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
