San Francisco: December 31

The last fog of the year
make lists
collect remnants
of Christmas meals, chop, bag
mince for an audience of one

Stir up tortilla soup,
cut cilantro, yellow squash,
vidalia and

at last

the piano
play (badly)
and know
enchantment lives
between
the sharps and flats.

Kentucky: The Day We Sang

That summer, we sang. We were too far from Washington to march, we were too far from Birmingham to mourn. We were too far from Chicago to carry a sign. So we did what we could, we sang.

I was starting my junior year in high school, just feeling the adrenaline: we were on the cusp of a new day.

I have that feeling now, today, as I watch a record number of voters coming to the polls. By tomorrow we may have elected our first African-American president.

I think many people voted for Barack Obama not because of his race, or in spite of his race. He's a charismatic, idealistic candidate who restores that sense of hope, that adrenaline rush that I remember from the songs, and the causes to sing for.

Of the four of us who sang that day, three have lived to see this moment. As the years passed we've witnessed too much: the agony of Vietnam; the Kennedy and King assassinations; September 11. We've all gone in different directions, but I'll wager that my friends would agree: today we remember. Today we remember how it felt to sing.

photo: Franklin Stone, David Sensing, Liz Jewell, Cherry Darby

The Cardboard Truck

It's part of the Geary Street drama, the cardboard recyclers.

Accordion on wheels
the cardboard truck
turns on Anza and moves up 21st

Flying fingers of cardboard man
and brittle brown wife weave dry stacks
in horizontal layers–their mesa
grows skyward as seamless day ascends

and light slants --

and soft fog bellows from Ocean Beach.
The load groans toward Geary,
hovers at the crosswalk,

bent woman, piercings, baby backpack
a short processional moves by

he watches, flint-faced, then leans,
strikes blindly toward the seat beside him
and
celebrates sunset
by lighting up.

At Stern Grove

We made camp
high
among redwood trees
Puccini and pasta
on the slope

while below
golden hatless heads, quilts,
a hundred paper fans
moving

like butterfly wings.

How to Taste Edamame

Erase that Kentucky field
sunshot August morning
clay cracking, shaded by hearty green just

tackle the here and now

and holding by tail
pop salted pod into mouth
draw through teeth
as you would the artichoke then

close eyes and let the pearls delight you
breathe deeply hear first foghorns
held at Bay

then go back.

South Columbus
at margin of the long field
reaching toward September twist the stem
and
roll dirt-colored husk with thumb it

splits
you taste the little pebbles. If they give way just
toss the pod--

not ready for harvest yet.

No, It's a Whippet

When we leave San Francisco, Cleo stays there. This is one of the few kinks in our otherwise manageable lifestyle.

We've thought of bringing her on board disguised as an ugly baby. We have, in fact, debated every way to get her to Kentucky...other than stashing her in the cargo hold of our plane. Our lives aren't quite right without her.

Whippets are indeed the best kept secrets of the dog world. When I decided to get a dog, I began with a dog search engine. Sims and I entered all the significant adjectives: medium-sized, short-haired, quiet, gentle. No yappy dogs need apply. The answer came back the same each time: Whippet, Whippet, Whippet. I couldn't remember what a whippet looked like. Sims vaguely remembered the lanky hounds from reading the encyclopedia as a child.

Though her moods are mercurial, she's never disappointed us. We start the morning before Cleo does, particularly during San Francisco's foggy season. At daybreak she's usually sleeping soundly between us, having migrated there when we're in our deepest sleep. Later she'll lope to her chair and curl there like a brindle doughnut. With no padding whatsoever, she's always hunting a warm spot.


Heat-seeking, yes. A heat-seeking missile. The sound of leash-janglings transform her. In a flash she's at the door, ready for a sprint. As she loops in circles at Marx Meadow we continually explain: No, she's a whippet. this is our mantra as again and again passers by comment on her greyhound-ness. Whippets, in fact, were bred from runty greyhounds. Their lines stretch back to Egypt, and in Wales they were considered the poor man's greyhound--chasing rabbits for food and competing in spontaneous speed-matches.

When she's off-leash at Ocean Beach, she becomes Miss Congeniality. She flirts with small dogs, big dogs and occasionally meany dogs. When black labs bound into the surf she follows, the fabric of her dog-limbs translucent and kite-like. My heart stopped once when she racead away from me and sprinted alongside two horse-drawn sulkies trotting at low tide. It was like a scene from The Iliad, our graceful sight hound bounding beside the chariot racers. I was terrified for her, but transfixed by the timelessness of these graceful moving forms backlit by the sun.

When I'm in Kentucky I miss her amber eyes, too light to qualify for breed standard; I miss her occasional (and intentional) vocalizations--too speechlike to be considered barks. Most of all I miss her gentle spirit and ethereal nature--she enters the room as quietly as a shaft of light.

The Basket Case

Today, another oppressive fog. Or smog, from the fires north and south. The Dow plunged. A barrel of oil reached a new high. When the mail came, our water bill was $833.99, which--yes--we're looking into. So I've retreated into the baskets. The Dale Chihuly baskets I saw at the De Young Museum yesterday. The magical baskets.

To describe the installation is like trying to recreate water or heat. Or like trying to explain intuition or a fleeting memory. There was darkness, there was light, transparent color, there was one floating form, and then another. I believe it was Sontag who said photography is a secret within a secret. I felt the same about the line of baskets, with their sister baskets, woven, incised, stacked, nested, cradled. They were like bubbles of a past I couldn't quite grasp. Like a word I could see but couldn't recall.


I remember my father coming back from the farm with an arrowhead in his hand. I remember standing by the little mound of earth in the woods and knowing that underneath there were pot shards and charred bits of some past lifestyle, but to scrape beyond the surface would somehow mar the moment as well as the past. This is how I felt when I saw the baskets, warped, cradled and stacked--they were a reflection of a reflection. I wanted to cry for a memory that I couldn't possess but could filter through my hands, just for an instant.

At home, I checked my email and learned that a tree had fallen on one of the rental houses in Kentucky. Cleo was crying for a walk in the park. There was dinner, the gym. But I was lost along the cradled baskets, in a color called 'tabac,' a woven line, following a link to nowhere and everywhere.

On the Fault Lines

It starts as a soft rocking, a silent vibration. Before daybreak the mind answers impulsively and irrationally–-a storm is testing the windows, the dog has leapt on the bed. Then realization rights itself and opens like a book: we’re having a quake.

Photo by Earl Warren, Jr.

When these tremors wake me from a sound sleep I could be at either of the places I call home, since both sit above separate and major fault lines. My life is divided between San Francisco, on the San Andreas Fault, and the ragged western corner of Kentucky, on the New Madrid.

Kentucky is where my sons are, and it’s the place I’d choose in the event of the big rumble. The county of my childhood is wedged into the southernmost corner of the far end of the Jackson Purchase. It's in the South, but in the northern South, a place of sweeping fields and grassy hills where, during the Civil War, some wore blue and some wore gray.

The course of the Mississippi River defines the western perimeter of Hickman County and forms the edge of the state as well. So besides being where North meets South, it’s where East meets West.

The river is a fickle boundary. Threeponds, a low, cypress-rich hunting ground south of Columbus, was once bisected by the river before the channel shifted to the west and left behind a trio of slender and connected pools. The curving sandbars of Bessie Bend are visible today but might be gone tomorrow. Wolf Island was orphaned by the river, distanced from Kentucky by its fierce and unrelenting course.

Kentucky would be a more tidy, more geometric state without this trapezoidal, sparsely populated, end-of-the-universe county of ours. It doesn’t have the stately elegance of the Bluegrass, but what’s missing in polish is recouped in drama. Balance atop the chalk cliff at Columbus and take in the breakneck, almost perpendicular drop to the rich mud and gravel of the river’s shoreline. Look below and beyond, past tug boats, stray logs, and swirling eddies to see a sweeping, hazy, green and lavender watercolor of Missouri farmland.

As kids we climbed crab-like down the bluff and skipped flat rocks along the murky waves.  The shoreline offered up wet chunks of clay and we let it ooze between our fingers, merging veins of ochre, tan, and red.  We walked barefoot at water’s edge, scanning brown-sugar sand for sharp rocks and glittering shards of glass. In time we headed back toward the bank and made our way upward, gripping saplings and bare tree roots, and sometimes pausing to swing in the knotty cradle of a grape vine rope.

Swimming in the river was not allowed. There were currents that could pull a child to the bottom and under-tows that lusted for the most experienced swimmer. Stories of man-sized catfish added to a river mythology owned by every boy and girl who grew up near the shore.

There’s no bridge, no ferry now,  but the banks of Columbus have hosted a wealth of real and imagined travelers. The earliest mound-builders stole along the water’s edge, as did the Chickasaws. Marquette brought religion downstream, accompanied by the fur-trading Joliet. Confederate soldiers struggled to stretch a great chain across the water, hoping to deter the path of Northern gunboats. Cotton from Vicksburg and Memphis floated up the river along with steamboats carrying the raucous jazz of New Orleans.  And we all believed when Huck and Jim left home they poled along the mile-wide course that we knew well.

To live near the Mississippi is to ever be reminded of forces larger, greater, grander than ourselves. It’s a stern parent, always in charge, a force of nature, God, or pantheistic blending of the two. Stand at water’s edge and learn life’s contradictions: it beckons us, then leaves us on the shore. 

In San Francisco, a half mile from the vast Pacific and firefly lights of Golden Gate,  I still feel the pull of the Mississippi. I see it clearly: it’s dusk. The empty barges seem to defy gravity. The water is a broad slab of glass that mirrors the sky.