Rift Zone

by Tess Taylor

  RIFT ZONE

  RIFT ZONE

  TESS TAYLOR

  Rift Zone

  Copyright © 2020 by Tess Taylor

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book layout by Mark E. Cull

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Taylor, Tess, 1977– author.

  Title: Rift zone / Tess Taylor.

  Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019038520 (print) | LCCN 2019038521 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597097765 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781597098625 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3620.A979 R54 2020 (print) | LCC PS3620.A979 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038520

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038521

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In writing and gathering these poems, I am enormously grateful for a MacDowell fellowship and for time spent as the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College and as Distinguished US Fulbright to the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queens University Belfast. Huge thanks to Sinéad Morrissey and the cohort of Queens University Belfast, and to Gary Dop and Laura-Gray Street.

  Deep thanks to editors of the following publications where these poems appeared:

  Alta: “Downhill White Supremacists March on Sacramento”; At Length: “Berkeley in the Nineties,” “Song with Schist & County Line,”; Copper Nickel: “Song with Poppies & Reverie”; Harvard Review Online: “Found Poem: Pocket Geology”; Kenyon Review: “Apocalypto with Aquaria,” “Song with Habitat Exchange,” “Song with Sequoia & Australopithecus,”; Literary Hub: “February, Rain”; Los Angeles Review of Books: “In Olema”; Mantis: “Around the Hotsy Totsy”; The New Republic: “Song with Shag Rug & Wood Paneling”; Poetry: “Elk at Tomales Bay”; The Tangerine : “Loma Prieta 1989,” “Punctuations and Wind”; Tin House: “Valley Girl & Paramount, 1988”; and VQR: “Aubade with Faultline & Broken Pipe,” “Aubade with Redwood,” “El Camino Real,” “Escrow,” and “I Gave My Love a Story.”

  The poem “Train through Colma” appeared on the San Francisco Muni as part of the 2020 Muni Art Project. Thanks to Darcy Brown and San Francisco Beautiful. The poem “Notes on a Diebenkorn” appeared in The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making edited by Elise Paschen. The poem “Handgun & Tetherball, 1990” appeared in the anthology Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited by Alexandra Teague, Brian Clements, and Dean Rader. The poem “Cardboard & Aria, 2011” appeared in the anthology 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, edited by Dean Rader. The poem “Song with Shag Rug & Wood Paneling” appeared in the Studio One Reading Series Chapbook and in Lightning Strikes II, from the Dolby Chadwick G allery. Thanks to these editors.

  Enormous gratitude to early readers of these poems: Nuar Alsadir, Dan Alter, James Arthur, Michele Battiste, Nicole Callihan, Stephen Connolly, Forrest Gander, Lynn Melnick, Valerie Miner, Manuela Moser, Toni Mirosevich, Beth Ngyuen, Aimee Phan, Patricia Powell, Brynn Saito, and Dean Rader.

  Thanks to Frances Kaplan and the staff of the California Historical Society.

  Thanks to Bob and Brenda in whose good shade so many poems grow.

  Thanks to Claudia Rankine for the prompt to write about blondness.

  Thanks to Tom Panas for deep knowledge and Melanie Mintz for opening shut doors.

  Thanks to the inimitable Ciaran Carson for guidance and generosity.

  Thanks to Evan Bauer, Alejandra Detchet, and Jamie Valle for reading the fine print, and to Miriam Herrera for care across years.

  Huge thanks to all of Red Hen, but especially to the wonderful Tobi Harper, for good wine and an even keel.

  This was a labor of years: I send gratitude broadseed for community in which to grow.

  Enormous gratitude to the Taylor, Clark, and Schreiner families for your great extended love.

  To Bennett, Emeline, and Taylor: bedrock.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Preface: Pocket Geology

  I

  Del Norte

  Sixth Grade, 1988

  Song with Schist & County Line

  Berkeley in the Nineties

  Three Dreams, 2018

  Song with Shag Rug & Wood Paneling

  Song with Sequoia & Australopithecus

  II

  Song with Pneumonia & Telemann

  California Suites

  Downhill White Supremacists March on Sacramento

  Song with Habitat Exchange

  Year of Drought & Protests

  Cardboard & Aria, 2011

  Around the Hotsy Totsy

  February, Rain

  Valley Girl & Paramount, 1988

  Handgun & Tetherball, 1990

  Notes on a Diebenkorn

  III

  Apocalypto w/ Aquaria

  Breach & Wake

  Song with Poppies & Reverie

  Emeline at Six Weeks

  Untitled with Sadness & Suckle

  Train Through Colma

  IV

  Raw Notes for a Poem Not Yet Written

  Once Again at Nonviolence Training, 2017

  Loma Prieta, 1989

  Song in Which We Yet Sidestep Disaster

  Elk at Tomales Bay

  Etymology with Tectonic Plates

  Song with Wild Plum & Thorn

  Aubade with Faultline & Broken Pipe

  Aubade with Redwood

  I Gave My Love A Story

  Punctuations & Wind

  In Olema

  V

  Envoi: San Francisco

  INTRODUCTION

  TESS TAYLOR’S FAULTLINES

  by Ilya Kaminsky

  When Tess Taylor takes a large look at this place we call home, our North America, what does she see?

  Atop

  the Earth’s mantle, rock moving.

  Continents are milk skin

  floating on cocoa.

  (“Preface: Pocket Geology”)

  Then, her lens focuses, and she sees San Pablo Avenue, which runs through San Francisco’s East Bay:

  San Pablo, old trade route, widens there

  peppered by pupusa stands.

  Passes the crumbling mission and the corner

  where Donte, who my sister loved, was shot.

  (“Del Norte”)

  It is no accident that the perspectives in this book change from geology to microhistory with such incredible speed. One moment, we are to perceive the largesse of geological time. The next, we overhear a gunshot.

  It was Chekhov who famously said, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don’t put it there.” I have no doubt that Tess Taylor is well aware of this advice. For very early in Rift Zone, the readers will find these lines:

  No one explained the reasons

  D
ana found that spring

  to bring her brother’s gun to school,

  triggers that led her to threaten

  to shoot you bitches.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  I remember

  Sierra Burch’s thin legs running,

  a shrill voice yelling

  call the teacher.

  In high-noon California sun

  Dana’s palm was shaking—

  her face tight with fear or anger.

  In dream-time big men came

  to cuff her & I heard her whimper.

  Saw her lean girl’s body fall.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  That day

  we watched her disappear—

  heard the big door shut,

  the silence after.

  Decades floated

  over all our bodies.

  (“Sixth Grade, 1988”)

  This silence in the presence of the gun shows Taylor internalizing a very American kind of violence—one that reverberates though the whole book. What do we find at the middle of perceived normalcy of a typical California suburb? Fear. The “silence” of the shut door. And, as often in Taylor’s work, larger, almost geologic time enters: “decades float over all our bodies” (note: it is all our bodies, not just one).

  What interests me most here is not that one gun, but how Taylor’s lens allows us to see an aftermath. I am interested in her many investigations of American fear, especially in her ability to map it both in terms of geography and time: we watch the poet take the BART train through San Francisco watching “the old school crumbled in a landslide.” At the same time, we see how generations of her contemporaries “disappeared / into our overpriced adulthood.” I am interested, also, in how images of guns reappear in what should be a lovely California landscape. For instance:

  The man a few blocks over with his lettuces,

  raw twang & melanomic skin

  saw me walking with my infant son.

  He said hey lady, keep in mind

  I have a gun. You can take my lemons if I offer,

  but steal ’em—bam—you’ll know who’s boss.

  (“California Suites”)

  Then again, many pages later, we hear:

  Then once again someone is shot

  at a school by a sniper by police in a movie theater

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  But you are lucky, so you try to feel lucky.

  By the numbers you have always lived

  in an apartheid state.

  (“Punctuations & Wind”)

  These echoes are no accident. The sound of “the big door shut, / the silence after” vibrates throughout the pages of this book, as years pass and “the decades floated over all our bodies.” What is all of this motion? What is Tess Taylor doing here? In writing about the place in which she grew up and lives again, Taylor is, it seems, at home. But what is that home? Where does she live? She is mapping the landscape, yes. But her investigative act doesn’t just happen in terms of geography or even in terms of history. She is also asking questions about our emotional relationship to this space we call home. It is also the topography of our emotions Taylor examines here:

  Bodies in space were revolution.

  Some of us were feminist & queer.

  Some of us wore wool sailor pants

  & passed out at bad university parties.

  Oh my god, that was embarrassing.

  Some of us cut class to spend

  days reading in the dank public library.

  Alone in our aloneness we fumbled

  with one another’s bodies

  in dim alleyways near City Lights.

  Our revolution: under cherry blossoms,

  reading Virgil.

  (“Berkeley in the Nineties”)

  With the turning pages, Taylor constantly shifts perspectives. But the place remains: California, as core sample, ethnography, representative history. The poet moves from personal detail to larger violence. She also moves from particulars (“blackberries choke the bike path; / schoolboys squall like gulls”) to the largesse of hills and faultlines. We are in 2020 of our ultramodern moment, which nonetheless is inextricably linked to a 1933 when “some people from the Stege Church / lit up the hill / with their white enormous cross.” Over and over, we are presented with a California of middle-class suburbia: “My parents renovated that old home,” she says. “It is clean as a lobotomy.” Cleanliness? Yes. But not exactly safety.

  What’s at play here is a very American kind of violence—done by time, or guns, or economics—which happens beyond or behind or even inside the façade of suburban landscape, unsettling the inhabitants who refuse to recognize it. The violence which middle-class Americans pretend not to see—though it is right in front of them (and us)—is perhaps at the root of Taylor’s obsessive mapping. Is Taylor safe in her California suburb? Perhaps. But what does safety really mean in America in 2020? The answer to this question is uncertain, and this uncertainty vibrates through almost every poem in this collection. Taylor understands she is living at the edge of what might be a great gulf, in the face of what might be called precarity—of her own life, of the lives of people around her, of the geologic earth, of the planet as we know it. To simply recognize this in America today is no small thing. To write the kind of work that actually maps this gulf is special. The mapping here goes further than most: in fact, it extends to something scary—to the very bodies of her husband, daughter: “& nose your blowhole into flesh.” Very beautiful, compelling poems for her family often involve verbs of motion and vocabulary of measurement. The poet chases the patterns and counts the stars:

  I only chase the pattern that I hear.

  Something I meant spins farther off.

  And: You didn’t die that awful year.

  I haven’t lost you yet.

  My love, I count the lucky stars.

  I lie, rocking on your breath.

  (“Song In Which We Yet Sidestep Disaster”)

  This urgency—this foreknowledge of loss—points us back to the early pages of this book, points back to the first discovery of guns. We can almost hear again that “big door shut, / the silence after.” The double-vision of Taylor’s work, its constant need to shift and measure what is still hers, her poems’ constant awareness that “everything we name / is disappearing” has a source. It has to do with her ability to overhear danger and see historic and cultural violence where others see a lovely American suburb. This is why perspectives shift so rapidly between scales (the domestic, the geologic, the political, the hypermodern, the ancient); is why the beautiful lullabies for her child in this book are so filled with sound and are “all vowel.” In the end, this powerful book is the poetry of a mother who lives in a violent country which refuses to admit its own violence. But the poet sees it for what it is: she is not reconciled to it. Perhaps that is why there is such a piercing tenderness to these lullabies. Certainly, “Emeline at Six Weeks” is perhaps the best lullaby by an American poet that I have read during this decade. I think this beauty of sound has to do with the sober clarity of perspective on how things stand in America at this moment. The faultline here—the rift zone where Taylor lives—is on the ground between fear and tenderness. This duality makes the book so compelling, makes Taylor the poet for our moment.

  rift zone ▸ n. A large area of the earth in which plates of the earth’s crust are moving away from each other, forming an extensive system of fractures and faults.

  —American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,

  Fifth Edition, 2016

  California is the product of a prolonged head-on collision between the leading western edge of North America and the floor of the Pacific Ocean as the continent overrode the ocean basin . . . the details are complicated but the broad picture is not.

  —Roadside Geology of Northern California,

  David D. Alt, Don
ald W. Hyndman

  in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space

  —The Government of the Tongue,

  Seamus Heaney

  PREFACE: POCKET GEOLOGY

  Atop

  the Earth’s mantle, rock moving.

  Continents are milk skin

  floating on cocoa.

  A restless interior

  sweeps them along.

  In trenches

  minerals decay—

  at the corelandmasses

  digestthemselves.

  The crust does not move

  in one piecebut in segments.

  Mostly these carry

  the continent with them, but sometimes

  continent

  and mantle un-couple—

  then blocks tilt

  like sidewalk

  on unstable ground—

  I

  Whose fault

  our fault

  & in the dream were marching

  DEL NORTE

  San Pablo, old trade route, widens there

  peppered by pupusa stands.

  Passes the crumbling mission and the corner

  where Donte, who my sister loved, was shot.

  Blackberries choke the bike path;

  schoolboys squall like gulls or pigeons.

  I rode the BART train with my Latin book.

  Ayodele played college football,

  but what became of Mynon Bigbee

  Noah Zoloth-Levy Katie Bolton-Shmuckler?

  The old school crumbled in a landslide.

  We disappeared

  into our overpriced adulthood.

  The BART train hurtles past

  raw schist and scar.

  Stucco blocks repeat themselves

  in sameness. In the corner

  of my eye, another strip mall.

  My mall: the one I grew up near.