This fall, I dug into Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It was hard for me to read. I didn’t finish it. Hardly started it. This is a reaction/intention/release that I wrote after reading a particularly difficult passage. I wanted to somehow prove, that the way we love and live presently, can somehow honor the past, undo a portion of the pain. I want to believe this is possible. These images came together last night.
This November, I read with Quiet Lightning at Chez Poulet. Quiet Lightning is magical, check them out.
Here are some links to the performance, and their Sparkle and Blink publication.
Quiet Lightning is performing Monday, January 2nd at Club Deluxe in San Francisco. Check it out.
A Surprise Phone Call, on Day of the Dead
For Helen
After the afternoon dishes,
Sara drove to the cemetery,
she was looking for you
but couldn’t find the stone,
sat down beneath a tree instead.
She wasn’t surprised
when the birds came.
Dozens of them,
appeared out of nowhere
and shot up
to the five-o’clock
east coast moon.
She picked up her phone.
The sky
is purple orange,
she said, and it’s dangling
like a dream catcher,
above all the dead bodies,
and all the living ones too.
Headed east for a wedding last week. Just got back this morning. Reminded me of a poem I wrote a few years back, inspired by a Jonathon Richman tune. I wanted to write an opposite, and a truth. A coming to terms with the coast I was born to. An attempt to articulate everything I love and fear about it. I’m still learning how to best articulate this. Here are some images from my recent trip. I stalked the neighbor’s clothesline, thinking of this poem the whole time. The napkins and table cloths that were hung out to dry, had tiny crimson crosses stitched into them. It really was terrifying up close. Again, the sound is an issue. Press mute:) And imagine an old woman reading the text, or a young girl, or me. Imagine the text stitched into the linen. That would have been something.
The history of New England is full of the horrors
that have turned life into gloom, joy into despair,
naturalness into disease, honesty and truth into
hideous lies and hypocrisies.
–Emma Goldman
Sweet New England
Look at you there
all stately,
ghost towned
all blueberried
all bare.
You built libraries
for us to sit in,
memorials for us to kiss.
You have bugs in the summer,
whales in the spring.
Your country stores,
thunderstorms,
your universities,
make us want to go driving.
We forget about
the women you’ve burned.
We turn our heads
to the stones you once threw.
Like this one here,
used to split and bruise
baby skin.
From you we learned guilt.
From you we learned lying.
Look at us watching
all cross legged
shoeless
all brave.
Tall and long necked
as an apple tree,
we wear a black dress.
We picture a light house,
an orchard, a steeple,
a mill.
You like it best
when we picture these things.
Last winter, I was contacted by the amazing musician and Choir Director, Mimi Jans. She was beginning to plan her spring program, and had an idea for a collaboration. Mimi asked me to write a poem about birth, that she would then compose a piece of music to, for her newly acquired high school choir. This was especially exciting for many reasons, one of which being, Mimi’s choir is located in Basel, Switzerland. The idea of a whole choir of Swiss adolescents, singing a strange and creepy song about birth, makes me so happy! I sent mimi a few poems to sift through, and luckily she picked the weirdest one!! Since I have never given birth, i tried to re-imagine what it was like being born. This is a recording from their 2011 Spring Concert.
A few months later, the incredible visual artist/performer/designer, Rachel Znerold, asked me to compose a piece of poetry for an installation she was making for a Womb themed show. Her piece, Womb With a View, an interactive, Womb Tent, became the home for this sound piece.
A flood, and suddenly
you are meant to understand,
the slick patience of gravity.
There is a slideshow
of mother skin and air.
There is muscle.
The persistence of pushing.
The first sound is pink breath.
Release, cold, then everything
That is earth and not water,
Rushing in to meet the body.
This is not the mystery of home.
Where’s the nest of silk stones?
Where’s the warm and glow
To cling to?
I am anxious and impatient, so i’ve decided to stop waiting for technology to arrive at my doorstop, and start making things. Dear technology santa, please send help. In the meantime, here is a video poem, minus the poem. I can’t figure out how to add the sound just yet. The two pieces came together a few moments ago. Or at least they tried. Their future is uncertain. I was asked to write a “love” poem for an amazing raven, marriage ceremony, that I’ve just gotten home from. When I sat down to write last night, all I could think about was this conversation I had with Peter. We were talking about art, how we make it, why we do. Peter thinks we make art to create the impossible, to make up for nature’s limitations. We are mechanisms for the impossible he said! I loved that so much. The images are from the garden, and a trip I took to an old gold rush town.
Maybe turn the sound off, and read the text out loud:)
What Peter Losh Said
“We are mechanisms
of the impossible,” he said.
“We can make horses fly!
We can do whatever we want!”
Peter, I agree with you!
Nature has its miracles,
sure. But we are designed
to make Art! To take mineral,
sun, night, to take earth, hurricane,
home, and put this together
somehow, streamline it.
Look at us moving
our perfect hands in the morning.
We collect the day,
stir the parts that impress us
the most, into a ruby pot
called purpose.
Isn’t it wonderful to discover
what we’re here for?
To make Love,
make Art,
to honor the Sun
as she finds her way
home again,
through the thick and pull
of the night.
It started with handfuls of rain
and breast in October. It started in a doorway,
someone was 17, but most of us
weren’t born yet.
It made our mothers buy hair dye
and finger soft fruit at the market.
It made our fathers
our fathers.
Isn’t it something,
that here we are now
rubbing on each other’s
bellies and bottoms
slipping on and off
silk robes
of mother, lover, and father.
We fill each other’s mouths
with the pulse and promise
of art, music, and living the way
we always thought that we should.
What I’m saying is,
it all makes sense to me.
* text first published in Getting There, 2008
*Photograph found and coveted. My birth mother Regina, and father Kevin. Circa 1975, California.
Cat Bones in the Flower Beds 