ghosts at a banquet, 

recording the remembered past. But your face 

is a map of sorrow packed in a carry-on suitcase. 

Did the mouth lead you too far astray? 

We are all drinking from the same ancestral river, 

dissipating the dream, waiting to be named. 

The indigenous women of the desert held stones 

at the back of the throat to belay their thirst. 

The poetry of negligence lays down its burden at the gates 

of the old cathedral, prays for divine intercession. 

I swallowed small stones and tried to hide 

the obligatory ephemera of my mind from everyone. 

Who shattered the 4th wall, a 2-way mirror staring into the sun?

What is riding whitewater on the river of memory? 

What about the storyline, the cast of characters? 

Who will be last one standing with one foot in the void? 

The clock is hungry but the numbers of darkness 

are always too late to see the the precipice or the void.

We are counting down the days and the nights 

marching towards the harvest of death. 

Solar flares reach into the darkness 

disabling all the motherboards. The alpha 

and the omega of the Anthropocene Age. 

7/12/23 Write On! with Susie Terence (take two).

Unanswerable questions inspired by Michael Torres’ poem, Writing Prompt

What if I were stuck in space, at the point of no return, would the urge to write even be an issue? Who would I write for, and why, especially if the forest inside already caught fire long ago, and all that was left were the charred stumps of the past? Being above the clouds like this, watching those lightning strikes from space is like witnessing a coronation of the petty gods. Then what? My hands, like the lost wings of birds, orchestrate the music of the spheres. The river of regret is filled with starlight singing of celestial events. But I am not an astronaut stuck in space. That thin ribbon of life, all that intense blue leaking into darkness, that is home, the big blue jewel. But in the distance, the impenetrable blackness inside a song, has lost all the notes. Remembrance is an Oort Cloud in the first mind of regret. The great white what if? What comes into focus, stars waiting in the limelight. And what about the gravity and weight of stars circling the brink of a black hole, what about the hunger, what do they regret, do they feel the edge of Occam’s Razor slicing through the sorrow, paying out their light like that in the undertow of experience? Do they perceive themselves as selves as they circle the drain of oblivion, or is that being too specific? Am I being too anthropomorphic? We have entered the Anthropocene Age. What is selfhood when we have changed the course of earth’s destiny? Do we replay those eons of storied light feathering the pages of an old book where the letters escape to their own darkness? And what about the transience of constellations, depending upon one’s point of view? What does Orion look like from the other side of the Andromeda Galaxy anyway? Can you still see his large shoulders carrying the weighted stories of humanity? The sheath of his sword, that singing blade, will it slice through the darkness? They say consciousness is like a river rippling over stones. But the creekbed is tired and wants to sleep.

7/12/23 Write On! with Susie Terence 

I am still not ready to unpack this one. Perhaps never.

Do guinea pigs have souls?

Someone on Facebook asked us to pray for the intersession of their dead guinea pig. My first thought was that I don’t pray for guinea pigs, cats, chihuahuas, or trivial pursuits. I can’t understand people asking for prayers for the daftest things. Part of me is scandalized by the concept, thinking it’s downright sacrilegious. Maybe even a venial sin. But then I find the idea of prayer and intercession ludicrous—especially for pets. Do guinea pigs or pet rabbits even have souls, and what about goldfish who can’t remember anything longer than five seconds? And what about the rainbow bridge? Someone points out that the Bible doesn’t specifically say that animals don’t have souls. I want to counter that interpretive theological dance of anthropomorphism by saying nowhere in the Bible does it say that animals do have souls. Nor is there any mention of the rainbow bridge. Perhaps they don’t know what the concept of immortal soul means in regards to western religion. Or the idea of animals, with no concept of mortal sin, needing salvation and redemption. Do they need to tally up a purgatorial piggy bank of prayer credits in order to be able to go to pet heaven—the rainbow bridge? What is soul vs. spirit? An entity separate from the body. During the Middle Ages, barnyard animals—especially pigs—were hanged from the gallows tree for gluttonous misdeeds. Did their owners eat those condemned felonious animals? Did that make them sin eaters? Then I think of all the barbecued guinea pigs I ate in Peru. Should I have also said grace for their souls? Of course I stay silent, for fear of stepping on anyone’s cosmic toes. But also, I realize that it gives people a tangible form to contain emotions that they otherwise cannot cope with. Perhaps invoking St. Francis would make more sense. And what about that coin for Charon? And of course, then there’s the big taboo to never mention the D word—saying something has passed versus died. I abhor euphemisms. Is it because I am a writer in love with strong nouns and active verbs, not adverbs and adjectives. I want to be able to blurt the word death with impunity, and not be sanctioned for it. I want to scream it from the rooftops, and not let it get expunged from our vocabulary. But I fear it is too late. The parrot died. It didn’t pass. When somebody says so-and-so passed, I think he passed what? The test, the corner, gas? The past? Now there’s an idea. Like Dylan Thomas, I will not go gentle unto that good night. I’m not too sure how the avoidance of the word death began. The beginning of taboo, that which must not be named. The idea of praying for pets, like saying Bless you, is so Deep South. But I can’t help but think it is a curious sociological concept of sanctioned avoidance. I never say anything, but I do acknowledge their grief, usually with the care button. What else can one do? It is horrible to lose a pet we get so attached, but the idea of praying for its intercession seems downright silly. Then I realize I don’t have to accept their bizarre theological constructs, nor do I need to enter their world in order to understand that someone is genuinely grieving for their small, dead pets.

This was from a Facebook comment on Judith Gip’s page that I worked on and expanded instead of doing my Write On prompt for July 5.

Poem forthcoming in Spectrum 36 NOT Don Campbell took down the web page. Gone.

 

OPEN-ENDED POEMS

• Spectrum 36 well, I guess the poem is not forthcoming. After all it is the editor, Dan Campbell took down the blog, so now it is once again unpublished.

July NaHaiWriMo, 30-something haiku

31. Papyrus

30. Pulp

29. Apple

28. Sugarcane

27. Hydrogen

26. Oak

25. Kenaf

24. Wheat

23. Banana

22. Oxygen

June NaHaiWriMo, haiku

Playing catch-up on haiku prompts, I only just discovered this Facebook NaHaiWriMo site on July 5. There are also May prompts. (I’ll stop here for now). Since I injured my leg June 28, it’s been hard to think about writing, but haiku is feasible.

30. Summer's end 

BRÓN TROGAIN, SUMMER'S END

Lúnasa dances 

with the coming dark season. 

Winter's cold music.

29 seashells

BEACH GOSSIP

Listen to seashells—

long distance conversations 

with tide, wind, and waves.

28. ocean

ANOREXIA

The ceaseless hunger 

of the ocean nibbling 

on towering cliffs.

SHAME WORN HAND-ME-DOWNS

My aunt brought home a cardboard box of old clothes.

It was like Christmas in July. My heart foundered

on the festive picnic of a gingham dress 

with puffy sleeves and ruffles framing a scoop neck. 

It made me feel so grown-up as I whirled and twirled 

like a dust devil dancing up a storm in the driveway. 

I wore a funnel of pleasure floating off into the blue sky. 

I wore it to church. I wore it to school, it made me feel 

like a princess with its full skirts rustling in the breeze.

I vaguely knew the girl from catechism, she was older,

she didn’t go to our church or to our school. 

But it was a tight-knit farming community 

so I was careful not to wear it to the other church 

where her family were parishioners. I was in 5th grade,

it was a time of transitions. At our annual church bazaar, 

as my grandmother culled clothes on the rummage table,

there she was, whispering to the others, pointing a finger

at her old dress. She made me feel so ashamed 

for wearing hand-me-downs. Thing is, there was 

no shame attached to old clothes—until she outed me 

and I put that dress away, never to wear it again.

6/28/23 Write On! Prompt. Terri Glass

Facebook addiction and other revenge leitmotifs

An artist friend, whose work and being I very much admire, announced that she was leaving Facebook. We later found out that unkind comments were behind her urge to leave the platform. I periodically run into jerks on Facebook too. Aside from wanting to kick the scumbags in the proverbial kneecaps, or perhaps a little bit higher, my revenge is often siphoned into writing scathing blogposts about the situation. 

I was saddened to learn of her experience because I enjoy seeing her artwork and I enjoy her commentary. It made me think about the role of Facebook in my life. So much depends upon… a right attitude to commentary. If I do run into nasty commentators, I usually gain satisfaction by leaving a pithy comment, and if they persist, then deleting all my comments, and erase myself from the particular site, leaving a grim archaeology of their negative comments behind, stet. There are a lot of loonies out there in Facebooklandia, for sure.

I used to worry about Facebook addiction, but then the pandemic came along, and I realized that social media was not necessarily an addiction, but also a lifeline for me to keep my sanity and to be able to interact with a wide swath of people I have known throughout my crazy myriad walks of life, bringing them all under one roof, so to speak, and also to meet many like-minded new friends. The best bonus of all.

Because of Facebook, I now know many passing acquaintances on a more intimate level, despite the physical distance between us. Some folks whom I’ve never met, I could count among my closest friends. I’ve met many Facebook friends later in person. So many kindnesses. One time I needed a place to stay for the Highland Games and a Facebook friend offered her floor for the weekend. Getting to know her in person was delightful, but it was facilitated by Facebook.

When I decided to join Facebook back in 2009, I vowed that I would use it as a tool, and to not be sucked into the shallow world of senseless trending inanities. I primarily use social media as a stimulus, and a platform for my writing, art and photographs. The people I befriend are primarily creative colleagues, so Facebook offers me an opportunity to keep up on their dailiness as well as their creative processes.There’s a certain comfort in knowing that an artist acquaintance is going through similar things as you. Life as we know it. One way or another, we are all in this together.

I use Facebook as a tool to learn new ideas, to expand my reading repertoire (before the introduction of those inane sponsored posts), get ideas for new artwork, and to also write new blog posts. Heh. The Facebook groups I belong to tend to be science and nature groups, so I also use Facebook as an online learning tool for geology, plant and bird identification. I had to give up the bug group. It was just too squeamy for me. 

I think the secret is to make Facebook work for you, and not to be a slave to it. I mourn the loss of those who have permanently left Facebook, like UC Berkeley classmate, the brilliant engineer and musician Chris Devine, but I understand their motivation. And then, there are all the ones that we’ve lost. And their Facebook pages become a perpetual memorial to their memory. Norton Buffalo, Howard McCord, and others.

There is so much trivia in the shallow end of the wading pool. I, for one, am glad that my artist friend has returned to the Facebook fold after a hiatus, because I so enjoy her posts and I love seeing her artwork. It changes my daily outlook for the better. For me, seeing her art process is a golden bonus.

Maybe the right attitude is to ask not what you can do for Facebook algorithms, but what Facebook algorithms can do for you… Perhaps, in my case, the best revenge of all is the excuse to write about it, warts and all.

My father’s pony

Not all of us had functional fathers, or parents that were present. Neither of my parents were cut out for the job of marriage, let alone, raising a child. Let’s just say, it’s complicated. Mine was an absentee father who drowned in the belly of a Seagram’s 7 bottle, and never recovered. His heart failed him. It’s heartbreaking that he turned out to be such a tragically flawed individual. From a photo I learned that he loved Big Band music and played the piano. Recently I found a news clipping—very nearly accidentally—where it reported that  his mother had committed suicide using rat poison, leaving him to find the body after school. And a note saying that he should join the priesthood. The only thing I was ever told was that she had committed suicide, nothing more. Finding the news clipping was devastating. Also enlightening. And with that, came the beginning of compassion. No wonder the poor man was so effed up. His father, a San Francisco cop, died earlier of TB. Perhaps it was all too much for her, being a single mother, and it sounded like she suffered from depression. And a sadist uncle stepped in to raise my poor father. He might have been better off in a foster home. I chose this photo of my father on a pony because obviously it was a time of innocence versus the grim reality of what was to follow. My crazy, gorgeous, talented, bipolar mother wasn’t much better a parent. She left me with my grandmother as she went off to design costumes for Frank Sinatra’s showgirls, and to pursue Hollywood dreams—but then, when she came to collect me, I refused to leave my grandmother. I was extraordinarily lucky in that my grandmother raised me. She was both my mother and my father. And I don’t regret that in the least. However I refuse to close ranks for the sake of Hallmark cards or sympathy, by hiding the unacknowledged family trauma caused nearly as much damage and grief as the myriad traumas themselves, that is why I chose to share this story. I’m not one to latibulate. Cormac McCarthy, God Rest his Soul, ain’t got nothing on my family tree! After all that, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. For those of you who had extraordinary fathers in your lives, I wish you all a Happy Father’s Day.

COYOTE COMMUTE

In the rearview mirror, I saw a scrawny coyote 

trot down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard,

midday, in the tiny hamlet of Forest Knolls, 

looking over his shoulder, watching for cars,

before turning up Tamal Road, 

headed for home as if he lived there.

I kept looking for Road Runner, 

knowing I was in the wrong cartoon.

6/16/23

Taming my spam box

It seems that once a year I get fed up with my bulging junk mail folder and begin deleting hundreds of political newsletters. During spring cleaning, I go on an extreme culling binge. If organizations ask me for money instead of offering a petition to sign, I give them the proverbial axe. 

In order to tame my Gmail inbox, I send Zoom events, newsletters, rewards, and political action items to my junk mail folder. It also means those pesky emails load in plain text, sans imagery. I have issues with flashing graphics, too much color on a page (especially red and yellow) interferes with my reading comprehension—which makes me angst ridden. And, more importantly, anything in the spam folder is a one-click forever delete button away instead of the usual three clicks to banish it from the trash. 

When I am on the unsubscriber warpath, very few sites escape my delete finger.  I don’t mind when reputable political websites send me petitions, as I spend considerable time each morning signing them as my standalone civic duty, but I get irritated when organizations attempt to either shame, or browbeat me, use insulting infantile, or alarmist verbiage (DCCC), or aggressively seek contributions. I am also not fond of surveys either. It seems like it’s another bogus attempt at drumming up money for their coffers.

In that case, very few political websites get a free pass. Most California politicians, also Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sauders, and Robert Reich, and most progressive websites such as Daily Kos, WinWithoutWar, MoveOn, Social Security, Medicare for All, and a few environmental websites—all get to stay and play.

I think some political organizations exist solely to pad their own coffers, rather than actually offering successful progressive political acts with those petitions. It’s a racket. The thing is, once you sign a petition, they often pass your email address onto the next political entity, and so on, like a bad virus. I don’t worry about losing touch, as the deleted political action websites eventually find their way back to my junk mail box.

I swear some of those sites look legitimate, but I have to wonder why I get an influx of weird spam email after signing some of those petitions—as if my address was intercepted and held hostage in a Soviet silo along the way. The past few days I’ve been unsubscribing to nearly every entity that has asked for money, thus taming my spam inbox. Blessed quietude. At least for a while. But then it will begin all over again in a few months.

HOUSE SPIDER

HOUSE SPIDER

Nearly invisible house spider 

spins desoléis on his delicate web 

searching for breakfast 

in all the wrong corners.

6/15/23

PLAYING WITH WORDS

There are holes in the lost ecology of language. 

Words, falling from grace, out of lack of usage, 

acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, otter—

words wandering far from home, looking for loose lips 

of poets, perhaps long in tooth but not short on ideas.

I never meant to play with words, it wasn’t my idea,

they came to the rally all jumbled up and in a mess. 

It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces 

no endgame photo in sight, or a Rubik’s cube bereft of color—

as if to taunt the most OCD of us to complete the poem,

so we ratcheted color into shape, hoping for form.

Sometimes I want to take a hammer to language 

or to pry syntax apart with a flathead screwdriver, 

and beat it up until the cube shatters, internal structure lost, 

leaving larger puzzles to decipher in the aeolian winds,

but the lyres are silent, once destroyed, won’t resurrect.

Only a pale shaving of sawdust and grit riding the wind.

And as we grow grey with age and larger in vocabulary, 

old words continue to haunt us, wanting a mouthpiece,

but the audience shrinks to nothing until we are left alone 

in a cavernous barn with archaic words roosting in the rafters 

looking for flight to escape the throat of darkness.

6/14/23 Write On! With Terri Glass

Swapping MacBook screens

Well, Margretta’s old 2011 headless MacBook Pro is still running. But swapping out a new screen didn’t fix its problem. Namely, it doesn’t have a working screen, which is a real bother, complicated by the fact that I actually need a laptop that will also run Snow Leopard (mid-2011 was the last year that the Snow Leopard OS was supported) for editing and scanning software that too has been rendered obsolete. Not to mention software for those back taxes.

And it’s nice to have a laptop I can move around. You know, actually use on my lap. Margaretta’s old MBP is tethered to an wonky lavender-hued external Apple LCD monitor—which is also losing its resolution. Now, I love lavender and all things purple, but not on a screen. It’s OK for Netflix, but makes editing photos a nightmare. I harbored some vague hope that swapping screens would work, I had nothing to lose. It was way easier than I expected, so I was pretty chuffed.

I do have other obsolete MacBook Pros, but this one was once my main squeeze for a few years as it has most of my work (photo archives) on it. And it runs my scanning and editing software. I have an exceedingly pricey top of the line Epson negative film scanner that cost $1200. Scanning old negatives was my big pandemic sequestration project.

I have file cabinets of thin black and white negatives of famous artists musicians and writers I need to bring into the 21st. c. (See a few samples here.) Reason enough to keep a working version of Snow Leopard alive. And before you ask, yes, I tried some of the newer third-party scanner software. No joy.

Then there are those back taxes. Shhh! As a teaching artist/poet, I make so little money, I am below the poverty belt, so to speak, but because I am also self-employed, I might as well be a billionaire as far as filing complicated taxes goes. 

Why do I write, and who do I write for?

Today I spent several hours fleshing out a rather long paragraph I had written on the ambling gait of horses way back in 2019. It’s sort of a longish sidebar or a companion piece to go with my Kiger Mustang blogpost. I posted it there because that was when the genesis of the essay began, but the bulk of the work was done today. And little of the original writing remains. What took so long? Every time I circled back to it, I never felt like I had the chops to flesh it out. Today was different. I was ready to tackle it. I realize that I have an audience of one.five people on this rather obscure topic. But that’s what floats me. Sometimes my thoughts are like a three-dimensional scaffolding built by synesthesia. I hear rasping sandpaper sounds as I uncover ideas, words take on notes and color. Writing soothes them, puts them on the bookshelf. Ever since I was a child, I was fascinated by obscure and ancient horse breeds. In contrast, I wrote my Connemara pony piece all in one long go—because I was irritated that an acquaintance, Phil Cousineau, who leads spiritual journeys to Ireland wrote that the Vikings brought the Connemara pony to Ireland. I went ballistic—nothing like cultural appropriation via Wiki and Google to get my knickers in a twist. So why do I write, and who do I write for? Myself, alone. And for you, Dear Reader. I don’t think the web crawlers can read.

BLOW WIVES

BLOW WIVES 

She filled a cow pelvis with wild roses, 

as if that would repatriate the long dead. 

Scapulae nestled like snow angels

in the powdery alkali dust as if

the beauty of death in bleached bones

was seeking a redress with the darkness. 

Her small poems traveled on the wind 

like the wishes of blow wives, 

lost in the desert varnish of time.

6/7/23 Write On! with Terri Glass

Note bene: this is a stub, no idea where it’s going. Sort of Georgia O’Keefish! I have been looking at a lot of her work that I’ve never seen before.

About those famous musicians…

A silly Facebook meme asked what famous musicians we’ve met. There were so many, I couldn’t choose. I liked Allegra Broughton’s (Solid Air) idea of telling the backstories of how we met. Much more interesting than a vanilla list.

After I posted a partial list, someone asked me how come I’d met so many musicians, I said mostly it came down to time and place. Many nearly famous rock musicians played at our high school assemblies and political rallies (Class of 1970—we made the 6 o’clock news when we shut down the Marin County draft board). From the Tubes, Moby Grape, Talking Heads, Country Joe to John Cipollina. So we thought hobnobbing with musicians was normal. 

After the Summer of Love, when utopia began to sour, and society as we knew it had the DTs, the rock musicians and hangers-on began to flee the Haight in San Francisco for Marin County, they invaded our tiny little valley. We all had to learn to live with each other, which was an uneasy compromise. Old redneck school met hippiedom. It was not love at first sight. And I was not at all starstruck. If anything, I was angry that our valley had been invaded. 

The influx of new people stretched and tore the warp and weft of our bucolic valley. And when Tam school district took away our buses (too expensive, they said), we had to hitchhike in order to get to school. We demonstrated, we walked to and from school—but it was 17 miles each way! I was exhausted. I took up hitchhiking. And the only folks that would stop to pick us up were the rock musicians. Never the ranchers who even knew us. No solidarity there.

I grew up in west Marin so I met many of the musicians while I was hitchhiking home to Forest Knolls. I thumbed rides with Van Morrison, Jesse Colin Young, Sons of Champlin (our main lid connection), Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and of course, Janis—many of them lived on my road. Carlos Santana was always good for a ride. Janice never stopped for us, but then she only had a two-seater Porsche. She always braked for young men hitchhiking.

Linda Ronstadt, Grace Slick, most of Jefferson Airplane, Maria Muldaur all lived in nearby hamlets at one time or another. When Jefferson Airplane moved to Woodacre, they hung a model biplane that was featured on one of their albums from an oak tree.

I met many, if not all of the Grateful Dead—both living and dead, Micky Hart was a neighbor both in Forest Knolls, and later in Forestville—we boarded his girlfriend’s horse. Later, poor Jerry Garcia was in rehab at Forest Farm Camp, renamed Serenity Farm, so we saw him dawdling down the hill to the little grocery store in Forest Knolls to get his daily fix of Häagen-Dazs, or Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, right before he died.

Bobby Darin was a very good friend of my mom’s. I tried to play If I were a Carpenter for him on my Palamino Pony guitar. He was not impressed, I was 12, but he showed me an E minor progression chord I was having trouble with. I met Pete, Mike & Peggy Seeger at several venues. I must’ve been radiant with joy because after one concert in Grass Valley, Mike Seeger came up to me and gave me a huge bear hug, and wept on my shoulder. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott used to hang out in downtown Forest Knolls. He liked watching all the girls on horseback. I was one of them.

OPEN-ENDED POEMS

I never write open-ended poems meant

to be all-encompassing, or accessible to all, 

replete with striped wheelchair on-ramps, 

and neon-vested service dogs sniffing the luggage.

You’d think a poet would make it easy 

for the reader, but that’s never the point, is it? 

However, I suspect those little poems harbor dreams 

of grandeur to titillate the psyche, perhaps stretch 

the intellect, or maybe even surprise the emotions. 

But my poems are naked weather balloons of truth 

stretched taut over the throats of escaped lines. 

So, picture these words, vapid little mouth-breathers, 

up late at night, and drooling, gathering like zombies, 

shuffling from grave to yard, in search of spare brains, 

an easy fix, limping clichés circling a Hallmark card, 

not a divine spark of meteoric brilliance among them. 

No two tinder stones rubbed over the cold campfire.

They are no Rhodes Scholars seeking status.

Call them cowards, cheap floozies, and shapeshifters—

they’re not ambitious seekers of fame,

nor do they want to take a stab at redefining 

the great I am that haunts us all. 

5/31/23 Write On! with Susie Terence , forthcoming in Spectrum. well, I guess the poem is not forthcoming. After all it is the editor, Dan Campbell took down the blog, so now it is once again unpublished.

Ancestor dream

Moonlight fell like slivers of light on the sea, as the ship circled the island. She gathered up her carpetbag to disembark, not that she had very much by way of possessions to begin with. She had with her a sewing kit, and Irish lace to earn her keep. Luckily, she wasn’t alone. Her brother Joe looked after her, but he soon he would leave her  to ride the train from New York to Battle Mountain, where her uncle and cousins would meet her with the wagon. He would work on the boats and come to her by way of Galveston months later. She clutched the old carpetbag to her chest, the stars overhead wheeled a brilliant mantle over the desert sky. She wanted to sing about the halo she saw around the sun. That sundog of music filled her with wild dreams. Then the low lying fog that muted all sound, spoke of other futures, and no one would hear her silent screams tinged with fire, her earthly inheritance, or the lyrics of blood coursing through the generations that she would beget.

5/24/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

Leave-takings

I was born with wanderlust. When I was a child, I would traipse off into the woods and hike up the ridges of Mt. Barnabe to see Elephant Mountain and Tomales Bay cleaving the land like a saber shining in the distance. Since then, I've traversed many landscapes the world over and for that I am grateful. 

One summer, when I was working in a small village deep in the Swiss Alps, I involuntarily threw my arms open wide as if to encompass the sublime majesty that left me breathless. Whenever I am overwhelmed by raw beauty, I open up my arms as if to embrace the landscape.

To anchor the self in place and time—if only just for a moment—that is my one true religion. I’ve done something similar with my own childhood landscapes, my ritual involves greeting the landscape as well as saying goodbye. Perhaps it is also a form of gratitude.

I once taught an old lover how to embrace the land. It was so exhilarating and liberating to acknowledge the intangible like that. As we hiked the long ridges that traversed the coastline, we opened our arms wide with impromptu hugs, kissing the vast landscape, saying I love you. I love you. A ritual that he continued to cherish long after we had broken up. 

When a Soviet friend had to return to the USSR when his visa expired, I was surprised to find there was also a Ukrainian custom of leave-takings—or saying goodbye to places you’ve been—which included bidding adeiu to my little cabin. 

It was somehow a fitting reminder to acknowledge the importance of departures. When you say goodbye to a house as if it were an old friend, you acknowledge its hospitality and shelter. It doesn’t need to be your house, it could be a place you've stayed, a place where the walls have protected you from the vagaries of the world.

And the house offered us refuge from our ourselves. Yes, I know, a house is an inanimate object, but it both shelters and cradles us in its arms like a mother. In that moment, it becomes not a house, but the idea of home. Something I learned while living in the USSR—and it seemed a fitting ritual. 

I can’t say there were many places in the Ukraine I wanted to embrace. The vast breadbasket was flat as a pancake all the way to the horizon and beyond—except for the desecrated kurgans, tumulus mounds punctuating an ancient landscape carpeted with sunflowers and wheat. 

At the steep ravine of the Bibi Yar, Stalin’s secret burial chasm, I wanted to weep even before I knew the backstory of the atrocities that had happened there, what was inhumanly possible. I said a goodbye racked with sobs for the eroding debris—bones of the unnamed dead hidden from the world in a mass grave.

Ditto that in Iona in the Hebrides as well—for entirely different reasons—the holiness of St. Columba's abby was graced with filtered light. I was letting go of something so profound, it was nearly nameless. It was as if I were shedding a lifetime of grief. The death of my grandmother, my mother. The absent father. 

Maybe it's a form of hiraeth or saudade. An overwhelming homesickness, more than nostalgia, it’s a longing for a place you cannot return to—the soul harboring equal parts of grief and love. As sobs racked my body, I was grateful that the holy community of Iona tactfully looked away, they understood the personal conversion of psyche.

The idea of leave-taking dates back to the 12th c., to receive permission from a liege lord to formally depart, as in fare thee well—I’m off to the holylands. As I made ready to leave, I was reminded of a saying I coined as a form of closure while on the steep slopes of Huayna Picchu, where I had left talismans: a lock of hair, and milky quartz from our hill in Northern California. For my grandmother, I said, as if bearing witness.

I instructed my friend, Always remember to say goodbye to the places you've been. Cherish them, say goodbye, for you will never pass this way again. 

And with that, I kissed the landscape goodbye.

5/18/23 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

A MEADOW OPENS

Here, a meadow opens with arms outstretched, 

where the meadowfoam and field iris 

paint the eye into carpets of color. 

The cattle work the grass and low to each other, 

they are far from the police state of cities and self. 

They peacefully graze, while we plan and strategize, 

ever vigilant to dangers, perceived, or otherwise.

5/17 Write On! with Susie Terence

Pandemic freewrite

Ghosted, we were lost. A splash of blue on the canvas of the sky. The birds took to the air, the raiments of spring, so much relentless beauty in the midst of all this darkness.

We clung to our sanity in any way we could. We took to our minds. Our inner sanctum. Our inside worlds flourished in a hostile world where the faceless enemy waited, ambush at every encounter. 

Despite everything, I needed to take care of Sam. I was rich in responsibility for his safety, my care provider job knew no other boundaries, and so we persevered. 

Which saved us was ourselves, alone. The psyche explored new boundaries and took no hostages, only ourselves. The floor of darkness waged with open borders, we were refugees all.

Life during a time of COVID

We all erred on the side of caution from this unknown disease that arrived from a distant shore. We were unschooled astronauts suiting up to face an invisible foe shining in the dark. We relied upon caution, where every encounter could prove to be fatal. We experienced stranger danger and friendly fire. Suddenly ordinary actions were potentially lethal. We could not see the enemy, it was unnamed and faceless. We saw danger everywhere. The gas pump, doorhandles, cardboard boxes, even the mail was suspect. We hunkered down and hoarded toilet paper. We came to selfish blows over our own asinine priorities. The fear was palpable, it was like the time Chernobyl blew, and we all hid indoors. Only that danger could not be avoided. The late April rains brought lethal isotopes to our doors, and as we watched the rain fall, we knew that the eaves of our houses or the metal roofs of our car offered no protection from the invisible fallout. Then, there was the nightmare of Fukushima. But despite everything, we survived, though we couldn’t see the enemy glowing from within the cellular walls. During Covid, we didn’t know the face of the enemy. It too was nameless, though it had an acronym and a number. We also learned that the enemy was us. I knew it would be a long time before the world as we know it would be safe to return to, some semblance of normality was beyond reach. It was a long wait. During the barrage, we turned inward. We examined the star charts etched on the cave walls. We didn’t realize that the tools of resilience were embedded within us, and as we explored the unplumbed depths of our collective psyche, we arose like singed phoenixes, and then we turned our dark isolated realms into global villages, and the airwaves created an electronic renaissance studded with starlight. We thrived in that limelight, despite everything.

5/10/23 Write On! With Susie Terence

San Geronimo Valley Spring arts show, May 6- 21, Mercury in Retrograde

I’m not sure what year I am on now, but I have created new art for the San Geronimo Valley Community Arts Center Spring Arts Show every year since at least 2018. It keeps me in the game in a manner of speaking. 

Besides, the SGV art center is my auld alma mater. Literally. I went to third grade in the art gallery, once part of Lagunitas School before it was decommissioned as the Spanish style building wasn’t earthquake proof. Tuesday was both Bank Day and Hot Dog Day and hotdogs cost a nickel. I saved up my pennies to buy those nitrate-laden dogs, but they didn’t love me—I remember a bout of midnight projectile vomiting.

Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald tune was from an Irish dirge

Yesterday, on Beltane, Gordon Lightfoot died. When I was writing an blogpost about Bobby Sand’s songs Back Home in Derry, I took a lot of flack for saying that he did not steal or copy Gordon Lightfoot’s melody, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, because that old Irish tune already existed. Bobby Sands was in solitary confinement during the time he wrote that song, he would not have had access to Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, but he certainly would have been familiar with the County Clare slide, most often used as a fiddle tune jig, The Road to Lisdoonvarna.

In several recent articles, I found that Lightfoot had acknowledged his use of the Irish tune. “I already had a melody in my mind and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about three and a half years old.” Why couldn’t I find that information back in 2013 when I was writing the Bobby Sands story?

Finally, I found a quote from Gordon that supports my theory. I wish I had found this quote when I was writing my blog post, Old Tunes, New Licks. It would’ve saved me a lot of grief. I wrote:

The melody of Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, recorded in December 1975, seems to suggest a similar pattern. What came first, Lightfoot's melody of The Wreck of the Edmund FG, or the Irish melody associated with Bobby Sands' Back Home in Derry?
I think what happened is that the melody itself (not Gordon's fabulous song lyrics) was based on an older Irish dirge—after all the ship had an Irish name, Fitzgerald, so an Irish melody was fitting. Also, many Canadian folksongs are from the Irish and Scottish folksong repetoire.
During the 1960s and 70s folksingers were raiding traditional music wholesale—Irish music was the hardest hit—most North American singer-songwriters did not credit their sources. At least two of my folk heroes Judy Collins and Joan Baez noted their folksongs as "traditional," but as Behan noted, Bob Dylan was among the most arrogant of songthieves.

The Lightfoot obituary went on to say: 

“The biggest came in 1976 after he [Lightfoot] read an article in Newsweek about the the sinking of the bulk carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. He called the epic maritime disaster song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

“It was quite an undertaking to do that. I went and bought all of the old newspapers, got everything in chronological order, and went ahead and did it because I already had a melody in my mind and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about three and a half years old….I think it was one of the first pieces of music that registered to me as being a piece of music.” From Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian Folk-Rock Troubadour, Dead at 84 , Yahoo

After I wrote this piece, I found out from Mudcat the name of the Irish fiddle jig was The Road to Lisdoonvarna. Old melody. Full circle. Someone else said that Christy Moore set the poem to music, not Bobby Sands. Now that is ann angle I have not thought of as I understood it to be Bobby Sands’ melody as well. All the Google links suggest that Christy Moore borrowed Gordon Lightfoot’s tune. Egad! Circular file. Either way, it was an Irish tune shared across the sea. RIP Gordon Lightfoot. Safe passage.

Spring arrives

The wildflowers were late in arriving, all that rain, deluge after deluge nearly had us building arks or doing glacial prepping. The trees, too long without adequate water, are cautious, having shed most of their leaves during the long drought, including the coast live oak, and redwood. It’s hard for me to witness the miracle of spring when all the backroads are aligned with dead and dying trees. Still, spring arrives all out of breath, the distant hills are losing their first blush of yellow against green, and the sky lupines seep into the crevices to fill the void. It’s as if small bits of the sky have fallen and landed on the steep hillsides. Of course the poppy gangs are shouting like cheerleaders on their thin rock outcrops, they are unable to compete with the foreign grasses that the cattle dote on. This year, the sun too was slow on the scene and the grass was a pale shadow of itself which kept the cattle working overtime. But now the sun has returned, and they graze contentedly, none of winter's sparsity nipping at their heels. First up are the spring calves snoozing in small hollows, their ears like small sails luffing in the breeze, while red shouldered hawks circle and careen with the vultures, looking for an easy meal. The light is still low on the horizon and you can see in the way it drapes itself over the hills, as if dressing the curves in a shawl of chiaroscuro light.

4/26/23 Write On! prompt Terri Glass

Sleeping on it

When I was troubled, my grandmother always told me to sleep on it, as a solution would come, and invariably she was right. I only needed faith that a solution would arrive, as it often did. Even though I didn't believe her, a solution would often come while I was sleeping. I think of the scientist Kekule and the inventor Singer who both slept on it as well, when faced with a conundrum and no obvious answers in sight. Kekule dreamed of benzine carbon rings opening and closing, as if they were linked arm in arm like girl gangs. And Singer dreamed of a sword fight when he was trying to resolve how to get the thread to loop through the needle and to link a stitch. They were stitching together memory and dream with practicum. Sleeping on my math book before a test did not yield any tangible results.

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

MORNING COFFEE

Before a thought could penetrate her consciousness, 

the odor of coffee robbed her of all free will. 

She followed its siren call to the kitchen. 

It kicked her in the teeth and she arose to the calling. 

Her grandmother often looked skyward like that 

as she stirred her morning coffee, 

the spoon clanging against the side of a mug,

purloined from the San Francisco jail, 

the spoon ringing in the morning with victory. 

The brown towhees answered with a one note song,

hopped over the lintel to peck the toast crumbs 

scattered at her feet.

4/23. (my extra free write from the NarrativeMethod.com prompt).

Our bodies, ourselves

In the photo, a woman, perhaps she is a dancer, is looking up, she's looking skyward for answers, so, perhaps she is seeking a higher power. Once it was called searching for an answer via the God conduit. But that process has fallen out of favor, thank God, I said laughing. I certainly had an uneasy relationship with the idea of God at an early age. 

Even as a small child I had an unusually strong sense of self, call it freewill. I questioned everything, much to the chagrin of my teachers, and the nuns. That time the nuns said the reason why it was raining was because we were naughty in church and God was crying. 

Well, that did it, I was indignant and asked what if he was peeing on us? Chaos ensued. I flunked First Communion, perhaps the only child in history to do so. I was six.

There was an Irish saint, Pelagius, who was excommunicated twice. Once during his lifetime, which was rescinded, and then again after his death, he was tried again in absentia for promulgating the idea of free will. We can't have anyone thinking for themselves, the church said. 

A battle this nation is facing today in spades. I don't know what the answer is, but here we are trying to find our way back to that wonderment we once felt as children. We are trying to get back to the garden.

Most mornings begin with my spam box, all my political emails and petitions are rerouted to the spam box because there are no graphics, I have dyslexia, so flashing bits and color distract and befuddle me, making me not only anxiety-ridden, but also angry. 

So, I begin my morning by signing petitions. During this day and age, the least I can do is to object to the myriad laws designed to suppress our civil rights, especially those of women, and those who are otherly-abled. 

See, when I was still going to church, it was the era of ERA, the beginning of women's rights, our bodies were being politicized. It began with the introduction of The Pill. Meanwhile, organized religion was trying to suppress us all. Something snapped, I was 17, how dare the church dictate what I could and couldn't do with my body? 

At least in those days there was still somewhat of a separation between church and state. We took up the banner the Suffragists had held aloft. Our bodies, ourselves, we chanted. We had the vote and we used it. And now it's the government suppressing the vote, pissing on us, telling us what we can and can't do with our bodies, ourselves. 

4/23/ TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

My 2023 CAC artist panel application

I’ve worked 2 decades in Bay Area schools, teaching poetry & art to historically underserved students in Oakland & Hunters’s Point, developing culturally relevant arts programming. I implemented school arts programming, and trained poets & artists in both rural Sonoma County and urban Alameda County. I’ve worked with all demographics, including inmates at Napa State Hospital, elders, preschoolers.

I’ve taught artist-in-schools residencies in rural & urban schools in California since 1979. I’ve had 7 individual CACAIR grants in Sonoma & Napa counties; & a grant from the Montana Arts Council. I’ve administered/taught in CAC multi-artist residencies including Poetry Flash (current), received a PBS/KQED AIR grant, & two Oakland Cultural Arts Council grants. I’ve led arts workshops in the Western US & Florida, as well as the Bahamas, Netherlands & the former USSR. I’ve mentored/ trained artists, writers and teachers through several arts organizations including California Poets in the Schools, Young Audiences, Artists in Schools of Sonoma County, and Rural Arts Services. 

I’m widely published and I’ve won prizes, fellowships and awards for my writing, art, photography—and teaching residencies—including a Golden Bell award. I’ve worked for alternative newspapers, writing news & arts feature stories & photojournalism. From 1980 to 1997, I produced literary events in Sonoma County, including Russian River Writers’ Guild, Sonoma State University, Cotati Cabaret, Johnny Otis Club, and other venues. I was staff photographer and workshop leader for the Napa Valley Poetry conferences..

I’ve taught clients in a diverse range of communities of all ages/abilities throughout California. The schools where I teach are historically underrepresented in all the arts—I utilize poetry and language from their respective cultures. I also invite in guest artists from the community. Needs were determined by meeting with host clients before the residency and creating an arts program to meet specific ideals and goals. For example, at Malcolm X ES in Berkeley, we developed, and are expanding a long-term poetry and art project that celebrates racial equity, diversity and inclusion. 

I’ve worked with many cultural demographics with a diverse language base & cultural focus, including training Middle Eastern and African health care providers to teach creative writing to their clients in the Netherlands. Though not fully bilingual, I speak Spanish & can converse in several languages. I also volunteer at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center working with elders. I am a coordinator & current  coordinator and emcee for the annual Poetry Flash Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, as well as administrator of the Poetry Flash CAC AIS John Oliver Simon Legacy Poetry Project grant.

DEAR POEM, THE POINT OF NO RETURN, NaPoWriMo, PAD Challenge, Day 12

NaPoWriMo write a poem that addresses itself. Dear Poem…interrogate it.

DEAR POEM

Dear Poem, why did you leave me in the lurch like that, 

surrounded by mundane words, second class ideas 

and turns of phrase so trite, they made me wince?

We had a good thing going, you left me standing,

you walked out the door like an irate lover.

What on earth were you thinking? It’s been said before.

Didn’t you learn anything at all after all this time, 

that metaphor and simile must always be served fresh 

and piping hot out of the smithy’s forge?

There is no way to resurrect or to save a stale poem, 

no matter how precious the subject matter,

without undergoing a linguistic blood transfusion.

They say poems need to be retranslated every generation 

as language takes a powder, words change nuance 

and meaning dissolves into cliché 

whenever you least expect it.

4/12/23

2023 April PAD Challenge write a sound poem

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

Lonely cars on the tarmac late at night, 

remind me of wind soughing in the pines, 

or the restless surcease of the ocean’s roar 

and I want to follow the vagaries of that road 

leading back to the point of no return.

4/12/23

THE BLUE VAULTED SKY

1. My grandmother hauls an oak sapling to the sawhorse, 

tumps it in to place, wields the bow saw like a violin, 

orchestrating the sonorous wood, as it plays the air 

like bees droning in the acacia trees. A sawdust pile rises up, 

and the cats, ever curious, watch it for signs of life. 

Our breath hangs in the air like half-formed ghosts. 

The winter reminds us there is only the wood stove for heat.

She never says anything much. Only later will I understand 

she is missing her husband, my grandfather, 

who died at the turn of the new year. She is alone now.

2. When he said he was going away, with suitcase in hand, 

I looked at the sky and asked to go with him. 

I couldn’t understand why he would say no, 

or why he’d leave without us. There was our shared birthday, 

I blew out his matches as I sat on his lap. Was he mad at us?

The aunts and uncles laughed uncomfortably 

when he said he was going up to heaven to be with the angels. 

I asked the practical questions of a four-year-old:

How would he get there, who was driving? Was there a bridge?

Would he stay in the clouds? And where was the road?

3. The following summer, I was obsessed with angels, 

as I struck wooden matches, thinking they were toothpicks, 

against the rusted seat of the teeter-totter lying on the dry grass,

when out of the blue, a disembodied voice said, don’t do that!

Startled, I dropped the matches, looked around.

But there was no one there, only the curious cats, 

and the merciless blue vault of the sky overhead.

4/12/23 Terri Glass prompt, Write On!

Early morning trail ride

Some Saturdays I rose before dawn for early morning trail rides with my friend Stephanie. Everyone else was asleep. Her father never knew of our morning escapades, and my grandmother didn’t seem to mind. But I also didn’t tell her where we were going, as it was too far from home for a child on her own. I was on my horse, somewhere deep in the hills, and therefore, safe. At least she never said anything to me. My own parents were in absentia, my father deep in a bottle, my mother in one asylum or other. Steph‘s dad was a little more controlling. See, her mother, who was a Russian translator for the UN, blacklisted by McCarthy, knew all about silence. She drank in silence, and because of that silence, she died in the fire. A short in the dryer. Because Les couldn’t protect his wife, he was over-protective of Steph. The boys, her two younger brothers, not so much. Bucky was close to our age but Gooby was still in diapers. We’d simultaneously sneak out of the house just as the sky was beginning to lighten, and meet up at the county road. The morning fog was like a tight glove protecting us from the mid-20th century. We could’ve been anywhere in time. Sometimes we’d sneak through her upper pasture, past Old Grandad, the Hereford bull, to get to the fire road that led up to Mt. Barnabe. But the stiff barbed wire gate gave our small hands pause. The top of the mountain facing due west was our goal. It was always a spectacular view from the crest of the ridge, the morning mist parting to reveal the sheathed silver sword of Tomales Bay, tracing the trench of the San Andreas Fault, and the clenched bare fist of Elephant Mountain. It restored my equilibrium to see the word from a raptor’s viewpoint. These refuges, these steep hills and valleys were the coping weapons of my youth.

4/12/23 

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

GHOST SHIPS

A toxic desert with abandoned fleets of ghost ships

A herd of white camels, like displaced whitecaps, 
seeking refuge from the grueling desert heat,
slumber in the shadows of rusted ghosts freighters
resting on the bottom of what once was the Aral Sea,
a sea so vast, that Alexander the Great couldn’t cross it,
disappeared within a generation. For Soviet cotton.

3/11/23

BLUE LAZARUS

I once loved an old blue truck 

the color of deep mountain skies

that always rose from the dead, 

like Krishna, or a phoenix from its own ashes, 

overcoming great mechanical odds, 

from a stuck starter, to cranky carburetors 

to broken ball joints & missing catalytic converters.

It kept me on my mechanical toes, 

praying it would not die in traffic, 

and cursing it whenever it did, 

until a runaway dumpster took it out. 

That was the final insult. 

I needed a crowbar to open the door. 

Damned if the truck didn’t fire up, raring to go. 

But I had to let it go. Its wings were clipped for good. 

No rising up from the grave this time. 

3/9 &11/23 this came from a prose piece,

• Easter Sunday

THE BEGINNING OF TRUTH

There is always an infinite supply of uncertainty and fear, 

which is far easier to mine than following your dreams. 

I took instructions from the sky to talk less,

not allowing love in. I was accustomed to abandonment, 

and I continued on, in love with my own darkness,

until the path disappeared. No lantern to light the way.

I convinced myself that the shining beauty pouring in

was merely an algorithm of the soul. I didn’t know 

my silence too was a form of armor, shielding me

from myself, that celestial light shining upon us, 

was bearing witness, only I couldn’t see 

that armor is no longer needed to let amor in.

This is where the truth begins to let the light in.

4/9/23

Easter Sunday

1. Easter Sunday. The question was what wisdom did he impart just before he passed? Are we talking about Jesus here? He is risen, and all that. Don’t know if I want to even go there, if you know what I mean. The aftermath of all those so-called Christians using God to justify their bigotry is just too much to bear. I sidestepped it all for the gathering of meadows and the mountain cathedrals. The blue secrets of the sky.

2. What was it about his last statement that turned on the light for his witness? I once had an old blue truck named Lazarus the color of a deep sky that always rose from the dead, like Krishna, or a phoenix from its ashes, overcoming great mechanical odds, from cranky carburetors to broken ball joints, until a runaway dumpster, took it out. That was the final straw. 

Days earlier, a runaway van crashed into it as well. Poor truck, its days were numbered, and I just couldn’t let it go. By that time, the side of the truck and the driver door was so bashed in, I needed a crowbar to get inside. But damned if the truck didn’t start up, raring to go. But I had to let it go. Its wings were clipped for good this time. No rising up from the grave this time.

3. There is always that moment of epiphany, when everything coalesces, and comes together in such a way that you are dumbstruck, at a loss for words. You realize this was the moment you were waiting for, but didn’t know it. Call it synchronicity if you must name it, that split second when everything aligns to create a cohesive moment in time that stays with you, keeps you wondering who or what is in charge anyway.

Sure, Diogenes was always looking for an honest man, but I don’t think he was looking for truth in a cave. He is risen…

4/9/23 

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

NUMBERS, NaPoWriMo, PAD Challenge, Day 9

NaPoWriMo write a contemporary love sonnet.

I didn’t feel it.

2023 April PAD Challenge write a numbers poem

NUMBERS

Yeah, I didn’t have much of a dad. 

Not much of a mother either. 

It all came down to numbers. 

No child support was the biggest number.

My mother, who was part alley cat,

dropped me off at my grandmother’s doorstep 

when I was four. Followed by my brother 

who arrived one Sunday morning in a bassinet 

on our doorstep some four years later.

My father came to see me a few times 

during those growing up years. 

And then he ditched me when I was 18. 

He loved a bottle of Seagrams 7 on ice 

more than he loved me. That was his number.

At least my mother tried to love me

as she descended into the depths of depression 

but her good days were a finite number. 

But I adored my grandmother, whose number 

was marred by a widow’s half pension,

so I grew up in the country, dirt poor,

but somehow made whole by the algorithms

of landscape, despite everything.

5/31/23

Nothing rhymes with…

City Hall. Used with permission, Donald Kinney photo c. 2023

Last night, City Hall was lit up with orange lights to support the SF Giants, but street photographer, Donald Kinny noted that it looked more red than orange. Well, technically, if this were the early Renaissance, then he would be right—it is red, scarlet or cadmium red. Not orange.

Before 1510, the term yellow-red was used (geoluread in Old English—say it aloud with a swallowed g = y) or red-yellow to describe orange. Or the color orange was referred to as tawny (probably a Celtic loan-word). Saffron and green were the most favored colors for Medieval Irish clothing. I imagine that gold was also used to describe orange. It got me asking, why did the English language suddenly have the need to distinguish the colors red from yellow with a new word?

Weirdly the English word orange is a relative linguistic newcomer. It’s a “new” color name, meaning it wasn’t recognized as a separate color name in English until the 1500s….so, yes, some reds border on orange. Especially the light cadmium reds.  

I didn’t understand that when I was taking painting classes at College of Marin why cadmium orange and red were so close in color. I dislike orange. I was pretty relieved when I discovered that color newcomer, alizarin crimson as I favor the blue reds versus the yellow reds. Also alizarin crimson was way less toxic than the cadmiums. Poor mad Vincent. Was it the cadmium yellows and reds he used responsible for his affliction?

Letting my fingers do the walking through the Google pages, I found this: “The first recorded use of "orange" as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor.” Curious as to where the term came from, I discovered that it probably came from the Old French, pomme d'orenge. 

Curiouser yet, the color term took 600 years after oranges arrived in Europe, for the color to be named in English by way of those Normans. Perhaps politics and the Reformation played into it? As in the House of Orange? The word orange, or flan bhui is flag-yellow, as there is no word for orange in Irish (oráiste is the fruit) is a politically charged color in Ireland, signifying oppression and the division of Ireland. 

And of course, as you know, in English, nothing rhymes with orange. Unless it’s a Giants home game. Then all bets are on. Then City Hall and Coit Tower are bathed in a victorious orange afterglow. But here is the clincher, early oranges that came all the way from China, or India, weren’t necessarily orange-colored. They were green! They were bitter as well. I read that Florida farmers dye those green oranges orange.

Valencia oranges marked Christmas season for my grandmother who was raised in Bantry, Ireland. Each year her Christmas gift was one Valencia orange wrapped in foil.

AS YOU SETTLE INTO THE LIGHT, Burning a path towards the sun, NaPoWriMo, PAD Challenge, Day 6

NaPoWriMo make a transliteration from Poetry International tricky for me, because I can sort of read Dutch, so I extrapolated and stretched it.

AS YOU SETTLE INTO THE LIGHT

Note the steps of the ladder, not the stories of the lost children.
Note the house, not the starry night. Go ahead, drink the wine.

Remember the house is dark. The windows with their eyes shut
doubt the light, they are learning to sing the ways of the wind.

The house speaks of memory and there is no stopping it, 
with its hard wounds and proud flesh and angst it wants…

It wants you to climb into the attic of the psyche and dream
behind closed doors and dwell in the sunlight plaited in gold.

It will make everything seem like new again.
Stand there with the door open wide, your hands trembling,

greet the wind as you settle into the light.

4/11/23

2023 April PAD Challenge write a poem about odor. I misread an earlier prompt, wrote this, wrong piece.

Burning a path towards the sun

The odor of acacia reminds us that spring arrived. But the cold air severs us from beauty. Chilblains become a real thing as cruel April rolls up its trousers. The coastal mountains are still holding onto last week’s unseasonable snow, Cobb Mountain, dressed in a lace gown, is draped in a shawl of clouds and darkness like a grande dame waiting for the opera to begin. Mustard and chamomile brave the elements as if last week’s snow laid down in the deep ravines, was waiting to sleep it off until the morning comes. I admire the bravery of daffodils and tulips, they harbor no grudge against the vagaries of spring, yet rise up from the darkness like phoenixes, burning a path towards the sun. 

4/3/23

As you can see, I wrote this earlier, but it fits.

The idea of strangers

1. What misconception is the host planning to clear up for once and for all? I wrote: who is the host? What is the misconception? We are all imperfect receivers, each interpreting, and navigating reality as best we can. There’s so much to choose from. Where do you even begin? Racial injustice?

But on this day of Passover, it’s clear that every single group of people and cultures has been oppressed by, or has oppressed another. Take the idea of naming people by their nationalities. The Welsh, for example, an exogamic name given by outsiders. Why would anyone want to self-identify as strangers or foreigners? That’s what the word means.

The name tells us that the Welsh were named by outsiders in their own land, and the land they lost to outsiders and they were being oppressed, denied their own name for themselves, Cymru. This holds true for native tribes of the Americas as well. The word Anasazi, meaning stranger in Navajo or enemy and so on.

2. What does the host admit was hard to overcome? We live in an us versus them culture, where every stranger represents danger from the outside. No one single culture is exempt from this practice. Sure, we can sing, all we are saying is give peace, a chance, but, bottom line, when threatened, we close our doors quickly at the first sign of danger.

Look at what happened during the pandemic. It was worldwide free for all. Everyone was out for themselves. And look where that got us. Hoarding toilet paper and massive shortages of disinfectants and other oddities as people locked down and hunkered in, and not their neighbors. In a just world this should never have happened, but it did. And no one is willing to admit that no one is in charge, and we’re all at fault. We’re all to blame, for a moment we let go of our humanity.

3. Every group, every culture has been subjugated with pressure from the outside, whether by war, or assignation. Every group has put labels on strangers defining them as enemies. This is the way of things. It’s hard to admit, but there you have it in a nutshell.

The prefix, wall, as in walnut, wall, and even the name Walsh means, foreigner or stranger. The Welsh would not have named themselves, thusly.

We need to begin by not holding onto the past, or our heritage. There is always one grudge or another to bury us unto the next century. Look at Nagasaki. Something is always at the ready to distract us and derail us.

If only we all knew that, then the world would be a much better place. But even the pandemic didn’t help, we witnessed that from the ground up.

4/6/23

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

LAMENT FOR LAKE TULARE, NaPoWriMo, PAD Challenge, Day 5

NaPoWriMo write a poem based on Simic’s Melon.

LAMENT FOR LAKE TULARE

In the Central Valley there once was a lake so vast,
So chock full of fish that it fed entire cities.
As it dreamed of clouds mirroring the Sierra Range,
The rivermelt sang its praises of spring song,
And painted its shores with wildflowers and tule reeds
While steamships huffed and chugged into port.

No one even remembers when the lake died.
The last farmers to whisper its name, all gone now.
The story persisted, and the mad language of water
Returns to haunt the memory buried in that lakebed.
Soon it will reclaim its long-lost shores
As the spring melt rises to reclaim what was lost.

3/11

I merely replaced Simic’s words with my own. See Day 3, CURSE THE FLOODWATERS. Check out this NASA image of the lake now. I never start each line with a capital letter anymore. So it was odd and I kept trying to erase those capital letters but that’s how Chuck wrote his poem. And so it stays.

2023 April PAD Challenge take the phrase "(noun) in (location)," replace the (noun) with a noun, replace the (location) with a location, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles might include: "Dinosaurs in Jamaica," "Popsicle in Cairo,"

The above poem could count for double, I suppose. The PAD prompt didn’t move me. On the other hand,
SUNRISE OVER MT. HOOD, which I wrote before I saw the prompt, fills the niche. Oddly, I uncharacteristically came up with the title first, as I was driving to work. So I think I will let it go. Besides, it’s all a springboard, as long as I wind up with 30 poems.

SUNRISE OVER MT. HOOD

     —for Rick Coyston 1963 - 2023

The sun rises over Mt. Hood, a golden cowl 

of mist and fog painted in crimson hues 

and delicate lavender pastels to greet the dawn.

I can’t help but think of Rick on his motorcycle, 

the old woman who foolishly pulled out in front of him

has to live with the aftermath of her choice.

I can just hear him saying in his broad Essex accent 

Oh my God, before his life ended on the old Bolinas road.

I’m obsessed with the moment he left us 

and that sublime beauty he left behind.

4/5/23 one of the few times that the title led the poem.

AT THE VERNAL POOLS, and INNER DIALOGUE NaPoWriMo, PAD Challenge, Day 4

NaPoWriMo write a triolet, an eight-line poem in iambic tetramenter, lines  1, 4,7 are identical, as are the 2nd and last lines—the poem begins and ends with the same couplet, within a tight rhyme scheme  — ABaAabAB. I don’t think I like writing in forms.

AT THE VERNAL POOLS

Across the pond the herons glide,
And the egrets seek higher ground
From prying eyes and compromise.
Across the pond the herons glide,
Hunting for froglings and newts’ eyes.
We used to watch them soar around.
Across the pond the herons glide,
And now egrets seek higher ground.

4/9/23

2023 April PAD Challenge

Write a dream poem, and/or Write a reality poem.

INNER DIALOGUE

Some say that in a dream, 

the idea that we carry a dialogue with us, 

wherever we go, day and night, 

it accompanies us, is like a familiar, 

watching over us, waiting for the news, 

hidden behind a veil of symbolism 

and random metaphor.

4/9