|
•
|
|
Three Pieces by
I. The British Museum Reading Room The cool, gray-blue light of the British Museum Library Reading Room hovered above me, swirled around me, pulled itself into my lungs. I wanted to weep with wonder. I wanted to laugh or shout, but I also wanted to be invisible so no one could see how inexperienced and inept I felt. It was 1970, and I was a very new graduate student recently arrived from Antelope Valley, California. To check out books, readers were required to submit written requests. Someone would bring the books as soon as they were located, which could take thirty to forty-five minutes. Realizing that I must find a desk where my books would be delivered, I turned stiffly and allowed my gaze to circle the wondrous room. A glass ceiling far overheard illuminated the room with pale light filtered through fog and clouds. Semi-circles of connected desks surrounded the central service area with its frosted windowpanes. Each polished mahogany desk had a high back and sides to separate the readers, a broad, green writing surface, ink wells and penholders, and was accompanied by a large, heavy, comfortable mahogany chair. Though everyone in the room appeared to be facing a book, still I felt a jury of eyes follow me as I walked gingerly, bashfully among the rows until I seated myself at an empty desk. As I settled and explored the dark vastness of it, I found a small brass plaque noting that this had been Karl Marx’ desk. I was stricken with awe. I was sitting and reading and taking notes at the same desk as Karl Marx. My journey to this desk began in the home of an avid John Birch Society mother. To escape to England for graduate school, I had made my travel plans secretly. My parents were vacationing in Mexico when I came home from the University of Arizona with my letter of acceptance from the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. I had received it mid-summer while I was attending summer school, eking out the last units I needed to graduate while working two jobs. Holding it to my heart, it gave me the extra beat I desperately needed to make my escape, to toss myself beyond the world I knew. I had been trained to avoid the world at all costs, especially the world, as mother wrote to me in England, of “free thinkers, communists, and atheists.” I spread my hands as wide as I could on the desktop, Karl’s desktop; Karl, that horrendous husband and father, but also that genius who thought beyond the boundaries of his class and daily struggles, who wasn’t afraid to examine the whole social and economic structure of his society. The man whom my mother charged with creating Russia, the evil empire she contemplated almost everyday. The man who wrote the bible of world destruction, the anti-holy book Das Kapital. The man who prompted the Virgin Mary’s visitations to this wayward earth at Fatima. And the man whose words surely portended a future described in the visions of St. John the Divine and the other apocalyptic prophets. The man whose ideas would be used to rationalize the cold war’s nuclear arsenals and the arrival of the anti-Christ who would entice us all to the communist table. This man, whose name was rarely spoken in my home, and, if it were, it was with the tension of disgust and horror. This very Marx who shaped my mother’s daily activities and thoughts and who shaped my life and social analysis when I debated in support of my mother's ideas while I was on our high school debate team. Karl Marx. I sat at his desk – our desk I wanted to think, though I couldn’t allow that possibility to enter my consciousness. But when my books arrived, I settled into our large chair, stacked the volumes in order, opened the first one with a thrill, and eagerly read.
II. Caviar, Mango, Endive
Her eyes glittered caviar newly scooped from the sturgeon. Her joy-- black, salty, wet with the sea, old, dark, expensive.
She laughed when the joy grew So full it swelled up through her belly past her heart to her throat. She laughed with tropical sweetness, a ripe mango, golden glorious.
Words wanted to form on her lips. But how could her cells with no books and no jokes to provoke anyone shape words? This is the meaning of mystery.
Instead she pulled off the yellow- green leaves of endive from the smooth bullets and laid them out in a long row. Each one rested lightly On her green table - small pale boats on a vast sea.
Into each she placed a treasure: One she kissed, one she touched, one she sighed Into, one she pushed, one she gave a drop Of her blood, one she gave a drop of spit. One she licked and one she laughed into, One she swore on, one she cried with In sympathy for its loss, one she sang to, One she screamed at, all she invited to dinner. . Her meal was the mouth, the sea, and the sorrow. Her message the fish, the fruit, and the leaf.
III. Rain River Wetlands
1. RAIN ON GRASSLAND
Earth swirls her blue skirts on long slim legs of rain Rain slicks down the Live Oak leaves softening the soil for grassland seedlings Rain hollows the mountain sandstone and purls in the creek beds Rain soaks to bedrock and flows downhill underground until the fault-shift ground breaks and a shock of sunlight glazes the water.
2. RIVER
The Los Angeles River twisted green with willow, sycamores, wild roses once moved the city mountains: Santa Monica, Santa Susana, Verdugo, San Gabriel in a rain-water sluice flooding soil layers, making land for backyards.
The wild old river shifted courses. The new river: cool cement gray, 20th century-style Destination: San Pedro, assigned by engineers who thinned fat river wallows trimmed curious meanders to a swift lean channel that gets downstream fast without distraction. A good hard working river carries detritus: shopping carts and plastic supermarket bags emptied, burst open, buried upside down waste water from a treatment plant rain water run off the roadways mountain springs and streams flow into culverts pour into the river.
Rain in the river still soaks to bedrock where the cement breaks waters willow roots where it finds them carries river birds on its back.
River still flows to wetlands, cocooning in green amniotic shallows, Reworked by roots and fish, worms, sea birds, and sunlight before diving under waves into the Pacific’s deep blue.
3. WETLANDS
Ballona Creek softens spreads open swallowing the sea And the sea unties the shore to take the rivered water.
A delta of yes! A muddy basket woven of reeds bird wings beer cans white plastic bags shredded by now to lace and the frogs’ gravelly song slipped through nets slung under the bridges where a day’s catch clogs the waterway and the poisonous drift of petroleum gleams on the surface like a grasshopper’s wing.
Settled into the Ballona Valley a long flat wetlands breathes its tidal breath from the dry uplands deep into the bay’s dark current: fresh water--salt water fresh water--salt water fresh water--salt water.
A Great Blue Heron suns in a Eucalyptus tree and the small, rare Green Heron lands and folds its wings in a forgotten slough beside Lincoln Blvd. where the tide water rolls in under the roadway through a pipe that was never sealed and spills over a cement wall to drench the salt bush and the wetland sedges.
The tide-and-creek soaked ground won’t forsake its nature and the sea won’t leave it alone, slowly ruining metal tide-gates with its salt scissors.
|