Secret Life

A L V I S O

                                                                                                                 (ver6)

 San Jose, CA

Sloughs empty and fill all day. Mud dries and bakes under a broken up, shell colored sky. Pelicans heave off to roost elsewhere, fading to a gauze of haze that isolates, almost holds us. Drops in a soft focus. The landfill piles in here, at the end of the bay. Tattered hillocks teem with paper and rag, carpet and wood, chips and shavings. Scrap metal heaped clusters of edge and gleam.

Tide leaves; viridescent oil sheen. The dark silt still pocked with clam air holes. Boats splinter in the reeds.

My father, aircraft mechanic, tunes and wires and mends his seaplane, here, near the salt ponds. Oiled hands, cracked cylinders, vise-clamped hoses. The body in need of repair. The faint tap and ring of his tools impeaches the caw of birds and as I watch him, he works, absorbed by a mesh of light and fog.

Hollow wind, shore breeze cold ruffles my hair, water, and the reeds. I’m usually in the hunt for shells.

Red and pink and green. Salt ponds expand then shrink. Colors that flex and glow. It’s an empty horizon down here, but from the air; stained glass. Latticed colors bound by levees. Sometimes it’s just pale saline sheets of salt pond brine. A brocade of variegated lakes threaded by a thin gray slough.

                A skein of black wings.  Geese float like peppered specks over
the jade hued water.

My father’s still out there, mired in soft salt mud of the channel. Perched on the floats, he mends what will fly, but what won’t really leave. He wrenches the engine into a growl. Later, at high tide, we’ll bob in the water and he’ll get me to turn the prop until it mills and blurs the air. Then the seaplane picks up speed down the estuary. Scales ripple the top, danced on by coots and heron. Gulls explode in white clouds of panic.

The waves tumble and shake me. A wound-tinged wake sprays behind us as we begin to angle up into the sky: I hang on.

Together, we rise away from the world.

A L V I S O
                San Jose, CA

Empty. Wires bisect the sky. Valve of bridge in the distance. Pipes snake out of the marsh to go under the gray throat of water. These sloughs empty and fill all day. Mud dries and bakes under a broken up, shell colored sky. Pelicans lift off to roost elsewhere. The gauze of haze isolates us. Holds us in. Drops in the soft focus. Tide out: an oil dark sheen that hardens and grows pungent. The dark silt bubbled and pocked with clam air holes. Boats splinter in the reeds. This is where the landfill piles; tattered hills of paper and rag, carpet and wood, old Naval manuals, journals stained with rain, diapers, jewelry, scrap metal heaped clusters of edge and gleam. My dad takes me to this rust stained place, forgotten in around the salt ponds. Red and pink and green. They expand, then shrink. Saline sheets of salt pond brine. Black-winged gulls on red water. He anchors out there in the slough that runs past them. Works on his seaplane. Changes the oil, fixes cylinders.  The faint tap and ring of his tools. Hollow wind, shore breeze cold and going nowhere. Reed flattened bank slopes off the spine of levee. I hunt for shells. The vet on an old and bent barge comes out periodically to shout something at no one in particular. The aged man in the trailer (back near the cobwebbed iron pipes) sometimes sleeps on his floor. I think he’s dead and I watch him all afternoon until he stirs. Yet, my father’s still out there, mired in the soft salt mud. Perched on the floats, always working on his plane, wrenching the engine into a growl state. Slough-belly snake. Mouth around nothing; hungry. Scales ripple the top, danced on by coots and heron.

Fall in East St. Louis.....

The dark silt gets washed ashore. Along with river born wood, 
splinters softened by the lap of water. The Mississippi brings
notes of barge howl and steamer churn, which carry the afternoon,
flow through the night. But still, we lie there immobile,
mostly awake for hours. Stare into ourselves.
What can I sell? What will be worth anything? 
At four am, the horn sounds from Granite Steel. 
Breakfast: bread sliced so thin, the kitchen
almost shines through. Butter helps.
Coffee in the thermos. jesus!
Aren’t we just thankful we have this?

Outside, light builds and constructs the street
that spreads under it, dun and soft. 
Morning etches out on the distant water like a dull pencil
tracing its way over to the west side. People and cars
on the go again. Not sure where. The sputter of day
turns over and over until it fires. All the cars bolted together
for maybe just one more winter. It’s September and things are
still holding back in a place pinned down by its own binds. Strapped
and immobile like some mythic figure no one sees anymore.

Later, you hear the shouts of kids up the street. 
They throw firecrackers down the ditch nearby
‘round about three, when the falling-
down school lets out. You can smell it, the gunpowder in the air,
& hear the sharp crack, rat, tat. The staccato repetition
of anxiety tossed off from their bodies.
Yet it rarely ever gets heard in time. In a month, the snow starts. 
Then, come April, the rain. That’s when the river finally
builds and swells and roils into a mud-fist of cloud
or whatever else falls in. 

Well, I take the test soon.  I'm done with studying.  It's a hard test and math may very well be the thing on the GRE that brings me down.  On the practice exams, I breezed through the verbal/writing though....

Out of desperation for writing time and much needed personal space, I've been looking for a short term rental .  Yesterday I found a great listing on Craigslist for a Guerneville "cabin".  This place looks downright gorgeous!  Two bedrooms with a full bath and a huge deck in the redwoods.  Heated via a wood burning stove.  Sounds like a writer's dream come true.....

Anyway, I meet the woman renting the place on Sunday.  She wants to build a fire and chat about the place and is bringing the contract with her.  THis sounds hopeful.  I still plan on keeping my rent paid on the apt here in SF while I live up there.  I have a rent controlled dream come true here and I'm not abojut to give that up.  It's cheap.  And for what I'd be getting in Guerneville, that will be cheap too.  The two rents combined just about equal the current price on a one bedroom in SF.  So I can justify it that way.  Plus, I have copious amounts of work right now.  The old job in SJ called twice today and finally talked me into doing one more week down there....

All I can say is the extra cash will come in handy.  So as of next week, I'll be working three gigs.  But what about my writing time?

I'm hoping it will taper down by Feb a bit. 

Anyway, the war in Iraq continues to rage on.  Is this what Vietnam was like?  Leave me a comment on this if you have an observation.  I was born in 1968 and I'm curious if this is similar to the atmosphere at that time.  I think, personally, what we are facing now is even more serious.

Muslims are following the news carefully and scenes like the one of the battle-stressed soldier killing the wounded and unarmed Iraqi the other day in a mosque has probably rocked the Arab world.  Yet again.  I can't imagine more fuel for the fire than that kind of image, in fact. And for the record, I don't blame the soldier.  He was most likely battle stressed.  He's been shot in the face the day before, lost his buddy I guess ad was running on little sleep and lots and lots of adrenaline.  Who wouldn't ahve a quick trigger finger.

No.  Bush is to blame.  Not the soldiers.

If you need more graphic evidence of how fucked up war is, well, check this blog out.

http://fallujapictures.blogspot.com/

End of Bay

Herons suggest the shoreline but we're never sure as they wade in and out of a changing boundary. White and black wings blur. No one ever defines where the mud softens. Clams dig airholes where the dark muck shines. They pock the face of any afternoon like urgent tunnels dug deep in a place where any given yesterday oozes or stories. Maybe, years away and past, the forlorn wings of St. Louis. Someone supposedly saved a nation from half shelled dreams. Yet. Still we shuck shelled air off the oiled afternoon. Oh rainbows! Poke them with a stick. Pooled slicks of where skin over water won't sink. Where the wind might fink and hide. How the tide recedes, then sinks. Yet, between us and the land and the creeks, it still links.

Mulch

Notes on sound and smell....

Fall

Gravel(wet). Pulp (a high note of pungent pressed wood bleached then burned) leaf floor (colored carpets of fresh decay and ribboned with worm).  A stew of rain and thrush and the clean air song  of sky falling. Thousands of pale, cold bodies of water drop in at a steady pace.  Mulch in the nose.  Smoke. A mothdun of sky that sinks bayward.  My heart does not go with it.  It stays here, in a warm dark place inside.  It beats towards all of this, loves what it can, tunnels a place to the other side.  A blossoming field of nettles.

SALT POND

Wires bisect the sky. The valve of a drawbridge
opens in the hazy distance. Pipelines travel
through the marsh, go under the gray water
where sloughs fill and then empty again.
Mud dries under smog filled skies
and waits for the relief of twilight’s tide;
that cold, blue pull of a bay drawn in and away from itself.
Skeletons of boats lie mired, peeled in the reeds.
Occasionaly, trucks bounce through. Gulls explode in the air
and swarm the cargo in the back. Trash-heaped
hillocks of unsorted refuse. Chips and shavings.
Sweepings on a final journey to the landfill. Tattered piles
of paper and rag, carpet and wood, old Naval manuals,
journals (stained with rain), water heavy bottles,
diapers, scrap metal heaped clutters of edge and gleam.
Rust burnished land humps forgotten around the salt ponds
that pockmark this place with their wound-colored water.
Yet, sometimes the ponds turn viridescent.
Light speared afternoons, the garbage smell floats tight
and sure on the insect air. Sunlight jewels their surface.
They shrink and grow year after year, leave behind
thin saline sheets. White birds on pink water.
Black birds too. Hollow wind. The shore breeze,
cold and going nowhere, flattens the reeds.
I hunt tiny clams that make air holes where they breathe
hidden deep in the dark ooze. I sneak solace
on the decks of rocking boats. The vet on the half-
sunk barge comes out periodically to shout at it all.
Ramon, in the trailer back near the iron pipes,
sleeps on his floor. I watch him through the screen
until he stirs. My father anchors in the mud next to an old dock.
The faint tap and clink of his tools; a steady beat as he wrenches
a seaplane engine into a healthy growl. Slough snake,
scales ripple the top, danced on by coots and heron.
Trains surprise all of us occasionally, speeding through on trestles.
Window-framed faces gape at me. Someone is out there.
Blurred and gone. Silence. Except the creak of dock-wood
and shrieks of birds that rise to fly off somewhere else.
He sits grease-streaked in the truck come evening.
Talks to someone, cracks open a beer, cracks open another,
hands it to me. I'm twelve. My father and I drink together like this;
him talking to someone while I sip warm beer
and watch the sun waver on the flat, red water.

Thanksgiving Revision #5

THANKSGIVING DAY

—Taos, New Mexico

Snow drifts in from the canyon, dark swirls carried across a moon barely up. You wait all night in your rented room until just before the sun rises. A smudged light in the distance that fills the iced-in puddles with orange. Then you fall asleep, losing the feeling you carry around into dreams about being left behind by people you've never met but somehow know. When you finally wake mid-afternoon, the bone in your knee creaks and you hear faucets in the room upstairs hiss on. Somewhere a phone rings faintly and the staccato bark of a dog two homes down reminds you no one is coming by. Changing clouds turn things sepia then filigree the stucco walls of the home across the pitted dirt road. Cacti are still barbed and sheathed in ice but sage brush pierces the air clean. Your neighbors thicken the late afternoon with gravied meat smells and wood smoke. From the window of your room, you see the mother with white hair that halos and shines all around her face. You can almost hear the murmur and clink of their family language soft-droned through the blurred glass.

On other days you might stand out there next to your building, its red adobe smeared with grime and dust blown in from beyond. They say if you stay long enough in one spot, alone in silence, you can hear a hum. A distant sound that never settles anywhere. So sometimes you do that but the only thing you ever find is your own blood coursing through you; a warm and anxious life. You think of your other home. The empty yard with a belly-sagged fence. Its window that still gazes through you. A shutter closing. Old photographs of being held. You've come here because inside there is a spin that never stops. You've come here because all the time you think of running down a long, dark hall for the sudden white brilliance of any other place. But now, at day’s close, long shadows are taking this rutted road again. At its sloped-away edges, you can see the coyotes patrol and hunt near the yards. The doorway chile ristras sway in an increasing dusk that swells with light from your room and others. Someone emerges from a door to light farolitos, paper bags of candles and sand. It’s time to close your blinds. Time to fold all those clothes that keep piling up and maybe heat water for your tea.

Carnival in the distance.....

I think that over the last week or so, most of the things whirling about in my life became more like a carnival in the distance. One that remained on the horizon of some field while I watched it thoughtfully from the dark window of a nearby house. A house that I broke into. One where I had to jimmy the window and stay quiet enough so as not to wake the occupants while I sorted out my thoughts.

Because I'm still trying to find my own language house. But I think the really, really important thing to note here is that I've admitted to myself that the language in me is not yet my own. I have not taken ownership of my own sense of place, relationship, rhythm, unbuckled running at full tilt sense of verbal power.

So I can really describe place in my writing and I can really talk to myself about the effect place has on me and on others. The trick now is finding place within my relationship to others. That's the most important thing I have to understand.

I was writing a draft this week. Coupled with reading too much and putting myself under enormous strain to perform. To hammer out something that sings a bit. Yet, I could feel myself giving under the heat. The heat of what?

This has to be done in stages. Careful stages. I have to remember not to hurry too much.

And as for that carnival? It's still there. People are on the rides. But the feeling of being a freak in the side show is starting to fade.

San Jose

The palm trees outside my office window wave and wave until their arms fall off. They seem to be dumbly waving at everything, myself included. The light is too strong down here. Too hot.

At lunch, the Co-Workers discussed golf, yet again, and their desire to move to Arizona where they would buy new homes upon retirement. I quietly ate and didn't feel like saying anything. My mind was really far away.

And yet, while sitting in the middle of Chevy's, one of them suddenly said "Would anyone like to see a picture of the little boy who drowned?"

I guess she had some friends in Washington who had regularly left their small son with a daycare. The boy figured out how to slip unnoticed from the house one day and drowned in a nearby creek. She had just returned from the service on Tues.. Everyone at the table cringed and looked away. At the table nearby, a crew of waiters sang Happy Birthday to someone. She asked again, "Does anyone want to see what he looked like?"

I suddenly remembered when Mani died 6 months ago, how I carried his picture around for months after the service. How J. and Miya looked that day and how that picture was the only way to connect me to something that had been irretrivably lost. How it looked before so much changed for everyone.

"I'd like to see what he looked like", I said ignoring the others. She had a real need for someone to see how this little boy had been there and then not. In her own way, I suppose, it's how she could share the burden of grief. I should know....I had to talk about Mani and J. and Miya to anyone who would listen in the direct aftermath. Grief is so incomprehensible.

The picture was of a sweet small boy. His head cocked with that smile that only children have. I handed it back to her, she smiled thankfully and tucked it back into her purse. No one else at the table said anything.

They seem so uncomfortable with any amount of emotion. Strange. How to live like that? I suppose they get used to it.