Under my feet

San Leandro Creek early this morning, 

so still, unmoving, only a shudder or two from frozen. 

Under my feet, points of light twinkle 

from the deep litter of dead leaves, each light 

a leap off a frosted drop sparkling like a star,

adding brilliance to a damp and dark 

forrest floor littered with corpses, 

but how they lie lovely in their graves, 

greens and yellows faded or completely gone, 

but at least they have me, a grateful woman

for this carpet of gold and brown 

under my feet where I spot a fresh leaf, 

still yellow, others gold or dull green, or grey
as if born at the last minute 

then dropped from the exhausted arms 

of these old trees. Just beyond I see

pure brown earth from which swollen roots bulge 

silent and battered as if they popped 

out of the ground in a plunge for air.

I can’t take my eyes off that sad disarray

of skins cast off  by the eucalyptus trees, 

as if in a rage about the shortness of everything 

they are tearing off their clothes.  

I find a long thin branch on the ground. 

It serves well as a walking stick to steady me 

up the slippery slope where my car waits. 

Just one last look around before I go. 

I'm pleased that all this winter dead-- 

its silence and bareness, its sharp chill--

doesn't carry me off to melancholy,

instead takes my hand and squeezes it.

The view one recent morning

It rained lightly this morning. 

A rare thing around here. 

A good time to visit the wood  nearby. 

Inhale its air, clotted with wild scents. 

A redwood stump 7 feet tall, 
wide and dark as a bear, stands alone, 
wounded, beside the path. 
What whacked its crown off in its prime?  

A bird quacks hysterically in the branches. 

Why this racket? 

Some quarrel over a nest or meal no doubt. 

A plane roars past overhead. Who is looking down from those tiny windows?
Are they worried?

Some little leaves holler

Yellow! Yellow! We are yellow! 

Under my feet, a wet carpet of wood chips. 

So soft, my boots sink lower and lower. 

Trees large and small, some bare, some thick with needles, 

bend over the San Leandro Creek and across my path. 

What chooses which way they'll bow, when they'll grow 

tall, when they'll give up and fall? 

The creek lays still and dark as a graveyard. 

Tiny winged creatures leap in and out of the creek, 

some swim in circles, bumping leaves that just float, 
accepting whatever comes. 

Suddenly the sun slices through the cloud. 

I feel as if I've been standing alone 

in a dark temple 

and all the lights have just gone on 

and people are streaming in. 

Awake now, I turn back to my car. 

One thing I think about on Thanksgiving

Sue pressed on a bottle cap protruding from a hole in her throat. 
It was her turn to tell why she joined my “writing for beginners” group at the San Leandro library. 
It took several presses of the cap to explain that since her tracheotomy, speaking was very difficult. 
Being a person who loved to communicate,
I decided I better learn to write. 

But Sue panicked when she heard the library 
would publish our Thanksgiving Day stories. 
I don't know where to begin, she wheezed.
I don’t want to embarrass my children.

Sue settled on the topic of her mother’s old oak table. 
She wrote about how in the weeks before Thanksgiving, 
her mother pulled off the plastic table cloth and polished the table 
from the top to its claw feet. 
A week before the meal, she set the table for eight, sometimes squeezing 
ten around it. 

For decades, her family assembled at this table for a traditional turkey dinner, 
every year losing and gaining family members as they passed or moved away and spouses and grandchildren took their places. 

When Sue’s mother died, Sue brought the table to her own home
and continued the ritual of polishing and setting in exactly the same way.  
The work summoned memories that made her sink into the nearest chair. 
Every plate Sue set, every candle she unwrapped, brought to mind 
scenes from her childhood, from her children's childhood, 
and now from her grandchildren’s childhood. 
She felt the gentle presence of spirits hovering around the table, 
especially her mother's, always there at my elbow, checking my work. 

When Sue died four years later, her daughter invited me 
to a memorial service at the Oakland Hilton. 
In the hallway, I spotted clawed feet 
beneath a white tablecloth with framed family photos. 
In the center stood a double-paned silver frame 
holding Sue’s story, The Table. 

When he is diagnosed, he calls to tell me

Bill

Died November 20, 2006

 

Ok let’s cut right to the chase, my friend says.

I have lung cancer.  

Right then, ants skitter across my skin in all directions. 

We wait a a long time for me 

to speak but the ants eat my words. 

Finally some words escape, something

about God and disbelief.

But I’m not going for chemo and all that shit. 

I’m going for alternatives.

 

Faith performs miracles, I say and mean it

because I have seen it bend reality.  

After all, thoughts can raise and lower

body temperature and once 

I saw a man walk on burning coals. 

If anyone can do this, it is you Bill.

An unfamiliar road

From time to time, driving in the country, 
I'm struck by a disturbing image of an unfamiliar road.
A straight two-lane highway lined for miles 
by rows of tall trees, 
the trunks lean and nutty, bare up to the middle, 
then bushy with leaves thick and green, each tree 
identically tall, their pointy crowns aimed at the sun. 
I may or may not be alone in the car 
but I'm always alone on the unfamiliar road when
it suddenly seems familiar. 
I tell myself, Ah, here it is again. 
I don't know where I’m going or coming from 
on that unfamiliar road but each time I think I’m
on it, my heart starts drumming, something 
whispers, Look, you will die here
and in a flash I watch my car plunge deep into the arms
of these tall, straight trees.
On a drive to Mount Lassen, the road 
suddenly took the shape of the unfamiliar one.
This is the road! 
I slowed the car, turned off the radio.
But looking again, Maybe not. 
These trees have needles. 
No leaves. No slim brown trunks. 
So I relaxed. 
Once along Highway One 
between Stinson Beach and Point Reyes, 
I came upon an unfamiliar road that too began 
to look familiar. 
I pushed on the brake, 
tightened my grip on the wheel. 
No, look, look! This road curves, it bends. 
It’s not the unfamiliar road, 
which is very straight and very flat. 
There’s a road I drive often along Lake Chabot. 
It’s lined with many kinds of trees, all of them
the wrong trees, and the road has sharp curves, 
so I know it isn’t the one. 
I try not to think about that road. 
They say we give ourselves permission to die 
a certain way 
and then wander into that death
like a sleepwalker. 

A family story

My brother Arthur was born blue, partially strangled 
by the umbelical cord. He couldn’t catch his breath. 

After that, he was different from other kids. 

He made funny noises, couldn’t remember his address, 

said odd things. When he turned 9, St Joseph’s Elementary School 

said Arthur couldn’t keep up so my parents sent him to Mary Haven School for Exceptional Children in another state. 
He returned home when he was 18, 

tall and lean and strong. 
My mother got him dressed in a suit and walked with him 
from store to store but no one would hire him. 

So she sent him to the navy and to everyone’s surprise the navy took him and put him on a battleship. 
After three years, he returned to my parent’s house in Philadelphia. 
One day he typed up every page of a joke book 

just to have an extra copy of it. He watched a lot of TV and helped my mother with odd jobs 

around the house. Then one night he went to a sports bar and met Barbara, 

a frumpy little woman 15 years older, who told him she was dying of cancer. 

They began to date and soon she insisted he marry her. 
Not long after they married at City Hall, 

they rented a row house and she helped Arthur get a job as a bus driver. 

Then she forbid him to have any contact with his family. He obeyed her.  

After ten years of silence, my other brother, Frank, parked in front of Arthur’s row house

before sunrise one day and waited for him to come out. Around 7:30, the door opened 

and Arthur stepped down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. 
Frank jumped from his car and called to him. 
Arthur turned his head and when he saw Frank, he began walking faster. 
Frank ran after him, Wait! I just want to talk to you a minute. I’m moving to California. 

Arthur didn’t stop. He turned his head and in an anguished voice told Frank, 
Get out of here before she sees you! Get out of here! 

Twenty years later, Arthur was notified that his mother was dying, 
and then that she had died, and finally that she had been buried. 
Arthur didn’t respond. But his lawyer, inquiring about my mother’s will, 
which directed her estate be divided equally among her four children, 
instructed where to send Arthur’s check for $40,000. 
I pity my brother, strangled in the womb, strangled outside of it. 

I hope the money bought him a little happiness but I doubt it.

What I save

It occurs to me I frame photos

of their childhood for the same reason 

my mother framed 

so many photos of her children’s parties,  

dances, roller rinks, the poses around
the Christmas tree: 

Not so she’d remember us that way but 

so we’d remember us that way.  

Look, she shrieks when I blame 
her prickly temper for too much 
that’s wrong with me, 

See how happy you were. 

Your 8th birthday. So many gifts! 

The photos give me little clearings 

of pleasure in the woods of
my wearisome family ties. 

And now my children rebuke me for 
shortcomings as their mother which

worries me--do my failures cast 
too great a shadow on their childhood?

So from my album of ruddy flashbacks, 

I select the photos that remind them of their

three separate trips to Disneyland. 

To prove how very happy they have always been.

Notes

My mother writes me short notes and mails them 

even when we live in the same town. 

Ellie, Once I loved you with all my heart. Then you grew up and we went our separate ways. 

Read this interesting article about wrinkles. You have good skin. 
Use Ponds. Love, your mother.

Sometimes she asks, Did you get my note?

I reply, Yes, I did, thank you. 

She waits for me to say more but I never do. 

Now, 15 years since the last note arrived 

in my mailbox, I frame one or two and when 

I pass them on the bookshelf, 

I stand awhile and think of many things 

I might have said. 

Redemption

My father comes from a breed unkind to sons
so who can blame my brother for saying
Good riddens when I tell him the old man’s dead.
And when I trick him into a graveyard tour
and pull alongside the flat rock under which
the old man sleeps face up and barefoot in his uniform,
who can blame my brother for saying 
I’m not interested.
And when I stand at the grave, who can blame my brother
for staying in the car and when in a loud voice 
I read the words on the plaque about two wars and 
a purple heart, who can blame my brother for standing
at my side and saying, Go sit in the car, please.
And when I lift my face to the clear sky, to redemption,  
I hear a pelting, a cloudburst.
And when I turn my eyes to that flat rock, 
my brother is urinating on it 

and who can blame him?

The voices

The voices arrive one day without warning.

No troubling ideas, just constant chattering. 

But this scares my mother nonetheless.
This is her mind, her spirit, her ego. 

Her instrument for living in this world. 

I want to ask if the voices sound like her, 
if they have a German accent, 

but I don't dare. 

They have no physical being, she says.

Her mind is blank, just noisy, coming 

from another consciousness. 

She talks to the priest about the voices 

and he wisely sends her to a doctor 

and gradually the voices fall silent. 

When my mother tells me this, the voices
are long gone. 

She is calm, unconcerned. 

She says it was just an electrical problem.

She is sitting across from me at Howard Johnson's. 

I have not seen her in two years and she looks and sounds
like one who is able to bear what she must bear, 
able to adjust herself to any situation, 

and sometimes adjust the situation to her, 
as she does with that situation that is me. 

She does not seem vulnerable, nor like someone 
who will ever die.

But I dare not question her too much 
because she does not like to be questioned.

And so, because, I cannot read her mind, 
I study my mother's face politely 
as I would a stranger's on a train. 

I'm sorry

 
I was too afraid,
didn’t try for Harvard,
didn’t even try to run for mayor. 
It never registered you have
to put yourself in fantastic situations 
to do fantastic things. 
Did Hillary play it safe? 
Would she have chosen State 
over Cal just to save the BART fare? 
And it didn’t help to have a romance 
quandary in the works at all times 
(I was too terrified of being alone). 
My poor little fledgling self, 
my poor little lion, 
why didn’t you find your courage?  
You might have stolen the show.  
Isn’t that what it was all about for you? 
Love, uncommon love? 
Well, I’m sorry. For us old frady-cats
the ordinary stuff will have to do.

What I ate

There on the shore of the Bosphorus on 

that baking hot summer evening, 

hotter still when Rudy and I stood next to the bearded 

old man and his small grill, waiting for him to wrap 

two fish sandwiches.With sweat pouring 

down our faces, we searched for a place to sit 

but gave up and strolled as we ate. 

The fish was cheap and delicious. 

We went back for more almost every day, sometimes twice. 

Our hotel room was unbearably hot.  

The window opened to an alley so narrow 

no breeze could ever find us. Many times 

during the night, we stood up in the dark 

and soaked our bedsheets in water 

and then laid our naked bodies on them, 

feeling cooled only for minutes. 

But we were happy. We were still in love. 

I didn’t know if we would stay together forever 

but I felt sure that whatever happened

would be fine with me. Being very young, 

I expected my future to keep changing. 

No matter how delightful the present, 

I wanted the future to be even better 

and knew it would. When I returned to 

Istanbul a few years later with a different 

young man, one who was afraid to eat fish 

from the Bosphorus, who could afford a room 

with air conditioning, those wet sheets 

were much on my mind and for the first time, 

the past seemed a little sweeter than the present 

and I was no longer certain my future 

would be the one I desired.

Istanbul August 1970 

The back yard

On the west side of our house, my father planted 
a row of sunflowers, their heads towered
over the fence, and made a cheery sight-
their dark, round faces tucked inside 
those yellow bonnets nodding at passersby. 
In the wind, they swayed 
every which way, a line of excited 
teenagers at a rock concert. 
Under their shade I moved on hands and knees, 
poking around for grasshoppers, pulling 
off their wings, dropping them into pickle 
jars with leaves and bottle caps of water. A
city of glass jars built on my dresser
noisy with crawlers I thought were better off with me
than in the yard fending off predators like my brothers 
who crushed their bodies with riotous joy and
observed the horror of death for amusement. 
But with me, the millipedes, chameleons, beetles 
became my children, not my prisoners. 
Sprawled under the tall flowers, half awake, 
half asleep, I let them scamper over my face--
how sweet the tickle of hairy legs and soft wings, 
the feel of damp, cool skins. At night awaiting sleep, 
the lightening bugs turned their tiny bulbs 
on and off, my lizards moved the pebbles and I
wondered if any of my crickets lay upside down 
again, their little legs wiggling in the dark, 
and if I wasn't too tired, I turned on my flashlight
and checked. 

It's all a blur

Like so many San Francisco nights, Fisherman’s Wharf disappeared into the fog that appears even denser now as I recall how boozed up Jim and I were when we left the restaurant and the rough force he used on me and the horrific thing that might have happened were it not for an encounter I took then and, even now, to be preternatural. I had been drinking vodka martini’s while listening to Jim's long list of sorrows and regrets. He had spread them out for me as he poured down whiskey sours and chain smoked. It was very late when we walked to my car. He wanted me to spend the night. I wanted to drive home. Come on, come home with me, he slurred insistently, too drunk for sex and so was I. For weeks my desire for him had been waning anyway. I could go a whole day or two without remembering how nonchalantly he made love, with that same careless air of pouring himself a drink. It used to excite me, loosened me up. But in those waning days, only the steam from his mouth came to mind, the way it drugged my air with liquor and smoke.  Key in hand, I leaned forward to kiss his cheek. But he grabbed the neckline of my dress, yanked on it violently, split the front seam in two, exposing my bare breasts. Oh my God! I cried. Oh my God! and I stepped back, walked quickly to the car, jumped in and sped away, hurtling myself down the Embarcadero onto the 101 south freeway. It's all a blur, those cars speeding past me in the murkiness, the smear of lights encircling me like a carrousel, my eyes frozen in a stare, my lids so heavy I was afraid to blink, worried once closed they might not open again, afraid to move any part of me, not even the pressure of my foot on the gas, every second feeling like an hour. Up ahead, I saw the exit sign, Army Street. That was not my exit, mine was miles ahead, but something took hold of me, turned my wheel to the right onto that exit and down the ramp. My hands held lightly on the wheel, obeyed its will, the car now in command of itself. I did not hand myself over to it, no choice was offered me. This is where the car would go, I could do nothing, the way a mountain stream flows where gravity pulls it. Once on Army street, my car slowed, rolled to the side, aligned with the sidewalk, and came to a stop. I heard the key turn off the ignition, the motor fall silent, and then the space before my eyes vanished, the world went instantly black, silent, and bottomless.

In the hospital

I did something in that hospital 
that I never told anyone. 

It happened when I was alone 
with my mother in the last weeks, 
when she is not conscious, 
and I did it only for seconds at a time, 
when I didn't think my mother lived 
in that little body any more,
(Are we in our bodies or are we our bodies?), 
while I sat by her bed trying to remember 
her without white hair and parched lips, 
without ashen arms, noticing how thin her fingers 
had grown, the strange long nails that seemed 
not to know it was time to stop--no one had 
trimmed them since she fell 
(Only now I wonder, why didn't I trim them?), 
watching her mind-essence slumber, 
this barely breathing body, 
trying to remember her right leg, 
cut off just the other day with my permission, 
but not hers--how my sister and I agonized 
about letting it go, right below the knee, 
under the patella--the doctor said her bones 
were too thin, fissured like glaciers. 
Even in this near death sleep my mother 
sensed her leg's absence. Her fingers woke up, 
moved down her thigh like a spider, tapped 
just above the knee, no doubt sensing something 
was not right, deceived by a phantom, 
and that's when I lifted the sheet from her thigh 
and looked at that stump, thinking, this isn't human 
but an animal, not the limb she was born 
with and had used every day around the mall, 
and then I made myself touch it--I had to force myself--
I placed my hand gently on her thigh, stroked the 
bandaged joint now connected to nothing, to empty space, to air, 
because I wanted to see, because I didn't want to see, 
but thought I must to show her I'm not afraid, 
that this is nothing to be upset about, that life is still worth living, 
and then tears welled up, flooding my vision, 
my throat, for my mother, the amputee.

Out of the corner of my eye

I still remember it with wonder, the sight of him naked, 

the sight of him impressive and appalling-- 
I had never laid eyes on a bare-skinned man
(but had imagined how men might look, 
had turned over images in my head,
ruminated about the angles beyond 
the pelvis), and now here lies such a beast in person. 
In the hallway, in the early light and hush of our house, 
(I am the only one up), when out of the corner of my eye, 
I see my parents' bedroom door ajar
and there in all his raw vitality lays my father, his bulk 
and scale so marvelous: 
a buttocks in full view, a heft of thigh 
roofed in tangled hair--and, terrifyingly--
that ripened kiwi dangling.  
My parents lay side to side, his face in fields 
of her hair, his arm a bridge from his 
breathtaking flesh to hers, 
his thigh a mountain along her dunes .
My eyes wander without shame over their bodies 
as if they were dead.

.

.

To Me At 20

You don’t know it yet but your life has assembled.

Your vignette fully formed. Your brain custumized.

Your heart swooshable. Your are unchangeable

beyond what’s required. Yet still straining in the yoke, 

which will never yield but you don’t know that yet. 

You think you’ll wiggle out with time. It’s good to think that

(I even think it now so late in the game)

but here’s what you don’t know yet: the yoke is loose 

enough to tolerate. You won’t make a huge fuss.

But if we ever get a second chance, little girl,

let’s break out of it, let’s really break out of it. 

Insomnia

The worst time is 3:45 a.m. hope is gone. 

It is the most melancholy feeling. 

The room fallow in that shade of night. 

Dreary, desolate, even the breeze 

from the open window is misery. 

My eyes burn as if peppered. 

I repeat dumb things to myself, 

not complete thoughts, just vague bursts. 

I think about the word, Burgundy. 

My mother wore a burgundy dress 

to a wedding. 
Did we bury her in it?

I roll from my stomach to my side again. 

I try again to count to 500. At 76,

my mother's burgundy drapes float up
then vanish. 

No one on earth understands why
creatures sleep, 

why they must sleep to stay sane. 

If only I could see the stars! 

Is that a piano I hear? 
It's my old love. 

I lay still, listen. 

He looks stern, almost angry when he plays. 

I remember the burgundy gown 

my mother gave me, how it annoyed me.

She gave me something so formal!

Me, who hasn't worn a gown since my prom, 

and that was knee length, a ruffled taffeta 
dress, fuchsia, which is almost burgundy. 
I guess the love of burgundy runs in the family.  
Come to think of it, 

my mother dressed her porcelan dolls in burgundy. 

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I am dreaming? 

If I am actually asleep?  

Bad Habit

I must stop watching 48 Hour ID.

A thrilling distraction but all those murders

make me wonder: will my husband club me

in my sleep? Will my son arrange

a drive-by? My daughters?

They want new cars, new stuff.

So they all have motives.

The scary part: it's often those you least expect.

Possibly my niece. A lawyer with a social conscience.

Who would think she'd kill her aunt?

She's the person I least expect.

Hard to know when a good person turns killer.

Greed, vengeance, jealousy degrade our souls.

And yet we are not all killers.

I couldn't kill anyone.

I have wished people dead:

the leader of North Korea,

child abusers.  But I couldn't kill them.

The very thought of murder freaks me out.

I don't believe in ghosts but I imagine

the murdered haunting the earth.

Just to witness life fading from a body naturally

makes for a frightening spectacle.

I sat with horror next to her bed

when my mother in law took her last breath

in the nursing home. Her boney chest rose and fell

all morning and suddenly it did not rise.

I stared at the spot, waiting for her breast to move again,

slowly realizing it would never, never move,

all her being was gone, and then my own breath

refused to rise from my own chest as I grasped

the meaning of never.

And oh how my mind slipped from my body,

like a sword from a sheath, the evening I walked

into that hospital room where my own dead mother lay.

What fear seized my body, paralyzed it.

I had to feel around for the chair like a blind person.

That's how frail I was in the presence of death, turned

into a pile of salt like that woman in the Bible.

Yes I must stop watching 48 Hour ID.

It's a very bad habit. It keeps my mind

on the dreadful question:

Who wants me dead?