Tuesday Tumbleweeds, Rosarito

I’ve taken to watching for tumbleweeds.  Here, in the long pause between lashing rain,  one careens down the center rut of the road, a tumbleweed with no wheels, big as an SUV, steering cable cut, the color of mildewed dust.  It came from further up—higher on the hill—places I haven’t walked.  I know wind tears them from the saturated slopes, pummels them to action one by one.  If I’d crossed the road without looking, stepped into its hell-bent-for-leather path in the brokelight of a January storm, I’d have been tumbled too, left the road and its ruts until some far fence penned us from going further.  Or the wind let up.

Fences.  Wind.  Tumbleweeds.  The pig-tail days of twelve, striped tees and jeans.  The dirt-clod field where the Dodd’s and Nelson’s, Tingle’s and Due’s hit long fly balls and grounders.  High ground above the river; Etiwanda Avenue; our backstop, a line of eucalyptus trees, trees that stopped nothing.  Thud and crack of ash bat to hardball, showing the boys I could hit, catch line drives they couldn’t.  And up in the rainbow-curls of eucalyptus bark, the youngest Dodd boy, slow-witted or bored, blew great foamy gobs of spit.  Cackles from his monkey face and hoots of derision when he hit.  Not easy to watch the pitch, impossible focus when concentration is split.

Not a proper baseball field.  A five-acre lot.  A far fence stuck with blown tumbleweeds.  The Santa Ana River below.  Cows roaming the basin.  Black and white Holsteins.  Ginger Brahmas with eye-liner’d eyes, drapey neck wattles, shoulder humps.  A dangerous breed.  The bulls for no reason.  The cows if we got between them and their calves.  A pawed cloven hoof.   A snort not heard but read like the deaf read lips.  A riffle in the chest and a basin tree’s low fork I could climb.

That was then.  Then, when Santa Ana winds piled tumbleweeds into long walls.  When the walls became ladders, more tumblers rolled over them as if doughboys rising out of World War I trenches.  When domestic herds roamed the freedom of river and flood plain.   There was Wayne Tingle and his army of Dodd boys.  There was the clearing they’d commandeered and the guerilla war they would embark upon if the dirty, Red Commies or Cubans invaded.  There were red Manzanita limbs for M-16’s.  There were hand-stretched strings on willowy bows.  There were twiggery arrows.  Lethal as a boy’s imagination allows.

Down the Californias—U.S. and Mexican—miles from old homes, I watch.  Though the dusty mint green is long spent, I see them.  Fuzzy burs of beginning, a blossoming of scratchy stems, leaves.  Onion shapes of airy abrasiveness, and they are present in memories or present in what will come.

Vietnam, real guns: the delta of the Mekong and real boys, gone.  I can’t see the jungle, only the narrow trunks of Santa Ana river bottom trees.  Then the olive complexion of Wayne whose cheek barely knew a razor: missing in action some days before a black bag zipped shut.  Parts and tags.  Tags and parts.  Where was his look-out?  Who was on point?  Did he listen for snapped twigs or does anything crunch in a jungle?   I see myself launching dirt clods at him in a war between tumbleweed forts in a field where fly balls hit mitts and mines were only those dug with our short shovels bought at the Army-Navy surplus store.  Where the only no-man’s land was in front of a Brahma bull or a cow separated from her son.

Forty-three years and the full, round weeds end their cycles at fencelines or borders of oleander and bougainvillea, trapped, until their bodies pile up.  Then, with the debris of what’s stopped before, the next is air borne.  Winds shift.  Weather settles.  And wars:  fractionally, seasonally, cancerously in remission.

The long look loses focus—a conjured Dodd boy in a tree is not something you can see, his spit has missed you, your eyes have not darted to that long string of drool daring you to glance back for the pitch, daring you to watch Wayne’s long-armed windup and release of a fast ball you know will cross in the strike zone—between your scabbed knees and the newspaper-green rubber bands your mother has bound off your braids with.  Home plate is a pillowcase filled with some dirt and folded to shape with a point toward the mound.

The rutted road is empty.  I am safe, but at such a cost.

wc 756

Day Watching the Weather

The sea is sharp; you hear
the cougar-whined wind in roundels
of dance, and wonder
the walls hold or the house corners,
the rails of the stoop
where Buddhist prayer flags,
fragmented to dust-blown wishes
have sailed, names written on threads
like smoke written on air, like lives
written and lost—
how sharp the white breaks, like ice
carved to blades the sea melts,
reforms to rip this angry gray.

The sky is endlessly blended,
a fuzz and a feathering of pale
against pale, of spent against spending–
as if a savings and loan and the interest accrued
is not yours.  You wear a blue shawl,
one knit from leftover wools, and finger
the fringes, the knotted endings,
frays checked by the knots and
the remnants make a warm enough weave
while you and this sky wait for a patch

of bright, a sheen on a satin sea, this wind
to slink off, sated and stilled to a purr
of prayers scattered and hopefully answered:
rice in empty bowls and corn harvested
from distant fields, grinding stones busy
and ovens and oasts, threads of cotton
from elsewhere and wools from alpaca
and sheep warming, warming.

There is
the weather, the wheel of wind’s caterwauling
and briefly, from the south,
a shaft of sunlight lights your floor,
tiles flow with gold
and the flood of change is
at your feet.

~

[after Eleanor Wilner, Otherwise, “Night Fishing in the Sound”]

Lesson #60 : a.k.a. Mexico Time, October

Mexico is not in keeping with California’s clock,
timepieces here already fallen one hour back
of the border’s other side.

This makes for a zone of hands, one set lurching
forward without me in its minutes, day’s rewards
unborn, a knee I might scrape safely bent, not much
different between sheets as inside her womb.

Mick Jagger’s been elusive, a scarecrow taunt
of ticking beats: you-can’t-always-get-what
get-what get-what get-what
you want from a dream observed in an hour
yet to come, sleep stuck in a groove of pursuit;

or am I the one running the creases of time,
plumping the seconds inside my pillow, rearranging
sharp feather ends away from a cheek where the hands
spin.  Stage lights come up.  No, it’s the sun
rained through slats, wind stuttering them to thwack,
the rod where they attach, a watch stem.

~

[After "Bar Time" by Billy Collins, from Sailing Alone Around the Room]

September Scorpions

They are the color of golden french fries.
Drought brings them inside for water.
Already I have killed six
where they froze sensing movement.
If the orange bulb of venom did not dance with hurt
like a bauble hung to catch light,
I would scoop each onto a page of white
and carry them out to the field.
But fear races this heart.
The orange bulb pulses and I toss a tome
flattening these small lives.
Rain would save us this grief
like a widely arced flag of surrender.
A truce would ensue between creatures
and these books, these tomb markers
would rise and regain alignments on shelves.
These weighted words, these poisons –
these sabers rattled against what’s not understood.
I am the color of killing,
more orange than the bauble of tails.

21 July 2009 : Three Tries, One Possible Success

Three things [other than packing glasses, plates, food saver sealing bags and associated machines and apparati, heavy {and I mean HEAVY} duty KitchenAide appliances that take more woman than me to lift, much less operate) occupied my mind today — three small things on my Moving Agenda.  (1) Pay my phone bill and terminate service at the Calle Guanabana, Villa Floresta address; (2) Pay my CFE (electricity) bill before they terminate service which they have a habit of doing on the 22nd of every other month whether or not they’ve ever sent out any sort of billing; and (3) Inform Sylvia of Marcar Reality that I was in the process of moving and that I had someone interested in moving into the Guanabana casita on September 1.

(1) Struck out at the local store where I have before paid my phone bill by giving my telephone number; successfully paid my bill at the Telnor office, however, to terminate service I must first pack up the DSL equipment and obtain an order number, by phone, from the Internet Service Provider and then take that number to the Telnor Office, along with the equipment — then they will terminate my Guanabana phone service.  I “think” this is what the very patient lady told me in Spanish.  I truly think this is what I’ve been told to do.

(2) Struck out on paying my CFE bill at the local store where I have paid it before based upon my Guanabana address; also struck out at the CFE office which closes at 3 PM and I wasn’t there until 3:10.  Tomorrow is another day.  Right?

(3) Struck out on talking with Sylvia about the potential renter and my ongoing departure from Guanabana.  I did tell Lupe.  I must have faith that all will work out as it should, that what I told Lupe was understood, that what Lupe tells Sylvia will be understood.  Now, where did I pack that faith?  What box?  What room?

O!  I see it is 3 minutes past the cerveza hour.  Must away now!  Adios!

20 July 2009 : The Status of The True Life (etc.)

The True Life Adventures of Irene in White Tights has survived through four drafts and the weight of an added Epilogue which may, or may not, be incorporated into the final chapter — depending upon what the fifth draft demands.  Each draft assumes its own personality and presence; or, perhaps, each draft decides upon yet another facet of ’self’ it will show.  I begin to think I may be in need of psychoanalytic training, that if I asked the fourth draft to relax on a long sofa (a very long sofa, one capable of accomadating one hundred thousand words, not to mention a circus, a carnie venue, a Brooklyn brownstone, an adobe casa in Cottonwood, Arizona, a park, some pigeons, Barbados, Hell’s Kitchen, China Town NYC —-> nevermind <—- trust me, a  v e r y  l o n g sofa!), and then asked the fourth draft to tell me its innermost fears,  well, I begin to think I wouldn’t know how to soothe the fourth draft, how to give comfort, how to advise it other than offering some sort of mantra, like: 
                                      I’m ok.  You’re ok.

          Advice from my friend and editing coach, Lynn Vannucci, is along the lines of “start a new project, occupy your creative side with other enjoybable tasks.” 

          Sure, Vannucci.  Fine.  Meanwhile, the first chapter may or may not have been discarded by an agent who has those early pages in hand.  Ok.  Ok.  The new project is moving out of one Rosarito, BC, Mexico casita into a casa with an ocean view.  (Has the agent opened the email yet?)  Second new project is knitting socks from yarn recaptured from old sweaters I can’t wear down here in Old Mexico as Christmas gifts later this year for children who live in climes where such socks might be appreciated.  (Will the agent have read the first chapter by December? By Christmas?)  Third project is squeezing pre-mixed sheetrock plaster onto red roof tiles out of a cake-decorator’s parchment cone in primitive motifs of leaves and stick-legged goats.  (Is The True Life Adventures of Irene in White Tights a stick-legged goat?) 

          Fourth project is on the horizon.  I will look there right after I publish this journal entry to my long-abandoned blog.

 

Hunger

Mexico.  Baja Norte.  The Popotla Cove.
Mid-morning. This ocean and sky are one soft gray
expanse. If there be surfers inside these mists
waiting out lesser rollers for larger rides,
they wait or rise, bodies slick with sea and balance,
in silence.  As if gauzed.  As if their whoops of
success are wounds carefully bound in bandages
wheeling out from absorbent marine layers, thick
with possibilities:  all night the beach fires glowed
before tents, boards stood as totems facing west,
hopes went up like incense for feasts of fine rides
with sun’s break.  And break it did
behind quiet fog.  Here, the foam’s ebb and flow
is a lick heard, invisible, salted, receding
as surely as clock hands proceed about faces
through measured time, allowing small creatures who
abide in the sand their meal of air, of continuation
between tides.  Now the totems may be weighted
with the builders of fires.  Striations of sea
blend with air.  The larger ride will come.
They are hungry; they are ravenous with faith.

~

[after reading Ted Kooser's ALP post of Wisconsin poet Ronald Wallace's 'Sustenance']

7 April 2009 : no power : trip : bloody-awful cold

There you have it.  Right there in the title line.  And with those three excuses, I advise all who view I still have my head, but not my muse.

11 March 2009 : Camelias in the Red Bowl

They last such a long time, camelias broken on short stems from a friend’s eave-high plant outside her blue front door.  Only now, a week later, do they begin to show dark beginnings at the edges, as if someone has held a fountain pen or sharpie marker a tad too long in dotting the “i” on a page, but the page is a petal of glorious coral pink.

Second draft on Irene in White Tights has also been waiting for the sharpie or fountain pen to move on, to scrape a horizontal scratch across a waiting “t” wanting to be completed.  Her ladyship, the muse, seems on hiatus.  She never strays a great distance, this wayward muse of mine.  But, since the power outtage for 5-6 days a week ago now — she has been lolling about on the beach or watching pelicans dive headlong into the ocean.  At least some homely, plain birds are at work!

5 March 2009 : Where Has She Been?

The simple answer first.  No.  The simple question first: Where has who been?   I suppose the “who” is me, lynn, and where I have been is here, in Rosarito, Baja, for six days without electricity or DSL or phone internet keyboard printer imagination [oops, no, imagination never went off even for a blink, unfortunately! Ah! but then, you see, the pencil's lead has gone dull! and the only sharpener is electric, but for the pocket knife to shave a new point ... but by then the thread of what I'd meant to write is gone all wonky and there I am, new point on the pencil and wondering what it was that I wanted to write], and sundry other things that go missing when you have no electrical power.  Where is the old manual twenty-pound Smith Corona when you need it? eh?

But the other “who” is Irene of Irene in White Tights.  She is, on page 145, or thereabouts, napping in her frigid tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen while someone taps lightly on her door.  Her mother, Olive, is in Hollywood, California, visiting Irene’s younger sister, Florence (the sister married to the fight promotor named Mike, the second husband named Mike Flo has wed, the fourth husband — but who’s counting — in her much-married, modeling career).  Irene’s other sister, Mae, is in a rocking chair back in Brooklyn and attended by Jane Smith.  (Jane Who? And where did she come from?)

Quite suddenly now, at any second, these words will stop and Lynn [that's me] will be waking Irene up from her nap and putting Olive on a train for home (Brooklyn) with no one waving her off and goodbye from the train station . . .