Pineapples gone wild  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . putting on the Ritz.

***


Still Tethered to the Things of this World


This morning, music and a mountain
ground to a hill. I’m feeling a bit removed
from eighteen-layer wisdom, confined
by the limits of Spring. My body's heavy,
motionless yet still a moving target.

When I turn the radio on, boys from high-born
families speak, clinging to slogans (and cash).
The heart is slandered, color cracked by the logic
of a world unwilling (or unable) to hear this waterfall
of birds drowning beneath trains and trucks.

If I were a plant, I would welcome the drift
of petals, blowing before the last winter wind,
pushed to green, piling promise beside me,
but then, I could no longer consider the nature
of failure: Love betrayed, desire caressed to Greed.

The Earth ravished. I wish I could provide
Confessions, Truth, useful Memory, but
breathing is my only measure: a subtle influx
of color, scent, and spring. An outflow
of mountains and rain, the breath of flowers --

Blooming and falling as time falls, as snow falls,
as wine falls,  fragrance after the cork is pulled,
as I fall, green tea spilled over rice, breathing
as fog breathes, as mountains breathe, reaching
sea and sky, suddenly apparent, suddenly real.


****

Recently, we experienced a wild rainstorm here in the Bay. Although the rain was icy cold, the storm was almost tropical in its suddenness. Winds ripped through, and the rain fell fast and furious. With my window open, I could hear the wind snapping through the dry palm fronds. I closed my eyes, allowed myself to fall inside that dry rustle pressed into pounding rain, and was soon drifting off to sleep and back through tropical landscapes, once so comfortable and familiar, now far far away. I think I spent the night in the back of valleys, under waterfalls, beside waves.

When I woke the next morning, the storm had fled. Skies were blue, the earth damply black, and I, of course, had not moved from my bed. Out my window, the BART train clattered, crows cawed, seagulls swooped, and somewhere far away, sirens. West Oakland was alive and well, still cheerily welcoming spring.

When I walked out onto the Street, I came upon a thing of beauty that I tried (not too successfully) to capture on film.  The tropical storm that rattled my palms had produced blizzard conditions, and all the blossoms of the flowering plum trees had been blown to the pavement below.

Our very own California snow.

Like most spring snows, this 'snow was gone by afternoon, not melted but blown aside by traffic and whatever breeze came along, but it was lovely, worth a smile or two, to see this early morning 'snow,'  so thick in places that it gathered in drifts along sidewalk edges.

This morning, walking under skies of high fog, I came upon this collaborative yet quite unintentional  landscape painting, painted on the only canvas available -- a telephone pole.

The official yellow strapping echoes the cheerful yellow flowers edging up to the sidewalk. The white spray paint captures the exhalation of jasmine spilling on the fence. The black tagging disappears under the misted white spray paint just as the black wrought iron fence disappears beneath that waterfall of jasmine, and the more subtle fades of black spray paint that climb the side of the telephone pole reach as poignantly (and as unsuccessfully) for the sky as do the pale thin black lines of utility wires above.

And the pink heart  translates the plum tree, labeling it correctly for what it is: the Heart of the Matter.

Collective, connective communication, rewriting the natural world.

Human Rights: a Fairy tale

Spring water filtered through stone
Air becoming wind
Nights without guns, mornings with sun
Thumbs, words
And the patience of eyes.

***

Gratitude makes me blush, but somehow that's okay. I would rather blush with gratitude than turn sour green with greed, wouldn't you? There is so much abundance at this time of year, so much to be grateful for and no reason, none whatsoever, for greed. There is plenty of beauty spilling from every crack, every crevice, every tree, every bush -- enough to go around, plenty for all.

At this time of year, everything blooms -- trees, bushes, flowers suddenly spiking from buried  bulbs -- but the most exquisite beauty, I think, is when the tallest trees glow pale pink, not because they are sporting pink blossoms as are the more exuberant flowering plums planted streetside but because their leaf buds are blushing red, ready to burst into a halo of green.  They blush with gratitude, grateful for the return of light, the coming heat of summer.

There's no escaping that fact that the delicacy and the enthusiasm of this time of year leaves us all feeling hopeful and grateful. I walk, glad for the sun, the soft hoo-hoo's of the mourning doves, the sudden cries of sea birds. I'm happy to be here on the coast amidst all this green where March comes ashore without roaring (or baa-ing, for that matter) but arrives instead regally seated in a sun carriage, all decked out in the most glorious flowers, perfumed with only the most gentle of winds, waving as gracefully as any Eastern May or northern June, bowing genteelly at the drying winter still hanging on in drab dreary garbage strewn lots.

With every bow, another flower pops, but it's the ones that spring unbidden I love the most. If the crowning glory of the barren lot, Oxalis, was blooming wildly a week ago,  it has now taken wildness to another level, reshaping even the most desperate landscapes of cracked concrete into spectacular rock gardens, alive with the brilliance of sun settled down to earth. I am glad for that.

I know some folk who think of Oxalis  as a most decidedly awful weed, yanking it without ceremony from garden edges and tossing it out with the trash, but I find it as beautiful as Wordsworth's daffodils. Like those daffodils blooming madly far from any homestead on a wild stream bank, oxalis, too, needs no tending, but it is even more resilient. It grows where little else will grow, sprouting next to street drains clogged with rotting trash, pushing its way through rusting fences, and happily blooming on bare patches of ground overwhelmed by plastic bits and broken glass.

Oxalis, for me, is the beating heart of spring. When it goes, summer begins creeping in.

Melting to Stars

In the desert, flowers melt before sunset
and rise after midnight as stars. It happens.
And it’s beautiful. That’s what she said --
holding her hand across the moon, fingers
stretched wide so stars might travel through.

All beautiful things should have a name,
but there is no name for that melting,
the reappearance, or the space between.
Resurrection is absurd and adjectives --
silver, high, bright – simply won’t do.

We can say Peony or Poppy and taste beauty,
but names for time’s transparency, the pause
before sleep, the instant the perfume of sun
on skin wakes us, the sudden surprise of sea
pushed into lava cliffs – those names do not exist.

At least not as words in any earthly language.
But I’m sure such beauties have names, vivid,
unspoken and unpronounceable, music
in a minor key, etched blue on meteorites
planted as ghost meadows in scarred valleys.

The thin breathing of evaporated deserts.

Before dawn, I drape shawls around my shoulders and snuggle into the couch cushions to watch Tarkovsky's Stalker, but I am accessing it on a Russian language YouTube site and the film stalls shortly after the opening scene -- Monkey still in bed, her mother weeping with her head pressed against Stalker's back as he brushes his teeth, face into the glaring light of day. Nothing I can do  will restart the film, move away from that image, but then, so what. The mise en scene is perfect, after all. What could be more strikingly beautiful than those two backs, male and female, and all that light?

I sit quietly for some moments and look at the stillness, the folds in the fabric, the curves of both necks, the deep scratches in the wall running up to the window. I trace shadows between with an imagined finger and try to recall what comes next, when exactly the film will turn to color. Finally, I recognize that if I am to watch the film at all, it will  be projected on the back of my skull in a dark cobwebby room by some faceless boneless projectionist identified only as 'Memory' who is rarely consistent, usually lazy, and frequently ignores the correct order of the reels.

As such a showing promises to be  as lacking in fluidity as is the YouTube version, I give up, turn on the radio instead, and what I hear is more grim, more barren, more desperate, than the stalled foreboding on my computer screen. Trucks exploding in war zones, children disappearing closer to home, still no word on the kidnapped French family spirited away to the Nigerian desert, overturned cars on a city street, a head-on on the freeway, another shooting overnight, a knife fight in a shopping center, a car crushed into a CVS store (driver dead), two divers pulled lifeless from the Bay. And more.

And so, I turn the radio off,  listen instead to the night disappearing into dawn, think about blue blue skies and the sudden surprise of daffodils streaming down the sides of Mandela Parkway.

 
I know too clearly that as the meticulously detailed description of misery streams daily from the radio, spills from the internet, sifts down from billboards, and piles up in drifts, I find it increasingly difficult to make my way through all that muck. Unable to create the positive changes I would like to see, I know I struggle mightily both with my own inadequacy and the increasing misery of our world  . . . and I also know it would be easy to sit down, keep my back to the world, my face in my hands, and give up.

Too easy. So, I don't. Give up, that is. I've never really liked easy.  I get up, make a pot of tea, paint the front steps, put another coat of sealer on the deck, rake up the leaves in the yard, and then listen to the early afternoon news (just as dreadful as the pre-dawn version). Then, I take my little dog and  heart out for walk, knowing the world will be there with all its grimaces (watch your back!) but trusting we will find all its beauties as well.

And we do.

 

Halfway through our walk -- maybe less, maybe more, hard to say when wandering -- I hear someone close by playing "Daisy, Daisy" on a trombone. I smile. No song seems more appropriate for this beautiful day blushed bright with flowers. I imagine Daisy on the back of that bicycle built for two, one hand on the handle bars, the other atop her head, keeping her broad-brimmed straw hat from flying away with the speed of the ribbons trailing behind. Blue, pink, yellow streamers twined first around the hat and then lying flat on the wind, tracing the wobble of the bike.

Not your grandson's cell phone bike route app.

The Earth writes a love letter to the Sky

Dear Sky, beautiful sky, pink and green,
I love no one but you, my thunderous queen.
Let no day pass without oceans, breaking
over grace. Let me give you forsythia
and luminous gooseberries, dropping
one by one to moss before rolling
to lava heights, passing on the way
March, April, May. Other springs.
New York: crocuses, purple gold.
Michigan: mud sleet, sometimes snow.
North Carolina: suddenly redbuds.
Colorado: asparagus in drainage ditches.
And, then, my most distant lands, red lava
turned to black made green with ferns --
Pacific winds pinwheeling up from blue,
letting go of ice gone too far.
A regular deluge, no reservoir,
no earthen walls to hold it,
but waves of tiny yellow birds
with blue-rimmed eyes swaying
atop pink grasses, color blurred
by city lights. They caught it.
Dear Sky, I cannot end this.
Love, you and I.

Spring is buzzing. Trees are blooming and new art is flowering, covering winter drab with image, color, dream, and something that tastes, smells , and feels like hope.

I found these stenciled  and sketched images -- just posted, brand-new -- within feet of each other,  just a few blocks from the BART station and near the new growth of a street garden across the street from a row of madly flowering plum trees, pink blooms already drifting to the sidewalk.

I especially liked this bee with its flower brain, stenciled below a quickly sketched portrait of an attentive two-blue bird. . .

 
. . . And appreciated the fluidity of this expertly executed four color piece, both mysterious and humorous. How many faces? How many mouths? How many eyes? How many places?

 . . . And then the One who wears his heart between his eyes. This Beast is a Beauty.

Keepin' it real.

Keepin' on strong.

It's spring.

Not officially, of course; the first day of spring is still six weeks away, but it's spring here on the coast. The groundhogs know it. The trees know it. And the flowers?

Well, the flowers are verging on ecstatic.

Just a week ago there were only one or two oxalis cheerily blooming along the shore in Alameda, now hillsides are turning yellow. Walking in Emeryville,  I saw a cherry tree in full bloom, pink petals already blowing to the ground. Tiny new green leaves dressing out the pink. Walking in North Oakland, I saw a raft of white tulips past their prime, stems arched, petals fully opened and dropping to mossy bricks,  curled and still waxy, looking ever so much like satin sails blown from tiny sailing ships that left port way too fast.

Way too fast.

Looking over my journals and my photographic records,  I find spring ahead of itself by at least a week, if looking at last year's buds and blooms, and slightly more than that if examining the previous year. Beyond that, I can't say; I was elsewhere.

I know my body, as always, feels grateful for the return of the light and exuberance of spring bloom, but at the same time, this year, I feel confused, inconsistent, and (oddly) somewhat threatened as if I had stupidly abandoned myself to nostalgia, of all things, but awoke inside the future. A bit impossible.

I find myself recalling other early Springs, holding them up for view, sorting them stacking them. One NYC Spring is crystal clear, a Spring when temperatures soared into the 80s by mid-March. I think Spring lasted one day in 1971, or maybe twelve hours. The trees unwrapped their bloom, unfolded their leaves, and it was suddenly (and gloriously) summer.

But this spring is not quite so decisive; instead, it's strangely tipsy, coming and going as springs are wont to do, but somehow, that's okay. Such indecision seems akin to grace.

So, what's a girl to do? Sweep out the basement, package winter's dirt. Go walking, ignore the trash blowing here and there, and focus instead on blues skies and trees, sprouting new leaves and expectant flowers pink and white. Even the pine trees are pushing new needles from cones still held at the end of branches. Beauty enough to make any squirrel feel she's been transported magically back to the pineapple fields of central O`ahu where scrubby grasses and wayward pineapples push against the sacred birthing stones of Kulaniloko, a place of thunder and welcoming.

Welcoming the new, celebrating birth. 

New life, the gift of spring.

Thank you.

What We Give

 
Early Sunday Morning. Blue skies, bird song.
Spring in February. Church bells tolling
and a fire truck parked and idling out front.
Cop cars stopped to either side, windows rolled.
No ambulance. I’m not even dressed yet.
I’ve just left my sleep, dreams of laughing friends,
dancing to mandolins in sunlit rooms.
And now this. Life close to death.
I want to go back to sleep but my dog
wants his walk. By the time I’m ready
to hit the street, the police cars have left
and the fire folk are pouring bleach onto concrete,
hosing blood to sewers. Nobody’s talking.
If truth’s beauty, what’s this before me?
Tomorrow, I’ll dig deep the rich black earth,
plant scarlet runner beans along the fence.

Staying focused on the real should help to create balance, but seeing the pain, hearing the  hunger, feeling the emptiness between, can upset that balance. I slipped into East Oakland the other day, driving along San Leandro past the Aloha Club on Fruitvale (boasting the longest bar in the East Bay) and Poor Honey's Used Furniture at High St, a block-long corrugated warehouse whose widely-spaced roll-up doors, each an entry to the store, are neatly centered within painted rectangles very nearly the length and height of box cars, each a brilliant primary color -- red, yellow, blue -- and each with its own set of painted (but unobtrusive) shadowy wheels.  A building disguised as a freight train disgorging its contents onto High St. The real train runs behind. . . and above.

I don't know why I am just now noticing Poor Honey's, just now marveling at its bold frontal stance on San Leandro Street. It's been open for two years plus a few weeks. I look at the loading docks in front of store where a few neatly dressed women stand examining a wooden kitchen table and see instead dozens and dozens of men -- day laborers -- gathered there, waiting expectantly for motorists to slow, roll down windows, offer jobs.

Of course, I am seeing only the ghosts of those who used to wait.

No one loiters outside Poor Honey's waiting to be hired, not at this late hour anyway.  The sign -- "Day Laborer Hiring Zone" -- is still there, and maybe during morning hours the men still wait. Or maybe Poor Honey's has employed them all to shift couches about, drive delivery trucks, smile kindly at the passing cars, potential customers all.

A shift in focus, but balance holds.

Or does it?

Things have been rocking and rolling lately in Beauty Land. A few too many gun battles and yesterday a bomb threat at the Lawrence Livermore Lab facility in Emeryville.

If the waiting men have all been hired, how much are they paid? Are they offered a living wage that allows them to provide shelter for their families in a region where rents are astronomical? Can they buy the now available health insurance or does it remain over-priced and out-of-reach? Do their children have access to an education that encourages creativity, wonder, and compassion, or are they scurrying from class to class in buildings that smell like mold, passing armed guards positioned by every door leading to sun and flowers and birds flying high in the sky? Do these now "employed" men watch with sorrow and fear as their elementary students grow to become sullen youth with deep silences and a disturbing knowledge of drugs, violence, and firearms, knowing that their "wages" can only permit a move from one "killing zone" to another?

Recently, an organization connected to a major University offered me wages of $120/wk to assume responsibility for a major research project here in the Bay Area. It was made clear to me that I would need to be available at all hours ('24/7', they said), including weekends and holidays, supervise at least six other personnel, but that I would be an "at will" employee paid $20/hr for for approximately 6 hours work a week. "At will" translates as "no benefits, no job security." When I refused that overly 'generous' offer, tendered with neither irony nor apology, they offered two dollars and fifty cents more per week.

That offer shook me to my core.

If a major University can make such a ridiculously absurd job offer and not even blink an eye, what about the men lingering on street corners, in"designated hiring zones", hoping for jobs? Are they, too, forced to accept twenty dollars a day (or less) just to buy milk for their babies?

The corporatization of America has severely polluted community life and gravely wounded our democracy as corporations work overtime to cut costs by cutting wages and increasing work loads. Unions have been busted, and too many who have traditionally spoken in support of fair wages have hopped onto the corporate freight train, riding willingly into the castle courtyard. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly obvious that too many of our institutions of higher learning are no longer beyond the pale of the corporate king-makers. Ring-a-ding-ding.

For now, in the dim present, the underpaid, overworked workforce continues to support, however unwillingly,  the "personhood" of America's corporations, but like caged canaries, they sing.

And the future?  We all know what happens when canaries are expected to live on fumes.

Canaries

On the last day in January, the street
buzzes. A raw beat attached to rawer rap.
I pull my garbage bins out to the curb
as the rapping teens step into traffic.
Hands up, hands down. Arms flung out, looking tough,
acting rough. When cop cars roar into view,
they laugh and move to choreograph.
Filming, they yell, one loud voice, out of tune.
Bop. Boom. Cameras target the squad car
and it speeds away. No back and forth chat.
Three lean back, hands held forth in gangland stance.
No way to know if these are ‘real’ gang signs
or made for show. Forefinger disappeared,
the other three lined straight, held well apart.
No thumb. No guns. Plenty of expletives.

A while ago, someone set a box of miscellaneous items on a nearby street corner -- mostly mismatched shoe but also a well-loved  one-eared teddy bear with a pink heart hand-stitched onto its belly, a potato masher, six plastic sippy cups, a grease-crusted stainless steel pan minus its lid, two garden trowels, and a plastic lemonade pitcher. There also might have been a t-shirt or two, at first neatly folded but well-crumpled after the passing of a week. And several baseball caps.

The baseball caps disappeared on the first day as did the garden trowels. The cook pan left on the third. The shoes stayed but the potato masher found its way on to a near-by tree branch where it lingered for several days, swinging like a soundless wind chime, until it too disappeared. The teddy bear went face down in the grass, and then, someone added six paperback romance novels and a stack of magazines to the box.

Two days later, another someone set the box on fire. The cardboard charred; the paper went to ash. The plastic sippy cups melted into goo but the shoes didn't burn. Except the laces. The burned box and the smoky shoes are still there, a smudged thumbprint, taunting passers-by to pay attention but to what? The ash? The destruction? Useful goods turned to trash?

I walk by and think about impulses -- the impulse to beauty, the impulse to kindness, to set down a box filled with unwanted but still useful items free for the taking and another impulse to see all those "goods" burned to ash -- ideas as well as things. Burn the sharing; burn the goods.

Days later (or was it the same day?), more burning but this time on the highway. A pack of speeders -- at least six cars, probably more (safety in numbers) -- held a "sideshow" on I-880, laying down rubber from their tires in great black circles  as they spun doughnuts across all lanes of the freeway, stopping traffic in both directions. An impulse to wreak havoc, destroy order, or a simpler impulse to be seen? Look at me, look at me, look at me? I'm here! I live.

Maybe we better start looking before the city starts burning. We all enjoy the beauty of the dancing flames of a campfire on a beach, sparks taking off after stars, but there's not much beauty in fires of destruction.

Can we recognize poverty and its sources, finds ways to eliminate poverty by rediscovering kindness, rekindling impulses to share and care for others and this damping down impulses to destroy?

I'm not sure.

We have written destruction into our national psyche. How else can a consumerist society continue to "expand" except by replacing the old with new, destroying what has been to "make way" for what will be -- even if all those "has-been"s are perfectly sturdy, functional and useful?

Capitalism, sadly, depends on the tear-down.

You finish the paragraph.

In Memorium

 
High tide, the bay lies still, windless blue marked
by sketched gold ‘vee’s, rising like so many
exotic butterflies newly arrived
from other lands, exhausted but unable
to clasp tight wings to rest. Instead, they leap
and dance, flutter and fall, dance again.
My eyes want to close but can’t, mesmerized
by white light dance, choreographed by tide.
The rituals I trust need these waters this light.
When my loved ones leave, I come down to the sea
and place my hands flat on water pushing
onto me, wait until waves pull back to free.
I accept the push, lay flowers on the pull,
watch as the blooms linger, bob, and drown
in the shimmer of the golden butterfly road.

The moon is pushing on to full, and with the moon's gentle "come hither" beckoning, coastal waters are rising well beyond expected limits. A nearly seven foot high tide is expected today, but the waters cover the beach and swamp the seaside path well before the tide reaches its peak. The pictures below show bay water sloshing over the tops of  handrails and obscuring entirely the path with still two hours remaining before the highest tides would breathlessly climax and once again begin to recede.

No one is calling this tide a "King Tide"; that was last month. This is just an ordinary high tide on a placid January day. The extra push ashore?  What a high tide looks like with the sea level rise from last year's melt.

So, folks, if we keep consuming at the rate encouraged by those who dream of bigger and better, faster and faster, what will next year bring? Tidal surges over-topping coastal barriers?

Every last one of us needs to take a long hard look at our habits and sloooow down -- consume less, eat less, do less. How often do you drive when you could walk or wait, combine several trips to the store into one? How many products on your kitchen shelves have been shipped from elsewhere by plane? Buy local! Still using plastic wrap? Plastic bags? Well, don't. Store your food in glass. Carry re-usable bags to the store.

Of course, one person's changing small habits is not going to substantially lower energy use, but one person plus one person plus one person  becomes a crowd. That crowd of individuals determined to change their habits as consumers can make a difference. So why not try?

It's a beautiful world, worthy of our tender care.

****

Extreme Tides

Out front, the moon rises nearly full.
Over the back fence, a string of golden lights
rescued on that last day of carnival.
Above, clouds in great drifts around the moon,
a star balanced above the cypress tree.

The clouds are washed pink by city lights,
and behind them, night bleeds through cobalt blue.
If I hang on that one star and ignore
the street (sirens,  noise), maybe I can sleep.

Today, I pulled the passion-flower vine
away from the fence, cutting back years
of dead leaves and branches. No butterfly cocoons,
but still no clear path through this dense fog
crowding in. I stutter when I speak.

All this expectation dissolves me.
I hear trains. Why didn’t someone tell me
earlier that the ‘pale’ of ‘beyond the pale’
was a sharpened stake poked into hard ground,
a resting place for crows and severed heads,
not (as I thought) a shimmer between worlds,
rare and strange? I can’t live with souvenirs.

****