Snowfall (dedicated to Christian Bök)

Snow falls, snow falls. Snow falls, and with it the ideas of snow (ideas playful, cool, elusive). The first snow falls with the graceful descent of a few feathery flakes. These scattered crystals mesmerize as they pass by our window, some generating particular awe as they float back up into the sky. We wonder if they are falling to confirm gravity or to prepare for a second coming. When snow falls we talk about the weather, how complex, irresolute and trivial it is, and how you must know everything to foresee it. And yet like meteorologists, when snow falls we continue to forecast, knowing all the while that we are just guessing. If the first snowfall seems to mock us, we are not offended, because we can see that as soon as it touches ground it is short-lived. The first snowfall hints at natural patterns, the beauty as well as the devastation of climate change. Scientists tell us that all snowflakes stem from hexagonal ice plates and that when the temperature is close to zero and the wind is still, these microscopic plates use the humidity of the atmosphere to branch out, but that when it is windy and only slightly cooler, they form hollow shafts, minute needles. And so as snow falls on a wind-still day like today, fluttering flakes – each with six extended wings – are silently lighting upon our windowsills like a cheerful chorus of Christmas carolers, though they remain silent. When snowflakes fall, we are reminded that they have not come to be heard, but to bring silence, to insulate, to seal cracks, to hush birds, muffle footsteps, dampen noisy traffic, and to reflect the light of the moon and the stars. Snowflakes fall, ever so quietly, fascinating us with their spectacular choreography in a new light. A couple of hexamerous bodies careen toward our panorama to the rhythm of a tango, freezing in a brief moment of passion and intimacy, before abruptly changing direction and swiftly disappearing from our sight. Others whirl like tiny dervishes in a trance. Each flake has its own path to follow through layer upon layer of atmospheric change. Each and every member of these dance troupes is unique and not to be mistaken for some frivolous, trifling or inanimate matter. Snow falls, and with it more and more dainty, winged crystals join together in a spirited flurry, like in the second act of Swan Lake. Then suddenly, the temperature plummets and the wind whips. Snow falls, and with it old ideas of snow (driven, bitter, apocalyptic), no longer content to fall gently in flakes, but intent on piercing with needles, throwing darts, spears and javelins in a random blizzard that is surely the beast of a Second Coming, if not a widening gyre that signals the revelation of a traceless void. When snow falls now it is charged to obliterate all marks of distinction, to bury everything in its path under powdery white blankets and crusty grey sheets, and to interfere with any clear vision by rapidly zooming in and out of focus. When snow falls now, it falls in a relentless flow of cosmic particles and icy asteroids that send chills up our spine as they scrape past our windows and ports. (Occasionally and incidentally) when the snowfall lets up we are temporarily relieved by a landscape view of the winter wonderland that has just touched down on planet Earth.

snowfall

The vertical fence posts planted in my garden last year are the earthbound foreground of an experiment for today. Pointing to the sky, like a row of pencils, they border the significance of choice among a myriad of ways to create new perspectives on a day (daylight is short at this time of year). The red points of the stakes have clearly taken on new form and color. Their rusty red tips, once the tools of a proofreader, are now soft, blunt, dull and grey as erasers. Perhaps they have become the stubs of a universal conscience with which poets communicate, or the toothless gum of a Muse?

Foreign assets at risk vs. risky foreign assets

Boy, am I glad I don’t live as far far south as Malmö or as far north as Umeå, Sweden!

Yesterday Swedish media reported on two more mysterious shots at foreigners in Malmö. Today there was an article in Svenska Dagbladet, the biggest daily Swedish newspaper (sourced from the biggest local news feed, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, TT) about doctors in Umeå doing controversial experimental surgery on foreigners. We have learned to trust our papers. Altercation. But real snipers and knifers are closing in (ever since Sverige Demokrater, the local populist party, entered the Swedish Riksdag?). I think this is getting really crazy (read: scary). Who and what are we to trust?

Maybe we should trust Google translate. After all, funny as it may be,it does at least give some sense (to the discerning mind?) of what is going on in the world around us.

The original TT article is in Swedish ( I encourage everyone who is familiar with English to enjoy testing Google translate) can be found at: http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/riskabel-hjarnkirurgi-pa-utlanningar_5550727.svd

This is the push:
A certain type of lobotomy-like brain surgery is no longer performed on patients because of the high risk of permanent damage. But operations continued in Umeå until 2007 - on Americans.

New snow

It snowed here yesterday.
They say that weather reports are trivial.
I say they’re fundamental.
Is it because I live in Sweden
where have all the flowers gone?



And to think that just last week
M and I packed our bikes
getting ready to move.

Swedish Election special

The dead can speak to the living, but the living cannot speak to the dead. Lars Gustafsson

If you haven’t yet read Dagens Nyheter’s article (19 Sept) “Two poets on their way to the ballot box” - email correspondence between poets Lars Gustafsson and Göran Greider published on election day - you might want to click on the aforementioned link (in Swedish).

It’s a rare wrap full of juicy election tidbits. Wise way to make use of a Swedish daily!

Having recently published a new collection of Lars Gustafsson's poems, a swell take on the Promythean myth, I can still envision Erland Josephsson sheltering a flame flickering in his hands as he trudges through the rain, splashing across a big puddle in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia.

Let’s face it, there’s no key in the back of the Book. Though when 20 xenophobes (not just their house-trained leader) enter the Swedish Parliament, they're bound to grow some interesting bushisms). Then Gustafsson might be asked to take another look at his philosophical equations involving tolerance and intolerance. The church bells tolled on Swedish Election Day and Greider ultimately promised to wake up Gustafsson on Judgment Day.

In the meantime, you might want to follow Lars Gustavsson's blog, in Swedish.

Sommartid

“They must be keeping you in the deep freeze over there in Sweden. You still look just the way you did many summers ago.”
My Uncle Pollard (spoken at a family reunion in a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz mountains )

“Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks?”
JM Coetzee (Summertime)

Ever since I first arrived in Sweden in the early 1970s I have always listened to a popular Swedish radio program called Sommar. These days the tag melody ‘Sommar sommar sommar’ is enough to put me into my laidback reception mode, prepared to reflect anew on the preludes to someone else’s achievement, ill-fated deeds or terms for life. Every afternoon, over a period of some 60 summer days, a series of more or less well-known personalities in Sweden are given the opportunity to host his or her own 90 minute public radio program. Air time consists of fragments of a personal monologue, broken up, tempered and joined by tracks of music.

The invitation to host the program is considered an honor, an opportunity for a seasonal crop of personalities to step out into the limelight and tell us some things we do not know, about themselves. The assumption is that those who are to host the program offer personal perspectives on life, anecdotes and reflections that will be of interest to a broad Swedish public. Many listeners believe that the honor should be a confirmation, not only of some pinnacle of achievement, but also of virtue. The latter is controversial.

Agenbite of inwit.

This summer I listened to the voice of Annika Östberg, a Swedish convict condemned to a sentence of 25 years to a lifetime, as an accomplice to two murders in California. After having served 28 years in San Quentin California State Prison, she had recently been deported to Sweden to serve the remainder of her “time”. Needlesstosay, I was curious, in much the same way as I am often curious about the lives of other Swedes who emigrated from Sweden to the San Francisco Bay Area, just before or around the same time that I immigrated to Sweden.

The thought occured to me that Annika Östberg may well have been one of the many young “street people” that I encountered in 1967 during the Summer of Love in San Francisco – a girl I saw propped up against the wall of Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on my way to school, or a waif that asked me for spare change in the Haight -Ashbury, on a visit to my maternal grandparents. Perhaps she was that forsaken woman who caught my eye one day in Golden Gate Park, the summer before I turned away, helpless as she, to understand why. Life is not just.

I was curious to hear the voice of a woman for whom an idealized childhood suddenly came to a brutal end, despite the surrounding fragrance of the Bay Laurel and Eucalyptus. I wanted to hear the voice of a woman who for all those years - that happened to coincide with my years in Sweden - had been imprisoned behind walls that block out a magnificent view of the Richmond San Rafael Bridge and the surrounding bay. A picture postcard, without a message or an addressee and thus no chance of reprieval? I sensed that her grip on the concept of “home” was as firm as her grip on the bars of her cell. Highway to Hell (AC/DC) and Seismic Rumbles (Country Joe and the Fish) have never made so much sense, before. Was it pathetic of me to imagine that we had anything in common, that we had simply exchanged places, tit for tat? Or that we had been playing a game of musical chairs that caught us both off guard? Whose release party was I supposed to be celebrating? For what melody?

I was definitely on guard as I listened to "her" program. She must be reading, but who authored the script, I wondered? Who could have chosen a more nostalgic voice for a Swedophile: Jussi Björling, Nämner du Sverige [Mentioning Sweden]? Was it true that her grandmother’s favorite tune was En gang seglar jag i hamn [One day I’ll sail into the harbor] by Alice Babs? Swedish words seemed to flow naturally from her lips. So how had she managed to maintain her mother tongue, though she hadn’t been in the country for decades, since she was 10 years old? Like her producer, she seemed focused on this task, I thought. Over the years she has kept in touch, with plenty of support from the Swedish media, without Internet or a cell phone... Curious.

Supernaturally

For M
(inspired by Harry Martinson's Höstdikt
and M's rose heap)

Flowers drop with supernatural grace
handkerchiefs for wet noses
that snuff out every last space
in a heap of fallen roses.
Heaven spits cold
on a bell of cress
before washing and drying
her evanescent dress.

Summer play

For N, O & U
Inspired by Harry Martinson's "Sommarspel"

This is where summer's green path went.
Coaxed by the sun in the field
poppy petals, opiate flags, unfolded.
Cricket played at last a passage
Despite all winter ants warning.

Like the poppy, she too is dead now,
but they lived their brief life there
where summer was within,
grounded in its own life,
at home in her green house.

A room with a view

Christian Bonos purchased a concrete bunker designed by Albert Speer to house his collection of contemporary art (see my blog entry May 10, 2010).
The SPCA picks up strays dogs and tries to find them new owners.
The social welfare department places children who need nurturing in summer camps and foster homes.
Bag ladies and gentlemen scavenge and recycle aluminum cans and bottles.
We find drooping plants - herbs, vegetables and flowers - on sale at local garden stores. We replant them in the allotment space that O has hewn from bedrock (and reinforced with concrete), water and nurture them, and love watching them grow.
A lot is whatever you make of it.

Calm before the storm

Moved back into my apartment today. And even though today's gusty winds managed to knock over a big pot of sunflowers and cosmos on my corner balcony, their sturdy stalks proved resilient. We're upright.

ps. Remember the calm before the lightening storm
Före åskstormen by Harry Martinson (my translation)

The sky goes black in the July night
Branches flare in distant lightening
The dragonfly that rested on a calming stone
seeks refuge over charred waters.

Alms

There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another,
either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye. Lord Acton





To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.
John Ruskin






Work is love made visible.


And if you cannot work with love [...]
it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple …



and take alms of those who work with joy.
Kahlil Gibran

Dig where you are 2

My potatoes (middle box) needed earthing up in early June.
Back box: Jerusalem artichokes. Front box: lettuce, chard and ruccola.

Growing on an allotment.




























Less than a month later we could begin to harvest potatoes, and the slugs had yet to discover the lettuce that is now harvested daily despite them (slugs are hunted every evening under a flashlight and disarmed with garden scissors).

Cultivating my garden today

Dear Polly (a.k.a. maternal Grandma Evelyn),

As Eyafällajökull continues to erupt on Iceland, her plume of ashes - however threatening - is apparently not overhanging, at least not here and not now. Flights between Stockholm and the United States seem to be arriving and departing on schedule. Peace is.

I am writing from my home in the neutral territory to which I return, year after year. The cherry tree blossoming in our garden, overlooking a delta of the Baltic Sea, is a witness to that place. Petals fall.

As a young student of the 1960s at Berkeley, the vibrant epicenter of student revolt, I adopted history as a major. What was I thinking? Was I out of touch with the times? Was I not really there? During my two-term introduction to historical methodology, I chose to dig into the Age of the Enlightenment. In that vein, I took a course in the winter of 1968 in modern French history that introduced me to Voltaire’s perspectives on optimism (Candide), which he concluded by advocating that “we must cultivate our garden”.

If claims to be truly contemporary are a current fetish in the modern museum of modern art world, then I believe that my own life incarnates that fetish.

I promise to write to you again soon about where I'm coming from...

yours,

Dig where you are

Dig where you are. Neues Museum, Berlin, in background.
For 10 euro I could purchase a time slot to visit the Neues Museum.
Bullet holes pock the window frames of Neues Museum, Berlin, both inside and out. The new staircase of the new Neues Museum in Berlin is a monumental reconstruction (in terrazo) of the old one which collapsed in the bombing during WWWII.


Since I did not have an appointment (with Bonos) last Sunday when I was in the area, I continued along the shores of the Spree to another architectural relic: the Neues Museum, designed in 1855 by Friedrich Stüler (who also designed the Swedish National Museum). Unlike Speer's bunker, Neues was not built to withstand explosives, and thus was ravaged not only by bombs but by seventy years of subsequent exposure to the elements. It has been closed since the beginning of the war and only recently (2009) reopened to the public. Ironically, the Eastern German government had just appropriated funds to restore the museum in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Thus it took several more years to reappropriate funds, and in 1997 David Chipperfield, an English architect, was commissioned to do the reconsruction.

Chipperfield was confronted by Goliath, a nearly impossible task fraught with supervision by authorities and storm fronts propogated by cultural and political stakeholders, as well as by the general public. He continued his task of sifting through layer after layer of material, reviving old techniques and developing new, to integrate and reconstruct from what he discovered in the process. (Strange how an essay appeared just this morning in a Swedish daily (DN) on the Neues.)

In rebuilding places to house art - Bonos or Neues - Berlin epitomizes the layer upon layer that connect history (cities where bombs have been dropped) with the facades of contemporary art and architecture. If a city reflects the time and space of life, then I might well choose postwar Berlin to reflect the kaleidoscope of my own...

tbc

I was here today

Berlin 2010

Albert Speer’s bunker

I collect art that I don’t understand
- Christian Bonos


Visitors exit the bunker slowly,
so slowly. One man’s voice still echoes
in the architecture
of fear –It is
the Remembrance, before the remodeling.
Then someone pounds his fist
like a hammer
against the wall and cries out
“Humpty Dumpty… “ had a great fall.
By the time Bonos arrives, visitors are
knocking away – with mallets, chisels and crowbars –
at the blue concrete.
They are so intent
upon deconstruction that their palms are calloused
their skin is cracking.
.
When they are gone, Bonos sits looking out. He imagines
the collection – sculptures, installations and performances –
His collection – that will occupy this space.
Meanwhile, buried somewhere in the rubble, Mr. Speer
is still breathing out, repentant,
through a sophisticated ventilation system –
His doing.
The temperature in the “Banana Bunker” is ideal
for storing fruits and vegetables, and constant
for sexexperimento, techno and fetish parties.
He once told Playboy magazine: “If I didn’t see it,
then it was because I didn’t want to see it.”

Bonos looks out
from his penthouse and garden atop the bunker,
where visitors enter, by appointment only,
today and every Saturday afternoon,
to view the works that he finds
so difficult to understand
in the beginning.


From Nazi Bunker to Artistic Haven

I tried to peek inside the window of this art haven. Though it was dark inside, I saw more there than I care to share here.

Christian Bonos says he did not purchase Albert Speer's six-storey ground-level bunker for protection, but to house his collection of contemporary art. While most war bunkers in Berlin were built underground, the marshlands along the banks (sic) of the River Spree necessitated protection above ground too, and this particular bunker is one of the few that was not demolished after the war. I hear that Olafur Eliasson's wrecking ball now hangs, however, from the gutted interior of the bunker - like the sphere atop the famous TV tower at Alexander Plaza emitting invisible signals throughout the city, or a rotating disco ball that explodes technicolor light shards onto the concrete surfaces of the interior. A man on the street pointed up to Bonos penthouse on the roof and mentioned that Bonos holds open house by private appointment only (Sundays).

Had you known

Stockholm, Sweden

Dear Polly (with a future, a.k.a. Grandma Evelyn),

This morning, as I was biking up an incline on my way to work I passed a young mother with a 4-5 year old child on the back of her bike. I smiled at the young girl, whom I heard say to her mother:
“Mamma, an old lady is passing us.”
I heard her mother respond to the young girl:
“It is not an old lady, it is a woman.”

So , not only am I an “old bag”, but an “It”, neutralized of any possible age or erotic power.
I had to laugh as I considered the weight and fate of myself, a fleeting vision.

As I biked on, I recalled an evening – must have been in the sixties, in my teens – when you came to our home for dinner. I remember the fleeting sight of your hand, alongside mom’s and my own, on the dinner table. I recall thinking of the significance of age, how it marks our skin. My own hand was pink and supple, mom’s was drier and more mature, while yours was marked by age spots, elevated veins and distorted form. Now, my hands are like yours:

Pacific rings and Icelandic threads
Sit atop a surface seam in the Earth’s crust
Straddling two of the planet’s
tectonic puzzle pieces.

The last time Eya erupted,
Her angry big sister had yet to awaken.
Thus, as Katla continues to belch
the planet’s unsettled insides
scientists are carefully watching her.

Had you known what I know.
Now. No Never.
You would never
have wanted to know.
How everything would be
Nor would I nor anyone
for that matter
ever want to tell you.
No one ever told you
What I saw
If only someone else had
Seen what I…
Then you would
never ever know
what I knew what you knew
If we had only
known then
We would never.

Their nest is one of the most restless
The Fire is a marvel,
highly coveted Bird,
charmed by the wonder of the pen,
the spring sprite
eventually blames feathers
for all its troubles.
the bird sings by night
and pecks the golden fruit
at the mouth of a nearby crater
and is restored to life
after the destruction
and the forest
is reborn with her.

Forever,
Your granddaughter

Earthquake and fire

Sunday, April 22, 2006 Kentifield, California

Dear Diary,
I intended to write earlier, but life just hasn’t been the same since last Wednesday morning. I remember that I was dreaming that we were out on the sea to go fishing, swaying back and forth in the swells, when suddenly the deck started to rattle and shake. I woke to the real nightmare of my bed rattling so violently that I was thrown out and heard the big pictures on the wall of my room crash to the floor, along with all else atop my dresser drawer. I thought everything was going to collapse. Daddy called out loud from the 1st floor and told me to get up immediately and into the doorway, but I couldn’t open it. I started to cry and pulled and pulled on the handle, when suddenly it just flew open. I hung onto the jamb with all my might, and could hear that everything was crashing all around. There was such a din of rattles and thuds, and cracking and crashing it was hard to tell just what was happening. When cracking and shattering finally stopped Daddy called again and told me to put on something and come get out into the street as quickly as I could. I could care less how I looked, just wanted to make sure I’d be warm enough…so I put on my riding pants and a wool sweater and my jodhpurs. I remember walked carefully as I could down the stairs, afraid that they would break under the strain of my weight. The back porch had actually collapsed, and there were cracks and dust everywhere and broken windows. There were lots of people on the street...
more later

your Polly

P.S. I am in Kentifield now, because we packed some bags and took the ferry to Marin County on Wednesday afternoon, and are staying with our Grandpa and Grandma Sherbeck. Daddy’s office building on California Street is gone as well as most other downtown buildings. I suppose you could say it is a good thing the earth quaked so early in the morning, because daddy might have been crushed to death otherwise. He is down there now, working with a rescue crew. With all the broken gas lines, fires have been raging out of control in the City ever since. The air, even here in Marin County smells of burnt redwood, and the sky is a haze. I can still see smoke curling up across the bay.

Waiting for Phoenix

Sundsvall, Sweden

Dear Polly,
As I write, a volcano under the Eyafjall glacier on Iceland continues to erupt. While I am not on Iceland to witness diverging (or are they converging?) tectonic plates with my own eyes, I am witness to the steam, the ashes and cancelled airline flights. I hear that never before have so many flights been cancelled by such a catastrophe, natural or otherwise.

Phoenix.

How long did the bird live? In any event, it would build itself a nest of herbal fibers at the end of that time. It would look like an eagle, fan its golden wings and set the nest afire. A small worm would then be found in the ashes. Are you that worm?

This weekend I had the privilege of attending a conference (SFÖ) for trade translators in the lively Swedish lumber trading metropolis of Sundsvall, Sweden, a town that literally rose from the ashes in 1888 ( Nils Johan Tjärnlund, architectural historian from Sundsvall). Mr. Tjärnlund proved to be more than happy to answer all my questions about first impressions of the town where he grew up. I did not tell him about you, nor did we talk about earthquakes, volcanoes, or fires. We talked about train stations and other buildings in Sundsvall, and national romanticism at the turn of the last century, when you were a young girl.

As I return to my typewriter this evening, I can tell that you and I are on a test flight, like Lina S. Berg (see my earlier blog entry, Nov 5, 2009). I sense timelessness of meaning in the redwood fiber, the heat and steam of your dream. A perfect Redwood hatchery, broken egg shells all around, frantic movement, wet feathers and chirps. Easter Sunday in 1906 was on April 15.

I am writing to you on a sunny Sunday in Sundsvall, Sweden

your dear granddaughter,
xxxooo

Redwood fibers

San Francisco, April 15, 1906

Dear Diary,
Daddy talks so much lot about redwood lumber and steamships, McPherson and Wetherbee, and Pacific Lumber.
Daddy is so proud of redwood, its insulating properties, its long-lived nature, fire and moisture resistance. He says it’s distasteful to vermin and insects. But what about redwood cones, fibers, fire and steam? Sometimes I think Daddy should get back to the basics.
The bark can be ten inches thick, and Daddy says it is a waste.
In a dream last night I was the bell of the Easter parade, with a gown woven from the fibers of redwood bark. In my dream I was hot and steaming, and under my gown I was hatching Easter eggs. My Easter bonnet was a redwood burl. Little yellow chicks were scurrying underfoot, chirping and pecking all around me...even as the vermin appeared to dance.
Daddy says you can do so many things with redwoods, but he doesn’t seem to be interested in using the fibers to weave a fabric like the one in my dream, an Easter suite, that could be used to insulate me and so many other chicks. Maybe he doesn’t think it gets cold enough around here, or hot enough for that matter, or that we need to worry about varmits and insects, but I do. I think it would be a strong fabric, useful in hats, blankets and so much more, if you mixed it with natural sheep wool. Just a dream. What do I know?

Your,
Polly (with a future)

Today's pollard

At the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco 2010

Dear Polly*,

Having been reading your diary, and fallen asleep, I was suddenly awakened to a poem by an Emily Dickinson. Perhaps you have read it before?


One dignity delays for all.
One mitred afternoon.
None can avoid this purple,
None evade this crown.

Coach it insures, and footmen,
Chamber and state and throng;
Bells, also, in the village,
As we ride grand along.

What dignified attendants,
What service when we pause!
How loyally at parting
Their hundred hats they raise!
How pomp surpassing ermine,
When simple you and I
Present our meek escutcheon,
And claim the rank to die.

*Evelyn (nee Pollard) Hund, my maternal grandmother

Palm Sunday

San Francisco
Sunday, April 8, 1906

Dear Diary,
What a bright and sunny day. We must have looked pretty grand in church today, waving our palms (not open hands, but fronds) in the procession. But next Sunday we’ll be all decked out in our new dresses and Easter bonnets. Florence came by yesterday to do our final fittings and my best dress this year is gorgeous: an oyster pink pleated satin bodice with a bone-white cotton yoke, white satin puff sleeves with smocking and flounces, and a matching pink smocked collar. My hat will be broad-brimmed, pastel green straw, with pink primroses around the sash.
After supper we played hearts and whist for hours. I can stay up late because I don’t have to go to school this week and Daddy has gone up to the Eel River on business. I hope he brings home some fresh salmon for Good Friday, since it is my favorite fish.
Mother, Rachel, Hazel, and Amy and I are going to see the flower show at the Conservatory of Flowers and then to a Concert at the Concourse. Amy and I have yet to decide what to wear.

Your,
Polly (with a future)

Polly with a future

San Francisco
April 5, 1906

Dear Diary,
My teacher calls me Evelyn P., because there are three other girls in my class by the name Evelyn, but I’m the only Evelyn Pollard. So you can just call me Polly for short. My daddy calls me Evy. When he gives me gifts he writes ‘For Evy’, which I know is short for “ever”. So please don’t call me Evy with a P, because that would sound peevish, and though I may be fretful at times, it might become a pet peeve that would annoy me no end. My best friend Amy already calls me Polly.
My daddy told me that a pollard is a tree that has been cut back as much as possible so that it will use all of its energy for new growth. My daddy is Thomas Pollard, and he owns a redwood lumber and shipping company on 22 California Street so he should know. I like being a Pollard, a part of the Pollard family tree, a Polly with a future. I am 14 years old, relatively tall and more redheaded and freckle-faced than the other Evelyn’s in my class. I live on 19th Avenue in San Francisco and am in the 9th grade. Next year I will be a sophomore, all the wiser.

Apple core

Both you (Gerdie) and I know that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”, though we may not be sure exactly why. You'd say "An apple a day is good for you! Gives you energy and stamina, exercises your jowls." And I'd say "Sustainable? Good energy, good fiber, easy to dispose of the core."

The legend of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, is curious. This American pioneer traveled miles across the frontier in the early 1800s, planting and pruning countless apple trees. What does Johnny Appleseed or you (Gerdie) have to do with anything anymore? What do values and beliefs have to do with anything any more for that matter?

And who will become the legendary figures of our times, if not Steve Jobs?

When I was a kid and we ate apples, we lifted the core for everyone to see and shouted:

“Apple core!”

And the kids around you would say:
“Nevermore Baltimore.”

You would say:
“Who’s your friend?”

And someone would say:
“hard or soft?”
and another would say:
“Now" or "Never"?”

And then you would throw the core at whomever had said “Now” and say:
“now, no more.”

Everyone, especially anyone who had said "Now" or "Now or Never" would, of course, duck.

Powered and communicated by Jobs hardware and Google software, I can’t help but reflect NOW on the future of core energy and nuclear waste. Hardly child's play.

Tunnel of love

She is a housewife
sitting in the passenger seat
on her way home
with a bag in her lap
full of the fruits of her life
and everything else
she has to make a meal,
when suddenly she sees
a blind man reaching out,
chewing with an open mouth,
and the fruits explode on her lap.
Swallowing the insult,
she gulps for air,
incapable of returning
his gaze.

Tunnel vision 3: play

There is a wonderful Swedish saying:

“Man måste rätta munnen efter matsäcken”
Literally “You must adjust your mouth to your lunch/food bag”

When you look up the saying in the dictionary you are offered more proverbs, literally:

“You don’t miss the cow until the stall is empty.”
“You shouldn’t offer buns to the baker’s kids.”

Tip: "matsäcken" (lunch bag) is a pun on "magsäcken" (stomach).

Since none of the above play, for example, upon the basic mouth relative to the acidity of the gastrointestinal tract, much less upon the basic idea that everyone has their own bag, I wonder how the saying best translates into English? Perhaps:

"Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow?"
"You are what you eat?"
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder?"
"When poverty comes in the door, love goes out the window?"
"Stolen fruit is the sweetest?"
"Don't bite off more than you can chew?"
"Don't spill the bag?"
"Half a loaf is better than none?"
"Make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?"
"Need teaches a plan?"
"A fool and his money are soon parted?"

Needlessto say? I love saying and playing with words.

Tunnel vision 2

...
The fruit of her laughter
hid my father's words from me:

Lemon tree very pretty
and the lemon flower is sweet
But the fruit of the poor lemon
is impossible to eat.

Will Holt

Tunnel vision 1

When the car drove into the driveway
she was on the walkway.
When the car stopped
she had arrived at the front door.
When the engine turned off
she fumbled for her keys.
When the driver’s door opened
she suddenly squinted.

When the driver’s door slammed shut,
she looked up into the sky.
Startled by the vision,
she looked back into her bag.
When the vision disappeared
she turned her key and went inside,
leaving the passenger seat
full of unripe fruit still
hanging from the past.

Woman nowadays 2

You see she is blind to the blade
about to fly from the edge.
No sooner do you make your own entry
than it must fall on the wedge
banked by executioners
ready to behead.

Woman nowadays

I make women like this nowadays

Aurora is her name
strands apart
Morning break

Brandishing a brush
Axe held high
Chop would to wood
Krona into pennies

I make women like this nowadays
Native strengths

Scalping barbarity
wherever it turns,
eager to build crosswords,
deeply ingrained in
every hammer that
nails another lie.

Forthright.

I make women like this nowadays

Axe is light
Metal resounds

(Neat stacks
Of split wood
Taming trees.)

I make women like this nowadays
Notching
Combing
Owing
Groping
Night and day
Inscribed along the way
Tending to a backlog
Of unfinished blows.

Acrostic in homage to "The Vane Sisters".

Re:turning a black eye

I can take it.
Being in the shadow
of a boxing bag
sour breed,
brooding
Re: return
too cold.

Returning piece by peace

Showering in a Redwood Forest

For Bonnie
P asked me if I would like to take a shower and wash my hair in her stall. At first I said no. Then I decided I would take a shower in her stall, where I decided to take the time to wash my hair. And then I lingered in the mist of it all, hovering upstream before I tested the silt.

Valentine's Day desserts

As though enough is not enough, I continue to indulge in the sweetness at my roots.

Managed to enter the Hillside Club on Cedar in Berkeley this evening, as the last person to be offered standing room only, where Haydn Reiss was showing his filmed interview of conversations between poets Robert Bly and William Stafford. "Even trees deserve their place." Artist, come home. "Find what the world is trying to be." W. Stafford.

The Day before the Day before Yesterday

Sunday 31 January.
The sun shone, the air was warm and balmy. Plum trees and daffodils were in bloom, not to mentioned the tulip trees generously laden with giant petals.
On the way home from our Sunday outing to the Camaldoli Hermitage in Lucia, we stopped by the Julia Pfeifer Falls in Big Sur.
Some days are more bountiful than others.

RE:turn to banagrams

Gotta make a note of these new words, otherwise I am likely to forget:
bogey (verb meaning to rouse trouble, also a golf term that means just one over par), bogie (framework mounted on wheels under a carriage), wen (a cyst, usually in scalp or genitals), paeon - my favorite word for tonight (a written, spoken or musical expression of enthusiastic praise or rapturous joy), clew (a skein, or a verb meaning to thread), loup (to leap or jump), loupe (a magnifying glass especially one of a jeweller or watchmaker).

RE:turn, whose turn?

Rich and intensive day yesterday: drove across Sears Highway, along the upper bay mud flats and bird sanctuaries, followed the Petaluma River northeast. Arrived at a wonderful little Taverna (Papa's) for a long visit with several good ol' close friends from college days.
Returned later in the evening to Berkeley and the chatter of young college girls from NYC who had gathered over the weekend to attend the funeral of a classmate, just engaged to be married, and who had died the week earlier of an overdose of heroin. Age 24, exodus from youth according to epidemiological studies? Drugs, exodus of immortals according to death reports. REminded me of the sixties and the summer of love, and felt my brain begin to sizzle in the cross currents of youthfull communication.
Still nursing a headache after the intensity of the day...coupled with my inability (age, hearing defect, lack of adequate references allergies and perhaps a glass to much) to integrate and process young female chatter ... which also made it difficult to make sense of bananagrams.
Today's competence development exercise: PALE + MUD = GEM, or better yet, don't try to swallow more than you can chew...

Salmon comeback 3:5

A pantoum for Bonnie

Sit down and strum along
gonna be a long playing album
ten or more slides to each track,
pictures that go a long way back.

Gonna be a long playing album,
to a beat that does not distort,
pictures that go a long way back
and rooster crows at the break of dawn.

To a beat that does not distort
memories of pecks and scratches,
and rooster crows at the break of dawn,
seen from your window, then gone.

Memories of pecks and scratches
come in on a record break,
seen from your window, then gone,
biting the dust in a groove.

Come in on a record break,
the times they are a changing,
biting the dust in a groove,
Roundtrip ticket to prove.

The times they are a changing,
no longer stuck in one place,
roundtrip ticket to prove
a magical mystery tour.

No longer stuck in one place
Pleased to see your face,
a magical mystery tour,
waiting to take me to...

Pleased to see your face
just as I was spinning
waiting to take me to...
hoping to bring you too.

Just as I was spinning
Country Joe and the Fish
hoping to bring you to
sea salmon on the run.

Country Joe and the Fish
up by the mouth of the river
sea salmon on the run
jumping, leaping and having fun.

Up by the mouth of the river
playing bass in Forever Young
jumping, leaping and having fun
on a magical mystery tour.

Playing bass in Forever Young
Can't say you never warned me
on a magical mystery tour
got hooked there once myself.

Re:turn 3:2

Thanks for another excuse to go through the tunnel, cross the bridge, and sit in a Stickley chair.
Poetry reading with Robin Ekiss (The Mansion of Happiness) and Cheryl Dumesnil (In Praise of Falling), ice cream sunday with Bonnie Mattison. And a bananagram.

Re:turn LP 3:1

What a comeback. Unable to escape the album covers that currently decorate the pink flamingo bedroom where I sleep on El Camino in Berkeley. Long play, between the earth and the night sky, 360 degrees all around, where four walls meet the ceiling, these albums continue to spin under my eyelids at 33.3 RPM REM. Rotations Per (ante meridian) Minute; Rapid Eye Movements. The stylus rides in the grooves of my brain, picking up the vibrations carved in the cortex, and is attached to a cantilever arm with a magnet (to the next generation) at the other end. What a bridge. What a comeback.
These are the album covers that currently decorate the pink flamingo bedroom where I sleep:

Joan Baez Baptism > Rolling Stones Let it Bleed > Quicksilver Messenger Service > Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited > doors > Queen The Game > The Manhatten Transfer > Santana Araxas > Jefferson Airplane Takes Off > Magical Mystery Tour Beatles > Country joe and the Fish > The times they are a changin Bob Dylan > Steppenwolf > Tarrio Brewer and Shirley > Blues Breakers John Mayall with Eric Calpton > Black > Crown of Creation Jefferson Airplane > Rubber Soul > Stephen Stills > Born to be Wild > Tea for the Tillerman Cat Stevens > Asleep at the Well > Other side of this life> Ray rogers Chops not chaps > Surrealistic Pillow > Arlo Guthrie Running down the Road > Donovan Sunshine Superman > The Allman Brothers' Band Brothers and Sisters > Blind Faith Eric Clapton >The Rolling Stones > Israeli Gears Cream > Linda Ronstadt

Yesterday I just happened to run into one of my old classmates at parking lot in downtown Oakland and still recognized him though I hadn't seen him since we graduated from high school some 45 years ago. That was when I was visiting Joanie Blank, founder of the Good Vibrations sex toys shop on San Pablo and avid co-houser. Today I had a moving encounter (planned) with an old close friend whom I have not seen for over 30 years.

Re:turning a Penny

I bicycled down to Lake Merrit this morning to participate in a poetry writing workshop that I had seen posted on a bulletin board earlier in the week. This first workshop was led by Jennifer King, Director of the Downtown Oakland Senior Center. We turned out to be a heterogeneous gang of seven 'students' representing a variety of ethnic backgrounds and both genders.
After quick introductions, we were given a couple of short poems to read aloud: “Those Winter Sundays” and "Full Moon" by Robert Hayden, a black American poet from Detroit. When enough reflections on winter Sundays had warmed us up to the task at hand, Jennifer gave us each a penny and asked us to reflect on the date. Mine was 1993. This is what came out when a copper coin was inserted in the slot in front of me:

Returning a penny
Nineteen hundred and ninety three.
Three years after the fall of the wall
where would I be if the penny
had taken another turn.
Here I am sixteen years later
and still spinning around (the earth)
listening to the rooster crow
while you are making dinner,
waking up as you prepare to sleep.
You say it is below zero in Europe today
and I tell you the sun is shining.
What is right, wrong, your honor,
heads or tales, East or West?
Humpty dumpty, can you see me now,
even though we are on different sides
of the mirror?

(Special thanks today for workshop members: Jessie for your "List called Gratitude", Eleanor's pantoum "I'm not sorry", Jennifer's "If it pleases the King", and Mathias W at AAC Global, my facilitator on the other side.)

Local Berkeley vagrant rests today after a long bike ride and intensive workshop.
Comment from Stockholm: "She would have turned into ice if she were here."