Blue Fledglings & a Gallant Eye

Blue Fledgings & a Gallant Eye

Today the scrub jays began fledgling, hop-hop-hoping throughout the garden and I was nervous of the cat. I finally discovered him fast asleep on the corner of the bed that we made fresh this morning.

I picked up the bird and rubbed his feathers against my cheeks: so soft. I discovered from a bird-woman that its a misnomer that birds won't touch their babies if the scent of humans are on them. The olfactory sense is the dullest of them all it turns out. This one's feathers are electric they are so bright. I caressed him and he lay in the palm of my hands, looking up at me, almost as if he were saying, "Are you my mother?". I finally set him down in the quiet green and sprinkled some raw sunflower seeds at his feet. Then I went and finished watering the new columbines and chard seedlings that have come up.

This year's garden is going to be the best. But I say that every year I suspect.
I have made a barter with Bill Bruneau of Bountiful Seeds (part of John Jeavons' gardening business) to trade some of my poetry broadsides for some seeds for this year's garden. I am so glad because this has been a hard year for so many of us in Mendonesia. Bill plans to frame the poems for the office that stores the seeds and puts out the catalogue.

I plan to have Kentucky Blue Wonder Green Beans and Thai Long Beans. The Snow Peas are already in. I want the Blue Wonders to be Pole beans because I make huge tipis with three seven foot bamboo poles and as the beans grow up them, I decorate them with wild turkey feathers, shiny tinsel left over from Christmas, colored yarns with silver and gold threads in them to scare off the birds and it's beautiful as well. I also want bush beans, but we'll see what kind of room I'm talking here. Because I must have my eggplant, both Italian Globe and Japanese Long. And then there's tomatoes. There is nothing like a hot firm juicy tomato cut off the vine with grandpa's sharp pocket knife and eaten right there in the garden. And we have to have so many different kinds. Roma for making paste. which we no longer jar up, though I think we should jar some. Last year we froze it in ice cube trays and when they were frozen, we popped them out into a freezer lock bag and filled the trays over and over again. The same thing with basil, both Italian giant leaf and Thailand's stream-lined flavor packed into a thin firm leaf all smooshed up in the blender with the nuts and some kosher salt, but no garlic or cheese because they don't freeze well. When I want to make some pesto, I will defrost a cube or two and add what's needed.

There are flowers everywhere and so beautiful. Six foot foxgloves, both giant and knee-high columbines, strawberries running through the herb bed and this year we've put in red and white currants and raspberries. This is a happy spring.

The Art of Needle and Thread; of Soap and Water

On the day before Fat Tuesday, I took a ceramic bowl from the stack on the shelf in the caboose's laundry room, the room in winter I call the "Rainbow Room" because in the wide picture window I have hung on fishing line and clear push pins, all the crystals and chandelier  pieces my sons gave me for Christmas when they were boys."Forever Snowflakes" we called them. Only in the winter, in this particular window does the sun rise to just the right meridian and catch the cut glass facets so that the Prism Effect is evoked. Such delicate magic that is added to by gently spinning each piece of cut glass on its line and the room swirls with rainbows...

So I pull a medium size bowl from the white white shelf and go to the table where I hold my soaps and spot removers and bleaches and ironically, my teas of different strengths. Not good drinking tea, but cheap strong and light teas I can use in dying cloth. This time I mix only a small amount of soap, stain remover and just a whisper of bleach and then cold water. I mix it with a whisk.

Then I drop into it a lace collar made long before World War 2 by a woman's grandmother. The length of buttons on this wide collar is too numerous for me to want to count right this moment and I have counted them before. A child's hand could easily button them, my peasant hands are of little value with this delicate work, but I still manage to hook each mother-of-pearl button into its crocheted receptacle. I even have a button hook! I swish it around for a few moments, rubbing silk against silk gently and then I let it sit for two days in the mixture. Today I have rinsed and rinsed it and finally let it sit in clear water until tomorrow when I will rinse it many times again to get out the chemicals that would eat it away. I wish I could afford more organic properties to wash things in, better for the environment, better for my few nice things.

I bought many many pieces of Belgium lace and crocheted work from a woman named Elsa that I knew briefly in Berkeley for $25 in the summer of 1975, right before I moved to the hills outside of Willits in Mendocino County. I had a job at that time washing dishes at, now I have heard closed, Smokey Joe's Cafe.
I made minimum wage and a good meal. And my boss Ned was very kind to me. I have carried these lace and crocheted collars with me all this time, and never have I washed them. I found at a thrift store a beautiful denim jacket made by Lauren's line called Chaps. The background of the jacket is the same color as the lace and then it has faded flowers splashed all over the fabric. It's beautiful, soft to the touch and almost makes me cry to see it hanging face out on a nail in the wall. But then, beauty always makes me cry. I prefer going to art museums alone, so I won't embarrass my date. When the collar is rinsed and hung to drip from my child's clothesline with the old whittled Gypsy pegs into the  sink below, I will spread it on a thick cotton towel and shape it to dry. Then I will use tiny gold safety pins and pin it to the collar on the jacket. I have done this already and that's was when I noticed how dingy with time the collar was. So I had to honor it by washing it.

This is how I make my clothes. Or rather the things that go with the clothes that cover my nakedness. This is the art of my warmth and other things in the summer to promote coolness. I inherited some pieces of mink that are also collars, one quite sumptuous and wide at the middle, tampering down on each side. I have pinned that one to a small jacket, also a very exclusive name, that is taupe with a black pattern of swirls and paisleys on it. The pattern is quite dense so that only a small amount of the taupe shows.

I like to describe things of beauty and things of squalor. It's because the adjectives are so rich in their ability to make another person see what I am holding, or admiring. I have so few clothes that I have been able to hang everything on coat hangers someone made covered with pastel silks of many different colors, some with small round mother-of-pearl buttons sewn onto the edge of each side of the hanger so the garment doesn't fall off. Such attention to detail. Except  for its spareness, my closet looks like it belongs to a rich woman. That makes me laugh. When I return from my train trip to visit my family who I haven't seen in twelve years I will return with some skirts made from beautiful and rich fabrics I have been collecting at thrift stores for years. I have been wearing rags for nearly two years and have grown ashamed. I don't seek much, but what I plan to do is sweet-talk my cousin Lin, into sewing pieces of beautiful  fabric into skirts. I wish she was willing to make some blouses, but it is difficult work and she would rather make quilts. My loss. She is a magnificent seamstress I understand. I have gorgeous fabrics bought at thrift stores for a couple bucks each. Lucky me!

These simple woman tasks occupy my time until the rains and cold stop and I may return to the Other Church, my garden. I love my garden until it borders on adoration. I have to be careful of that, which is why every Lent I try to give up something I clearly love. This year is butter. On Fat Tuesday the last buttered thing I ate was popcorn. Such fun to watch the cat bat a little cloud of corn around the bed and then lick off all its delicious butter. I am so charmed by his health, by his antics of pure joy, that I am filled with well-being, despite this terrible lung disorder I have been carrying around, nearly coughing my head off. If I don't leave the caboose except to sit in the sun for twenty minutes each day bundled up in quilts, I won't infect anyone and I can watch the daffodils push their pale green heads up through the surface and eventually turn yellow and open into an explosion of petals. Today has been a good days despite so many hours in bed.

Notes From The Rain Factory

               Willits from Halloween 'til Easter is rain rain rain. So now I have my Paris cafe in Willits, and almost enough rain. We're ten inches short of last year and that worries me. But still, let us pull on our wellies and run outside into the rain and kiss the clouds, let us lift our hands to the sky and reach for things that have no name, but are thrilling just the same or familiar things like chevrons of geese so soaked and cold that they are looking for a pond to land in and hide in the bushes and pussywillows. Let us pull the clouds right down onto our heads and make hats of them until we are ankle deep in puddles that water the vineyards and the little gardens all over our town..Why, I'm wearing mine  right now...

 

Illness and Fear

10 February Sunday 2013   
The Caboose on Catherine

Still feverish, hacking like a Welsh coal-miner, my canary sure doesn't sing these days... I'm missing church two weeks in a row, but at least I'm out of that dark night where watching the flames' shadows on the wall make faeries dance  was my only form of mad entertainment. It was all so George Mac Donald that first scary week of 102, 103 temperature and the hallucinations of my childhood with all the connotations of the step-father and the upraised fist and the holes in the cheap apartment walls in the parlor and the rising flesh, so now, so many years later, I need to be able to let it go, go far away from that place into my relatively comfortable now.

And why I would be flooded with these memories while in such a weakened psychic state, I don't know, except that I have also allowed myself back into the True Myth of Destry James and Alabama, and those days come fraught with memories that are so deeply embroidered, almost like cattle-branding, that those picture poems  beckon me.

The occupation of "Poet" is a lonely one and I think we prefer it that way, except for those after-a-public-reading when we gather in a cafe or a bar or some kind benefactor's living room and just talk our heads off all those ideas, dreams, plans and hopes we clutch to our hearts.

 Having recently survived cancer, a bronchial cold ought not frighten me so badly, but that's what has happened. I see the possibility of relapses everywhere. I'm not used to being so vulnerable. I rather like the reputation of tough girl-poet, even as I am now a poet in my fifties, a poet with great heart I have been called. If I don't look at the calender or in the mirror, my tongue can wrap itself around good poetry and snarl, "get out of my ways" as the street person I used to be. But my heart is no longer in it. I am kind to single mothers and small animals. The Good Book says to visit orphans and widows. I try never to go empty-handed.
                                                                                                       

Grief Is Another Word For Looking At The Stars

Grief Is Another Word For Looking At The Stars**  February 11, 2013

This place here is my old tree hollow dug out by the rain over many years until, I can curl up and close my eyes or look up at the stars and count the ones with tails. I've been depressed. No, I haven't. I've been so sad it's an ache in my side, like I've run too far, too fast. A dull ache. Certainly not that gnawing in the bowels as if a rat were in my gut and working his way out. It hasn't been a Christ-like pain; I don't credit myself with that. It's a very human sort of stitch in the side. It's the pain of loss. I know it's human because I can name it.

My best friend died. And I know it will lessen with each day; it already has, and thankfully my husband has been patient and caring. I'm old enough to carry a bit of wisdom in myself and know how to recognize the depths of what I feel. When I was younger of course it was more like a puppy's knowledge that something is wrong; but she doesn't know what. A puppy whose been weaned and given to a nice family, but never the less, knows something is wrong, is lacking. And that of course is the puppy's mother. This has that sort of feeling to it.

James was a painter and to begin with, a lousy poet. But I'm a retired poetry teacher and we wrangled backnforth with what sounds good, what is good and how to make what isn't good, better. And it didn't take much. He was so close to the center of what makes a poem a poem that I didn't have to much more than teach him how to tweak his own lines and line breaks and metaphors. We were colleagues.

Destry James and Alabama

February 10, 2013, nearly 3 am. update 27 May 2017
  
 The True Myth of Destry James & Alabama

Destry James and Alabama

Since I was teen and living in Orange County, I  have been carrying around the poems of my first boyfriend, though I'm not sure it's even fair to have called him my boyfriend. We were both so shy. He named me Alabama after mention of that state in Neil Young songs and the fact that I wore woolen mens' suit vests over 'wife beater's t shirts (STELLA!), didn't shave my underarms or legs and was a hillbilly and Cherokee from the Carolinas originally by blood. I wore old lady dresses that buttoned up the front or 501 jeans with a girl scout Tshirt. My grandmother who had been terribly rich at one time had given me some beaded sweaters that I wore in the winter and felt lush in. But really, it was Des who made me feel lush and wet and full of the vocabulary of sex. The language of skin-poetry. Later, after graduation, he found me living through the manipulations of a terrible-now-deceased-uncle as an indentured nanny for a passel of children where I received no money, not even to buy tampon. Des lit up my life that day. He kissed me, asked me if he could hold my breasts and I trembled at his touch, oh god, I felt my skin's hair rise like Robert Grave always said it would under the influence of poetry, the Muse, and I melted into his chest. Why did I leave? Why didn't I ask more questions? phone number, address...Why didn't he offer it? I was determined to be a poet more than anything, but I wanted him with me. Pretty please, I asked God every night, sobbing into the bunk bed I shared with a five year old girl who wet the sheets.

 I finally ran away to Berkeley and San Francisco with a box suitcase full of poems and a library copy from the fifties of Jack Kerouac's On The Road stolen from a public library... and Destry's poetry he had given me. I have held carefully onto that work like a vestal virgin carries a lamp of oil shining out into the darkness of a savage world.  I stupidly married two times, producing two wonderful sons. When I went home, single, in my early twenties, for a visit, I looked through the yellow pages for Des's father's church; for Destry's name himself (his father was a preacher and I thought it might be a way to find him.) If Destry was married, I could at least give back his poetry. It hurts me that he might be yearning for this beautiful work. A conversation between Thomas a Beckett and King Henry and another long one of a journey up the side of a shiny mountain with his best pal Puppet. And a few others. They were of course in those days seeking Illumination I believe. Like I was. My education is all my own, though kind poets gave me books and names and books bought in used stores or found in the free boxes of Berkeley. I learned to read in open mics and stop trembling at the knees, the paper, the hand after six months or maybe a year. I shook like a child, like a leaf, like a wild glacier coming down a Finnish mountainside when I first began...

My love, Des, was a miracle of a poet. He also played a beauty of a guitar. He wanted me to sing harmony with him, But I had no voice at all to sing. I wasn't even allowed to sing in the church choir.  Neither of us knew at that time my performimg voice would ripen into the throatiness of Peggy Lee, as poet Larry Beckett, one of America's finest once said to me.

I felt married to Destry at thirteen in the eighth grade when he would play with the ends of my hair from the desk behind me in Honors English, play with it so delicately I nearly came mid-class. We were both Believers in Jesus and so we were honorable unlike any other schoolkids I knew. He had a girlfriend (I prayed not to hate her or be jealous at least) and when I had a boyfriend, he was more than polite when I would have rather he stole me into his arms. We were together to a degree in junior high at Fremont Junior  in Anaheim in the late sixties. We would stand at lunch or breaks in classes and talk Neil Young and Crazy Horse, our hero. We would talk about poetry, Christ, his friend Puppet, and stare at each other. He gave me an abalone shell I wear as a necklace. I used to just wear it on a string around my neck and then I found an old chain and two old silver  engraved beads and I drilled a tiny hole in the shell because the one natural hole I had been using, finally broke through. I keep it now in a small gold box with our names written inside. Then I got paid for reading twenty minutes, and I went to a jewelry store and bought an honest-to-god sterling sliver chain that the abalone hole was big enough for the chain to go through.

When I was a little older we found ourselves in summer school together. I was always failing math, and one day he took my photograph at La Palma Park, Anaheim, which I still have. My son will put it up in this here blog for me someday he tells me. Oh, that summer of everyday in his presence! I remember one day in junior high, a clique-y cheerleader type made fun of him mending a hole in his black stovepipe 501 jeans with white thread and I bristled like the little wife I considered myself. I defended him, I believe I might have punched her if she didn't quit her teasing, but I believe she saw the glint in my eye...


We'd meet at bible studies on school nights at cheap apartments across the main street from me and I would I dream about him even though I am married to a good man who has saved my life so many times. (I have had a heart condition since I was ten years old.) I love Daniel and am faithful to him, but he understands. He had  lost a companion of twenty years who was afraid of doctors and so died of ovarian cancer perhaps six month before we met. He once told me that anyone with the cool name of Destry James deserved to be loved by one of America's best poets. My dear husband thinks that well of me and I am filled with gratitude.

I have nearly died so many times that my only real goals are to make sure Destry gets his papers back before I do die. If I am lucky to have someday done that and had more than four chapbooks published and a number of CDs with musicians behind my words, I will feel my life is complete.  Also an almost 200 page book of thirty stories about an eleven year old girl named Redbud Jane who lived in a trailerpark. I used up a lot of years raising two fine boys, raising them the way my mother never never seemed to have had time to raise us. Long chapter books at night, art projects on raining days. We had a thicket behind the Victorian and we played Elf Quest back there, costumes made of bits of fur and leather; beads and colorful string, exotic cloth from foreign counties via the thrift store of a hippie county, Mendocino.

When the ability to recognize a soul mate comes over one like a rush of waterfalls or silent tears, I believe it's a terrible tragedy to ignore those feelings. That's why I've never forgotten Destry James nor turned away after the poetry reading in Gualala when Daniel said he wanted to talk about my poems. I would have missed out on  all these years of companionship. We be going on thirty years pert'near.