Diary of a Magpie Woman

Almost Like an Easter Egg Hunt

2010-07-05T23:28:00.001-07:00

Quite some time ago we moved to this caboose from an eight room 168 year old log cabin on three hundred plus acres out in the deep woods. It was a hard decision to make, but my heart was pushing me to get closer to an ER. During the move, it was snowing and the guys, all six of them, they made me stay in the cabin next to the wood stove and stay warm. I realized after they left with the stuff in a huge U-Haul truck that they didn't want the "the little woman" organizing this last detail. I would have made three rows of boxes and with all my typed labels facing out so that I could read them and get the right box if I needed something. Well, the guys just threw the stuff in and that was that seemingly forever. I lost a whole box of poetry. I wasn't sure it was even in the storage unit we had rented. Well, last night I found a crucial ms I had been working on for five years. I kissed the pages and went leaping (bad mistake) out to Dan's writing room with the pages. We were so relieved. This was years of research before even putting a finger to a typewriter. I spent days in the reference library taking notes about the tribe of native Americans who lived in our valley before it became so brutally our valley. Then I had to decide on a format-how did I want this historical to appear on the page? Whose voice did I want to use? Another whole year of finding out all these pieces of information, before I could even put one finger down on the good ol' Remington Rand. Not electric. Now that I've found it, all these pages and pages of story, I can transfer them into the computer, back it up on disc and print out hard copy. And then of course, continue writing the history of one place, many people, much time. But it's work I love to do; it's my bent in life. I haven't gone through the whole box yet. I was so happy to find just this single ms. Another day, another hunting venture.

In Washing the BirdBath, The Birds Now Bathe

2010-06-23T14:31:00.000-07:00

The tiger lilies are open in their funny little turban hats. I used to hate the color orange and tiger lilies have made me love it, in all its different shades. I took my digital camera and got right smack into the face of the lily and snapped! it's portrait, you might say. I did the same thing with a poppy.
The bird bath I cleaned out yesterday has had two visitors today: a Roufus-Sided Towhee and a Western Flycatcher. Maybe I'll write more later.

"Don't Need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows..." Bob Dylan

2010-06-21T04:03:00.000-07:00

Damn cold in the shade, frisky hot in the sun. There seems to be no spring this year, no oh holy spring of pixies and fairies and the playing of telephone with the foxglove blossoms....After church I shifted goatshit from one bed to another and watered everything down mixin' it up with the little lady-like pitchfork, because to use any of those good manly efficient tools sends me to bed for at least a day with swollen up vertabraes and muscles twitching and jumping, "Let's do the Twist, let's do the Mermaid and Twist and Shout in the bathtub while the watering runs on my soreness and I have to close the door and cry baby cry wishing wondering why did we move in here without remembering to check if there was a bathtub or not? Fools, I say, damn fools. But it IS a caboose and charming as heck when the weather is perfect and I'm wearing a sundress, (my genius friend Cynthia with the sewing hands took my feather weight Singer and a Ralph Lauren pattern and we're changin' them around here and there and making six summer frocks all different by adding rick rack here and lace there and I found some old white cotton bloomers as gossamer as those faery wings and we're gonna make a pattern for more bloomers and petticoats to wear under the frocks and, slap a straw hat on our heads and our bleached pink converse, no laces (thanks Zaby *vogue mag*) and man, we're gonna hit every lemonade stand in town and make the six year olds rich as howard hughes..

We emptied out our storage unit and gonna have the biggest best-est come-one-come-all yard sale this side of the Tahachapis and that'll save $92 ducats a month. Then I had the great idea of savin' more money by Daniel growin' his hair out again like Rex did AT cHURCH and Erin braids it every morning before he goes out to split wood or clean out the spring box wearing his khaki kilt cuz he can work his butt off in it and then jump into the outdoor shower when he's done with all his garden chores, just by unbucklin' a few pieces of leather, tearin' off his Tshirt and unlacin' his loggin' boots. (i have Dan's first braid, a foot long, in the Victorian Curio Cabinet inside the stray pieces of Great Aunt May's china pieces, wrapped around itself inna dessert bowl of that cobalt blue design on white,which was my great grandmother Nellie's (glorious!)and vireo nests with dried up inside eggs and arrowheads the Boy found in the meadow by settin' down (ouch!). There are so many treasures in that cabinet that I'm already making out my will who wants what, rather than who I want who to have what. Like it was a cinch to know that my niece Asia Renee ought to become the owner of my Sir James Barrie collection because she loves Peter Pan like I do and she wouldn't sell "Peter and Wendy" just because it's worth over $400. She's smart as a whip knowin' that with three girls in the house, that the money would disappear in two grocery shoppings and then she couldn't read it to her girls come winter nights. I have so many precious books that really aren't worth an arm and a leg but they are dee-lish for lovin' yr girls and boys with at night when everyone clean and in clean P.J.s, tucked in bed and listenin' to the Adventures of oh so many heros and heroines. So can ya see why it's nye on impossible, but I'm havin' the Will noterized tomorrow so that everyone gets o' chunk of Mimi to remember and love her by just in case my heart goes worse. And I had fun doin' it!

Madonna Blue

2010-06-07T18:02:00.000-07:00

Can there be anything prettier than a western bluebird nest with three madonna blue eggs inside the crevice? But wait...something's wrong with this picture...What's in that nest used as material for making a warm bed for the eggs, but a bit of plastic? Humanity has brought its ugliness and danger into the planet again. Once I saw a video of a shredded blue plastic tarp in a nest. (they shred in the sun quite easily from the heat.) It was wrapped around a baby bird's leg and as the bird grew, the tarp string grew tighter and tighter and the leg had to be amputated as it had grown gangrenous, all because some humans didn't fold up their tarps and put them away at the end of winter and let the sunshine into the pile of wood they were keepin' dry. The people didn't know about it until it was too late or they would have cut the tarp piece off sooner. I'm so embarrassed by the human race at times. It makes me bow my head in shame.

When both my sons were eight, they had the burning need to rebel and I had raised them to NOT litter. They are eight and a half years apart and ironically, both of them at eight, decided to rebel. We had a family policy of candy on Saturdays only and "no littering" and they both decided to break both policies. Then they looked at me, as if to say, "And what are you gonna do about that,huh, Mimi? So I sat down on the curb, which you could do back in the seventies and mid-eighties and said, 'Rest my dogs right here until you pick up the wrapper and then we'll walk on home' and they saw how serious I was, so they picked up their trash and we went home. It's a good story to remember cuz this way I can tell the grandkids when they come along.

The Garden of Bit and Pieces

2010-06-07T17:51:00.000-07:00

When we first moved to the Caboose on Catherine Lane, the backyard was filled with plantain lily, clover, crab grass and other ugly "weeds" with intense root systems. We roto-tilled it twice, the second time digging sheep manure into the soil and soon, after several more tillings, I could pick up a handful of chocolate birthday cake and let it crumble through my fingers. It was wonderful and smelled liked the beautiful loam of an old garden, even though it wasn't. Old, I mean. It was an ugly lawn turned into "potential". I had brought small pots of this and that from my old garden up String Creek, but I was still in the 'keeping them in the shade' stage and watering them, while I decided what I wanted the garden to look like. Our caboose was at the end of a lane that was easy enough to block off because I had spoken with one of the men on the city planning commission and I had known him for twenty years. He said, "Robin, Catherine Lane is last on the list and the list is long. The City just doesn't have the money to fix the ruts in the road or fill in the potholes for several years, I'm sorry to say." I held my glee inside and said to him, "Oh, it's ok Dave, I just wanted to know where we stood in the scheme of things. I'll manage alright." And he actually thanked me for being understanding, little knowing I took his words for permission to go right ahead and make my wishes come as true as I could make them on my small pension.
I began by collecting stones and rocks and drawing out on graph paper some ideas. I had never done a garden this way. Always before I was so organic I didn't know where I was gonna put one stone after the other. I just carried stones to an area, dropped them in a pile and began laying them out. But this time, I knew I had to have a plan, because the garden area was so small. By the end of the afternoon and heading straight into twilight, I had made six beds measured out three on each side, north and south and in the middle, I placed a stone bird bath that i poured seed into. I had a fountain that I placed over by the windows that opened into our bedroom and after filling it with water and turning the pump on, water came spurting out of a stone pine cone which sat on top of the wide saucer (yes, very Grecian) and three wonderfully naked ladies, the Graces of course, danced around and around holding up the saucer with their arms. I had found the bird seed holder at a thrift store and the water fountain at a garden hardware store and its price had been knocked down to a third because someone had broken one of the Grace's feet. I decided since I was lame, my Grace could be lame just as well, and bought it.

My brother began a tradition of sending me a gift certificate for a hundred dollars to a local nursery to help me actualize my dreams and when I was at someone's house for a garden party, I always sat next to a bed of something growing, and as we talked, I would absent-minded weed that bed. After a while, the host of the party would notice what I was doing, and I would apologize. It's just that I'm shy and parties are hard on me and I like to keep my hands busy. They always joke about they feel they should pay me and I always reply, "Can I have a piece of whatever it is I've just been weeding?" and they always say yes in gratitude and thus, the garden grows. I cannot believe it's been ten years that I've lived in the caboose, come down off the mountain and made my home again, anew, it seems I am always starting over again and again. Twice I have been in two different places for fifteen years. I was shocked both times that I had to move. I could move out of this dear little caboose, but it would have to be into something a bit bigger and definitely have garden space. One birthday years ago I bought a quarter flat of corsican mint and it has finally after planting many thumb sized plugs of the sweet-smelling stuff, taken over most of the dirt in between the garden plots which ended up being made of brick one birthday. I buy a dwarf fruit tree every year and the bartlett pear actually has pears on it this year. The strawberries are massive and I cut their stringers and plant the new little plants in other places, so that I now have several borders of the fruit. My fox glove are seven, eight feet tall and the other day I saw a fat ol' furry bumbley bumble bee inside a 'glove'. I put my ear up to the glove and I could hear him buzzing away. Gardens make me happy.

This is the first year that I haven't been able to pull every single weed out of it for a fresh look. That hurts me more than the lame part does, but I simply can't do it. I weed fifteen minutes, rest, do another small amount, until I have done about an hours worth of work and then I have to go lie down. It's so disappointing. I couldn't afford seed or starts this year and I panicked. The Gleaners, a town group who collects food at the end of the season has now started selling plants. I don't know what for, the money, but I went over to their sale after church and just straight out said I have no money this year and if I don't put some vegetables in, we won't have anything to put by for winter and they said, take whatever you want and someone will drive you home. I was so happy. I hadn't expected a free lunch. I had expected a trade at the least. So I got a great deal of tomatoes, summer squash, some white currants (I grow red currants, so this will be interesting), dill, cilantro, I am not remembering what else right now, but it was a windfall. People around the world call America the richest country in the world and I just don't see it that way lately. It's a little frightening.But things are looking up and last month I was given three ever-bearing raspberries that I'm pretty sure I wrote about, and they are thriving. Also my snow peas are climbing their way up to the end of their ladder and I'm going to have to add more climbing stuff. I want to get some eggplants, because then I will be able to make ratatouille and freeze it for the cold snowy nights.The cherry trees in my neighbor yard are groaning and sagging with cherries and me and the man next door intend on fighting off the blue jays this year and getting some to jam and jelly up. Oh yes, and PIE!

Roses are going crazy all over town. And so are the foxgloves. Everything is big big big. And I know why. It's still raining. I don't know if it's because of that hole in the sky, global warming, none of it makes any sense to me, but if this is the end ecologically, it's sure puttin' on a mighty spectacular show in the natural world in our neck of the woods.

A Restless Song

2010-06-02T01:10:00.000-07:00

They were twitchy, the horses;
late moonlight braiding their manes with shadows of spindly trees.
I watched them with my face leaning on my elbows at the windowsill
‘til I couldn’t sit there in the room any more
breathing in the hobbled horses, the pastures, sucking up the air
of western dreams I was born to be part of, no matter
my upturned wooden box under a bridge in eastern Europe.
My town was across a sea, and I was headin’ back this evening.
So what you hadn’t received my letter yet.
My suitcase bangin’ at yr door day after tomorrow
would be the envelope and my face the postmark.
You’d know just by lookin’ at me,
I was yrs for the keepin’, you just had to say yes.

Dawn happened and I settled my satchel on my shoulders,
walked down flights of stairs where
history was made on every single step
between now and three hundred years ago.
The breadman lifted his basket and the tabac squeezed coffee
through everyone’s nostrils like alarm clocks.
All that history wasn’t just war. Some of it was wedding shoes.

The horses shoved their huge faces into mine as I raised my throat
to their eyes and rubbed the bald marks where the straps
had shaved their shoulders of hair.
Soon enough the panniers would settle
down into the grooves and be loaded up for market.
I pulled their manes through my hands
and stood there talkin’ to them while I braided a bracelet
chock full of memories and a cuppla beads from my earrings.
These gypsy horses were my brothers
and the man who led them through the streets to market, well,
I coulda stayed, shared his bed for longer than I had,
but there was an ocean with yr name on it somewhere,
like a ticket under the waves, as if the sea foam
was a brand on the ponies’ asses
I had to ride: my antiquated surfboard.

The rock salt on the baker’s bagels
was the sea on the back of my throat;
I shared the last chunk of bread
with these my brothers and chased the tears
from my face with tangled manes.
I was born to travel with these men,
their wives, their horses, but yr face kept calling me back
to a country so civilized it was barbaric and I shuddered to think
how I was trading pony bells for car horns, the squeal of brakes.
I slipped on the bracelet, shook my fist to the western skies
and climbed up the embankment to streets,
to that civilization I scorned.

I turned one last time to memorize the horses, the bridge, when
I saw the man I had lived with many months, slam open the door
to his wagon and run after me, his face, struck by lightening
as he sees me leaving. The knowledge of this
is too much for either of us.
It is a distance, but we both can see
the tears on each other: rain and thunder.

A Eulogy, A Celebration

2010-05-27T01:50:00.000-07:00

Today I received in the mail my late husband's letters and scientific treatises on ethno-botany and the shamanic implications of the plants' hallucinations, by a professor he had grown up with and wrote to.My late husband was a genius.He was also schizophrenic.He was quiet about it. He had no social skills even before the schizophrenia exhibited itself.But he was fascinating to listen to.It came upon him as a late teen and it frightened him. He had no social skills, but he knew so much and shared,amazed people.Then people came to notice something was wrong.Finally his father.His father was not a sensitive man,but he was also a scientist.
When my not-yet-husband graduated high school and went out on his own, he actually was able to get a job at the post office,which was a very good thing, because when the illness became full blown,his income put him at a high rank on the SSI,or disability,
list for a big check each month. Even then,I read in these letters, there was often not enough $ for food the whole month and he ate at church dinners for the homeless. I have been reading a time capsule:it is so painful.The photograph at the top of the entry is one I have treasured:I have just given birth to our son.My husband's face was so full of love and awe.I treasure the photo,wanted to share it,because so many people have misconceptions about schizophrenia and think that the ill person is always "out of it".My husband was often very clear and brilliant.When word salad popped out of his mouth,it made us giggle.It also frightened him.I did what I could to assure him.It frightened me as well, but not as much as the violence.

I spent all that rainy day in bed with these letters,essays,listening to the storm, listening to the ghostly sobs of a boy who very few people understood. I was reading a foreign language.I had a dictionary of madness compiled by myself through time, but it was incomplete,the grammar only went so far and emotional dangling participles often confused a concept.My poor boy couldn't even speak sometimes and it frightened him into deeper terror and a broken spirit for a time.

In reading these letters, essays,I piled on more woolen clothes,I shivered with compassion and fierceness: why didn't they notice sooner. Why'd they expect thank you notes every time his family sent him $100,a $20.Madness does not understand thank you notes.Madness writes operas of gratitude, but it is rare they get through the mouth to the givers' ear. Schizophrenics don't have stamps very often. The govt. doesn't send money enough to pay the rent. When I had to leave with the baby, (listen, I had no choice.)he had to eat at the local catholic church which served meals monday through saturday. What do the mad do on Sunday? He moved into town after burning his/our cabin down around himself,scarring himself terribly. That what they do. They are not good cooks I think.He was in the burn unit for months.

Madness is rude, violent, it cries in yr arms when you are soo tired from going out in the forest to collect firewood, cleaning out the wood stove, hauling water to the garden...madness doesn't know any better. He didn't know he should be doing it instead of me; he was lost in a barrage of shouting, whispering voices of command. I tried to let that not make a difference.But I was young.In reading these papers I felt so bad for all the places I failed. Im sorry I can't hold him now,right now,and tell him, I discovered the alchemical process by which to"kiss and make it better".But I haven't discovered it yet.I've only grown old enough to discover compassion and patience.

I've read Lisie's Story by Stephen King. I know the violence first hand of madness. But I had to leave.He would steal my clothes, my shoes, every time he caught me trying.

At first there were nights I found myself suddenly awake in my own studio flat 150 miles away in Berkeley again, (where we'd met years before when i was still a teen), just out of dream-time, a baby in arms, or strapped across my chest or along side my shoulders,my side of ribs, barefoot, wearing a holey T shirt,nothing below,just young downy legs splattered with tattoos and mud, a cold butt because it's the beginning of February, but there's no moon and therefore no shadows..I am walking, walking, down a dirt road with crooked fences on each side and that startling bird sound that mimics a wild cat...I am getting away, away, as far as I can, I am fast-walking.I am crying.I am missing him already. I am crazed in my own way, but not enough to stay.This child is the sanity which allows me to disappear.

I raised two sons to who I also had to say, I don't know how to make it better, but let's cuddle and when they were older and told me they were too big to cuddle, I'd say, " let's make cookies, let's go out in the valley and I'll let you drive that long stretch where no cars come"..anything to make them feel better,as if I were making up for the inability to cure mental illness, give my oldest boy,the genius son, back his genius father. I am hoping thats what happens when I give him these papers after I've copied them for the professor: I hope he hears the Good Father who always stopped before the violence came out to the baby. Except once. And that once is why I had to leave. You don't shake babies,even if they are crying for hours.It's a dangerous practice to push that little brain pan around inside that still soft cranium. I guess what his own violent and cruel father taught him was that violence works as a fear tactic on women and babies: they were for taking out yr own frustration out on. What he didn't know was I grew up on that. I knew all about that first hand from one parent and her husband. I am no stranger to violence. I tried to teach my sons that violence is no answer, and they being sane, know this is true. My sons are beautiful, intelligent, gentle and fierce in their own sane ways. There is so much to be grateful for, as I grieve the loss of one less genius in a world full of idiots, angry monsters with guns and wars to fight. He played dulcimer when it got too hard to hear me over the head-voices.My late husband knew in his heart that violence was wrong,but the voices in his head were louder than the beating of his own heart.Those voices took over like robotic monsters inside his skull so he couldnt hear his heart sing.He longed to hear the Gloria of his own heart, his paen to God and the Universe inside each tiny wild flower, fingers splashing across dulcimer strings singing latin botanica as if poetry. I wished I wasn't the only one who could hear the joy as he played and grinned at me over the instrument. I wished the whole world could hear the beauty of his heart and head, all healthy and happy, a married man, a father, a learned scholar, living in a shiny clean cabin where the only shadows were made by candles as the evening deepened into night.
Good night John, sweet dreams and G-d Bless.

The Rapture of Creativity

2010-05-20T17:47:00.000-07:00

The show at the Willits Art Center is comprised of three artists, two Painters and something I am not sure of, that looks like paper machied bottles and I am not interested in them by any means. They remind me vaguely of an elementary class project. But the paintings!
These two artists have caught the everyday chores of washing cracked plates and stacking them slant-wise in a home-made wooden dish drainer, painted flowers in a vase I felt I could smell lush all over my skin, a woman sunning herself in color...These paintings held our County, our way of living, our muse the same way the Poets long ago translated Mendocino County into syllables and consonants and breath that make the vowel sounds of water from ocean to creek that disappears in July or August.

The only thing missing in the completion of Mendocino County's own unique language is in the music arena. Raggae and Celtic tunes belong to their own islands. The Farmer's Market Band and Redbud are the closest, so far, to capturing the sound of Mendocino County that is slowly and sometimes at the speed of lightening, creating our own heartbeat. What Tamson Donner and Caroline Hawley have done with paint is by no means lost in translation. Their work is the song of the land and the song of 'country living' that doesn't mean C and W. Those paintings are 'just home' and I am grateful I was allowed the honor of seeing it, almost crawling into the different canvases and making myself, well, at home....the only thing missing was a turned down radio back in some room playing tunes I had never heard before,except in Redbud and at the Market; never heard outside my own d.n.a. , never listened to in the heart's beat where the drums mix in with the bass and the low notes on the concertina. I long for Mendonesia to have their own music, their own angelic hipster sound, as Kerouac would say,and 'with a trace of Country Joe and the Fish for sweet sloppiness mixed in a kinda Fair Port Convention and all the poets giving their words. It's a dream I've had since moved here almost 36 years. But my friends say let the musicians sound like they want. YOU like the sound you just described. What I want to say is a mixture of all those components of music mixed with each others' themes,would be our sound, because we have different background. It's a circus up here, I tell ya.

Mother's Day Presence

2010-05-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know what Mother's Day represents in Scotland or England, but here in America the holiday began as a peace movement, which tickles me no end. I began a peace movement here in our small town in the early eighties called Willits Working For Peace and we still stand every Friday night in front of our hospital holding candles when it's dark and hands when it's summer. We have silk screened banners that say Peace in different languages and all but the english one are in tatters. It's time to make new ones. We have a main banner that lists the troop deaths of both sides and it is a clarion for peace. Here is what I paraphrased from Google about Mother's Day

The earliest activity for Mother's Day was the meeting of mothers whose sons had died in the Civil War. There were several celebrations in 1870 and 1880, but none achieved resonance beyond the local level. In 1868 Ann Jarvis created a committee to establish a "Mother's Friendship Day" whose purpose "was to re-unite families that had been divided during the Civil War" and she wanted to extend it into an annual memorial for mothers, but she died in 1905 before she saw her dream realized. Her daughter Anna Marie Jarvis, following the death of her mother on May 9, 1905, with the help of a Philadelphia merchant called John Wanamaker began making a celebration for peace coupled with honoring mothers at the time. A small service was held May 12 1907. Anna Marie campaigned for Mother's day to become a national day and later, am international holiday.

Julia Ward Howe made a day of celebration called Mother's Day for Peace in 1872. I feel like I've belonged to a group of women pushing for peace for a long time. I first became aware of a peace movement when I was fifteen in 1972. The Viet Nam conflict would end very soon and as young people, my friends and I became aware of the troubles in Bangladesh, in Ireland, wanting to do something to make these wars, conflicts, killing and starving of people go away. I became a member of a peace group and while I left Southern California soon after graduating high school early for Berkeley, I stayed dedicated to working for peace and moving to Berkeley when I was eighteen made that easier where there were many dedicated groups already.

I didn't know the connection between peace groups and mother's day until a few years ago. I had raised my sons with the belief that mother's day was just a hallmark greeting card holiday. If I had known then, when they were young that it was really part of the peace movement, I would have had more opportunity to share my peace beliefs with them and train them to think "Peace" instead of, "a day to buy mother a present ". Also, when they were young neither son understood
why I occasionally practiced civil disobedience and went to jail for my beliefs. I would have had a better chance to talk to them if I had had the knowledge to tie mother's day in with demonstrating for peace. Nils has created his own small group of 20 something and high school students to demonstrate in Willits while the adults stand in front of the hospital with our candles and peace banners.

For mother's day this year, Nils came over and worked on my blog writing down complete instructions on how to put photographs on posts. I only hope this techno-moron can follow his directions. He and his lady came over in the late afternoon as I stood watering the vegetable greens garden and we had a lovely talk about all that I just wrote about. Earlier in the afternoon my daughter-in-law came over with a miniature rose plant. If any of you have read Rumer Godden books, receiving this small rose is reminiscent of her book "An Episode of Sparrows" which I first read when I was eleven and now, having my own copy, have read over and over. Kate is such a loving young woman and doesn't just give a gift she wants to give, but something she knows the receiver would want. And she's uncanny in her choices. My day was wonderful beginning with church and ending with mucking in the garden when everyone went home.
***************
I tried after Nils left to put a photo of my garden to go with this post, and of course it wouldn't work even though i followed all the instructions he wrote down. sigh...

The FleaMarket

2010-05-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

I spent the last two days at a craft fair-flea market selling my wares, which this time consisted of small ikons on two by three inch canvases, nature-themed; and dioramas in old cigar boxes. One I truly love and didn't sell has a nest and eggs that never hatched, small bits of poetry, and a porcelan doll's head the same size as a redstart's egg. I put the whole nest of the redstart and two eggs in the box, then, I found amongst my broken jewelry a gold-toned leaf about two inches long and I pinned that into the nest as if it it were wind-blown. Last year I pressed and dried a lot of feverfew and so I entwined a number of these into the nest as well. I have a series of antique bird studies and I color copied them all, so the redstart is standing on her nest and then I found in a dictionary from the late 1800s, a study of the cukoo bird and the story of how the cukoo always kicks an egg out of another bird's nest and lays one of her own in its place, so I placed the doll's head which is egg-shaped and so delicate and faintly colored, with the other eggs and it looked just like I meant it to. All the cigar boxes have slots for a wooden cover and I took them out and had them replaced with glass.

My foxglove dropped so much seed last year that I couldn't harvest and it's coming up , so I've troweled them up into four by four pots and sold them for fifty cents. I wish my son would come over and teach me how to put photographs on my blog, so I could show you all this talk. It's so beautiful, all these images...

I traded a larger ikon of a study on Wallace Stevens' poem "Ten Ways of Looking At A Blackbird" for an apron with appliques on it and a quilt from the thirties with very few torn squares.The woman wanted to do the trade so very much, I could tell she hadn't much money. It's pattern was the postage stamp. I hope I can fix them. I wish I could send it to my mother, it's something she would adore, but that's one of the grievances of being an orphan.

Listening to vendors and customers around me barter was a show. I have never done that before.
I laughed with my neighbor vendor about it and she said, "I love it; the customer loves it and it makes the day go." So when I was all packed up and my husband was putting my things in the back of the truck, I took five dollars and walked the faire. I hadn't had time before. I was determined to learn how to barter and I did! A woman had an antique lace collar with white thin thin gloves that had a thin line of brilliantines up the center of the back of the hand and they fit, but both items are stained. Now, I'm an expert at getting stains out, using a lot of old fashioned remedies, depending on what the stain looks like, so she wanted $5 and I didn't want to pay five plus do all the work and besides, I only had five, I wanted to play awhile. So I pointed out the stains and I said, "How about three?" She went for it. Success on my first attempt. Then I found a brass cigarette case which are excellent for making small handmade books in and the woman wanted a dollar, but it was definately too much, so I just walked away. She said before I got far, she would take fifty cents. Sold! This is fun I thought to myself. The final thing I bought was a small plastic (boo) baggie of broken jewelry which is what i like the best. And then I was out of money. The jewelry guy said, "I just undersold my daughter stuff, she's gonna kill me." I replied, "Yeah, but yr doin' her work" and he said back, "Yeah, while she's gone to get me a cup of coffee." That one I felt a little off about, but I had already made the deal, and maybe that's his way of working, to play Eoyore...

It was a strange day of hot and cold and windy. One poor man had two small wardrobes standing up and one sold for a hundred dollars and the wind knocked it backward, breaking it terribly. The woman wanted her money back. Of course he gave it to her. It was too battered to think it could be fixed. What a shame when history and hand-crafted work is destroyed in an instant.

I was glad to come home. Each day I only made fifty or sixty dollars and we need so much more. But at least my check from the college library came for the poetry reading. That hundred ducats shall come in mighty handy. I hate worrying about money. I'd rather be like the lilies and neither toil nor spin and NOT WORRY. We're down to twenty lbs of short grain brown rice, though I have about 20 packs of rice noodles. Discovering how to cook Thai which is a rice based culture has made having Celiac's a whole lot easier. I think after church tomorrow I will take a very long nap to make up for having to get up at six two mornings in a row and haul ass down in the truck to the sale lot. It's a rough way to make a living when yr as beat up as my body is, though I'm not complaining. I'm not! I'd much rather do this hunt and peck than go back to teaching, which I loved, but just couldn't take in the long hours any more with this body.

In a week or two I think I read in Sacramento and that will be a good help as well. Well, I've talked myself into feeling better and now to b-e-d.

Found Writing in Large Satchel of Papers

2010-05-07T01:40:00.000-07:00

Last night I stumbled through the raked, but not yet taken away maple leaves and so when I rolled my bike through them, there was a sodden crunch to the journey. I love Autumn, with all its inconveniences. As I stand out on the back porch drinking a cup of homegrown herbal tea after my long ride, I hear the last of the geese overhead flying south away from our harsh winter.

I imagine them standing on the steps of Mayan temples and chanting the prayers of summer through their beaks. I imagine them making long string of feathers in the channels of water that wind through jungles and each feather is etched with the name of a minor god who speaks the name of the One God with pleasure and delight.

All this comes onto the backsides of my eyelids as I listen to the wind blow through the maples, as if they were strange reeds in those waterways. And I too listen with pleasure and delight, as if there will never be another thing to do. And right now, there is nothing else to do when the darkness falls and the star-pricked night is a blanket we cover ourselves up with.

For there is no denying it is Autumn and it is too cold to do anything in the evenings after the clocks change except lie under that blanket and find new ways to fashion love, new ways to braid our hair together like a Chinese puzzle we cannot escape from until Spring opens up her head crocus-style, fortune-cookie style and gives us a little hallelujah of sunshine.

First Day of Summer

2010-05-03T02:52:00.000-07:00

True to calendar, the first day of summer has finally brought us warmish windy weather. Everyone is happy but me. I wanted there to be some cool spring-ish days that would make me feel like a slightly ruffled petticoat in the wind. I wanted to lie on the church lawn and find animals in the clouds, moles poking their noses outta the earth so whipped by large hands and rose-shaped snouts, that it was loamy and ready to receive seed the way some earth and seed mingle together like a pat of butter in a bowl of hot cereal.

I've brought eight foot tall foxglove stalks into the house to put in three foot vases, six foot tiger lilies on stalks in as well. The caboose is over-whelmed with flowers as if it were a funeral, but it's beautiful. Now, I'm not Tinkerbelle, but neither am I the dancing hippos in the Fantasia, and I carefully got in bed holding my laptop with one hand, so I could relax after working all day and ker-rash! the bed Daniel just rebuilt collapsed underneath me! I thought it was me, but he hadn't screwed the slats down to the main bottom frame of the bed and some extracurricular wriggling had loosened the boards from the main place and they just slid off their place and down onto the floor. Happy Solstice!

Smokin' Nights

2010-04-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

So, It's midnight. I've been working cleaning up the studio for hours, getting ready for another show. My spine is killing me, so I go outside to have a smoke. The cat is going wild, the dog next door, Bodi, is chasing a mother raccoon and I'm hearing squeak squeak squeak. Very unhappy babies on one side of a fence and mama on the other side running for dear life up the Baptist Church steps all the while I'm holding onto the dog collar and telling the mother she can come back now and I drop the matches...Some nights nothing goes quite right.

Why do I say yes to everything? Yes to a poetry recording in Sacramento and then a reading the second night. Yes to an art exhibit (sales allowed!!) in three weeks. Can this be done? I am not sure. But I say YES! because I never know how close Mistah Death is. It's just that simple. Heart meds, spine meds, Muse meds? Wouldn't that be nice to dial up the Muse and get lucky and write the best poem ever instead of drafting and re-drafting all night long, even if I do like it?
Good night.

A Lasting Man

2010-04-11T01:18:00.000-07:00

This seems to be the year of death for me. Another friend of mine died in Hawaii while snorkeling, he had a heart attack and didn't survive. Yesterday afternoon his brother and wife had a memorial for him at their home and it was packed, for he was a Willits Boy at 60, eternal boy of genius and thought and movement. He was an artist and had had lithos made of his pen and ink nature renditions. He could make a buffalo look like it was traveling off the page, a bunny appear to leap from the white it was drawn on.

I am proud to say I began him on his journey as an artist. He lived a while with my husband and I. We had a fourteen room Victorian and often had people stay in a spare room. We sat one summer day under the plum orchard and he said, "I wish I could draw. I wish I could set down on paper what I see inside." I quietly got up and went into my studio, returning with a box of new oil pastels, a pad of good paper and a pencil with sharpener. He grinned when I put them in his hands. He pulled his chair up to a wine barrel filled with blooming blue penstemon and began. I have the original hanging near a chair I like to sit in to catch the light to read by.

At the memorial, his brother or sister-in-law had laid out copies and copies of lithos of various animals and botanicals and at the bottom, a basket full of note cards with envelopes. I took perhaps five packs of a nest and eggs of mine he had drawn so beautifully. I had made in the late eighties wreaths for Christmas presents one year and one was a heart with delicate pastel flowers I had dried from the garden and hung on our door. He drew that too and called it Robin's Heart. I didn't know it, but his brother had the original which Drexell had colored it and Mike gave me that as well as three remarkable pieces that Drexell had promised me years ago of poets or philosophers and quotes of their work: Karl Marx, Allen Ginsberg, Jean-Paul Sartre. They were so surreal and I love them with my whole heart. I encouraged him to do more of those. I believed that genre was where his world acknowledgment would come from. I already had a few from various birthdays, one of Rilke and one of Bob Dylan and Milton. Quite a wonderful collection.

But what struck me the most were those simple notecards. I was sorry I hadn't taken more. I envisioned, just a half an hour ago , in that twilight place between wake and sleep, having more packets of them and giving them to various people for the holidays. I had to get up from bed and write this out. I saw Drexell all over the world. Like he had drawn an astonishingly sexy Iris which I thought I should send a packet to Zaby in New York because she is one of those people who is not afraid of her own sexuality, a packet of violets to my friend Betsy in San Bernardino because "The Secret Garden" is one of her favorite books and violets grew in the garden and Mary weeded it first in order to make the Garden. When he first had those cards made up from the originals I bought dozens because I had the money and I sent them to my mother, my aunt, different friends. I saw in that waking-sleeping place, my friends sending those cards to their friends one at a time, all over the world until Drexell's spirit was all over the world and he would never die in the sense of a regular person. He was not a Picasso, but I believe on a more simple level he could continue in the memories of many many people simply by them receiving a note card with a loving message on them. I was at peace finally and knew when I finished writing this that I could go to bed and not toss and turn. I saw in living colors even though he worked primarily in blacknwhite, a rainbow of my friend reaching from one continent to another.

...beggarman, thief

2010-04-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to write about this, but I keep having re-occurring flashbacks, and that tells me i need to get it out of my system. Last week I was robbed. It wasn't a lot of money, I never have a lot of money. I had just cashed my disability check (heart condition and spinal injury)and I paid the water bill at $37 (which I thought was a bit high for rainy weather,) bought a hundred dollars worth of food, which left me $70 ducats and change.
I was in a thrift store which is just around the corner and I am like a cousin cuz I'm always dropping by for this or that or nothing, but a howdy. I took the five dollars worth of clothes and fabric to the counter which was three steps from the fitting room where my purse was and a woman went in to try on some clothes, saw my open wallet (I'm an idiot, i admit it) and took it. I saw it all in a blinding flash and grabbed her hand as she came out of the fitting room. I said to her, "That's mine, you know it, so give it back.". She, of course argued and wouldn't let go. I saw the tracks on her arm and saw the need in her face for a fix, so I knew I was the stronger. I could not go home with nothing. I couldn't do that to my husband who takes care of me so well. It would have been a failure in personal responsibility. So I hung on. I told her I used to be married to the town judge and it would be easy to find her, (I recited the car's license plate # at her) and in that moment, she faltered and I got back fifty dollars. I demanded the last twenty, but she was just seeing a fix. I just couldn't get it out of her hand. I told the thrift store women to call the police. They came, not fast enough because, come on, it was just a thrift store, but they came. I explained what happened. He took me more serious when I came to the judge part. (I hate using that damn piece of info. I feel like I'm cheating. Name-dropping. But I'm so poor, I had to get the money.) I ended up losing that last twenty. The policeman turned out to be Vice. He said I could report it, but I would have to appear in court. I told him physically, I couldn't sit that long, so for $20 I was gonna have to let it go. He was so nice to me, I was almost in tears. But it was the first time ever in my life I stood up for myself and didn't let it go. All my life I have let people tell me it's my fault (i know this one was, but...), that I'm wrong, that I'm a failure, that I won't amount to much, that I'm too dramatic, that I betray, (I don't) but getting this money back made me feel so proud of myself. We live on $1,172 a month. My husband does odd jobs that amount to about a thousand. I didn't get it all back, but I felt strong getting back what I did. The women around me were weak, and didn't know what to do. They were of an older generation than me. I stood around in shock til I yelled call the the cops. It's not their fault. It';s how they were raised. I love them, but I wish they had helped me physically. I was sore in my muscles for so many days afterward.
It was such an ugly dance how we were locked in each others' arms, because I would not let go, I wouldn't let her go out of the store and flee. The man she was with told me her name and I recognized it as a trouble-family in our town. Violent, drug-takers, guns, knives, shouting, beating women kind of hurtful people. I had compassion, but it wasn't on the top layer of my skin. It was underneath where I pray. And interestingly enough, I didn't pray that I can recall that whole time. I don't know why. Usually I pray in the moment. She ran before the policeman came and I let the twenty go. But it's been on my mind this whole time and I know I need to seriously write about it. A poem, not just a diary entry.

An ocean of good byes, a wave of hellos

2010-04-03T20:53:00.000-07:00

Today Dan and I drove over to the coast and down a good long way to Navarro Beach where a funeral was held for my dearest male friend James Rogers, American painter.His family was there and a few friends and us. I have to make distinctions between male and female friends, because there "are" distinctions between male and females relating to each other. We became friends about the time a friendship with a woman was ending its active nature to a hopefully dormant for only a small amount of time phase and he filled a gap that was a raw aching wound. We met through my writing and his love for it and then we became closer as we shared who we were in the world with each other. I have found that I cannot really, yet, accept that he is dead. That I can't call him up, write him a long letter, (oh I wrote him some long long letters). He promised to come back for another visit this summer so we could walk his beaches that are my beaches too.

His family had his body cremated, the idea being we would place his ashes in the Pacific Ocean in Mendocino because he said that was his real home. He was only living in Palm Springs because his mother, at 83, lived there and wanted him close. As I began emptying my little plastic bag of ashes into the sea, a rogue wave came up all the way to my crotch, wetting my long voluminous skirt, long underwear, (it's still winter-ish here) doc marten shoes and my once warm wool socks. I stumbled back onto the sand and it was only later I realized there was a bit of ash left in the bag. I am going to plant them under the buddha statue in my garden that James loved so much. When he was discouraged he would write me, "If only I could sit in yr garden and have a bit of a smoke, I could puzzle it out, Sensei." (I hope you don't mind, Debra.)

I had such a hard time accepting his titling me Sensei, but he sent me his poetry often, asking me to edit it, 'teach me how to write' and thus he said I had become his teacher. When we first met, I was a teacher of high school students: he knew how much I loved it, but how much I wished I could retire because my body is breaking up faster than I ever thought it would. I never saw his death coming. I was so sure I would go before all my friends and family. When one is sure of something, it is a shock when the opposite happens. It has made me aware, so very aware, of not assuming anything ever again. The good I have learned is to love yr daughter; it seems we will be fast friends if we aren't already. She has become my wave hello.

Dear James, you gave me so much. I never had the opportunity to tell you exactly how much, because of course I thought we had all this time. I have learned that time is an elusive creature that is skittish and reluctant to come close to anyone, even those who stand quietly outside with a palm open and filled with food to entice it to stay, to come close and snuggle up. I don't know how or why you died. I don't know if you knew how close to death you were or not. I hope you didn't know, I hope you didn't feel pain, I hope you had time to greet God with a welcoming smile, because I know He welcomes those who love and you were a Lover in the full sense of the word. You greeted each day looking forward to what you were going to paint next, but James, what am I going to do with a six by eight foot portrait of myself? I live in a caboose.

I love you , dear friend. See you in Heaven

Found Holy Week Poems

2010-04-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

1.Palm Sunday

The bright sun of spring beats on the metal,
where it seems only last week
Jesus rode into Jerusalem all triumphant
and gentle on the borrowed white donkey.
Now, in the brittle light,
two interlocking shapes a man can hang from,
are sharp and cruel as I stand in memory.
There was nothing I could say but,
"I'm sorry". There was nothing else

He wanted but those two words
as the blood poured from His heart into mine.

2. Good Friday
It was just us, at the end:
a few women bewildered, some crying,
tears mingling with snot
and whimpers of pain
just looking at Him from this long distance
up; and the ones who just stood:
their lips pressed hard against each other
lest sobs escape like rain
from the thickening clouds...

And then there were the two
completely different from each other,
but the same.
Oh Son,forgive me my early mothering
if it were not good enough
and
My Lord, did I listen close enough...

I was the one who looked up through
the blood, the sweat, Yr agony
and through those clouds,
saw Yr Father, again,
like Noah's, like John's dove descending
and I nodded as the sky broke.

3. Black Saturday

Those men, how could they be sure?
At first, they thought it was a revolution,
then they saw a way out from under roman rule.
It wasn't for days, who realized the mystery
because He hadn't ascended yet. That Dove,
the Breath, the tearing back of the veil
hadn't come yet. There was brooding, doubt,
grief. And the tears of the two Marys.

4. Easter Sunday

She hurried, having slept little,
but saw she was too late, she thought the soldiers had already been there:
she gnashed her teeth and cried.
The messengers in white robes sat waiting to tell her,
and she understood as the one spoke.
On the road to those still sleeping,
she kept repeating: He is going on before us to Galilee.

It was a circle, like a net, a fishing net,
and they were to wait for the Dove, the Breath,
the healing and the Work to begin.

*************
I used The Book of Mark for my interpretation.

The Nature of a Home in which the Govt is not the Boss, Just An Annoying Petty Bureaucrat

2010-04-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

In our left side cork oak tree we have some new additions. I don't know how many, but our pair of Greys had babbies in the last few days, and the ravens are trying to eat them. It's horrid. Well, this morning, the raven walked the length of the fence and toward the tree and one of the squirrels ran the fence line which is an inch wide and bonked! the raven in the chest with his/her head. It was the bravest thing I had seen in a long while. That raven was BIG! But he went a-tumblin’! I took a pie tin out to a fence post, nailed it in and filled it with fresh cut organic apples and organic sunflower seeds for the new family. I hope they like apple and I know they like sunflower seeds. I hope they are not too a-feared to 'come and get it!'. Today I am up and out of bed for the first time in awhile. I think it's the excitement of seeing the squirrels up and about. I was nervous when the storms were bad knowing the Mrs was due any day, but apparently the tree has a nice deep hole and they didn't have to build a stick and twig nest. I just hope I can stay feeling this good and get some chores done today. Ain't God wonderful to give that little squirrel some goliath courage about his/her family? There are some human fathers who could take some lessons from that little guy. Though it coulda been the mutha doin’ the bonkin’, as my sons say. We stand up here in Mendonesia for our kids, even if they are gonna be 33 in a few days....

On another note, the columbines are in bloom. They are so pretty and gentle.
All this rain has given the flowers a life of their own. The sun is out. My disability check came and thanks to The Hun, it's now a mere $172. Can one live on this? My African greens have swelled and twined and grown all over the bed; I'm thinking of putting the newly sprouted greens in another bed and let Godzilla have its bed with the six puny chard which will also swell and bloom out crazy huge leaves in a matter of weeks.

I am thankful for what I have. A few weeks ago I met a woman with a six year old child who had no home. It was freezing cold weather. I wanted to put her up but a caboose has no extra space. I look back now and know I could have made them fit for a time if my studio had been cleaned up from my last show. I am lackadaisical about this and just plain worn out, which is another reason I find Bed another loving continent. I wish I had help with the up-keep so I could have women in when they need it and then they could help keep it up. But the floor was covered. I have to find a solution to this. I will not live under the banner, that “There is no room at the inn”. This last encounter has shamed me. Shame is a good garment to wear once in awhile. It’s kind of like a kick in the ass, yes?

am feeling much better and plan to go tot he market (we've one of the best organic shops in the area) and buy some walnuts already shelled.Just as a little birthday present. (my disability check comes today and being a vegetarian, I eat a lot of nuts.)

Holy Week Poems

2010-04-01T06:30:00.000-07:00

I have been writing poems for the week and losing them (misplacing them) because I keep getting invited to read in public. I've read in a Methodist Church which is not my denomination, so that was interesting. So far I have several for Palm Sunday and plan to finish out the Week...

The Weather Report from Bed

2010-03-31T23:28:00.000-07:00

I live in a caboose. It’s been raining for three days and three nights. I hear up the hill, (which is a small mountain, really) it’s snowing….Capt’in, the tuxedo cat and I have been in bed all this time. I have been sick since January with small intervals of health. The cat is being just cat, an animal who sleeps between snacks and a quick step outside in the winter. In the spring and summer, he takes long naps under the rosemary tree. I have a church pew under an awning I can nap on with cushions and quilts and a large endtable to hold glasses of iced drinks , a pitcher, books, gardening tools for when I can actually get up and sometimes that “getting up” turns into three hours of delicious gardening, which also puts me back in bed for a day or two. There is no winning here, or maybe if I look at it upsidie down, it’s ALL winning. I’m alive and I have a grin on my face most of the time. I have a fever right now, so I look maniacal. I go from hot to cold and back again so I am wearing a black slip past my knees, a black Tshirt, black sox with Rastafarian stripes at the top and a black velvet hoodie for when the chills hit. I found at an strange little shop that carries clothes for people in their twenties and old beautiful Afghani jewelry, a polished sea snail shell cut in half, polished to such a high degree it shines, set in silver that holds a beautiful tear drop shaped jewel the color of celandine. I took forever on “lay away” to buy it and then I strung it with large pearls the color of the shell which I had also bought somewhere else on lay away. When you live in an area for thirty five years, you know the shop owners after awhile to the point they can even leave you in the shop while they run to the school and pick up a sick child. I’m lucky that way.

A man I know who used to own a used bookstore gave me a boxful of McCall magazines from the fifties to the mid sixties, right before he sold the store, so of course, being of the generation I am, (I was born in ’55), I quickly turned to the last few pages to see if the Betsy McCall page was still there. YES! A child had not purloined my little treasure-girl back when I would have also or a grown up for me. And not only that, but the FIRST page introducing her was in the stack. Because I live in a caboose, I had to do a terrible thing, but space is space. And no space is like entropy, an ugly thing. Except for the first mag introducing the paper doll, I had to carefully tear out the doll pages of the rest of the mags and toss the magazine. I simply have no room. If I had any sense, I thought later, I ought to have color copied all of them and sold the originals on Ebay to someone as silly as I am about paper dolls and Betsy McCall in particular. I grew up poor, so there was a series of time when my mother who is an artist, or used to be,
would pencil me extra clothes, using Vogue mag models as inspiration. It’s a shame I still don’t have those. I didn’t care for the era then, I wanted a little girl; but I was so grateful for the kindness. The fact that I didn’t care for the fashion era all that much I’m sure is the reason they’ve been lost. I have a box of paper dolls that my husband’s mother drew with a myriad of “outfits” based on Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca”. She’s made the dolls look like Rita Hayworth. They really are amazing. She married Dan’s father when she was in her very early twenties, had two children and died of leukemia in her late twenties. She had one of the first degrees in modern dance from UCLA. So talented, so many directions.
It’s women like this who inspire me to keep on being creative. I’ve figured out a way to work my own art in bed by loading up a large engraved silver tray with exotic hand-made papers, glue, colored pencils, needle & thread, scissors of the tiniest dimension, and a compartmentalized box of tiny weird objects. I make books from scratch, starting with pasteboards usually from the eighteen hundreds and sew papers into a spine I’ve made of black silk velvet or some other kind of gorgeous fabric glued onto the pasteboards Usually I use a Singer featherweight machine, or a treadle to sew the pages in, but if I’m in bed, I sew by hand, the tiniest stitches in the centerfold of the book. I told my husband just because we’re poor doesn’t mean we have to have ugly in the caboose. I’m fortunate: I have a thrift store right around the corner from my caboose, even though it appears the caboose is in the country. The lane it’s in is covered by two cork oaks, a holly tree and a flowering May. The ruts and potholes discourage anyone from driving through, so it’s our little secret. Since moving into town from a three hundred acre plus ranch, I need, absolutely need, this privacy. The front door opens onto a slim porch on the alley side that goes almost the length of the caboose and one end has a small picket fence gate to keep the neighborhood dogs off the porch. Those pickets are my only concession to middle class living.
I wish it would stop raining. I have about twelve from seed plants to get into the earth. Russian red kale. Bok Choy, mixed up lettuces and spinach. Which will put me right back in bed if I’m not careful. Careful Bones, one of my girlfriends calls me. But I am so tired of being in bed. And greens are so nice to eat with quinoah and tamari. And now I believe it’s time to go to sleep.

Help!

2010-03-29T02:59:00.000-07:00

so for some reason I missed a button on the keyboard and now every time i try to go back and finish writing about the clothes, it kicks me off that blog. i don't now what I am doing wrong. It's maddening. Is there a way to write off line say in Word and then copy and paste it into blogspot? i believe i would kill for that information. (my kitchen has ants, it would be an easy way out...heh heh) and now i am going to bed because i am so discouraged...

2010-03-28T01:23:00.000-07:00

I read last night at the Methodist Church in a seies set up by Linda Noel. The secratary double-booked their events and were having a dinner social in the hall we had planned on using, so they moved us to the sanctuary itself. Which of course made things a bit tricky. We were asked to watch our language (the Wild Women of Mendocino watch their language?!, but on the other hand, I was perfectly at home reading in there as a christian and so near Palm Sunday. I had planned to read a series of holy week poems, though my first poem was a strong one full of coarse language and I set it aside. I don't think I make a difference using a foul word when it's exactly the word needed. And the Palm Sunday poems are so strong and deep, I felt good, so good that I had writen them. I am taking them to service tomorrow for Steve, one of the elders and who knows, maybe he'll ask me to read them. They've done that before.

I made fifty dollars. I've been doing a great deal of readings lately and earning some decent money these days. This time only fifty ducats, but there were three of us. Linda did a beautiful job.
I found a dress on a lovely girl in a magazine that I plan to show to Cynthia. I have been collecting fabric for years and hopefully she can find enough of some to make several dresses. All the same pattern, but different fabrics for the summer. It seems like an extravagant moment, but at the same time, everything I own is in rags, and I need some new things that will last.

It's like the organizing of my study. If I gather things into their proper places, I can work much better. I have to go to bed now. I am so tired from the work last night. And the getting ready for the work. Patrick and I rehearsed and rehearsed. We plan to record a CD and sell it as we both need money to go on with.

The Magpie Woman Dreams Big

2010-03-15T22:33:00.001-07:00

When my husband and I used to drive to Los Angeles to visit his folks, we would always stop at this wayside near Camp Roberts, where a rare flock of magpies lived. Instead of black beak and black legs and feet, they have yellow there. They are so beautiful. So far I have been unsuccessful at posting some photos, but I will keep trying.I am a techno-moron. These magpies don't say, "mag, mag , mag...",like the ones with the black beak and feet, but "reet, reet, reet..." It is so charming.

They are a friendly bird. We always stop at this little town, Greenfield, on the way to the wayside where we rest from our hours of driving and need to do the stretch-and-rest dance. There is a Mexican grocer who also sells fresh meats. I don't eat meat, but the mags do! They love potato bugs, but we have discovered they especially love roasted chicken with Mexican herbs and spices; so we splurge and buy one for the birds. There is a square of cement with two pillars to the north and the south. I sit with my legs criss-cross and I pull meat off the chicken and when I look up, the magpies are sitting on the pillars around me, waiting for me to toss a bit to a bird. I have to choose a beginning of the circle, (thank goodness for the pillars which act as a landmark) and I toss a piece of chicken to that bird. He swoops off the pillar and gobbles it down; and then the next bird flies down and comes forth a few inches to look expectantly at me, so I throw him (or her) a bit and this bird also eats it quickly and then steps back. We go all the way around the circle several times and they politely speak, "Reet, reet..." if I take too long in tearing the meat from the bone.

I long to bring my hand down their sleek head all the way to the tail, or caress the breast of just one magpie, but they are too shy. I would need to stay there a few days to "make friends". And I would love to do just that. You take Hawaii, or Aspen skiing. I love the long meadows sparsely filled with shropshires and ravens and of course my magpies. Their nests are huge and high up in the trees which look like cottonwoods, but I see no streams, so I am doubtful as to what kind they are.

Here is my day dream. To live in a stout brown canvas tent deep in the trees so that no humans could see me and I would have my small fire to make meals and heat water for tea. I would try to keep the fire to a minimum so that I would not be discovered. I would spend the days cooking on a low flame, a chicken turning it on a spit, because I couldn't afford to buy one everyday. I would water-color my birds and the sheep amongst the trees as they spread through the grasses. I would hope they would get friendly enough to come right into the tent! The wayside has bathrooms, so I could stay clean and at night I would read by the light of a small candle , but going to bed early, because I have a feeling these birds rise early. I would try to make friends and actually 'pet' one in a few days.
Just a simple summer dream, but one that would be filled with wonder as I got to know the birds better and better.

Map-Making

2010-03-12T20:03:00.000-08:00

The rain, all day and night and all day and night again, long time.
I've wanted to take them back, the words that scrawl
long slow geese paddling through the river,
because sometimes we're so unforgiving;
and I fear we'll never speak again
each to each, because we are so true to our dramas.
I want, one day, to know we'll laugh and maybe dance
in our dutch shoes and fancy dresses without men,
except the organ grinder and his monkey as audience...

I want to disappear all our angry words;
take baskets out to the fig tree
and in between pushing tender fruit into each others' mouths,
tell all our map-makings, our explorations
of the springs that bubble up between yr place and mine
without exploding into rage, resentment.

Oh you. I'm so lonely without the sound of yr non-stop voice
making topographical maps where the beauty of mountain meets
the feminine curve of valley in yr vocal cords.
Yr a journey I am putting my shoes on for.

A Diary of Grace, Long Grass in the Hot Sun

2010-03-11T22:59:00.000-08:00

1.

I love walking through abandoned houses,
listening to the echoes of a distant child,
a worn woman taking her shoes off,
almost wishing she hadn't,
so she could walk through the tall grass out back,
but just too tired to get up again.
The windows reflect the glare of a late afternoon sun,
but I just watch the dust motes
on the floor in the bare light and I listen,
listen for the voice of a clock
that stopped running years ago,
just as I listen for yr faraway voice
to walk through the stamp, the envelope, the ink from the pen
and lying in my hand,
the alphabet rising up to say 'hello, it's been a long time...'

I was never gone, I just can't talk
because I don't like yr answers:
so bus stop, so call waiting, so no address.
What did you say you changed yr name to?

2.

Packages come in the post.
I don't know why you send these glossy photographs
that disappear in the brilliant late sun
and I can't tell if there are words written
on the back to tell me who, what, where
because the light is so strong and I've lost my glasses again.
Without the information, it's just a handful of shining paper
so slick there isn't even a braille dot to hang onto.

3.

I...I opened my fist...moments before I slammed it into the pure white.
I do not believe in violence, and so I have to fight myself from hurting...anyone.
I eat greens from the garden. I hate the way animals are slaughtered,
so I'll have no part in it; just like I won't speak yr name
until I can say it with all the love we once carried around
in a burlap sack and a canteen.

4.

Now it's so late, the darkness is that clock without direction.
I lie down on the naked floor in the house no one lives in any more.
I bring my knees to my ribcage, my chin tucked so tight into my collarbone
that my hair falls away from my neck, but down my back, becomes a blanket
I can tangle my feet in for warmth.

5. I say my "Lay me down to sleep" and somehow yr name gets mixed up with God's.
This is not blasphemy, it's a little song I sing myself to remember Grace.

When Beauty is Killed Something Dies Inside

2010-03-07T22:16:00.000-08:00

My youngest son's girlfriend is moving back into the cottage across a small fence. They painted all day and yesterday too. They'll now live three blocks away and she will be paying $600 for privacy. (my son's father comes downstairs frequently and I guess it's getting old for them.) Duplexes have false privacy I think. She and I laughed how they will be going from next to one parent to next to the other, but I promised I wouldn't 'visit' without letting them know and i wouldn't do it often.

Once a year I find my self watching television because my husband is a screenwriter and he loves to watch the Academy Awards. (Actually he's a retired screenwriter and a fiction writer now, because he hates Hollywood. No amount of $40,000 checks for a simple treatment for a script was good enough. And I couldn't see us back in Southern California again anyway.)

Anyway, I hated the way when the documentary "The Cove" (about killing dolphins) won an oscar for best, the TV cameras cut away and didn't show the presentation of the award. It was so ugly political it makes me want to vomit. Tell the truth, damn it. That wonderful and terrible short film is the reason why I finally had to become a vegetarian, oft' times vegan, again for the rest of my life, because I cannot bear the senseless killing of animals both for food and for keeping creatures of beauty away from other fish like dolphins away from tuna. I haven't seen the film, and would like to, but I've read a number of books by Ruth Ozekie and those books are what reminded me of returning to vegetarianism. I feel better being responsible for my own food anyway. I have been growing so much it, I feel cleaner from Celiac's disease and I feel safer. Some local people make their own tofu for public sale, so that helps with the protein as well as quinoah. I just have to remember to take vitamin Bs. Was there anyone else who saw that awful moment when the cameras cut away. Did it affect anyone besides me with anger and grief?

health, memories and pink salt

2010-03-05T00:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I lost a good chunk of a poem I've been working on since 2005. It's one of the most horrifying feelings...similar to losing a good friend's daily hellos. I'm not sure how to go about within trying to recover or re-work this long poem. The machine recovered as much as it's going to and so it's up to me to reflect on where I want to go, how I want to re-write the story. It's different from writing fiction which I've been doing a great deal of lately, because the poetics that come are inspired, influenced, what have you, by not just imagination and education in the field, but are Muse-induced and my carelessness and the cuteness of one tuxedo cat made a mess of what she's given me already. Like, my blog says no one under thirteen can read this. That was the cat's decision. And of course, I have no idea yet how to reverse the cat's antics.

But the important news is that the jonquils are blooming. The white violets are a carpet and the grape hyacinths are sprouting everywhere, so I have bouquets everywhere. Even the ironing corner has several little vases full. It all seems so simple sounding, but there are times when after one has been sick for a long time, that the simplest things are the best things. I've been scrubbing the kitchen like mad and have selected three pots and pans that are only mine and have essentially kashered them and told Daniel he can't use them, but he's got a bountiful and doesn't mind, he hates to see me so truly ill like I was this time. When my body had been glutin free for such a long period of time and then to ingest something somewhere twice in such a short period of time, apparently that is worse than before it's been discovered I have celiac's disease. I threw the toaster out. Toast is rather nice made in a pan with the smallest amount of olive oil and an even smaller amount of local butter.

I ate glass noodles and tamari with african tree collards from the garden for dinner and not only did my taste buds say thank you, my innards were very happy. For dessert I had a glass of almond milk and I devoured a goodly amount of a Charles deLint book. Health looks so good from the right angle. Yesterday I walked to the health store and i found some salt that someone turned us onto a few years ago. It's from the Himalyas and is pink. For some reason it tastes better than any salt I've had before and I don't know if that's because it brings up the precious memory of an old friend or if the salt is just plain damn good. It was quite expensive and I'll have to be careful with it, but it's worth it just to think of her when I sprinkle some on my yams.

Oh gosh, it's one in the morning. I think it's time to put the PJs on and grab that book. I'm just out of the woods and see no reason to stay up too late and get sick again.

The Secret Language of Diaries

2010-02-23T13:18:00.000-08:00

It seems I've spent the beginning of this year mostly in bed, but I've put it to good use, albiet slowly.Our crafty green poet has been a huge help and she doesn't even know it. Lying in bed day after day and almost but not quite starting to feel sorry for myself, I read her post about journal re-vitalizing and it reminded me of a 'chore' I love to do. So I , with some help, put some things like glue, scissors, needle and thread and pans of watercolor and a pot of glitter called twig which is an amazing color between brown and gray with a smidgeon of green in it, and three small photographs from an old magazine, took an ordinary, plain covered journal and made a beautiful, if not simple diary. Sometimes i get carried away and make symphonies of them, but this felt just right. But then it took three days to begin writing in it, because I was worn out. cry babby! I am presently making a three-D birthday card for my eldest son's god-father with a very surreal theme, it's unusual and unlike anything I've done before. I worry I might have taken on more than I planned. But I am enjoying it immensely. {warning: my 'j' button often doesn't work, so if you see a word like ust, figure it's just.} I found this fabulous painting of a young girl watering from a watering can, cups of tea that are sitting on tall stalks. She's very delicate and Richard does drink a great deal of tea. I long to return to 'delicate'.

All at once, the firetrucks are going off, hence the dogs are following suit, so it sounds like a rabbit is loose somewhere here. Everyone is miserable, but i'm sure, mostly the people whose house is on fire.

When I was a teen and young at that, my mother always looked at my things under the bed. My diaries, my letters from Viet Nam, my poems. I always wished I could write in the French she made me take, (i was coming along nicely in Spanish, but it was too plebian for her and she insisted I change over), because then she wouldn't have been able to read the poems, the diary entries. After awhile, I stopped keeping a diary and kept my lousy poems with me. When I left home and found myself in delicious Berkeley of the oh so cool and beautiful weather, I began again until I was married to my sons' father, who also was a snooper. I kept a 'safe' journal in those years. Now I can write anything I want and my husband of fifteen years wouldn't dream of looking. It's so pleasant to relax. I love , absolutely love the concept "to relax".

Later:
I went to the cardiologist's office yesterday. What an arduous trip. But he said I was doing well and that I looked well, (even though the vanity of me hates that the, he called them steroids,has put some weight on me.) My face still looks nice I guess. It's nice when a doctor compliments one. I forgot to tell him that the day before my heart was absolutely haywire. I think he might have run my pacemaker and seen that. Well, it will show up the next time he runs a strip and sees the flips and trapeze swinging my heart beat was doing.I have spent enough time on me, i think i shall move on...

Two Women Sharing a War: Why Do We Have To Still Keep On Doing This?

2010-01-02T04:59:00.000-08:00

For the last several months, I have been corresponding with a woman in North Africa who speaks Turkish, French, Spanish and lastly, the kind of English, she, I suspect, does not dream in. I’ve been told, if you don’t dream in a language, you don’t know it well enough to grasp the intellectual overtones, and under currents and I have found this to be true for my own self. I have dreamt in French, and alas, not understood a single word I listened to in the dream. Almost comic relief, I know. So we are almost, not quite, but almost able to discuss the political issues I know we are both going through. She has exhausted my French, my Turkish is limited to two poets, and so we are stuck with a kind of English that inquires daily about each other. As time goes on, I see we ARE learning to talk deeper and deeper to each other and that feels really good. We both are furious about the way the Palestinians are being treated and I'm married to a Jew and consider myself both Christian and Jewish, practicing the traditions that Y'shua grew up with. And she is a Muslim. The deeper we delve into the outrage and grief we both feel, I can tell the closer we are coming into friendship. I can tell from just the little we have discussed, that this is a anger we both share. She is just as frustrated as I am.

There were a few weeks there when we couldn’t communicate at all, and it wasn’t until this late night that a message came through in French which I often find myself sending on to a friend in Montreal for a translation with some depth, but this one, I could, after a few re-readings, get the gist of, as we say here in America. There is often no explanation for her silences, or at least no explanations she can write down for me. And I worry that much more about them.

But here are two women who long to sit at a small café table on the patio of a North African coffeehouse drinking good thick coffee and discussing our daily lives, our dreams, our inability to reach through that door of language and touch each others’ hearts with our concern.

With men and boys, they can ‘tough it out’, ‘suck it up’ as they say these days, while we women and girls are left stoic, but uneasy inside, fretting about the fact that America has become a third world country, that there are people, not just women anymore, or for the most part, who are tortured, starved, cold, wearing rags and needing medical attention, because of men, whether they be soldiers or not. It is mostly men in congress and they are not voting with humanity in mind it feels to me. It seems to me to be the money game. And my men friends: some of them know exactly what I’m talking about and don’t think I have this hidden agenda of men-hating and others are so impatient with me and ask me when I’m going to get out of the Sixties and stop fighting all the time. I tell them if they think striving every single day for communication between the sexes where at the end of a conversation, there are big smiles and long hugs is fighting, well, I don’t plan on ever stopping. Because I believe in working it through to the bittersweet end. I long for those moments, hours, days and years, oh god yes, give me the years, where men and woman can fight bigotry, poverty, disease and shameful acts of torture on one human being from another until finally these acts are disappeared completely.
My friend is rabid about the Palestinians not having enough to eat or items to stay dry or warm with, and I am that way with my small town and other small towns in American and inner city ghettos, only because I can’t reach out any further than that. The Europeans and Mid-Easterns have an easier job of helping each other in some instances I’ve noticed, because they live so much closer to each other. I saw that when I was reading political poetry in Europe. I could skip out of one coffeehouse and pass through a bar to actually get on a train I wanted to and therefore into another country for another reading if I were willing to travel so light , the heaviest item in my medium-sized backpack would be a seven pound maclap as I call my snow leopard. (We haven’t known each other long enough to introduce each other by name and of course that’s a girl thing to do. My last laptop was named after Don Quixote’s boney horse and when she blew up, I mourned deeply, grateful the week before I had used those little magic sticks to save the tirades and love poems to a nation.) Of course it was a woman who lent me this lovely thin MacBookPro, knowing full well I was going to “shake the dust from my feet, cuz the times, they are a-changin’ and move on, always a column ahead written by someone else about what’s happening in YR neighborhood…

That’s what my friend in North Africa and I do for each other and for the world we hope. We write essays and articles about the outrages we see in other places or in our backyards and how can we change them, and when we see each other getting dark and despondent, we send each other little gifts like Patti Smith singing “Power to the People”, and enclosing a vid of her just reading the words so my friend can understand them better. And she sends me Jacques Brel who I love, shouting out against his war, and it makes us both feel better. We are the cornerstone for each other sometimes without a syllable of language between us. The one or two consonants that get by our ignorance, become our machine guns of poetry and the warmth of our belief in each other, becomes a strong piece of cloth that can be used to do so many things with from drying our asses after bathing, tearing strips for binding wounds, strips for sewing on the rip in jeans, for tying back a braid of hair because the metal on a hair tie can sometimes glisten like a compass to the enemy about our whereabouts. Make no mistake: we use words like bullets. Music is our gun. Poetry is our soup kitchen.

A Poem I found While Cleaning Out a Large Cardboard Box

2009-12-23T02:17:00.000-08:00

And God, the mast of my ship:
tall, thick, true, leads me straight
on, by eye, to the North Star,
His Son by mouth, the allelujah
of starboard! And by dream,
pulling rope hand over hand
in a measurement of heaven,
I reach into my pocket of infinity
and pull out an anchor.

c. 2009 Robin Rule
*************************
Juliet, I realize this might not be yr spiritual path , but I want to ask you and anyone else, a question from a purely literary position: After looking at the poem that I wrote dec 2, 2007, I want to change it to "...I reach into my pocket of infinity..." because my relationship with the Holy Ghost is forever (since I was eight), but is
"I reach into a pocket of infinity and pull out an anchor..." (I left it "an", so you could see how I was originally thinking/feeling when I wrote this poem, but I am an intense editor, re-drafter and like to know in the end, that the poem is as perfect as i can make it. What say you, matey?

juliet's purple poem

2009-12-20T21:57:00.000-08:00

dear juliet, i didn't know where to put a comment, but nevertheless, i felt the poem deserved its own blog. You made it come alive. when i saw the assignment, i groaned. I didn't think it could be done without being silly, but you even through in the ecology there which i'm a sucker for. bravo!Robin

How Birds Are Made When God Is Busy

2009-12-08T19:18:00.000-08:00

How bright the gates look from the great inside;
how tall from out beyond the world.
We children play, then sleep
and in our sleep, we dream.
We sew the feathers real birds leave behind
to the shoulders of our shirts;
rub mud into our glorious faces;
and sing the sun hello.
We tell each other all our dreams
and comfort those who’d none.
This is how birds make themselves,
if they haven’t come from eggs.

All That White Stuff

2009-12-06T16:49:00.000-08:00

It's snowing for the first time this year! Now that I live almost in town, snow has returned to romance. When living in the cabin a half an hour from town down and through a muddy pot-hole-y road all slippery and slide-y, I am so glad to be loving snow again as when I first moved to my String Creek cabin when I was a teen. At first, it was frightening, being all alone if I had to do something outside, because I knew if I slipped and fell and broke something, I could easily be snowed over and smothered with a white blanket.
Sitting next to the fire with a hot cup of tea, reading and even watching the snow fall from a window was far sweeter; but firewood had to be brought in and when I raised one goat for milk, she had to be fed and brought in, so these chores had to be started the moment I saw the first flurry of snow and finished definately before dark if it were an afternoon storm. Then I would run inside to load up the wood stove and fill the kettle up with more water. (I always kept water in it when there were a fire, so that humidity filled the air.)

Now, with this in-town snow, there was little to do. My pipes were long ago wrapped. Any plants that were delicate had long ago died back until next spring. Now it was simply time to enjoy all this white stuff.

I lie in bed and slipped the glass curtains to one side (which I thought looked like snow the way I had arranged four layers of them and crocheted lace pieces tacked to the wooden part at the top of the window itself when I first moved into the caboose) and admired the way the snow had fallen on the heads of my stone girls and filled their baskets and some had fallen in the criss-crossed arms of St. Francis and from a distance looked like he was cradling a lamb. It was a holy card in assemblage.
I have been in bed all day and watched the sky grow dark until I thought it was going to rain, but the thermometer kept dropping and dropping until I suspected it was going to snow and it is.

I love weather. I love to watch the garden transform itself with the changing of the seasons. Except now, I am so lonely. I couldn't even go to church this morning. I had sat up all evening on Saturday at the art opening and I think the metal chair did my spine in. I hope by tomorrow I can walk. When it hurts this much and even the morphine doesn't help, I am such a crybaby. Oh, it's all inside. I'm silent, but the pain is like snow on the hands for too long. And now it's dark and I can't see the lovely white stuff lying on the roses and the bricks, so I think I'll close.

The River I Carry In My Bones

2009-11-09T22:06:00.000-08:00

The bones of my body lay long under the water
in summer, a trickle of creek so quiet it says nothing,
just the way my parents taught me to be: silent.
The anger in my blood is cooled by the silk flowing slow
over me. But in winter, the creek is a river and I can't stay in long
where the song is the roar of the current almost frozen.
Sometimes I lay on the long grass whitened by ice
and put my face under the water until my eyelashes freeze open.
I see steelhead fry suspended in animation, hanging in the water
like puppets held by strings as invisible as fishing line,
as invisible as my own child hands who could not help or prevent
the violence done to my brothers and I.

I have not been taught how to carve weapons from my tears,
my bruises, welts, broken bones.
I can only hope before I die, I learn to speak out loud
and let the silence drop from my flesh like unwanted clothes.

It Feels Like Death, But I'm Still Breathing

2009-10-14T04:16:00.000-07:00

Beginning September First three people I have loved died and I am so reluctant to also write, I had to kill my cat, Soot. He was seventeen, suffering kidney failure and suffering. I don't pander with people saying "I put my pet down" Down the fuck where? Or with peope, "He made the Great Crossing. Pal, He died. These poetic terms don't make me feel better, they aren't particularly the truth and they don't change the the way I feel inside, so I've decided to just say it like it is. I was too young in the sixties, but now I understand.

First on the list was my first husband the schizophrenic and the father of my first son. I loved him, I worked with his mental illness, we did well until his also schizophrenic brother showed up with a baggie of cocaine. This is a person I wouldn't mind killing. He offers nothing to society and no, I don't feel sorry for him. He chooses to make it worse with self-medication. My husband and I lived in the country, ate vegetarian or the occasional deer given to us by neighbors who I suspect were fearful of our starvation. We lived on $350 a month and I could do this. I grew up poor and I considered myself an expert at it. This was the mid-seventies. We smoked a large-ish ounce of pot a month and had two small jelly jars of cheap red wine an evening. This seemed to stay the demons. I had a secret stash of phenobarbatol the doctor gave me with instructions on how to use it. He rarely needed it. We share a doctor in this small town and the other day the doc said, "You know when you were pregnant out there in the woods, he was not schizophrenic." I was so proud. My methods had worked.He had worked on himself to the ability he could. But the cocaine changed it all and I had to take child and run for my life. He had tried to kill me several times. He moved to town after burning his cabin down around him and almost not making it out. This is what hard drugs do the mentally ill. I cried the first year I was gone, shivered with fear, reconstructed my life around our child's who inherited the genius , but not the mental illness. The night he died he was found outside on the highway naked and acting "strangely" , (police report). They took him to the hospital. There were two mental health workers on the floor. One of them said, "It's clear this man needs to be hospitalized." The other said,"He's fine , take him back to his motel. " He did not wake up the morning. It was days before anyone realized something was wrong. As next of kin, my son had to go into that room, ID and retrieve effects. I hope the mental health worker has a grown child who experiences this sometimes. I hope the parent left is willing to pay for some crisis therapy. Yes, I'm angry. That death didn't need to happen. Yes, he needed to stop using weird drugs (he had in high school been on his way to studying himself into a degree for ethno-botony I was told). He had been drinking copious amounts of alcohol but at the time of his death he had stopped drinking any thing but the occasional glass of wine or beer.He needed to get on a maintenance program, but he should not have been marked a 'useless part of society " and kicked down into the gutter again.

By the time I felt I could handle this and keep my son from grief-anger overdose, I got a phone from my cousin that the father of her daughter had a massive heart attack and died. We speak on the phone as often as I can afford it which is not much, but I email her often. Thanks to the dear friend who loaned me a fabulous laptop. She feels like she can never marry or date again.

There is some distance there. I hadn't seen my cousin since the eighties and she and her daughter reconnected last summer because the daughter felt she wanted to be a poet. And wanted my advice. I came through that safely when one morning, the phone rings and its the daughter of my best male friend. He's a painter; I'm a poet and I had just shown him, at his request how to tweak his poems into real poems. They were damn fine poems when he was done with minimum work. Her voice was off, I have to ask her what is wrong and there is gasping and fast light breathing before I realize I already know what she's going to say and I scream "NO" and the quieter, "when. She says, "This morning." I really cannot bear this. I have to sit down. Then I find myself back in bed, all my clothes on under the covers, the walk-around phone with me, listening to her tell me things I can't bear hearing.

Growing up I had read in books, Autumn is the month of death and I always took that to be a melancholy thing. More poetic than real. But I understand people die from the cold, or poor diets which make for germs to creep in. I have had to put this aside and let my emotions stew, mull around, I've had to let the sharp intake of breath hurt less and now, months later, I'm able to write. I always thought I would be the one to die first. I expect with my heart condition to die early and yet I'm fifty-four. A miracle.

I go outside and stare into the blackness. I always go outside when my emotions get too big for my chest. Slowly, my vision stops looking inside myself. I stop thinking of myself. Stars begin emerging. I give them names. Now, my dead are not lost. On the clear nights I will be able to see them, talk to them and the nights full of white, covered with fog, I'll reach out my voice like a hand and wrap it around a star of someone in particular and pull it into my heart. I'll let the star beat for my heart instead of my pacemaker. I'll let the star become my little/gigantic machine of love.

Water is for Drinking & Washing Babies' Faces

2009-10-10T02:25:00.000-07:00

Tonight I participated in a poetry reading which was delightfully unusual. Our County is pretty dedicated to being Green, and our Poet Laurete for the next two years thought up this beautiful way to celebrate our watersheds. There were six poets, all women, because women represent water in so many ways. (Don't worry, the men get their glory) The poet laurete asked the County map-maker for a map of all the watersheds and she framed in with UV glass and its the only one framed that way which is so important. All the other maps are fading or faded already. Then she found six poets she felt dedicated some of their writing to the importance of water and she asked us if she could use a line or two from a particular poem. Then she made the same map as the map-maker did but on transparency plastic with the watersheds inked on it, and then, with the computer, she transferred those poetry lines to fit on the transparent map. As if a miracle, she found an old piece of packing box probably from the 1800s which had stamped on it our County name. It was probably a ship's cargo box which made it even more perfect for the project. She made little clips and then clipped the transparency right to the board. It's funky, it's beautiful, it's information.

We all sat in a semi-circle with the maps behind us and held black notebooks with fifteen pages of the names of the watersheds typed in a column, though sometimes part of a second column.
We had arranged which sections poets would read and some sections we made for each poet to read three creek names and then the next poet, three creek names, every ten creeks or gulches, we read in chorus. We each read several watersheds all by ourselves. It was beautiful.

We drove thirty miles from our small town to the county seat where it took place and when I got
into the old, but renovated building, I set my notebook down to get a glass of water. Someone accidently put some object over it and I didn't find it until after the show. I had to read with my neighbor, who graciously pointed out my names to read in advance. Oh, but the names were beautiful or silly or someone's true name who had lived there back in the 1800s. So many mysterious-by-now reasons why a river or creek got its name.

We gave this reading to a full house in order to remind people that to name something is to give it power. Water is so valuable. I don't mean money, despite the fact that people are selling their
water which is not their right. I mean as an entity which nourishes us and keeps us alive, we require water.
Two of the poets made food that was truly art. We will probably do it again in a studio because the rustle of papers was distracting. We do a watershed event every year and each year try to be different.

Diaries of Light, Diaries of Dark

2009-10-06T00:14:00.000-07:00

1.
Sun out for a little bit today. I feel like it was a parade. I've had a migraine all day, so besides a monthly doctor check up, I have done nothing today, but sleep, pet the cat, and lie with an ice pack on my forehead, ala eighteenth century femme and finally give in to one helluva cup of coffee which has knocked me upside the head, messed with my gut, and made my headache go away. I'm tender and fragile the way a migraine leaves me. My skin shivers at thought of being touched. My eyelids twitch with the uneven light of autumn leaves gently banging on the window as the wind goes in and out of the arbor. Sometimes i am protected by a whole branch of rattling leaves, and then the wind blows the branch aft and my eyes are inflamed by the weak sun on the maple limb that lost its leaves first. It's such an ordeal to go through, listening to artillary all day and it's only the distant whirr of cars two blocks away where the transcontinental highway roars through town.
Any kind of big noise makes me try to get away from it, fast-walking, since I was a little kid, but migraines, double the effect. Now I can't run away from the noise, so I stick my whole head under the covers and let the dark ease the pain from my psyche. It's a relief to be over it. It's a chocolate kiss dripping down my throat as I gently suck on its triangular form of sweetness.

2.
Several years ago I was commissioned to make a crown for someone to give to a relative of theirs who had won two Grammies for script-writing day-time soaps. It sits under a bell jar with a Grammy on each side of it on her mantlepiece. wow! The guy who made the initial base for me made several, so I'm working on another crown and having so much fun going through boxes of stuff looking for rhinestones. "All that glitters..."

3.
My studio is absolutely immaculate with cigar boxes labeled with this and that: it's a little too much like lining my dolls up at the foot of the bed before I go to sleep which I still do, but I can FIND stuff when I need it. That's a relief. The Magpie is getting bad posture walking down the street looking for...TREASURE. I need more shiny stuff. The nice thing about ANY project is glue and paint takes awhile to dry, so I'm making a second crown with small irridescent turkey feathers and paper dolls from Italy glued to the tines that rise up from the base. I'm not sure what else I want to cover the metal with. Obviously jewels, but not white diamond-y gems like with the first one. The turkey feather one has white rabbit fur sewed to the white velvet I glued to the metal. I wanted light brown velvet and that nut brown rabbit fur that feels so soft on the bunny, so eastern wind without a vicious nip. These are on the inside of the metal, so it sits on the head gently. Oh it's an enchantment. Not sure I can sell this. But I say that all the time.

4.
There's only one book I've made I should not have sold called "Transfusion". Oh, I dream about that book sometimes: it's beauty and of personal importance. I made it after I had two units of blood. (infected pacemaker and finally a signal that I had something wrong and it turned out to be as simple as celiac's syndrome, which is self-curing. (is that a word?!)So, as far as I can figure from what the techie told me, units of blood are made up of the plasma of twelve donors, so I had the blood of 24 people in me as far as I tell. It took all night to drip drip drip into me and then they sent me home at the unholy hour of 7 am. The nurses who were not doing anything major wanted to trundle my butt out the door at 4am, but my doctor (yeah! wave flag!) yelled at them to let me lie there and rest awhile.

For the next two weeks I dreamt those other people's dreams! I know that sounds bazaar, but it's true! I never held forth at night with my unconscious like that before! So I wrote those stories down in first person and found pictures and stuff to make collages and sewed the whole thing together and put it in old paste boards held together by a strip of black velvet. The cover itself was a magpie heaven. Oh, it is a piece of beauty. I showed in Palo Alto and these women of,let's say, means, started taking this little book's picture with a digital camera until I told them to stop. They wanted my ideas, but didn't want to pay. I sure liked the shine of their diamond ear-bobs!! The magpie came out with a flutter! Very frustrating to have my unique ideas stolen. I had never thought of something as ephemeral as an idea being something that could be stolen. But I had sold it an hour earlier to a woman who truly appreciated the whole conceptual masterpiece. She was nice enough to let it stay on display until the end of the show. She even said I could come to her house in Sacramento and photograph it. (At that point, I didn't have a camera, but this woman bought all four books, so I bought a camera the next week.)

5.
I took this year off. I desperately needed a sabbatical. I made no art, I only wrote poetry and essays. It feels so good to be back making things, collecting things. Women from my church bring me little baggies full of junk jewelry. I think that's one of my most favorite things to do, is to go through those baggies. Every woman saves the earring of the pair she lost one of. Every woman saves old-fashioned jewelry Aunt Agatha left her, but isn't her style. I love to inherit those things. I love yard sales and church rummage sales for the same reason. There is always jewelry only someone like me knows how to look at with a different eye. It's not one earring from a set. It's its own shining little planet of sparkle. And that necklace drippy with rhinestones, but missing one or two, is a cascade of icicles to me. Suddenly I am making a crown for Hans Christen Andersen's Snow Queen, in my imagination. And maybe I will someday. But right now, I am waiting for the glue to dry on the crown that will be worn by the Woodland Gypsy Girl on the First Day of Winter.
"Darling,"says my husband as he peeks into my studio, "There's glitter all over yr brow..."

(juliet, i could no other way to get rid of one of the two identical posts and i accidently got rid of the one that has yr comments. So, it looks damned odd. I apologize. I can't seem to get this blog center together. I'll keep trying though.)

There's a 'Possum Under the Porch, Daddy

2009-10-05T12:05:00.000-07:00

In an earlier diary entry I write about hating opossums and it's true , I find them ugly and prehistoric: what do they DO for the planet? Walking home early evening, I see a young opossum lurking under the porch and then, like the wind, gone, underneath the caboose, not even a shadow remaining.

Something shifted in my heart. I held my breath between my teeth like a small puff of smoke. I remembered that in the animal kingdom, when a young animal can feed itself, run and hide, the mother moves on to make another nest and another set of young in the months to come. This opossum looked like he's just been left to himself. The two sides of myself were at war. Did I get the hose and shoo him away from under the caboose, or did I set out a little bit of dry cat food in an old pie tin? The war didn't last long. I capitulated almost before I found the little puff of smoke had disappeared from the edge of my incisors and the rattle of cat food on tin became music, the way the beating of an irregular heart can be. I remembered that four years ago I had folded an old holey towel into a square and knotted it inside a plastic Chinatown shopping bag to keep the dampness from creeping into the cloth. I had hidden it under the veranda for a semi-feral cat Frenchie , who I suspect has died by now. He wasn't young, I had nursed him through so many problems and got very little thanks for my work, though once he was so sick, after I had forced antibiotics and ear mite meds into him, I had swaddled him tight in a towel so he wouldn't scratch me to hell and back, I sang lousy in French to him my deep and abiding love. He would disappear for months and then show up, either fit as a fiddle or barely alive and the circle of health would start over again. It's been over a year since I've seen him this time and I don't think he's capable of being taken in by a family or a person even, he was that wild, so I am fearing he is dead. I gave him the last eight years of his life, fine quality, from meds to chopped chicken livers, so I have no guilt, I just miss him, even though he was so brutal to me with his claws on my forearms. I had put the towel out for him when we first made aquaintance. It wasn't until the heavy rains began that I made a bed on the porch itself under a bit of roof, so he could stay warm and dry and he would sleep in there, or on those days when it rained all day every day for weeks, he would live in there, coming out to eat and drink some water, rush out under a tree and perform his ablutions, then run back into the warmth where I would dry him off and leave him be. I promise you, I have no intention of doing all of that for the opossum. I will feed him occasionally and leave the folded towel under the porch. There seemed to be a small indentation in the middle of the square. I said to myself, I'll bet that lil' ol' opposum is sleeping there these cold nights.

I'm still afraid to look at them up close, those sharp teeth, those almost red eyes, the small powder puff of pink nose that if you blink seems to fade into the night, but I have found the compassion that the Samaritan had for his stranger on the roadside and I am sneaking catfood out when I can.

My continued relationship with wild animals is probably the only secret I have from my husband, because he remembers when we first moved out here to the caboose and in the abandoned house before us were at least twelve cats and or kittens of various injuries, deformities and stages of starvation. We had a little bit of harvest money left and I went to the feedstore and bought a big ol' bag of dry catfood and a couple of tins of wet food, because I noticed there were two females, both knocked up past the time to do anything about it. If we were going to have kittens we were going to have healthy kittens. There was a nasty ol' junk pile in the back of the house where those mother cats lived in order to be protected from the raccoons and opossums. I noticed, sure enough when the kittens were born and old enough to tumble out from under old car parts, undefinable pieces of metal and scrap lumber, that if they didn't get back under the pile with their mamas, by nightfall, who by the way nursed each other kittens, the raccoons were libel to get them and the next day I would see just a tiny kitten paw or two on the ground and I would just stand there and sob. So I was no friend to the larger feral animal. I think he assumes I am done, since there are no more feral cats. he hasn't yet realized that I have grown braver and taken on the larger feral animal, just not getter close, not yearning to cuddle and sing to them.

It took me seven years to get rid of all the cat, catins and kittens, but finally there was one left, who we believe lived here with the previous tenants and was left for one reason or another. I named him Capt'in because he was captain of his own fate and made us take him into our hearts and incidently, our kitchen.

So what's this got to do with one youth of a opossum? That simple word: vulnerability. My heart is vulnerable to any animals or human who is in need. My husband, like Dorothy Day, cooks at the local Catholic church for the homeless or the poor and the hungry, and because I'm disabled, I'm left to care for the animal kingdom, which is a far easier job. But the benefits are better I think. After awhile, my creatures allow me to pick them up and croon to them, and the most Daniel receives is a handshake and a "Thanky Sir", which isn't enough, because Dan is a real hugger. But he respects the need for space from the mentally ill, the disenfranchised, the lost and lonely and puts his whole heart into that single handshake. We both have our tasks in the world of entropy and we do it with all our hearts.

Reflections in the Morning Cave

2009-10-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

In a mid-morning coffee break, (which I shouldn't drink), I sneak into the shadowy writing shanty and just sit in the dark and reflect. Part of my family has been shaky for a month. My oldest son, which makes him the oldest, "kid", at thirty-two, got married the last day of last year, and buying a house in the redwoods for himself and his Bride and as of the first of the month has been dealing with the news that his schizophrenic father died on the first. Death is always a harsh rattle in the back of the throat, but this carries more baggage than the usual, I think. Oh, who am I kidding, all families feel, they're the only ones carrying the greatest load of grief and sorrow. Though every family thinks that, and rightfully so, this is more than a prolonged illness we had time to "get ready for". John contracted teen schizophrenia in the mid-sixties (the third generation to do so; there are two children in his family that suffer and two 'normals' with big hearts) and has been , except for a short period, miserable ever since. The police said he was acting 'strangely' and took him to the E.R. Our state apparently doesn't have enough mental health ducats, because one mental health person said, "This man needs to be hospitalized and the other one , wanting to save money, said he didn't. The police took him home and he died, apparently in his sleep. I am waiting for the toxicology report. We know that the mental ill self-medicate because they hurt inside so damn bad, but I want to know what... When we married, me, the "child-bride" with no concept of mental illness and he, a twenty-eight year old genius whose ideas he shared with people in their field (ethno-botony) like Terrance McKenna, author of "Invisible Landscape", which were a lot of John's ideas, also deciphered into modern day reality, the works of the Mage Levi, actually drawing out the crystal wand. John played a part in a film by George Csiecery based on myths and the wondrous powers of archetypal beings (helluva time memorizing lines), and a film in which George interviewed him on 16 mm for the sheer weird and wacky magical conversation that coherent schizophrenics are so capable of sharing. I clicked an old brownie as much as we could afford film for in the early seventies when our baby was tiny and even a toddler and I hope I can find the all the negatives to make a Cd and prints to share with old friends. We were so poor that year, I had to send the spent rolls to my mother for developing; but she was smart, she was guaranteed pictoral copies of her first grandchild.

Life and Death are a circle. Anyone with any ability to let go of their fear will understand that Death holds as much wonder as life does, we just don't know what it looks like yet. (except for those boring people who think when you die its just the beginning of "The Worm Song" and nothing more. (The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle in yr snout..."). We know that's what happens to the corporeal body, but the giant mystery of the spirit and the soul just shouts for thighbone trumpets, and forearm piccolos to sing joyful the D.N.A. song of the transcendental heart.

My son is busy being his own genius right now. And receiving recognition for his endeavors; he really doesn't need to take time out to go to residential motels and clean out stuff he might not know what is valuable intellectual property and what isn't. I'm hoping there is enough stuff there to ghost-write the rest of a book he had been working on since we married and if it sells even as popularly as "Invisible Landscape", it would give my son a big chunk to pay on his beautiful house in the redwoods. Parents always want to hand birthday cake out, well, good parents do.

Well, I've had my thunk, and I see the butterfly bush is in need of a severe pruning to guarantee a good show of blossom next year and I need to seed the greens bed again to fill out the chocolate cake earth. We eat alot of greens in the winter, especially when ya need more iron. I have Celiacs and so have to pay attention to iron, calcium and vitamin D which my body won't store. Twenty minutes of face lifted to the sun is a lovely mediation in the winter's weak sun and we are still operating on the batteries of Autumn's intense afternoon heat and seemingly freezing early early mornings. (As in, whining, "it's cold, it's cold every 3 am when the cat wants out and then again at 5:30 am when he wants back in. There's a reason I named him Capt'in and only part of it is based on Walt Whitman's poem.)

It's time to get up and stretch , walk the lines and pretend they outline "my" ownership. And of course, admire my beds of food and flowers. I have to give myself joy. My son's father is finally at peace and we like to think here at the caboose, that peace is contagious. Have you had yr peace shot today! Pass it on.

In the Early Morning of Summer

2009-10-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer, I stood in the garden behind the caboose, filling a pail with water. I glanced upward and noticed the grapes on the arbor were bigger and very hard green. Soon they will turn purple and burst with the musky odor of wine. When this happens, I pick them and pasteurize juice into bottles. Many clusters of the grapes are wasted
each season, trampled underfoot. The fallen ones will ferment in the heat of summer afternoons. It will smell like wine. The arbor is the only cool spot and people will gather to sit there under the table
and do chores. The air will be rich with the sweat of human work.
An older woman will shell peas while a young girl embroiders raggedy tea towels, sewing daisy chains around the various holes and making a blanket stitch around the edges to keep them from fraying anymore than they are. Nothing is wasted here. A boom box plays fado in the garden
across a small fence which keeps dogs from digging to China by way of the artichokes.Young mothers are weeding and discussing the upcoming concert at Black Oak Ranch, while their fat babies dig in the rich earth with old teaspoons.

This is a small compound of six living places. Everyone has a purpose and a commitment. It took several years of people moving in and around to discover the right combination of personalities. We have children, we have cats, two dogs, a hot tub on wheels that visits different farms throughout our community (you supply the wood), we have elders, well, one now, Virginia at eighty-three is waiting to join Stan at 92 who left us last September. We have a single father and a boy and his dog. Mark cooks every weekend , come eat with us, we are all us and Virginia is teaching women how to make fudge the old way. Our newly weds are smiling. On Friday evenings we stand with candles in front of the hospital with others from our small town and witness for peace. It's time to heal the land before the winter curtain comes down until Spring.

The earth is a thick rich chocolate cake here, where we have worked the soil for years with goat manure or sheepshit. We are growing babies in rows and mounds of earth. It's a happy time for all of us in a place where to compost means to enrich, to grow, to fatten instead of to rot,
instead of to war one against the other. We cling to our ideas with strong hands and thick arms, with breasts full of milk. We are bringing summer into jars and braids of garlic and apples hidden in straw, so that on cold winter days, we can open the plum jam and honey bees will lighten the room with their golden song.

When Night Turns to Autumn

2009-10-01T02:31:00.000-07:00

Autumn has finally reached her hands into the walnut tree and given it a good shake. The knocking on the old shanty's roof is a rat-ta-tat and then the high hat. When the wind gets up a real wrap around the branches,the beat is Gene Krupa and then dies down, til I'm busy with my books and cleaning out fountain pens when BAM! the wind scares up another drum solo smooth and fast. It's scary for the first month 'til I get used to it. Then the storms do the same thing and I'm jumping out of my skirts.

Tonight when I locked up, there leaning up against the front door, sucking up the heat that was pushing it's way out of the thin crack along the bottom was a baby possum. I love animals, but I can't stand those little guys. Most animals, any animal is cute when it's a baby, except possums. I don't know if it's that linty color, or the seemingly hairless tail, or the snout with that nasty shade of pink flesh at the end...they just seem a bad job of it. I feel bad that I don't like 'em, but there it is. Mister Ugly. The cat's been wanting to go out , but with the possum there, I don't dare, so I'm picking my Capt'in up and walking to the back, which is how I end up in the writing shanty and I need more warm clothes. So, I dump the cat and come back inside. Hopefully the little gray ghost will go somewhere else.
This is early for me and i want to keep it that way. I need my rest after not sleeping thelast two nights. Good night cat, goodnight gray ghost.