Julia Bloch

 

APOLOGY TO LOS ANGELES

I’m sorry because winter.
I’m sorry because “Lost Angeles.”
I’m sorry because the hand is the
most versatile of instruments and even zero
is a position. I’m sorry for the
poem, I’m sorry for the email, I’m sorry
for the subject line in the email, I’m sorry
about that line about the email in the poem.
The window was open and a hard
piece of metal flew in from the street, I think
that must have been what happened, it was
just the dirty structure of everything.
In the mornings the peacocks at Hollywood
Forever walked around and around
in caged circles and I was the cat, I was the housecat.

Michael McClure

portrait photograph by Grand Malanga (197

Mephistos and other poems

"A landmark work of bio-romanticism, Mephistos and Other Poems is the first completely new collection in five years from legendary Beat and SF Renaissance poet Michael McClure, reflecting his interests in mammal consciousness and ecological survival. The title sequence stems from McClure's ongoing "grafting" experiment, growing new poems from fragments of previously ones. "Some Fringes" is a series of haiku-like nature poems, while the seventeen-part "Rose Breaths" derives from the poet's practice of meditation. The freestanding poems grouped under the title "Being" pay homage to many of McClure's collaborators and fellow travelers like Bruce Conner, Terry Riley, and Dave Haselwood. The book climaxes with "Song Heavy," recounting McClure's recent encounter with a beached whale in Rockport, Massachusetts, and recalling his classic "For the Death of 100 Whales," which he read at the Six Gallery in 1955-the inaugural moment of American eco-poetics. Michael McClure is an award-winning American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving from Kansas to San Francisco as a young man, he was one of the five poets who participated in the Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem "Howl." A key figure of the Beat Generation, McClure is immortalized as Pat McLear in Jack Kerouac's novels The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He also participated in the sixties counterculture alongside musicians like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. McClure remains active as a poet, essayist, and playwright and lives with his second wife, Amy, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Michael and I have been twisting the Dharma for twenty years now. He reads his poetry like a mad lion or a hummingbird or a soft evening tidal pool or a wild California thunderstorm. His words are of a new realm of love and joy and terror. What a pleasure to play with such a perceptive artist. It's always been my great joy to make music to his words."--Ray Manzarek [C]ertainly a genius in thought and writing it out. McClure is one of the few contemporaries to have understood Kerouac as a literary poet-and learned some joyous classic invention therefrom. Thus we have a McClure poet, a McClure natural philosopher, and a McClure prosateur and novelist. Hardly anyone in America with equal range and sharpness, liveness. What more?"--Allen Ginsberg In Mephistos we are again thrown into Michael McClure's lavish lair of forceful magic. Its actions are literal ones, handfuls of jewels disintegrate as a firewall rises to a solid prism. There is no poet more adept at calling forth the elements, only to fashion them later as eternal amulets for his readers. 'NEW MOON ((BLACK!)) /STAR CLOUDS/ HALOES/ Flashlight reflects/ into two small eyes.' You will find your body changed through the labyrinth these poems initiate."--Cedar Sigo  "Close attention will be rewarded in kind. Keep Mephisto near at hand, read only a poem or two at a time, let the imagery possess you. It's okay, you can trust it. It's McClure: he'll never steer you wrong."--Robert Hunter, lyricist, poet, songwriter"-- Provided by publisher.

Clark Coolidge

The So Gone

The room sounds like a stun
the window shone.
The petals are missing this felt dry sky.
Dun day. Mister warblilngs.
Crease bunch bricked to the ankles.
I write stormings. Visors for fenders.
The alkali in the moot tip pending.
Slant the tree among its polish.
Twine rum at ankle tub. Balloons
to the shed thud. The bark is parting
a mackerel and lodged much cheese.
A submarie trouser warning, of so's
to be got brought. A cherry filminess
the ridge will edge with the mattress molding.
Bulk. Day gone room for the end.

(from Own Face, 1978, 1993)

Brenda Hillman

Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways

—i pull the hate

on a rope ladder to the resting zone…
               H
                   H
                       H
    pull the A on down.
A
     A
          A
           Put that sick A to bed. Get well, A. Pinched
           fire. Bring the T down now
                                                         
                                                                  T
                                                                        T
                                                                              T
    Roman cross before the Christian thing.
Bump bump. Put that T to bed. Put
         that Garamond T
to bed before we kill someone with it. Such as:
    Whack-whack. Weapon contractors in Virginia.
Whack. Get well T. Won’t kill with you.
            Now. Being
         able to breathe for the E,
breathe into the prongs. Slide on its back.
                                                          
   Put the E to bed. Get well, E.
Weird shapes around campfires
         below the mind.
Tiny fires with hurt earth spirits
         as in Aeschylus. Resting letters now
           so they can live—

Brenda Hillman

 Arroyo

 

A child looks down the ditch that is childhood
and wonders how long it goes on:
weeds walking out of the loved desolation,
mica winking in the killer sun.
All morning, she had dragged
her horseshoe magnet through the sand,
collecting iron,
wondered how the grains choose sides
like love and hatred in the diagram
and where would they have gone
had she not caught them.
She knows there’s a warm, triangular sea,
like the huge adult future somewhere.
The lizard scurries in the bramble.
The doll is soft, propped up beside the jar.

The child walks under the forbidden bridge,
stands beneath the rushing cars
studying dirty words on concrete:
curses, intersecting hearts
with smudged darts piercing the initials.
She stands in awe
before the faceless couple,
etched in a coffin of chalk,
having sex forever.
She sits so still and thinks
death must be like this,
among your favorite colors,
the world above you, roaring,
all distinctions gone.

Now she sees the dry ditch
as it is:
the glint of litter,
chrome of the abandoned fender,
how all things unloved, rushed, pushed out
to the great sea against their will survive,
and sees behind the broken feldspar
the expert shabbiness of daily life.
The child knows what the hawk knows-
the night-sweep with the yellow eyes-
or the dog that drinks the nothing beside her:
within pure joy exists
a kind of hollow,
the inverse of a river, the negative water.

Brenda Hillman

Triple Moments of Light and Industry

 During our protest at the refineries, our friend R tells us there are bugs in the oil in the earth-colored vats at Valero & Shell, tiny slave bacteria changing sulfides, ammonia, hydrocarbons & phenol into levels of toxin the mixture can tolerate, & then we consider how early tired stars gave way to carbon molecules a short time after the start of time & now carbon makes its way in all life as the present tense makes its way in poetry, the sludge in the vats where the hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria break things down to unending necessities

                            of     which Dante writes
 
                                  of           the middle of hell
                                                 
                           light     where no light is—

 

R says his friend who tends the bugs for the company feels tenderly toward his mini-sludge-eaters, they are his animals, he takes their temperature & stirs them & so on. We pause to think of it. Such small creatures. At the beginning of life the cells were anaerobic, ocean vents of fire, archaea, then they loved air. In the axis of time there are triple moments when you look back, forward or in. As a child you were asked to perform more than you could manage. Your need was not symmetrical. It is impossible to repay the laborers who work so hard. R describes his friend’s work as devotional. The bacteria do not experience hurt or the void but their service is uneven & that is why i protest.

Brenda Hillman

 

Sediments of Santa Monica

A left margin watches the sea floor approach
 
It takes 30 million years 
It is the first lover
 
More saints     for Augustine's mother

A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka's
The Trial free of some sand
 
A left margin watches the watcher from Dover
 
After the twentieth century     these cliffs
Looked like ribbons on braids or dreads
 
A dream had come right over 
With a sort of severe leakage
 
Ah love let us be true to one another
 
Went down to the ferris wheel
God's Rolodex
 
There were neon spikes around everyone 
Like the Virgin's spikes 

Old punk's mohawk     Evidence of inner fire 

Rode throwing words off     Red current     Light swearing 

Ah love The century 
Had become a little drippy at the end
 
We're still growing but the stitches hurt     Let us be 

True to one another for the world
 
Easy on the myths now 
Make it up     Sleep well

Brenda Hilliman

Little Furnace

—Once more the poem woke me up, 
the dark poem. I was ready for it; 
he was sleeping, 

and across the cabin, the small furnace 
lit and re-lit itself—the flame a yellow 
"tongue" again, the metal benignly 
hard again; 

and a thousand insects outside called 
and made me nothing; 
moonlight streamed inside as if it had been . . . 

I looked around, I thought of the lower wisdom, 
spirit held by matter: 
Mary, white as a sand dollar, 

and Christ, his sticky halo tilted— 
oh, to get behind it! 
The world had been created to comprehend itself 

as matter: table, the torn 
veils of spiders . . . Even consciousness— 
missing my love— 

was matter, the metal box of a furnace. 
As the obligated flame, so burned my life . . . 

What is the meaning of this suffering I asked 
and the voice—not Christ but between us— 
said you are the meaning. 

No no, I replied, That 
is the shape, what is the meaning. 
You are the meaning, it said— 

Brenda Hilliman

Girl Sleuth

A brenda is missing—where is she? 
Summon the seeds & weeds, the desert whooshes. Phone the finch 
with the crowded beak; a little pretenda 
is learning to read 
in the afternoon near the cactus caves. Near oleander & pulpy 
caves with the click-click of the wren & the shkrrrr of the thrasher, 
a skinny pretenda is learning 
to read till the missing brenda 
is found. Drip of syllables like olives near the saguaro. 
Nancy Drew will find the secret in raincoats & wednesdays 
& sticks. Nancy whose spine is yellow 
or blue will find the brenda in 1962, 

Nancy who has no mother, 
who takes suggestions from her father & ignores them. 

Gleam goes the wren ignoring the thorn. They cannot tell the difference. 
Click of the smart dog's nails on linoleum. 
Nancy bends over the clues, 
of brenda's locket & dress. Word by word 
between syllables a clue. Where has the summer gone, the autumn— 
are they missing too? Maybe Nancy 
will parse the secret & read the book report on Nancy Drew: 
"neat pretty sly cute." Syllable by syllable 
& still no brenda! Nancy 
puts her hand to her forehead; is the missing 
girl in the iron bird? is the clue to the girl in the locket?

Brenda Hilliman

Saguaro 

Often visitors there, saddened 
by lack of trees, go out 
to a promontory. 

Then, backed by the banded 
sunset, the trail 
of the Conquistadores, 

the father puts on the camera, 
the leather albatross, 
and has the children 

imitate saguaros. One 
at a time they stand there smiling, 
fingers up like the tines of a fork 

while the stately saguaro 
goes on being entered 
by wrens, diseases, and sunlight. 

The mother sits on a rock, 
arms folded 
across her breasts. To her 

the cactus looks scared, 
its needles 
like hair in cartoons. 

With its arms in preacher 
or waltz position, 
it gives the impression 

of great effort 
in every direction, 
like the mother. 

Thousands of these gray-green 
cacti cross the valley: 
nature repeating itself, 

children repeating nature, 
father repeating children 
and mother watching. 

Later, the children think 
the cactus was moral, 
had something to teach them, 

some survival technique 
or just regular beauty. 
But what else could it do? 

The only protection 
against death 
was to love solitude.