No wonder Whiskeytown Lake drew us in,
holding up, as it does, all the great weight of blue sky,
holding down all those ghosts near the outskirts
where a mining town drowned
once the dam came in.  We hauled our crafts there,
escaped August’s heat, February’s ennui,
lines humming on Summer’s catamaran,
kokanee nibbling bait thrown
from our blue-bottomed skiff in pre-Spring. 
We used the road to the drowned town
for a boat ramp, saw walls standing in the clutter
of blue gill schools once
after a seven-year drought - the water, so low then,
small fortunes could be had mining 
snags for lost lures.
When gnat wings went gold with sun and buzz,
we tied off to wild vines and took the shore grass
to our thighs - yours mine, yours mine -

O how we laughed at the thorns.
O how we laughed at their bite.

With nothing but water, we’d go dizzy and drunk,
shallows lapping us free and making us new
in the womb of a finger cove. 

Uphill from the drowned town there are cattails
and blue-bodied dragonflies, yellow marsh iris, blackberries,
minnows, frogs.  When the burrs of memory snag
and hold, I am water and sky and you
are the honest air of both, allowing me breath. 
The road remains.  Always will.  

. 

I know the park, but the name is gone.
The trailers have awnings and shaded eyes.
Nevertheless, the homebound who no longer drive
more than golf carts, finger
drapes open a dime or a nickel
to watch those
who no longer speak
dance walkers
over speed bumps. 

After Easter
narrow white flags that waved from Hershey’s foiled
kisses tangle the thorns
of Duchesse de Brabant
of Comtesse Cecil de Forton.

The arched pavers fence mulberry saplings
with scallops like collars, but harder than coffin wood.

Acid pits in the Pedley hills closed before
this park was built.

We are yellow
now
in the book
and the clear page that sealed us in
flakes small triangular shapes
to stick
on my open palm.
I know the windows where the dead stood,
where the waiting went
without answer.
She was a place and time.
We grow up.
We change. 
I pick off the flakes
of us, dust unto dust. 

~

[After Pablo Neruda "The Rooming House on the Calle Maruri" from Isla Negra]

                                    Pour les enfants d’Alphonse Doiron
                                    qui sont magnifiques à moi

Portrait of Suzanne Marie

Between Lawrence, Mass.
and northern France,
she grew inside
Josephine. 
Missed by the curette,
(wee failed curettage)
loved for her fetal dodging,
she was one
l o n g
complaint,
but her violin was sweet.
From an orchestra chair,
solos, sonatas
that made cats
give up cream
and bastards weep.
She gentled the guts,
whispered the rosewood,
created
a peace
without.

Her children
could not break in.
And the flowers of sound
went to weeds.

Mother-of-pearl in the bow,
rosin stick, old and talcum clouds
even now in a room
she’s no longer in!

Josephine Dehullu

Josephine Dehullu had
a fisted heart
and wizened hands bereft of blood.
She knocked heads, grandsons, boys, but good.
Starved girlhood
sculpted
all she could be.
She’s seen, in dreams, red poppies climb
slow rises in French fields
again or Walloon leas
afloat with spring.
“Mon petit cochon,” she soothed,
“Mon petit cochon,”
her song broken with
blue cataracts and                 
1914 wars.  There is killed a childhood.
Life grew around the stone
of it, that death.

Nightfall

Windows
and half-lit stars.

In the red soil
Oligochaeta moves among
root hairs, practicing
conversational French.
Bon, bon, bon,
she calls.
No hairs bend.
Tres bon! she says.
Lions stir above
and rye
under a quartered moon.
Spheres shake.  Now
the white pappi rise
and go.

Death’s Lament

                                For Joseph Doiron 

Clear bottle with brown gold
top right kitchen shelf.

I came handsome here, and sure,       
and almost laughing still
I go.
Eighty-I-don’t-know - enough!
(In the lean-to,
the Marlboro reds,
light one for me
at the end?)

I wanted to love her, I did,
and I did for awhile,
I did.  But I was bought,
early on.
(In the lean-to,
a red box,
light one for me
in the end?)

Small green tomatoes,
whole tomato plant,
let the green worms grow
fat and cocoon
into moths
unafraid of the night!  (In the lean-to
the red Marlboro box,
light one for me
soon?)

Clear bottle with brown gold
top right kitchen shelf.

Church/Farm

The might of Right
is Wrong most times
and deaf and numb
to corn, to grass, to barley.

Farm of words.
Plowed pages.

Below the smoke of holy
writ and nonsense, wee
bits like fleas
make a truth that bites.

Farm of words.
Plowed pages.

We seed our furrowed
hearts, we green.
Our fruit
perfumes the world.

Farm of words.
Plowed pages.

Memo

When I die,
scatter me with thin yellow ribbons
over the apple orchard.

When I die,
among the windfall
and winesap.

When I die,
scatter what I am if you will
on the high lakes.

I love them so!

March 2, 2008, Santa Barbara, CA

My father and mother should never have let them take the roosters from my heels.  But in 1947 we were seven days in the hospital after delivery and those birthmarks must have been red and raised and crowing to be taken off my tiny feet, so my mother agreed.

            When I wonder about those roosters now, I have no one to ask.  My mother’s only surviving sibling doesn’t recall them at all.  He is eighty and remembers my shoes too white, my dresses too ruffled, my hair too perfectly parted, and bangs too perfectly cut.  Except for my mother’s boring devotion, he remembers no flaws.  No birthmarks of any kind, no rooster marking one heel, much less two.

            Whims of imagination allow me to re-establish them there, one to each heel, raised like a delicate cameo but in the shapes of full-silhouetted birds, wings aflap and beaks ajar, welcoming that line of light that widens to run up a blue-black night.  Try as I may to have my rooster-marks face each other in mirrored affectations, they refuse, adamantly crow toward my left, regardless of where the east and the sun might reside.  Yet they’re never petulant, my roosters, never wraiths, but rosy as coxcombs overall in color and, being of my heels, possessed of the same sort of magic as, say, Hermes winged feet.   What can compare with the imagination of an old writer:  the abducted muse; the crippled messenger; surgical removals of potential flaws shaped as harbingers of breaking days; blind feet; shorn wings; the quiet years of mother-clucking adoration.

            Above all - I was adored. 

            Out of that great depravation of the Depression came showers of protection, one set of eyes upon me and then the next and the next and the pairs of eyes were connected to smiles and coos and no doubts, none, that I would be anything, everything, all.  They were a system, a flock and a herd and a gaggle of care - grandparents, aunts, uncles.  There were cousins, of course, mere boys.   Different, somehow.  Somehow outside the magic, beyond the protective lore and the curses.  Yet - a part of the cures.  A part of what it would take to ease us from who we were, or might maybe have been, into those women we became.    But they did not know to turn shoes at the end of the bed to carry off cramps; or, for the removal of warts, they knew nothing of chicken bones and threads buried in holes you dug and dared not look back upon after circling thrice and walking away.   

            From brand new with my surgically flawless heels to fourteen, I moved in the circle of No Doubt Whatsoever About Anything Under The Sun.  I had a little light that I let shine every Sunday in church and Sister Martha (Brother Benton’s daughter) had a flannel-covered storyboard: pale blue felt made the cut-out Mary; dark blue felt made the robe Joseph wore; the donkey was brown.  Books of the Old and New Testaments rolled off my tongue like birdsong.  Catholics were wrong on account of confessions; Seventh Day Adventists were wrong on account of their days were confused; Baptists were wrong on account of some reason I cannot recall; atheists were an abomination; agnostics were not defined.  My brother Randy and I were given dimes to drop in the basket when it passed down our row; we were meant to tithe.  I was oldest and did; he was younger and bought jaw breakers with his.  

            My brother never had birthmarks.  At Easter Egg Hunts, he did fine, though he never earned a single small zippered testament with a color photo of Jesus in the Garden for memorizing The Beatitudes or any of David’s Psalms.   I had them, the little testaments - but I don’t anymore.  Now my brother is the one who drops dimes in the tithing baskets.  In fact, I think he may be one of those select and trusted few who stand along the center aisle and move the basket up and back, watching the hands that do drop, insuring they don’t retrieve. 

            If there were a heaven, I believe my heels would resurrect those old rooster markings, but unlike my Christian brother, I no longer believe.          

Yesterday I noticed the top step into the loghouse and the names written into concrete and the year, 1981.  The steps, two of them, and the walk are made of creekrun rocks and concrete.  I gathered all the stones from the creek; my neighbor helped.  Julie’s moved away now, and I live in the detached garage — the kind we build with living quarters for old widows.  My son and his family live in the house with the creekrun steps and walk.  Why mention noticing a year written in a step up to a porch attached to a house where I no longer live.  And the names: Al, Lynn, Don, Dani, Aimee, 1981.  No particular reason other than the math: 1981 from 2008 is like, a lot of years to pass up and down those steps, over the names of us.

The other thing, the February 1981 thing I wanted to mention as I noticed it in the Newspaper Archives was that Prince Charles became engaged to Lady Diana on a day in late February of that year.  I never kept up much on Prince and Princess news, and it strikes me as odd that I’d mention them here, even as I’m mentioning them.   But I think it has to do with the castle we built for ourselves back in the late seventies, and the wide cobble walkway and the steps with our names and he was King and I was Queen and the boy was our Prince, and the girls, our Princessesses for a little while back then — for about seven years back then. 

If my father had never been the second son
Of a brick-red man with a red-tick hound, 
            I would be someone strange to me  –

If there’d only been the one red-tick, no blues,
No black-and-tans, a better house than an oil lease,
            I would not be who I seem to be  –

If the clapboard house on the oil lease had even floors –
If there’d been room for a dozen children born,
            I would be made out of different genes  –

If the young man my father was hadn’t left home at fifteen
To work for a wage to save for the oldest son’s college,

Or if he had been less a good son, a poorer brother
And saved for his own selfish needs and future plans
            I would not be me  –

If he had not left Texas for California at eighteen
Because it was 1923 and West seemed a pleasant direction,

Or if, when he knew the wine he taste-tested at a vineyard
Addled his body and brain, he hadn’t stopped,
            It wouldn’t be me writing this  –

If his best friend’s sister had not been a freckled girl
With auburn hair and a shyness borne out of Arkansas,

Or if the shy girl’s family had followed the pickers out
Of California after harvest into god knows where,
            I would not be here, not this me, not this way  –

If the young woman had said No instead of Yes
So that no Justice was needed at City Hall,

If my father had not been equally shy and flushed as red
As my mother’s turned-paler shades of white,

Or if when the Justice glanced up at them
He had found cause to waylay their wedding,
            I wouldn’t be who I am  –

If that time my father left never to come back,
If he had kept his angry word and not returned,

Or if my mother had refused to let him in,
Had never given him the chance to make it up,
            I would not be writing these lines  –           

            I would not be writing  –
If I were not the child of my father,
If I were not my mother’s own  –
            Not these lines.  Not these.

[After reading Stanley Burnshaw's  House in St. Petersburg]

Almost a year after his passing, I heard Uncle Goober died.  I don’t stay in touch like I should.  The aunts are old.  Hell, I’m old and getting older (if I’m lucky) day by day.  Uncle Goober, though, that was a loss.  They all are, of course, and Albert Josephy (his true name) wasn’t related to me by blood but through marriage to my tiny Aunt Mary, Daddy’s sister.  One of Daddy’s sisters.  (There was Ruth, Helen, Mary, Wilma, Jesse Jean, Janis Sue.)  All dead now save Helen and Janis Sue.  And Daddy’s been gone since the eighties.  And Mama since ‘93.  Of Daddy’s brothers, and there were six of them, only L.D. (which stands for Lowell Don) and Earl remain.  Marion, Noel, Gerald, Cletus, Daddy - all gone these many years.  But news of Uncle Goober’s death made me sadder than I think I’ve been in a while.

He grinned so much, you see.  And blinked.  He had a stutter, a real one, when he talked, and he would just grin and blink his way right through it.  I can’t recall ever seeing him in anything other than striped overalls with some collared and long-sleeved shirt underneath and workboots.  I only saw him when we went to Oklahoma on vacation every summer and the one year when he and Aunt Mary came to California to see their middle boy, Kenny, who was stationed down at the San Diego Naval Base.  What I mean is, I didn’t see a whole lot of Uncle Goober over the years, but I loved what I did see when I saw him.  He used to put his hands inside his bib overalls, from the sides, and rest his forearms there, hands hidden.  His hair was about the thinnest, sparsest hair I’ve ever seen without a man being flat out bald, and his ears stood out a little bit.  And when his hands would come out to play horseshoes and he’d get a ringer from throwing, he’d put them back inside and jump, I mean spring right up off the ground and click his workboot heels together up in the air.  He could jump so high, like I imagine the Mr. Bo Jangles of song.  And his eyes would blink-blink-blink and his grin go ear to ear, so beautiful, I can’t describe, and he’d say “How-how-how whad-you-think about that?”

He was a clown for us and Mama and Aunt Mary would laugh so hard they’d cry and he’d pull a Kleenex out of his bib overall’s pocket, sometimes two at a time, one from each pocket.  I wish I had photos from then.  He was ninety-three when he died.  They say he didn’t know anybody by name anymore.  They say he’d grown very fat.

I write what I can remember, remembering him, glad that I never saw him too fat to spring into the air or unable to know who I am.  Then I get to imagining, create a different scenario to his final days, one where I fly back to Grandfield, Oklahoma and go to the tiny house where I used to stay for weeks in the summer as a girl.  I find the backyard there just as it was in the fifties, the old iron T-posts with the clotheslines stretched between them for Aunt Mary to hang out the wash, the weather-stained chicken coops where we, my cousins and I, used to collect eggs and where Uncle Goober once put a toy soldier, a Johnny Reb, for me to find - oh how he blinked and grinned then.  And in my imagined scenario I take a shovel and I pace off twelve steps from one of those T-posts toward the other one.  This is where “X” marked the spot on a Treasure Map Uncle Goober helped us draw.  And I plant that shovel into the ground and bring up an old tin box, about a foot long, about six inches deep, about four inches wide.  All the paint is gone off the box and the lid is near rusted shut forever.  But I manage with some finagling to pry it free.  And inside there’s a broken pocketknife, the handle part chipped, and some marbles and jacks, a disintegrating red rubber ball, a plastic barrette with blue ducks, and a lock of honey-gold hair.  An archeology of a young girl, an archeology of me.   In this scenario, I take the tin inside to Uncle Goober and we go through the bits and pieces that made up our lives; we blink together; we grin.

Off Victoria Road
the citrus groves are all luster in moonlight,
aqua daubs blur orange leaves and lemon,
and slur orchard rows into bas relief.

And the pulse is strong in the fruit
and the fruit many and many and sweet
from the one, and sour from the other
as night rides the moon-and I-you.   

This the beat; this the harvest; this magnolia
bloom opening moonwhite and thick-scented
with waxing rhythm. I am a blur slurred
into the grove of you; you, a thorned

lemon tree grown into the row of me. 

[After reading "Favela" by Milner Place, from In a Rare Time of Rain]

A funeral day way back when and after the services, dead but not dead, I sat in our only armchair with my hands holding either arm. The upholstery was green tweed.  Or big blue flowers on beige.  Or brick-red worn thin with batting and wood showing through.  I see my hands on the arms, his wedding band stuck on my finger and held from falling off by my wedding band stuck on after.  But I can’t see what fabric the chair was or if my legs crossed at the knee or at the ankle or if my ankles ran parallel down to the brown rug and angled side by side there and flat.  I can’t see that.  We were dead, you see, these parts of us—hands, feet, the stuff in between.  And not.  I watched people move  They moved as if falling through water.  But not, obviously not, as they paused, exchanged nods, bubbles of small talk with other participants halting from slow descents (or ascents) through currents I could not see.  The embers cooled and went out on the fire screen and new sparks hung there and died.  The log was spitting itself free.  Flaring in size just to fade.  Strange to remember the sparks but not the covering on the armchair.  Did I nod when people came close? and if I nodded could they see that it was me? my head that bobbed up and down agreeing with something said?  Or:  was my presence a figment of communal imagination?  was I the one passed and Al the one somewhere about—shoulder leaned into a porch post and head cocked to one side—listening?  My mind is of two worlds.  I decided all those years ago to rise from my armchair and walk out among them.  I was invisible.  Truly.  Known, like an earthquake is known to animals before the ground shakes, but invisible: I was Death they could sense but not feel.   I wore double-knit, dark gray.  The skirt was very long.  The belt, very wide.  And when I moved among them, his friends and siblings on the front and back porches of our life, they parted to let me pass.  They parted as schools of minnows would part to go round a bit of wavering root.  Or flooded grass.  

 Hummingbirds come and go through the summers.  Hot reds and hot greens zero in on their feeders.  Doris fills more than one, more than two, having sugar water and red food dyes enough for dozens.  Every hummer that comes is the first one for the day, every day is filled with firsts, every day is the same as the last. 

Two skinny cypress trees frame Doris’s window.  Star jasmine climbs and covers the cypress completely, makes an arch just under the eaves, connects one cypress tree with the other.  The feeders hang off these vines and the hummers circle and sip. 

Sharon uses a step stool to remove the feeders so Doris can fill them.  “Joe usually does this,” Doris chortles.  Doris does not say Joe’s name without happy places in the utterance, as if there is an encoded giggle between the J and the O and the E.  We hear it and smile; Sharon, the hospice caregiver, smiles; Ernesto next door, who raises chickens in a yard too small to raise chickens and who cannot speak any English, he smiles, too, when he hears Doris say “Joe” and nods Bueno! to the overcrowded hens.  

One night we hear the rattle inside him.   

We hear that rattle inside him.  We hear and it makes us shake and turn our faces away.  When we look back . . . 

But we don’t look back.  No use in that.  Joe was gone.  “Joe is gone,” we tell Doris. 

Over three months pass.  Nobody remembers the funeral hearse that took Joe away after the night hospice nurse pronounced.  Joe was gone.  Joe was gone.  Every day we tell Doris.  She bends her head toward the window.  The feeders are more than half full.  “The first one will be here any minute.”   

“Joe is gone,” we tell her.   

“Any minute now, the first one will show up.”   

“JOE IS GONE, Doris!” 

Her cane drops away.  Her gnarled hand finds her mouth.  Her eyes fill . . . “Not Joe?” Doris says; there is no happy place in her saying his name—but that will change. 

That girl in the navy blue flowers, that girl wearing eighty-odd years.  She stands and holds the lip of the deep sink.  She stands and watches the hummers diving for food, her ears not hearing us.  There are hours when we want to be her not hearing us, lost in a year of days when bad news is like a draft at a shaky window and a towel situated just so makes the draft go away and we are all warm again and can’t remember why a towel should be planted there, on that sill, where the feeders hang empty through winter—to us. 

Not to Doris. 

To Doris, ruby-breasted warriors vie for her red nectar, come and go, all day, every day, and every hummer that comes is the first one.  “Joe! Joe!  Come look!”