Rift Zone

by Tess Taylor

  SIXTH GRADE, 1988

  No one explained the reasons

  Dana found that spring

  to bring her brother’s gun to school,

  triggers that led her to threaten

  to shoot you bitches.

  We were nubbly, by the morning glories—

  hadn’t scattered different ways.

  We were playing tetherball.

  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.

  This year I found a photograph:

  Dana and her friend Mynon

  mug for my frame.

  Mischievous grins

  split baby cheeks: ponytails

  bustle in the wind.

  It came back like a rusty fountain,

  a smell of chalk & sixth grade funk.

  We were learning

  fractions. That day

  we watched her disappear—

  heard the big door shut,

  the silence after.

  Decades floated

  over all our bodies.

  All the schools

  have drills for guns now.

  None of this names how it feels

  to look back thirty years & find

  this odd remainder.

  Bright and on the verge of life,

  as if we are yet unhurt:

  There’s Dana smiling.

  SONG WITH SCHIST & COUNTY LINE

  The town of El Cerrito, CA, pop. 23,000, was first incorporated as Rust, after the name of one of its most prominent nineteenth-century Anglo farmers.

  i

  The little hill exists, the one

  the town was named for. It is

  a huge real hill, not “Lakewood” or “Happy River”

  where the name points to a thing that never was

  or is so fully paved

  no one can find it now.

  Our real little hill

  looms just south of town.

  ii

  Before this town was town it was

  “unstable real estate,”

  the last Castro inheritors

  of a Spanish land grant

  locked in US land dispute.

  Their great-great-grandfather arrived

  on the De Anza expedition. They claimed the land

  for Spain, then Mexico. They

  built their adobe hacienda

  in the shadow of the hill, near

  a radiolarian outcrop

  of Jurassic limestone

  on windswept treeless grassland

  here when mastodon

  wandered to the Farallones.

  Their house faced the glittering span

  we now call the Golden Gate.

  iii

  After this stopped being Mexico

  the Castros traded land in parcels

  to pay off American lawyers.

  Japanese immigrants acquired

  wide plots for building nurseries

  along the streetcar line. They took roses each day

  by ferryboat to San Francisco—

  (had to purchase land

  under the names

  of their American-born sons).

  iv

  there were also

  chicken farmers

  greyhound racetrackmobsters

  retired prospectors& escapees

  from the 1906 earthquake,

  Italians & backyard vineyards

  & (I hear) a tunnel

  under Central Avenue

  where gangsters cached bootleg liquor

  (never confiscated during Prohibition raids).

  Hillbillies played the Six Bells

  (now the Burger King).

  They called our town Stege, then Rust.

  v

  Some people from the Stege church

  lit up the hill

  with their white enormous cross.

  Easter 1933, they burned it for the Klan.

  (I only lately learned this—

  latest in the line of histories

  they don’t teach / I didn’t know—)

  —all of us were always perched

  atop a Ring of Fire—

  Developers slapped up houses

  & quarried blue-schist hillside

  & used upthrust seafloor

  for constructing modern freeways;

  & Dorothea Lange traveled from Berkeley

  to photograph migrant workers

  & the Portuguese farmer Balra

  sold his ranchero up the hill—

  it became split-level tract homes

  the Japanese were not allowed to live in

  “nor any person not of the Caucasian race,”

  the titles said.

  —great moving fissure where the earth

  destroys and births itself—

  vi

  In Richmond, the ship industry was booming

  & workers from the South traveled

  by train & Model T

  across Depression valleys—

  Okie & black—all here to work—

  (only some allowed to buy

  the bungalows of California)

  By then it was unclear

  where the many members

  of the Castro family were.

  They had mostly scattered.

  Unclear if by then the redwood

  on the streambed

  in what became our backyard

  had been planted. Now the hill

  was bowling alley, Wild West Gun Shop.

  —it also tears—

  vii

  Dusty, crumbling, facing the Golden Gate

  the hacienda stood as it had stood

  as three nations claimed it.

  Arch corridors peered

  past live oaks to the bay.

  A few historians told me

  how it became a brothel

  in disrepair

  & just as preservationists

  began to try to save it,

  it mysteriously burned. Overnight

  some developer

  slapped up the boxy Plaza—

  viii

  They plunked a BART station down

  on the lumberyard.

  The racist codes lived on

  in escrow files.

  A few families did

  return after internment.

  Unbuilt lots still gape

  along the Avenue.

  On the hill, the Lions

  light their hot white cross at Christmas.

  Beneath it now we all

  can buy cheap wine at Trader Joe’s.

  The local historian says

  he does not know about the Klan.

  Hidden in a cave, Ohlone petroglyphs.

  In our city hall: One dense adobe brick.

  BERKELEY IN THE NINETIES

  again for C. & J.

  Too late for hippie heyday

  & too young to be yuppies

  we wandered creeksides & used bookstores.

  There were still so many movie theaters.

  Our parents marched against the many wars

  & fed us carob chips. We foraged

  in free boxes for old wrap skirts

  but had absorbed consumerist desire,

  & also longed for new J. Crew.

  There was no internet yet & so we listened

  to Steve Miller Band on repeat

  & cut geometry to skinny dip

  in the Essex Street hot tub.

  We knew the code, just as we knew

  to disapprove of America.

  We walked out of high school

  after Rodney King. We helped our mothers

  shop f
or bulk oats at the Co-op.

  We felt we could & couldn’t

  solve it. We could say systemic racism

  but couldn’t name yet how our lives were implicated.

  We drove our grandmothers’ Volvos up Marin

  & watched the spangled world

  from Grizzly Peak. We climbed Mount Diablo

  in spring rain. We learned

  the meaning of the word hegemony

  but thought the word itself was hegemonic.

  We got high to the patter of the windchimes.

  When we missed our friends

  we wandered to the farmers market

  for bruised peaches. Bruised peaches were

  our kind of revolution. There was not internet yet & so

  we made elaborate cutout flyers to invite

  our friends to picnics up at Codornices.

  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. One of us made red

  mushroomy kombucha. One of us

  taught the others to eat burdock.

  The burdock eating didn’t really take.

  Some days we paid the toll

  for people behind us

  on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

  At Steep Ravine howled Whitman at the sea.

  Most days, we were a crumbling outpost. Nearby

  the street preacher, Paul of the Pillar,

  spoke in helter-skelter baritones from

  liberated air on the Cal campus.

  We too believed in liberated air & some nights

  bought Paul sausages at Top Dog.

  Under the Campanile, we discussed

  how Ginsburg was a sellout now because he posed

  for Gap ads in wide-legged chinos.

  Chinos were not the revolution.

  Trigonometry was not the revolution.

  We memorized short poems by D.H. Lawrence.

  We were quick fish who read

  Gary Snyder in someone’s dad’s Mendocino cabin.

  Some of us climbed ferny gullies

  on winter solstice & got topless.

  Decorated each other in white reindeer lichen.

  Recited the Tao Te Ching. Had sex on a cliff.

  Reindeer lichen was the revolution.

  Our new breasts in rain were revolution.

  We craved transcendental revelations,

  the radical & burning future:

  We lobbied for condoms in the high school bathrooms

  even though the bathrooms needed toilet paper—

  THREE DREAMS, 2018

  i

  Whose fault

  our fault

  & in the dream we were

  still marching somewhere

  in fog, in acrid smoke.

  We’d wait out apocalypse up in the hills.

  We’d summon the spirits of coyotes.

  There was no middle anymore

  it was a mudflat flanked by peaks

  superrich

  encampment—

  & oysters braved the tidelines

  cleaning the bay out in their guts.

  You must always live on the brink said Breton

  & so the brink cut through our backyards.

  Most days it felt like nothing

  we didn’t think of the street as old seafloor

  except when earthcrust would snag

  the foundations

  of expensive houses

  suddenly upthrust

  like revelation—

  ii

  Sometimes you glimpse her

  the girl she was in free-box flannels

  she was you & you were radical

  ready for change & feeding on used books of poems

  Maybe history is already over

  said Fukuyama thenbut so much happened:

  you’re here nowthat ghost is lithe and strange

  as the deer who bounded

  in front of Monterey Market

  uncomprehending

  iii

  I live on faultline which most days feels like nothing

  except in sidewalk crosshairs

  streambeds where schist

  & bay leaf seep into the sea.

  Earthteeth, guzzling serpentinite.

  When they interned families from my town

  they sent them first to camp on a racetrack

  then into an arid valley

  torn between dry mountain ranges.

  What was before comes back again.

  I retrace so many fragments:

  what did I not know

  was already happening

  SONG WITH SHAG RUG & WOOD PANELING

  My parents renovated that old home.

  It is clean as a lobotomy.

  The cracked linoleum’s erased.

  New hardwood floors are gleaming.

  Gone are gold shag rugs the shade

  of California August,

  on which I lay beneath the dust motes

  studying the drift of genome, species, phyla;

  gone the shameful faux-wood paneling,

  dark embarrassment of my teenage years.

  They’ve added a back door to the kitchen

  where night after night I fought with my mother—

  I, who spent a decade sending hatred

  toward a glittering asbestos ceiling,

  have only a distant dump to hate;

  the settling of old carcinogens.

  My ancient vehemence is confounded

  by brightly lit new silence,

  emptiness beneath the open vaulting.

  SONG WITH SEQUOIA & AUSTRALOPITHECUS

  Limber pine, marbled godwit, diffuse daisy, stonecrop,

  I was learning your names—

  then heard Bennett waking.

  On today’s pajamas he wears dinosaurs.

  He does not know dinosaurs or that pajama

  is Hindi via the British;

  or that this tree is a paleolith,

  or that this state was Spain.

  Some year I’ll tell him:

  What is life for but explanation?

  Now he wakes under a tusky mammoth.

  His arms flail & he reaches

  for a tree branch to keep from falling.

  (He lies on the ground.

  There is no limb.)

  Moro’s gesture: vestige of monkey self.

  My primate grips me in new human skin.

  I rock him near blooms labeled sea thrift.

  Each body cradles its own conservation.

  Each body bears forth the enormous dark chain.

  We only half-grasp what we inherit:

  In caves the first humans played

  parts of the Doric scale on their bone flutes

  do re mi fa vibrating over eons.

  Our ears cock

  to old tones.

  Scientists believe that our wrist bones

  tell us which Australopithecus

  was our progenitor.

  O dinosaur, O Australopithecus.

  I rock my wrists, I grip my son.

  I might say Earth thrift, life thrift, or tongue thrift.

  Might say word-crop: pajama: Empire.

  Today I revert by instinct

  to glottal percussion.

  I coo & croon.

  Air blows

  through my hollows.

  I telescope song-shape

  into vibrating chambers—

  into his ears, fresh gills of this air.

  II

  The last ma
ngled slice of sea floor sediment and last shattered masses of ser-pentinite were added to the Coast Ranges perhaps eighty million years ago.

  Some of these breach faults are well known and precisely mapped, but others are not.

  Years of geologic work will be needed to unravel and finally assemble all the stray pieces of the San Andreas puzzle of faults.

  —Roadside Geology of Northern California

  SONG WITH PNEUMONIA & TELEMANN

  Mountains lost in clouds.

  Woman in roadside rain.

  Refinery silos, tumoring the hill.

  The bay heaves daily systole / diastole

  through blasted estuaries;

  I follow the path De Anza charted,

  now freeway, to the hospital

  Taylor inside, week three, a mystery—

  “all diseases partly drug resistant”

  says our brusque nurse.

  Terrifying illness, unexplained.

  On my iPhone, a Telemann sonata,

  arpeggios, progressing scales.

  In Taylor’s lung, liters of yellow fluid.

  Bennett says caboose; says knuckle coupler.

  Says buckle; puzzle; horn.

  Bennett feels untainted joy in engines,

  but when I park in San Francisco

  & chart my breath beside the beeping

  monitor my love is hooked to

  I read the toxins in our tide.

  Today, tubes, a fifth antibiotic,

  my husband struggling for his pneuma,

  spongy tubules in his lung’s great cloud.

  The scales grow furious. The song is cycling.

  When did it begin, this wild crescendo?

  At the seventh antibiotic they’ll give up.

  Doctors take him for another test.

  Redwoods can drink fog.

  Their needles sip the numinous.

  Redwoods make their own groundwater.

  My love is elsewhere, being scanned.

  I dream the limbs of old-growth forest.

  Beyond my perch, my Telemann,

  someone is responding, not responding.

  Each engine, each mortal machine.

  Now, another body carted in.

  I perch on this electric bed.

  Biotic, antibiotic: I am rocking.

  I dream that I can be my husband’s fog:

  I dream our lungs as cloud as tidal skein—

  CALIFORNIA SUITES

  I. Rainy Season