by Tess Taylor
Season of mud, of swollen gullies,
storms lashing off the Pacific, flinging
wet across our solstice months.
We call this bitter damp the winter
but it is different than rosy cheeks or blizzards
or catalogs of kids in reindeer sweaters:
Our winter turns the hillsides emerald.
Suburbs reveal thoughtless paving; drains
gargle now where salmon spawned.
Plum blossoms eddy
next to candy wrappers.
Between storms, the light is mercury.
Huge wet sets hillsides careening
hurtling down what faultline just thrust up.
Now ferns glisten, redwoods blacken.
Now cold buckeye seed & lemons come.
In rain, streets grow riverine
ferrying our cargo to the ocean.
O cold spray & green reclaiming:
In you, we are all tributaries.
II. Sempervirens
—California Redwood
We have no old cathedrals here
except for redwood groves
that wait in parks
behind brass plaques. Signs
date the oldest to Columbus or
William the Conqueror;
new roads wind to suburbs
that replace them. The plaques
are odd, as if we lack
another way to hold in mind
vast presences—
eons
passed in widening,
hosting murrelets & owls.
They carve the real estate
of centuries. They calendar
the former climate’s fires.
White settlers
cut them down
& made them cheap
& turned them back
into a luxury.
Now we stroke their burls
with short-lived hands.
They model wise economy.
Each ring is still a living record;
a transitive, ongoing,
giant conjugate for being,
rhyming out
inside its own slow time.
They widen now
as ripples do
on deep & pooling streams.
III. El Camino Real
The corridor parades its stucco newness.
What king was it that built this highway?
Jornaleros in wide bucket hats
wait for hire beneath the on-ramps.
Blocks fill with retirees from somewhere colder.
Chapped garages hold canned food & water
hoarded against sure disaster.
In sharp heat, the lava gardens bleach.
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.
IV. Escrow
In every sale, a list of ways
your home could be destroyed.
Flood, earthquake, fire.
Your house may end in mudslide,
be damaged by a rain of golf balls;
you may live downwind of poison breezes
off oil fields, refineries, or croplands.
You must assert you have
considered agricultural toxins; the risk
inherent in tectonic plates.
Signing on the dotted line allots you
a postcard plot of Golden State. Will
it be cancerous? God-willingb
not to you. Your new house is younger
than your mother.
At your bottlebrush,
native hummingbirds.
Behind them, two huge redwoods wait.
In redwood years, these trees
are babies. They overlook
your fragile real estate.
DOWNHILL WHITE SUPREMACISTS MARCH ON SACRAMENTO
High in the Sierra
green summer aspen
whisper to the lake.
The snowpack glitters.
Over the passes
Winnebago thunder
out of the wide red flats of Nevada.
Huge crooked knuckles,
the dark screes loom.
Deep in the roadbeds,
the bones of the Irish
& Chinese workers
whose lives were pitted
against one another
to drive down & down
the price of their labor
—who shattered their bodies
dynamiting these crossings—
blaze in their graves.
SONG WITH HABITAT EXCHANGE
Calmada, Calmosa, California, Mar Vista,
Ocean View: In duplicate languages, street names proffer
synonymous peace. The billboard hawks
“affordable luxury”—the building is derelict
no ocean view no sidewalks parks gated
even these nature paths blazed by oil rigs
even this trail a scar from fuel excavation.
I am pregnant again: The dust makes me cough.
Cool mornings I still hike the arroyo:
The plants here are replacements of plants removed elsewhere
“habitat exchange”—stand-in ecosystem—
for gnatcatcher, sumac, eucalyptus
scarred elderberry, shimmering mule fat.
Arid
crackle in the mud rat’s nest.
I pause near the tunnel: The baby kicks.
Black sage blooms in a dry inflorescence;
the toyon is a distant cousin of the rose.
Buckwheat bush, sunflower, endangered roadrunner;
I hear the cheat cheat of a towhee.
Whatever can wait waits for uncertain water:
The mod suburb beyond us
crumbles already.
I watch an unmoving freeway.
Stalled tankers grit particulate air.
Now, from the ridgeline, I glimpse the sea.
YEAR OF DROUGHT & PROTESTS
Tonight the train shuts for another death.
Jumper: third this month,
“a rash of copycats,” they say
in this hard year of drought & protests.
Beyond us, persimmon sunset.
Horizon, bright as abalone.
Traffic throb on freeways, mussel dusk.
From the station now slow cars
process. A hundred station-goers, all rerouted,
disperse to homes or cabs or friends.
Deep inside these shadows
some collapse. Absent
synapse—tendon—self.
Unrecoverable hub.
We each hurry on, not looking.
Dark is falling. All our taillights throb.
CARDBOARD & ARIA, 2011
& after the vermillion opera curtain
rose on Giovanni raping
the tiny distant woman on the stage,
we drank champagne at intermission
& exalted in the opera’s country dance.
We saw the soprano’s elaborate
improbably choreographed
re-seduction of her lover . . .
(fa la haa eeee)
& left the Opera House to head
down Market Street. The leathered skin
of that year’s men was peeking
out from boxes pitched as tents.
The camps were already grown & growing:
I heard again the aria, REPENT.
Down the street, protesters
held signs: We are the 99 percent.
By sheer dumb luck we had a home to go to.
We rode a train to wine & soup & bed,
but in the early hours an earthquake heaved
our bungalow on its soft-story floor.
I dreamed it as the Com
andatore’s fist
cuffing us just at the gates of hell.
I felt aftershock
& cold fog drifting.
Awake I wrote
the dream is not a myth
wanted to shakewanted to be shaken
AROUND THE HOTSY TOTSY
1
Nights, the young crowd, hipsters mostly.
By day, old bartender old men.
2
Coastline boxcars thrum:
Nights we wake & hear them pick up speed
a slow rag played out sad
then fasterwild harmonica
blown longcloudsong
along the crooked elbow, California
they claim the coastal route
for freight for trade
3
Coyote bush & buckeye hunker:
On Chevron land now many squatters camp
perpetually inside the rail-yard swamp—
refinery, chaparral, and foxweed;
tents & barrel drums.
4
Once this was a mussel-gathering spot a midden
once a farm a wartime factory
who lives here now paves paths with cardboard;
& if you leave your trail by accident
you find a piss-stained mattress, jetsam needles.
Between poppies, rusted box spring.
Half a greeting:
-LCOME.
FEBRUARY, RAIN
1
Dawn, after the hoped-for downpour.
Droplets beaded in the sage.
2
On hills, ruts revert to streambed:
Thistle-blue, the sky in rivulets.
3
On damp
fallen leaves, bright fungal blooms—
4
Live oak cradles winter sun: Satsuma.
Winter clouds—swift coho salmon—
5
Along freeways, pans & garbage.
Fragile line between expensive & discarded.
A screen, rotating advertisement.
A camp: three tents, two bicycles.
6
On this road, backlit coyote:
Quick illuminated trickster god—
7
At home: Absentminded,
under storm. Symphonic
crash, then silence.
Everything is gleaming, gleaming.
We prime ourselves to forest atmospherics.
8
On the mountain now mossy live oaks
twist, softening our hills.
Druid, draoidh—some greenish
Welsh or Celtic god
lodged in a latter Spanish colony.
After rain: white steeple, green behind it.
9
The light might be the Philippines or Goa.
Little mission church on a green hillock.
10
O white sanctuary gleaming:
You trail all your bloody histories—
VALLEY GIRL & PARAMOUNT, 1988
I’m twelve, for the first time ever watching
Earth Girls Are Easy with Rochelle B.
at the Paramount in San Francisco
in whose deco dark we flicker into
the enormous San Fernando Valley
as maze of split-levels
freeways turquoise pools.
A pod lands. A blue alien seduces
Geena Davis the high-cheekboned hairdresser—
she squeals he is so furry & so other
but she soon reveals his nearly human beauty
when she shaves his blue & alien hair.
Like omigod!
he’s actually Jeff Goldblum!
Wait: Did they blastoff to another moon?
California: Asteroid & star.
California: Futuristic planet
on which hairdressers danced & sang
songs about their blondness
Because I’m a blonde I don’t have to think
I talk like a baby & I never pay for drinks—
Easy: blonde as plundered sunshine
(Because I’m blond Bee-eL-Oh-eN-D-eee)
Nazi ideal in a parched valley.
Little sex-show song: white-blonde ditz song,
please harass/date me song.
Easy: I loved it so much, like trying on
my own pink training bra.
Melissa K. & I learned to lip-sync it
for the sixth-grade talent show
jiggling our arms & legs & also pouting
I don’t have to worry about getting a man/
If I keep this blond & I keep theeeesee tan . . .
Absorbing watermelon glister
the way some jellyfish or squid
grow coterminous
with phosphorescent cells
that make them bioluminesce,
we grew in symbiosis
with fucked-up desire.
Cause I’m a blonde don’t you wish you were me?
That year I would refuse
my lunch in search of bonier hips,
use my hunger to propel
myself towards some imaginary center,
warped magnetic field that sucked
as I drew nearer,
amplifying its desires.
I wanted what it was / was sex / was power
was hyped-up preteen musk potent as
the American myth of newness
or the bloody hills of California—
I was an Earthgirl: I lived in a Valley.
I kept reciting just a little further
the toxic playbook where I learned myself—
HANDGUN & TETHERBALL, 1990
Portola Middle School, they called it.
PMS, we said, feeling awful
packed together in our teenage sadness,
finding out the colors of our skins.
In long hallways, in classes of forty-two students
we learned codings, locker numbers, gangs.
Mrs. Nagsake Mrs. Theissen Mrs. Mitchell—
Mr. Hall—Polyester, acid-breath:
Our district skidded forward, bankrupt.
Lunches soured in their plastic,
busses idled in blaring heat.
Even so that year we still belonged
a bit to one another’s childhoods
to years we’d shared together and not yet
to wars waged in our names
& to racism poverty & privilege
though they were carving us/we were already carved.
We ran together punching tetherballs.
No textbooks teachers toilet paper
hull from which some of us headed
immediately to prison
some to private school or to Nation’s Burgers—
Jabraun, the long-lashed boy
who taught me how to use a combination lock
& said I was pretty for a white girl
shot the next year—dead three decades.
I conjure up his raspy whisper
his brown eyes flecked with hazel sun.
O those years of sweaty suffering:
We sprayed our bangs & danced to Boyz II Men,
& fumbled still towards one another,
running at the tarmac of our lives,
towards some impossible flight.
Brash laughter ricochets
out to the future.
I lug my dumb survivor’s grief.
O they are tearing down that school:
It was always in a landslide zone.
Perhaps it will be returned to hillside.
Perhaps someone will plant
the hillside with wildflowers
which the legends say were also blooming
when Portola, Conquistador, came.
NOTES ON A DIEBENKORN
—Cityscape 1, 1963
How in him the light is primary
the high hard sheen of Berkeley,
eucalyptus hitting walls—
How his
trick is catching
some refraction off the water,
beveled salty mirror
forging afternoon.
The copper’s shifty now
enough to tempt the fog in—
chartreuse & mineral asphalt
& a turquoise line—
foregrounded intersection
of gray maybe freeway
violet window // red streak
mainlined from Matisse—
ecosystem
constellation
map at height or speed—
Afterlife or foredream,
all this blurred onrushing:
Bright off-center longing
I always sense as home—
III
Each region has its own geologic style that permits some rocks to form and prohibits many others. We try to point out the possibilities within each region to give a general idea of what to expect.
Hopefully you will be able to tell for yourself what kind of rock you have.
—Roadside Geology of Northern California
APOCALYPTO W/ AQUARIA
Touching an urchin
in the reflecting pool,
Bennett says salt.
Urchin, I say. Anemone.
Each day he sings new syllables.
Anemone alemony amelony a melody—
We watch jellyfish, volutes in the tank.
Jellyfish thrive in many waters,
also in the face of vast pollution.
Next: endangered alligators;
cloudy octopi, one solo turtle,
back venerable as Aztec masonry.
Bennett says tortuga. Each day
his bestiary grows.
Still everything we name
is disappearing:
Zebra, hippopotamus, rhinoceros.
Soon I’ll also be explaining
how each word each marks
a half-lost species:
O exotic & endangered letters.
BREACH & WAKE
Daughter, sprog, fresh Odysseus,
amniotic, blue velella.
Kelpy grasper, baffled by light.
Your cry is the clatter of gulls.
Our limbs are your octopus.
We’re foggy, adrift.
Days crash & sail over.
Double-hearted, many-chambered,
we grow creaturely.
Then you, half-blind,
breach & wake, laborious porpoise,
& nose your blowhole into human flesh—
SONG WITH POPPIES & REVERIE
Thirty years later, my body grown.
Flickering signal economy, also fire poppies