On a street in an old mill town
there live twenty six poets
in houses made of words

The first owner of the Greek Revival -
the Formalist  – lives alone with his books;
stacked in columns, aligned in perfect rows
of equal heights – most are damaged by rain
falling through the holes in the old shake roof

but just last year
the Confessionals
had the house condemned;
now they roam the empty halls
listening to echoes and
putting out their cigarettes
in the garden fountain
while they bore each other
to stone with their only
subject

around the same time the Beats
bought the dump next door,
a fixer upper if they had a dime,
they put out the cigarettes with
the card tables and metal folding chairs
for all the angelheaded hipsters
from the cold-water flats

When walking by,
one must avert the eyes
and ears from the waving
of Ginsberg’s flacid organ
his Howling lips;
Ferlinghetti is still
constantly risking
absurdity and they
wonder why
there are no women
in this pigsty of a
tent city

             The Imagists…
what to make of this house -
a house of mirrors
with moving walls
hidden staircases;
the doors melt
in the doorjams,
the glaciers knock in
the kitchen cupboards,
a bowl of pears hold
summer in their purple hearts

The haiku poets
walk up the mountain at dawn
when the bank foreclosed

on the tenement
at the north end of the street
that casts blue shadows

At the peak they join
the heavy hearted Romantics
looking down on the ruined
earth, all of its defiled Edens
praying to imperfect gods
as the beautiful souls float by
with the blow wives
on the breeze -
they who have forsaken
the very idea of home

At the edge of a wood sits
a cottage of moss-covered stone,
last house on the left:
The House of the Moths.
Beyond the wrought iron gate
form and sound
collapse into nothing
behind locked doors

Home to suicides and rapes
slaves and concubines
housewives and freaks
unlucky immigrants
border jumpers
bug huggers
Fairy Dairy Queens
depressives and junkies,
The Man from Nantucket
singing sea chanties and
dime store hymns

These are the Outsiders,
the voices, softer than a whisper,
flutter in the darkness still
waiting for someone
to turn the key
rusting in the lock

Each piece in the Colonial Assortment
is an uncharted island
shrouded in a brown paper;
a sweet shop case of lily pads
from which you hop
flavor to flavor.

Salted Almond Caramels
are tropical beach getaways,
South Pacific whitewash at your toes,
an endless horizon of
Ganache Bliss, the mountain
sleeping behind you
under Scotchmallow skies.

Raspberry Creams
are the velvety blonde hairs
on your lover’s suntanned neck;
Butterschotch lollies,
the sensation on your tonuge
of his still warm skin and
and late night swims
with Praline Turtles.

But Vanilla Walnut Fudge is daybreak,
a well-deserved stomach ache.
And for gluttonous mistakes,
Peanut Butter Patties
take the cake.

Dark Bordeaux is a bloody ritual,
the jungle night dithyramb,
the cannibal’s matrimonial
the last dance of the native virgins
for Assorted old Colonials.

Bridge Mix has an aftertaste like
giardia at summer camp which
makes you shiver and wretch.
Ginger Clusters are gymnasium-spiced,
with notes of square dancing
and the smell of sticky hands.

Inside the Cocoanut Creme
the texture of childhood
goes stale, killing you softly
abandoning you to years
of Brittles and Toffees.

Mint Meltaways are nice like
Greenland’s shrinking ice;
Polar Bears Paws (nuts and
nougat in white chocolate,
oft called Bons Bons of Extinctions)
are delicious to Tamora
as Chiron and Demetrius.

Nuts and Chews are a plate of
oily noodle kugel on the table
stuffy sitting rooms of aunts
talk politics and cataracts
at the party where you chew
in closet with the coats
hoarding chocolates from your sister
every minute getting sicker.

The remaining Rum Nougat
is the bitterest pill of all, stinking like
the shrink’s sour breath
too close to your nose
inhaling when he proposed

‘Life is like a box of chocolates -
you never know what you’re gonna get”

and sent one to your father
for Christmas as a gift for a
mouthful of silence
at such a small expense.

The matriarch waits
in the shadows for
the witchdoctor to
conjure her daughters
her sons, her sisters
from the roiling waters

A Chinaman squats by the fire
carving an ivory Buddha,
nearby sits the Wall Street wife
the neighborhood thugs
bush pilots and arms dealers;
a small black girl has a secret

An elephant never forgets
the poacher’s face
nor the tiny voice
who told the baboons in whispers
to pour sugar in the gas tanks
drop dead rats in the wells

Soon this orphan will join the others;
they will ride upon the high shoulders
of three million childless mothers;
the ivory will bleed rivers
into the streets of Hong Kong–
the watering hole of hungry ghosts

In the ripeness of their youth
they were green and delicious
fleshy, full of juice
some might even say tempting

They had once splashed
in the whitewash
of a deep blue Pacific,
their blonde hair
catching the wind
like scarves spun of sunlight

They had once gathered
by the river’s edge
swimming in the emerald pools
while peevish boys
spied, hidden in the trees
one hand on a fishing pole
the other clammy in a pocket

These earthbound sirens,
these riverine selkies and
half-shelled Venuses,
these copper-toned goddesses
basked in the last rays
of a setting sun,
having traded their voices
for the scaled tail of a fish

Now they sit poolside
stirring ice cubes
melting in the gin,
their leathery fingers adorned
with small asteroids

someone’s son
has married a business major
another has new granite counters
another is taking legal action
one has a new jawline−
words unmusical
even to their own ears
so they no longer listen

They don’t dare go near the water
where the Lady of the Lake
holds her hand mirror towards the gazers
and the narcissus has dropped
all its pale white petals

One of their party has gone missing
Gone, quite literally, to seed

Nobody speaks of her−
the wild woman
planting pocketfuls of beans
and brown-eyed Susans, broadcasting
bush lupines and poppies

She wears a pair of crow’s feet
about her eyes
a shaggy grey braid
trails down her spine
like a tail full of burrs,
foxtails and blow wives

She buries acorns
in the earth’s hard crust,
offers libations
to a small hole in the ground
once covered by an inland sea

The towhee is in her kitchen
a fox nurses cubs by the back porch
the paper wasps have chewed through
the walls of her shingled shack
in winter the roof leaks
odd things are growing in her toes
on her face a sort of
lichen creeps

One year the field cracks
from too little rain
she finds the shell
of an ancient animal
the wind whispers in its
its hollows, calling her home
towards a saline dream

The others, still haunted by
the starlit encounters
with boys in the sultry heat,
still wading in the sapphire shallows
in the emerald pools
where their reflections
told them Time was a
a bargain to strike−
They are the Apple Dolls.

Time has made wrinkled mockeries
of their maidenhood yet
they have not a single seed
saved in their pockets
left to offer

Last week we were in Maui for spring vacation. To get off the busy Hana Highway, I went for a walk up Holomua Road – a beautiful tree lined road that runs through the sugar cane fields and eventually connects back to Baldwin Road after the pavement gives way to a rugged, potholed stretch of red dirt.

I had been for walks on Holomua years ago but never made it as far as the Old Maui High School. It always amazes me that the modern builders of public schools fail to consider the impact profound and despairing UGLINESS might have upon attending students. I have a deep fear of ugly, multi-roomed buildings. The ruins of the Old Maui School – designed by Hawaiian architect Charles W. Dickey, now home to birds and ghosts – stand out in stark contrast to the portable buildings, the acres of concrete, and the overall prison-like facades of many of the schools built during the last few decades in California.

Apparently, many of the former students of the beautiful Old Maui High School felt that what remained of the school, closed in 1973, was worth saving. Read more here.

I’m not convinced money is the only problem for California’s impoverished public schools; trying to get any new idea past most school administrations requires a Herculean effort or, more likely, a full blown revolution. Personally, I’d rather go to class in a ruin than a portable but I teach in the woods anyway. (It seems only fitting that the Old Maui High School is now home to an environmental education center.) But maybe that’s the point – treat students like prisoners by surrounding them with stark, inert walls, feeding them chemical laden, packaged non-food so that the school districts can skim the profits, squeeze every last drop of critical and creative thinking out of the curriculum, remove outdoor education programs from K-8, and prisoners are what they will grow up to be. Prisons are, after all, one of the largest industries in the state.

In his wonderful book The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton writes: “Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.”

André Kertész, 1965

A strange event occurred a few weeks ago: my house was broken into. At ten a.m., after dropping my daughter off at school and running a few errands, I unlocked the front door of my house only to find the entryway stacked with my husband’s cameras and, of all things, my ten year-old’s broken piano keyboard. In a household of six – three teenagers – unexpected piles for school projects, sports, overnights, randomly appear all the time. But something didn’t smell right. Literally, I smelled someone else.

I went into the kitchen to my desk and noticed my laptop was missing. (More than one laptop thief lives in my house.) But I didn’t understand what was going on until l I went into the bedroom and saw all my drawers on the floor, clothing strewn about the room. Then I knew someone had been in the house. Or was still IN the house. It’s odd what happens to the perception of time when you realize things are not as they seemed. I walked slowly and quietly to the front door and crossed the street to the neighbor’s lawn where I phoned my husband and then the police. After describing the scene, I was transferred to the County Sheriff. “They might still be in the house,” he said. “Stay where you are. We’re on our way.”

Within a few minutes, three police cars arrived. They had been patrolling the neighborhood already since ours was the fourth house hit in a few weeks. It was the first I’d heard of it. Two officers searched the house. A neighbor stopped to ask what was going on and reported seeing a large black truck just a half an hour earlier. Suspecting the thief was still in the area, the helicopter arrived next. That brought out the rest of the neighbors.

Eventually another neighbor was able to give a detailed description of the truck and a young man with a “aggressive” buzz cut walking out of our house that morning. We sent photos of the truck (a ‘white supremacist mega-truck’ as my daughter called it) to the police. A young man wearing my son’s Giants hat in a jacked up black truck was caught later that evening and booked in the county jail. Although the Giants hat wasn’t enough to link him to our house, I suspect the fact that he was transporting a quarter million dollars of heroin probably didn’t help his cause much. Or the used needles on the floor of the cab. None of our property has been recovered so we’re waiting for the lab to match up smudge prints left on the window. I don’t envy a heroin addict sitting in jail. Cold turkey can’t be fun, even under the best of circumstances.

I know that people are “burgled” all the time. (I’ve since learned to differentiate between a burglary and robbery – one involves weapons.) This isn’t a unique story. We were lucky that nobody was hurt. It’s all just stuff, after all. If I hadn’t given in to a caffeine craving (everyone is an addict of some variety) and turned around to go to the drive thru for a double macchiato, I probably would have walked in right in the middle of his ‘curation.’

However, stored on my laptop was everything and anything I’ve ever written. This includes a completed (unpublished novel), two half-finished novels, an entire collection of poetry, essays, and more than thirty short stories, not to mention hundreds of photos, music, my CV, etc. I had been meaning to back it all up, just as I had been meaning to send out all those query letters and submissions. Over the next few days I was overwhelmed by something akin to grief but more like nostalgia for all that lost work. But then, after a week, a new feeling overcame me: Relief. Relief that all the  problems of those characters, their nagging, unresolved conflicts, their collective imprisonment in bad lives and even worse prose was no longer my problem. It was like the sudden silencing of ten thousand seagulls screaming for the last French fry.

In honor of this vanishing mob, I offer a few final words.

To the young slave woman of a futuristic South, pursued by a bounty hunter across an ecological dead zone where rivers glow with chemical luminescence – I hope you reach safety, I really do. Best of luck, remember to write, and turn north before you reach the Bible Belt where the zombies live.

To the rookie detective who meets a jaded cyborg informant in a San Francisco dive bar – don’t be fooled by the tarnished chrome; you’re being played.

To the old widow looking for clues about her dead parrot – it was your own sadistic cat that killed Sancho so stop blaming the neighbor. He’s got problems of his own.

Goodbye to the little Goth girl and her new friend- a gentle Samoan giant named Poi Boy – who helps her with a weekend bird count for a local wildlife refuge and becomes her loyal ally against the bullying high school jocks.

So long to the Holocaust survivor Morris Silver who, sitting in the car next to his wife of nearly sixty years who no longer recognizes him, experiences a sudden awakening when a few wild turkeys cause a ten car pile up on the 101.

Adieu to the sleep-deprived new mother in the haunted old farmhouse, kept awake by the ghost train in the attic that only she can hear.

To the free-spirited young woman drives her truck into a snow bank on Frozen Dog Road on her way to an isolated Wyoming ranch – your mother told you cowboys were trouble. You should have listened and you should have used chains.

To the middle-aged woman who flees a desk job to help study a rare albatross at South Atlantic research station, only to arrive and find the island barren, populated by spirits and full of hidden secrets – you’re better off so stop trying to get home. Your boss (like my most recent one) was a bona fide ass-wipe.

But for gentle David – I am full of remorse. After those endless hours spent practicing your violin in the old hermit’s cabin while your mother, abandoned by your father, scraped together a living in 1970′s Marin – you, David, deserved better than to waste away in a junkie’s loot pile, or to languish indefinitely in badly crafted words that could never do your music justice. Only music truly speaks for music.

As for my computer, the truth is still out there. The police didn’t have much to go on except for the few crumpled Venezuelan bills left on my dresser, possibly in payment for the $6.00 string of fake pearls from some past Halloween costume. My friend, a plain clothes policeman who works in Bay View/Hunter’s Point in San Francisco said of this decoy: “Oh, that’s classic. I’d be willing to bet the guy’s a suburban white boy who watches crime shows and is trying to pin the burglary on a Latino.” Along with the necklace, the thief took three guitars, two i-pods, my laptop, a desktop computer, my son’s brand new Giants hat and a Flower Fairy lock box full of seashells, poems, a few foreign coins, some special rocks and a secret letter written to a certain member of One Direction that belonged to my ten year-old daughter. This is where my compassion for a drug addict ends. Even the house itself seemed to be in a state of horrified shock at such an intrusion.  Everyone could sense the residue of the thief’s groping, searching fingers, the violation and his desperation.

The burglary did have one positive outcome; it gave me cause to reflect on the bits and pieces of other people’s lives I have myself stolen, patched together, re-fabricated, painted with primer, peddled, discarded. Perhaps one botched heist deserves another. So it’s not with an entirely clear conscience that I say bon voyage to the MacBook. I wish you well, my plastic companion. Maybe someone in a distant future will redeem those entombed within your zeros and ones and show that wandering multitude of ghosts the way home.

In the dark of winter nights, I walk along
the west side blocks of Broadway
where a few old mansions still stand, some of them
life insurance offices, another a pet clinic

there is a certain stretch of sidewalk
where new streetlights cast a sickly light
where the pavement buckles from
the surface roots of the Western plain trees

the effect is not entirely unpleasant;
it recalls the grand boulevards, the parks
of a European city - La Belle Époque
this alee of shadows, half lit by a false gaslight glow

I walk here often in dreamlike respite from the blight
of the big box stores, the housing tracts,
the portables of the elementary school
deposited debris from a great flood

At the end of the block our stage set ends:
the apartments elevated over an asphalt courtyard
the gas station, the abandoned used car lot
the sourgrass patches, the soda cups in the gutter

At the curb I see, tidily stacked, the overnight
things of children – the two little boys, I guess,
playing in the shadows of the apartment’s
covered entry where their mother smokes

two pairs of tattered, canvas sneakers
two worn backpacks, the zipper broken on one
a coiled comfort blanket bearing
the burrs of last summer
a soiled stuffed rabbit
a sippie cup
two tiny lunch boxes

These things, mute guardians of children
seem to protest: “Take me instead, Take me!”
The little boys give chase – one the hero, the other villain
the mother stands silently in the bone chilling air

They are waiting for the rolling in of tanks
for the Boogie Man to drop down from the trees
for the Chitty Chitty child catcher
for a piloted asteroid
an Axis of Evil air strike
for Gotham to fall
for Godzilla to rise
for Mothra to descend

When she thinks of her ex,
in the shadows she thinks–
They might as well be.

Alexandre Marie Colin – The Three Witches from Macbeth (1827)

In Dante’s Ninth Circle
there exists a hidden chamber where those
sinners against the greatest of all Benefactors–
that warm bosom of man known as Motherhood–
tremble in the icy darkness
wide-eyed and awake

Nobody speaks of this concealed room–
known among security as Judecca’s Broom Closet

It isn’t marked on any medieval map or chart
no stairs lead down to it
no doors lead out of it
it lies at the very center of a pathless void;
a great din surrounds it, drowning
the gently sounding stream–
narrow watershed of the stars

Even the purest of souls recoil, retreat
cover their ears against the roar of wailing infants
that blares, night and day, through speaking-trumpets
hidden deep in the gaping mouths of Dis
that long ago spat out their Brutus
their Cassius, their Judas

The emperor of the despondent kingdom
towering mid-chest from his frozen pond
has weathered, stiffened in limb and vigor;
yet the women who guard Inferno’s last stop,
ever resourceful, have found various new uses
for his spreading batwings –

a coat rack
a thing for drying towels
for beating rugs
for hanging hammocks
cloth for sails and linens
bone for hoop skirts
parasols

In life, these sinners bred this sonambulistic
maniacal army of wives, lovers, young mothers;
they kept them awake at all hours of the night
with their infernal raucous
their pig snorts, their sawing of logs
their diesel truck brakes
their low flying jets
their symphonies of pink noise

They never heard the babies crying, even when they did.
Here is always night, but the weary never rest.

Cursed until the Rapture to be awake until it comes
icy water is thrown upon the doser, the nodder
boiling pitch upon the cat napper, the hay hitter
the telephone is always ringing
the coffee is all decaf
the toast is cold, the eggs still raw
the game is never on
the beer is flat
the wine turned

Such a small price, say the guards,
for interrupting so many lifetimes of dreams

This site is shut for winter, i.e., the shutters are drawn, the fire’s cold, nobody’s home. I’ll be back in the spring, when the light is better and the days are longer. I hope you’ll visit me then. In the meantime, if you live somewhere with harsh winters, stay warm and be sure to tell me what you’ve read (if it’s any good).

Across the Bridge of Voids
a blind and ancient woman
with high-knuckeld hands
sat weaving in the blackness

With her Milky Way stare, the Weaver
wove the aerial roots of a strangler fig
as her mother and her grandmother
had done before her

The woman and the girl saw the
the serpentine roots emerge from darkness
struggling towards a dim star only to be
waylaid at the Weaver’s bridge

The old Weaver worked the roots
around the thin ruins of Time’s tunnel
of which little more remained than
an invisible, vibrating string

A string the length of six miles
the width of one quivering note
less than a trillion times smaller
than the radius of a single Hydrogen atom
yet heavy as the earth itself

“Weaving is the work of all
who await Calafia’s return to where
the hills and valleys once resembled
the honey-gold hide of a bear

“Where does the strangler fig grow?”
asked the girl

“The strangler figs grow here and there,”
said the milky eyed Weaver, who has
has been weaving the hanging bridges for eons

“We too are like ancient trees who carry
with us in our roots, in the clinging clumps of earth,
memories of our native soil, persisting
though our homeland be lost,
our hollowness unbearable

Like us, the roots recoil from their source
and lose themselves in desiring, grasping
within a dreaming Void,
while what we sought changes
past recognition during our sleep.”

The Weaver twisted a root,
supple and green, into a coil as thick
as a man’s arm; a hundred tiny tendrils sought
for the smallest cracks in the great
bridge where they might insinuate themselves
into some brace of permanence

“We are the Strangler Figs.
People have no respect for change
They despair of it.”

And so, the woman learned certain things about roots
such as not all roots are found in soil
some lay anchor to the host’s limbs and trunk
fatally constricting vital layers

Some roots begin in the future and reach back
into the dry, scorched earth of the present
in search of nutrients and the clear water
for which they thirst

Some roots carry the blood of generations–
women, all of them Weavers–
whose tedious and tireless work
bridges all Great Chasms of Despair
across which, they pray, their Queen
may one day return