Rift Zone

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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

 

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