Married Love, Year Thirty

                     Published in U.M.M. Binnacle UltraShorts 2012


Fading memory is now our little family’s art,

And gravity unwraps the careful packaging of youth;

So let’s meet in serenity, embracing grief and joy,

In the mercy of moments that dawn perpetually.

When you quit pressing weekdays into weeks,

And I stop scraping flotsam into heaps,

We’ll come together in the unmapped dark

And shine our flashlights at the moon.

Rafael Garcia Meets the Devil

The Spanish horse patrol was on route to Bodega on the Pacific. Rumors, then reports, had come to the fort beside St. Rafael near San Francisco Bay that other Europeans had been seen in the headlands around the mountain called Tamalpais.

The five leather-coated soldiers, their priest companion and the native servant stopped awhile to stretch their legs and barter food at a poor village.  The missionary, mildly drunk, was still able to talk with the village elder in Bay area pidgin.  The man had apparently seen nothing.

A Hint of Wind

The young priest cut the outboard engine half a mile from Horseshoe Bay off the Marin Headlands. He had no fishing pole, no crab pots.  He spent most Mondays off from his stagnant ministry in this rowboat.

He tipped the engine up and back, put the oars in their locks, let the blades hang in the water.  He waited, bow pointed across open water toward old San Francisco.  Outside the mouth of the Bay, the barren Farallons called and the immense Pacific offered to take him.  The boat drifted dully.

He closed his eyes.  His seminary enthusiasm had met polite tolerance.  He just couldn’t engage these natives with roots as old as the Bible.  Power-Points were useless.

Drum School

The drum gives me Now; and its silence Then.

Keep the beat and my soul will mend.

My father was a smith. We lived in tiny Dodona in a house behind the forge. We lived with the beat of hammer and anvil, and the longer pulse of heating and cooling. Poor, we embraced the rhythms of starving awhile until we were no longer as hungry, of collapsing exhausted until we were merely tired. My mother foraged meals from thin air and I worked at the fire from a tender age.

Father made a living selling pins, hasps and latches for a few lepta each. He taught me how to repair broken tools. Craning past his massive arm, I watched him steadily beat the ripple pattern of circles on a copper sheet until it became a shapely pot, worthy of Hephaestus, whose hammer icon hung in the forge.

His master was a Guild smith, who died before father could be Journeyed. Father’s craft sprang from glimpses of techniques he was never taught, leveraged into what he needed to know.

Myth or Mom?

Mom was perfect from day start till shut eye. I can’t mourn her:  her myth remains, clogging my mind like milfoil. The woman, not my mother, died.

She willed good things to happen, healed wounds with a kiss, never lost her cool.  She exuded control, and I believed it of her, even after I saw her face without her teeth or commanding smile.

At twenty-three, sans my wisdom teeth, I passed a doorway in a huge medical center, a woman’s face spotlighted in the operating chair, visible because the dentist leaned away.

Fresh Start

He dumped you; hard.  You decorated his smell out of the apartment.

Later, as you chased a rag up and down the new heron-leg stools and along the front of the Uba Tooba counter; as you polished the rubber plant; gave the prayer rug a shake; combed the sand on the end table with a tiny rake;  artfully managed not to disturb the bonsai or knock the crystals from advantageous points in the high corners while you dusted;

Hands and Knees

The priest woke up knowing how they should dig the channel to the garden. Under his tireless direction, dream natives from both sides of San Francisco Bay had already appeared to contour the site and bring water to the precious vegetables near their new healing Mission, recently christened San Rafael. He could taste the earth and smell the new onions, peas, garlic, beets, carrots, corn and greens.

Father Corazo threw back the cowhide and pushed himself to calloused knees on the compacted dirt of his room.

He recited the morning prayer of thanks to the Father.  This green, fertile land of fog was so different from the heat and dust of Baja. God’s humor had replaced the harsh sun of treeless Loreto, in Baja California, with these towering redwoods that obscured the sun all day.

Southern Writer Legitimacy Statement for the Dead Mule School

I’m Southern by adventurous inoculation. I left college in Chicago the first week of January as a White Seattleite with Mardi Gras on the brain. My friend and I got a lift from Farrell Haney in a rumbling Camaro convertible with Texas plates, and spent the first night away in a hotel in Kentucky. Pool was closed and covered with a thatch of brown leaves that stuck to us like fish scales: baptized as we swam a celebrating-being-free lap.

School Of Dad

I think my Dad invented Thursday Night School so he could avoid reading the notes my mother left taped to the fridge.

Dad made Thursday nights out to be a big deal, the weekly seminar at our house; he prepared for it all week, looking statistics up on line and checking newspapers, but I’m the one who had to haul the empty brown bottles to the driveway, Fridays, and sweep up all the cigarette butts and left over pizza crusts. Once in a while, I had to wash out a waste can laced with curds of old puke and napkins.

He was teaching the course: Inebriate Verticology. He had a sign, too, on his office door in the boiler room of John Russell Middle School: “Dept. of Inebriate Verticology.” He’s head janitor.

Drake's Cook

Eagle must have made the Golden Hind, with its massive wings stretched across bones of wood, its hold full of strange smells, clothes and implements. The white men, that sailed it in from the sunset, must have come straight from Coyote. Odd, agreed the old Miwok men in the sweathouse of the village nearest the beach, and surprising, that the passengers in Eagle’s basket with wings seemed to have forgotten so much about life, unacquainted with the simplest things, like atole, black eggs and pinole.

The seamen brought gifts, but demanded food and supplies of water in great volume in a rude way. They impatiently sucked their teeth or rattled beads or copper pieces, as if to say: “Right now!” Their speech reminded the People of duck quack and squirrel chatter and many shouted in a loud, coarse way. The strangers that were sick and losing teeth, hair and body fluids were nurtured in the village.