Questionable Stropharia

I am approaching the end of a twenty six-week long docent training at a wildlife preserve. Last week we did fungi and lichen – right up my alley of weirdness. Not everyone shares my enthusiasm.

One thing about mushrooms  - they have the best names. Common names of birds, plants, fungi, insects, etc. generally make great raw materials for poetry if you tend towards the playful. (Some poets are so serious.)  These words make for good list poems. Mushroom names seem to lend themselves to children’s poetry, where the most immanent dangers are concealed by an illusion of innocence created by rhyming verse.

Jump rope rhymes are great because the rope keeps the beat and forces the person (people) speaking to slow down or speed up certain words in order to keep time. I like the way meaning becomes subordinate to sound while the jumper is in; it’s a great metaphor for childhood.

The Blue-Skinned Man – a Jump Rope Rhyme

‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban!
The blue-skinned man
is a Fungus Fan;
the holy see
of mycology,
He’s the Mushroom Man
from a far-away land

When I went a strolling
Below the forest rainbow,
The blue-skinned man told me:
“Careful where your feet go–

‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban!
The blue-skinned man
is a Fungus Fan;
the holy see
of mycology,
He’s the Mushroom Man
from a far-away land

“I’m a fungus in the dead logs,
A mushroom in the roots;
I’m a truffle in the ground
So be wary of your boots!”

Skip a rope, jump a rope,
get in line–
How many mushrooms can you find?

Ravenel’s Stinkhorn
Deadly Galerina
Turkey Tail, Inky Cap
Bleeding Mycena
Dead Man’s Fingers
Strangulated Amanita

Dryad’s Saddle
Dung-loving Psilocybe
Beefsteak Polypore
Poison Pie
Witch’s Butter
Club-footed Clitocybe

Orange Milky, Panther
Shaggy Parasol
Witch’s Hat, Death Cap
False Chanterelle

Destroying Angel
The King and Slippery Jack
Swamp Beacon, Dry Rot
Fading Scarlet Waxy Cap

Fawn and Pleated Puffballs
Ochre Spreading Tooth
Old Man of the Woods
Pig’s Ear and Velvet Foot

Devil’s Urn and Sulphur Shelf
Sweating, Sweetbreads
If the blue-skinned man
catches you, you’re DEAD!   (jumper goes out)

‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban!
The blue-skinned man
is a Fungus Fan;
the holy see
of mycology,
He’s the Mushroom Man
from a far-away land

Our Lady of Palabras Perdidas

Marjory the Trash Heap: "I'm orange peels, I'm coffee grounds, I'm wisdom!"

We live in a world of disposable objects. In the last few years, widely circulated images of the garbage pickers on the mountains of debris in countries like India and Brazil harken the arrival of what some scientists are now calling the “Anthropocene,” or the Age of Man.  According to a 2011 article in National Geographic, the “stratigrapher’s ” job “is to piece together Earth’s history from clues that can be coaxed out of layers of rock millions of years after the fact.” This article got me thinking…what would one call someone who specializes in interpreting layers of discarded words?

I am constantly scavenging the internet for lists of old words. One of my very favorite books is The Sailor’s Word-Book by William Henry Smyth. The SWB is available as a free a pdf download through Project Gutenberg, and promises hours of geeky entertainment. I can’t recommend it enough.

In “Our Lady of Palabras Perdidas” I imagine a kind of linguistic bag lady, rummaging among the heaps for hidden treasures like a medicine woman looking for healing herbs. She encounters a frail and aging Mnemosyne –the embodiment of memory in Greek mythology and the mother of the nine muses– like one might encounter an artifact on which history is both inscribed and interpreted (i.e., Marjory the Trash Heap).

I don’t remember where I found this list, but it’s a fun one.

Mnemosyne

Our Lady of Palabras Perdidas

Old yes! But a bobbish yet, I is.
“Vagabunda!” They shout, hands over ears.
“Conservadora!” I says to me kindred scavengers,
Who have taken to calling me, in these times:

Our Lady of Palabras Perdidas.

Their language be but sad, cag-mag
Rummagin’ in Latin shards n’ splinters.
“Nossa Senhora, where came you from?”
“Ahhhh,” and here I point North and East,
With a stick of smooth olive wood.

“When the hills were still young and stupid,
I was married over the broomstick to a quaddy lad.
Many, many years back, he died;
I’ve since grown a good-sized hump upon me back –
A hillock cloaked in gray!” I says.

“I’ve no whingle, and I’m no drumble!” Meh.
I make my way scavenging in the rubbish heaps
For las palabras perdidas – unwanted and fluey

Made Time’s poor orphan,
him but a proud Costermonger!
“But when ye rub ‘em up, make ‘em shine!”
Even such a one as meself, of deep wrine can see
Under the oily tarnish and the stain
Ye know what they says (flourish of me hands)

‘Verba Volant, scripta manent – words fly but writings remain!’
Yadda, yadda, yadda.

In one heap Me found a birdish Burdalane
The last one, poor wee lass, surviving of her kin
Cark, she were, and thought a cumberground
“But now, now dear!” I said. “Our Lady
Will make ye a shake-down of fine feathers
And new spring grass, with whittles of white petals
And draughts from the clear, running brook
Before yer queachy young bones sleepaway.”

Her laughter flowed like music, a sweet rindle
And she kept a small pebble in her mouth
Lest felth become strength – its ugesome successor.

It were by chance me found Mnemosyne

– Beloved Eldmother

And muse of old and wordly women
I pulled her up from her Earth-fast taproots
But she, forswunak and grown lanken
Began to speak but clyted.

Her voice was wantsome from moss and rust
She’d become elden, and dwined
Under a wasted of letters and her long sloom
“These young and fluttersome moffles –
What do they know of a word’s wroth?”

We drank tea and eftsoons she spake again:
“Ne’er a word ran deeper than sewers of ruined cities
Nor does history disturb a taproot or a deep-sea clam.
All language will ever be in the heaps.”

Radiant City

When the woman fell through
the crack in the city sidewalk
she fell many fathoms
towards a radiant abyss

There were so many women
down in the crystal caves
they had been falling through
the cracks for so long

The women made a city near
the vents where the blue light
of bioluminescent animals
lit up the long nights

They walked quietly in the sparkling
salt pillar forests, gathering
in the flowing flora, collecting
honey from the honeyfish’s mouth

After they had been there a while
a few wished to swim in the subterranean
sea; and so they grew gills and tales
with prismic, adamantine scales

Soon women fell like rain through
the cracks in the city sidewalks
which are said to cover over
nearly two percent of the Earth

But nobody missed them.
Whenever a man went missing
through the cracks, the other
men would search the manholes

They did not see the radiant city
nor do they hear the mermaids
singing softly to the fallen, turning them
gently into pillars of salt
with their lullabies

Still Life With Objects

Like that infamous ship
on the flat horizon, the one the
Florida Indians couldn’t
see although it was right in front
of them I wonder how long
I have lived among these people
who were, until now, this moment,
broken headphones, steel wool
dryer lint, a throbbing headache

Lampooning behind mirrored masks
of debris in a car wash puddle–
Jiffy Lube coupons, a jay’s wing
a Big Gulp straw
a twist tie, an oil sheen

We know them – discarded bottles,
pills and perfumed soaps
that pass unaltered from us
into the coursing waterways
making amphibians female
as they go, killing freshwater mussels
- those keepers of the rivers’
clear waters all these eons and we
didn’t know until now
how things forever alter

I cannot re-enchant the world
myself, inert and alone
in my house
the dishwasher hums
the toilet sings
the radiator knocks; outside
the chainsaw, the leafblower,
the shop vac, the lawnmowers
drown out sounds
the laughter of children swinging

A small honey mushroom is growing
between my toes it is
beginning to discompose my
feet on the spot where I stand
suddenly awake
listening to all these people here

soon the microbes of the forest floor
will migrate through the rotten
webbing, through my limbs
on which the crows alight

I, like a tree
while things in my house,
the gathering, flammable armies beneath
garbage mountains, flotillas of objects
the size of Texas, the greenhouse breath
assemble, are on the move
singing, humming, knocking, flowing
while I listen to the rasping of
a diasporic wind
in my leaves

Dickens Fair

 

“The Cow Palace,” site of the Dickens Fair. What would Queen Victoria think about that?

DE POÉSIE OU DE VERTU

Winslow Homer's Girl Reading Under an Oak Tree

We have a beautiful plaza in this town,
Laid out by a Mexican commandante when the land
Belonged to one man or another, all according to plan–
But all the hundred-year-old trees were planted by women

Not many people I know in this town read poetry;
One hears many stale references to Jack London and Bacchus
But few to the raving ones, the Maenads – perhaps because
Everyone here drinks wine, yet few read between the lines?

I make a habit of always bringing a book
In verse, or a French novel to the read
On autumn afternoons when the yellow Gingko leaves
Fall like golden rain upon the children swinging

Just last week I saw a girl, eighteen if she was a day,
Reading my favorite book of Baudelaire’s prose poems,
(The one called “Twenty Prose Poems by Baudelaire”)
Under the quiet shade of the great Southern Magnolia

And what caught my attention first was the cover,
As hers was a library book, which ruled out
Some possibilities; for example, the book wasn’t a gift
From a friend at a university, a cousin in Paris;

It isn’t a book one finds at a yard sale or flea market
Not something she would’ve discovered snooping
In her mother’s locked trunk of forgotten treasures:
Old love letters and odd trinkets saved from a previous life

It isn’t a book the local bookstore owner on the square
Would have recommended (I know him); he’d freely admit
His taste is more tales of men and irony; he has little interest
In nonsense about the moon’s curse on a green-eyed girl

I wanted to ask the girl if she knew why the French adore Poe, or
What she thought of “Double Chamber” or “Favours of the Moon”
And if she’d read Remembrance of Things Past; but then I stopped,
Remembering this dreamland was made by women.

From across the sandbox, I saw that she had long brown hair
And was narrow around the hips, like I once was,
And was dressed in old jeans, worn sneakers and a sweatshirt
Just fashionable enough not to be noticed at all

When she rose to leave, she pulled the hood over her face;
Familiar trick! To avoid ensnarement in the imagination of a creep,
Fearing he should keep some part of us; she passed, like a phantom
Through the rippling autumn light under falling golden leaves

As she was leaving there were things I wanted to say, such as:
“Stay away from tone-deaf Troubadors who strum for your attention,
Even when you’re trying to read poetry at a bus stop,” or,
“Don’t wear shoes you can’t run fast in – you just never know!”

There were so many things I wanted to tell the girl
As she walked quietly away, under golden leaves, falling, falling
But all I knew to say in French was: “enivrez-vous sans cesse!
De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.”

Note: “enivrez-vous sans cesse!/De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise” are lines from Baudelaire’s prose poem “Enivrez-Vous” or “Get Drunk.” (City Lights Books)

Latkapocalypse

A Latke Memory

Every year, as the holiday season approaches, I revisit what I call my “botched holiday meal” strategy. If I can maintain my reputation in the kitchen, no one will ask me to be in charge of feeding crowds. As an occasional science writer, I’m more of a cuisine naturalist than enthusiast.

For example, last year, around Thanksgiving I had to make four separate potluck dishes for the kids’ heritage feast at school. I had a mild panic attack and called my sister in Colorado. She said, “What are you asking me for? Don’t you remember I don’t cook either? Make something white. Kids love white food.”

Sheepishly, I called my mother. “You failed to domesticate us,” I told her.

“It’s not funny anymore. You don’t even iron,” she said.

“Who irons?”

Finally, at my mother’s suggestion, I made a green bean casserole – a dish I truly believed to have passed into legend circa 1971. My mother made a list of the simple ingredients I would need. She assured me it would be a hit. “It’s all starch and salt. Everyone loves it.” I went to the Safeway and it took me at least fifteen minutes to find French-fried onion rings. I had difficulty classifying them as a species. Would they be with crackers and chips? Baking supplies? On the ethnic foods aisle perhaps, under “Regional American/Confederate States?” Near the green beans, perchance? Finally I found them near the pharmacy, arranged precariously in a tower that was listing slightly to the right. Next aisle over I found the cans of cream of mushroom soup – a mysterious coagulated compound of fungi and plumber’s putty. I brought the casseroles to the heritage feast. When I pulled the foil off to present them, the casserole looked like wet grout with green beans. No one touched it.

Determined, I finally mastered the green bean casserole after several more attempts, and I decided I would bring it to Thanksgiving at my mother’s house. Sadly, when we arrived, the meal had already fallen into disharmony. The gravy, stuck in traffic on HWY 5, showed up two hours late. We waited as long as we could, until the turkey shriveled and dried out on the barbecue and the kids had to dunk it in the sparkling apple cider just so they could chew it. There was a miscommunication about the stuffing and we ended up with about forty pounds.

After everyone had enough wine, the conversation turned to Turducken, a distinctly Yiddish sounding word yet a profoundly unJewish dish. Luckily my cousin’s girlfriend at the time (now his wife) took my part. (She animates adult cartoon shows and collects rare fighter fish – a real shiksamy mother says.) Authoritatively, she said, “I believe a traditionally prepared Turducken is a Turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. The French do something else. There are more birds involved. I think they start with an ostrich.”

“I bet,” I said. “An ostrich stuffed with a turkey, stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a house finch, stuffed with a cigarette.”

“Exactly!” she said. “Speaking of cigarettes…”

My mother rose stiffly from her seat. Giving me the evil eye, left the dining room. “You had to start,” she said later. “At least you could let everyone eat before you make them sick with all your nature. How did I fail my daughters?”

A few weeks later Hanukah arrived. My strategy was working. “Can we all just admit that latkes are just Yiddish for “hash-browns” and get over it?” I asked my mother.

“They are not hash-browns. It’s important to make them from scratch, the right way, hand-grated. Will I never teach you anything?”

In our family, the “traditional way” means hours of peeling and grating followed by billowing black smoke followed immediately by the onset of anxiety around the Christmas meal.

“Don’t you remember last year?” I asked my mother.

A dark cloud passed over her face. During the previous year’s Hanukah dinner, I walked into my mother’s house during peak latke-production. My son, always running through the kitchen, skidded out on a viscous, potatoey substance on the floor and injured his head on the refrigerator. Clumps of latke batter dripped from my mother’s hair, and her face was partially covered in flour. The garbage disposal was making that burning brakes smell and yurping up copious amounts of potato matter.

“This isn’t making latkes, Mom. This is a potato apocalypse.”

“Don’t you have something to do? A trail to run? A ball to kick? Leave me alone,” she said defeated. It was only then that I realized it was I who had failed her.

Finally, after some pressuring, I convinced her to try the frozen latkes from Trader Joe’s. “It’s just us,” I said. “No one will know.” She scoffed, of course. But in the end I won. We spent the rest of the evening drinking and watching the candles burn down.

“These were good,” my mother said. “Not a word to anyone about frozen latkes, especially no one Jewish. My reputation is on the line.”

“Mom,” I said, “Haven’t I taught you anything?”

OWS Protesters and Marcuse’s Political Preface 1966

Canal Workers - photo by Sebastiao Salgado

Marcuse’s Political Preface (Eros and Civiliation) seems to have some relevance to where we find ourselves at this moment in American history.

“To the degree to which organized labor operates in defense of the status quo, and to the degree to which the share of labor in the material process of production declines,intellectual skills and capabilities become social and political factors. Today, the organized refusal to cooperate of the scientists, mathematicians, technicians, industrial psychologists and public opinion pollsters may well accomplish what a strike, even a large-scale strike, can no longer accomplish but once accomplished, namely, the beginning of the reversal, the preparation of the ground for political action. That the idea appears utterly unrealistic does not reduce the political responsibility involved in the position and function of the intellectual in contemporary industrial society. The intellectual refusal may find support in another catalyst, the instinctual refusal among the youth in protest. It is their lives which are at stake, and if not their lives, their mental health and their capacity to function as unmutilated humans. Their protest will continue because it is a biological necessity. “By nature,” the young are in the forefront of those who live and fight for Eros against Death, and against a civilization which strives to shorten the “detour to death” while controlling the means for lengthening the detour. But in the administered society, the biological necessity does not immediately issue in action; organization demands counter-organization. Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight.”

Here is the entire Political Preface.

Women’s Club Occupies Sonoma with Trees

Like many, I have been following the OWS movement all over the United States, including the recent events at UC Berkeley and UC Davis. This may sound like an excuse, but I have four children at home to take care of, so camping out for weeks on end doesn’t really leave my family in great shape.  So I send the occupiers my gratitude as well as my hopes no harm will come to any of them. In the meantime, I continue to plant trees and remove invasive plants at the wildlife preserve where I volunteer.

I was reminded yesterday of Sonoma’s history of occupation, a history that includes some very uppity women who wanted to plant trees in order to decolonize our eight acre Plaza (the largest in California) from its former inhabitants and uses. Suzie Rodriguez of the Sonoma Index Tribune writes:

“For starters, the old plaza in the center of town was a disgrace. The train depot was located there, and the ugly, treeless dirt square was the first glimpse debarking passengers had of Sonoma.

As for residents, they avoided the plaza if they could. With pasture-seeking cattle herded through on a daily basis, it was dotted with dung, pocked with holes, and quite unsanitary. It also morphed into a giant mudpit when it rained.”

In another account, the Plaza is described as having been “a treeless, unattractive cattle yard where animals were frequently slaughtered. Early pioneers wrote about the unpleasant stench that surrounded it.”

That the land was taken forcefully from the many Native peoples that lived in the valley, and that many of them were forced into slavery, is another, much sadder part of Sonoma’s rich history. We all know how that story ended.

In any case, the push on the part of the Women’s Club wasn’t met with much enthusiasm by the men in the Valley. Today, anyone who has visited the Plaza knows what a worthy endeavor it was. In autumn, the rain of papery gold leaves from the three giant American Elms is a scene too surreal to describe. Mothers and children and grandparents, lovers, tourists, musicians, school groups – the Plaza is the model of how a central, public gathering place creates community.

The right to gather in public space for the purpose of peaceful protest – EVEN IF IT’S A CLOWN PARADE AT THE FARMER’S MARKET – is also a Constitutional Right. I think we’d have a lot to say as a town if the police pepper-sprayed students and teachers from Sonoma Valley High School for protesting peacefully against things like skyrocketing college tuition, lack of vocational training, widespread corporate greed, ravaged natural resources, state budget cuts to public schools and the impossibility of a decent job; these are all things that my generation took for granted but are now rapidly disappearing from their future.

I am writing this blog to express my gratitude to the OWS protestors as well as my horror at the recent police brutality on both UC campuses. And to those troublesome women  - our local Entwives – who wanted to plant some trees to make their community a better place for people and other living things – I tip my hat.

Solaris and the Death Drive