by Tess Taylor
in the lava garden. Clumsy
arthropods, fat pollinators.
Equal in mystery: I am a mother.
What does it mean to belong to July?
Blackberry, thistle, nectarine shadow.
How have I survived even this life?
At street corners sometimes
time hauls me under
like the stone guzzle
where the land’s crust
subducts into sea.
At the bay, encampment, encampment.
Dispossessed, dispossessed. Sometimes in my mind
ghost Okies still clatter
uphill in ghost Model Ts.
Rosie the Riveters smoke
in postwar sun.
At the corner, Happ- Tailor—
the y fallen; hapless.
A lizard runs by.
At the beach yesterday I heard
seven languages; corvid & seal bark.
Last year they tore down
the last town trailer park.
A stream gutters under my house.
A stream follows the path of a faultline.
Our gravestones are signposts to everywhere:
Yun, Kobayashi, Menendez, Revere.
The Sunset Mausoleum Welcomes All Visitors.
The backhoe inters the arriviste dead.
What’s the name of the stream in Huichin Ohlone?
The question lingers. Oyster clouds open.
Our coastlines are swallowed
are hollowed like vowels—
EMELINE AT SIX WEEKS
You howl, all vowel.
When you babble,
your elocution is clear
as a downhill stream.
With the eyes of a prophet
you gaze beyond us,
and when you cry
your wail is tremendous:
You stage revolution
on behalf of the stars.
UNTITLED WITH SADNESS & SUCKLE
Tonight’s emergency
is not emergent.
News that stays news but is not a poem.
Beating. Shooting. Children in cages.
Like when I was at Emily’s
watching cops chase Rodney King.
Same nectarine light.
Sometimes I think that all
privilege is
is some safer vantage
for watching the trauma, America, happen.
What human words will I use to explain?
In the dream I am screaming:
My daughter is asking me why?
Now the baby she is
squalls awake & I haul
myself out to offersuckle
oxytocinprovisional safety—
we are animal
in the broken ecosystem
her head smells like milk on my breast
TRAIN THROUGH COLMA
But will anyone teach
the new intelligence to miss
the apricot trees
that bloomed each spring
along these tracks?
Or the way afternoons
blazed with creosote
& ponderosa?
Spring evenings flare
with orange pixels
in the bay-scented valley.
Where in the algorithm
will they account for
the rippling ponies
that roamed outside Fremont?
When the robots have souls,
will they feel longing?
When they feel longing,
will they write poems?
IV
We wrote this book for those friends who want to learn a bit about the geologic foundations of their surroundings . . . we avoided the more rarified topics that only geologists enjoy.
We did our best to avoid crossing the delicate line that separates simplification from oversimplification.
—Roadside Geology of Northern California
RAW NOTES FOR A POEM NOT YET WRITTEN
—San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito, CA
I walk by the
Japanese
ruins
gated
behind
cracked pavement lot
where the bare hills
“a riot of poppies”
frame
little sh
wild lupine
geranium
hothouse thorns
They never came back
their white neighbor saved
(not all)
of their business
in the windows
torn rice paper
half a Shinto shrine
Sixty years later
toppled
where they were taken
last of those buildings
downin
O my town.
We perch on
what was done here.
My best friend’s grandmother
myfirstboyfriend’sgrandmother
I knew it later
they never spoke of it—(to me)—
whiskey crates
& damp mold
of abandoned places
Coyote bush rattles: seems
to be asking
who will they take next
when are they coming?
ONCE AGAIN AT NONVIOLENCE TRAINING, 2017
Because the white supremacists are coming
because the threat
becauseCharlottesville
& if you don’t who will
& you never know what baton what chemical
we are marching.
We plan chants.
Make signs at church.
Large assembly: bodies, linoleum, soup.
Cardboard & markers & salt fog drifting.
We bear forward our fury and sorrow.
Estuary sanctuary room for our hope lights.
HATE IS TOXIC TO ALL LIVING CREATURES.
Shalom, salaam. We root our anger.
Are alive together.
Must now be shields to one another.
& John said: Be a witness.
We brace one another. Plant our feet.
In fog, promise
to stay together.
We will not raise our hands. We are not leaving.
LOMA PRIETA, 1989
then in chorus up the risers rose
& for a moment we were riding
high & tottering on the bareback crust.
We were girls
preparing for our concert
so even when the raw ground buckled
& bucked us up we went on singing.
Our conductor led us into the courtyard
& in four parts we sang a poem by e. e. cummings
even as we learned that all around us
whole neighborhoods & a freeway had collapsed.
Baudelaire wrote under von Haussmann
that a city’s form is always changing
faster than the longings of a mortal heart.
As the sharp quake kicked our lungs
we learned again & for the first time what
it is to live on things
bound to collapse. Later I’d read
Roadside Geology of Northern California
funny yellowing book my father treasured:
I’d learn rift zonesubductionslab pull—
Then as October dusk drew down we sang
although the very bridge
that was our pathway home had sandwiched
between its decks a man a fleet of cars.
Later I watched dismantled piece by piece
the last of those 1930s girders—
week by week torn down as I assembled
the cells of a new daughter in my body.
That night as upthrust settled
we sang on, still children
alive inside the music’s oxygen. Even in the face
of devastation
we must make art: This was the lesson
Bet
h Avakian offered then
without a way of knowing
how much it would mean to me
these years later. In the space
the freeway was, is bay.
The new bridge glitters.
They named the quake Loma Prieta,
which means ‘dark hill’—
it represents a great collapsing,
though in my heart & memory
it now leans toward song—
SONG IN WHICH WE YET SIDESTEP DISASTER
for Taylor
Even stars are formed by loss. You know
astronomers believe that galaxies are forged
out of huge collapsing stars—
hollow, imploding on themselves.
As stars die the very charge
of their collapse sets matter loose:
This lost energy becomes a splatter
of elemental goo spinning in space.
If this is hard to see, think of a tub,
the one our kids play in each night.
When it drains, the energy that’s lost
in gravity’s huge suck is turned to sound. Sound:
what lost force becomes. Sound:
the gurgle left behind by entropy.
Think: collapsing stars
forging a galactic paint
of elements & energy;
nickel, copper, iron, ore
of which each new world is made.
Our life is splattered star.
Or, my love, we’re spun of losses.
Is this why
we sit up on the shore
& hear the ocean smash the rocks?
The air rings with lost force we call the waves.
Ten years ago I gave my life to you,
& lost some of the life I had before.
We marked promises & gave
each other mined-up core
to wear a while, minted now as rings.
Guise of permanence, to enclose a life.
I also know that when I write tonight
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.
ELK AT TOMALES BAY
Nimble, preserved together,
milkweed-white rears upturned,
female tule elk
bowed into rustling foxtails.
Males muscled over the slopes,
jostling mantles, marking terrain.
Their antlers clambered wide,
steep as open gorges.
As they fed, those branches twitched,
sensory, delicate,
yet as one buck reared his head
squaring to look at us
his antlers & his gaze
held suddenly motionless.
Further out, the skeleton.
The tar paper it seemed to lie on
was hide.
Vertebrae like redwood stumps.
In an uneven heart-shaped cavern
a coccyx curled to its tip.
Ribs fanned open,
hollow, emptied of organs.
In the bushes, its skull:
sockets & mandible,
sinuses, loose teeth.
All bare now except
that fur the red brown color
of a young boy’s head & also
of wild iris stalks in winter
still clung to the drying scalp.
Below the eye’s rim sagged
flat as a bicycle tire.
The form was sinking away.
The skin loosened, becoming other,
shedding the mask that hides
but must also reveal a creature.
Off amid cliffs & hills
some unfleshed force roamed free.
In the wind, I felt
the half-life I watched watch me.
Elk, I said, I see
you abandon this life, this earth.
I stood for a time with the bones.
ETYMOLOGY WITH TECTONIC PLATES
i
Faultline we say & what is this but tendril
to fault to foul a falling short a failing
to blame to blemish
e.g. a damaged place
the word also making visible
at least in part the unimaginable
moving plate: Earthskull
where it buckles
to trip to falter err or blunder:
boundary
in continuity
or stone
Fault we say hiking chert and basalt,
cracked seafloor
under fog.
ii
Later I
rework these lines, chart
lost pangeas, worlds
emerging at the brinkor try
to trace the crevices of mind
to sort
what rubbleall the shift
made visible
linen thread or cord
e.g. also the spool or snare
the mark or stroke or way of making bare
the staveto order
to trace esp. a band or furrow
the measure of a verse or hymn
to bound
to limn
to lineatea song
in a harsh climate
to crack
to realign
SONG WITH WILD PLUM & THORN
The morning is cold & the world is hard
but even in fog it is still midsummer.
The kids need to play & the grocery budget
ticks toward nothing the way
the world tips towards doomsday.
The walls in my chest will not let me breathe
& all the screens flicker & still answer nothing, so
I take the children down to the bike path,
& with buckets & a few blessed hours
wander a corridor of weedy fruit.
Blackberry, wild plum, all overhung:
we leaners or gleaners half-acrobatic
lost among boughs—alone till I notice
others stopping
with buckets or tiffins
in many languages
along these tracks picking
what weeds we still hold in common
as dry heat builds
and fog thins.In common, in common—
the thought feels strangely radical,
crumb or bloom beyond
loneliness. For a while, I feel
entirely animal, little forager
hungry for fruit.
Black sparkle, pale pit & thorn—
weeds binding
some world together.
A word appears in my mind
holdfast hold fast—
sprout—raw volunteer—
for a while it is hand to mouth & to bucket
breathing—still here still here—
AUBADE WITH FAULTLINE & BROKEN PIPE
& when at night there is an earthquake
& in the morning the upended gutter
flows out through the broken mouth of sidewalk
& the freed stream splays & loosens
asphalt & Key Route grows impassable; when
this muddy torrent now recalls
the way in marcheswe the people
do reroute the streets, I remember
how the pressures exerted
by earthforce are continual & invisible,
how eruptionsare instantiation.
Bataille believed the sacred lies in interruption
the festival tent unloosed & flapping
after the hurricane
what hurricanewhat interruption
in an epoch of pressure
unburied water claims its path
a force acquires
a voiceb
a valence
also: It sings as it goes<
br />
AUBADE WITH REDWOOD
If we were to go
if the house fell in an earthquake
if fire, if fire
& we were burned out
I imagine the redwood
in what we call our
backyard
would keep living.
I call myself I
but below its bigness am
small
eye & animal
near forest fractal.
Look: The gash
in its bark
thickens to heal
on our neighbor’s fence.
Look: The green hummingbirds
take us as neighbors.
I GAVE MY LOVE A STORY
Now it is night again, child on my chest.
I croon & my song drifts you towards rest.
As I chant in darkness you are also learning
to hear minor scales chime & fourths falling.
Together we hover inside a melody
many dead mothers once sung before.
Tonight the cherry still has no stone.
Tonight I rock you out of bodily memory
& these songs are older than we are,
& this tune I hum is wise as a virus;
it makes me a vector
for rhythm & cadence—
(tonight the chicken still has no bone):
The song lives on, persists & persists—
PUNCTUATIONS & WIND
Then once again someone is shot
at a school by a sniper by police in a movie theater
& the many homeless
are hustled & hunted.
You read how your clothes are sewn by slaves
your dinner fished by slaves
your fruit picked by starving children.
Mostly you don’t get away.
Mostly you raise the children you have,
afraid of no health care, of losing
the one goodish job you’ve finally got.
Mostly you keep your nose to the grindstone.
Your heart flails
a thick fish in your throat.
You have felt for a long time that someone is watching:
The administration is eroding your benefits.
But you are lucky, so you try to feel lucky.
By the numbers you have always lived
in an apartheid state.
You look at your child.
Read reports of the tear gas.
Text a friend. Cry at night.
Some days you march when people are marching
some batter windowssome are hit
things are cancelled:
The year has been dry
