Late Notes

BUCKEYES HAVE FALLEN, still shiny.
Lost 3 trees this autumn to the wind & dry.
First frost Oct 10th. Some rain while I was away,
week before election. Obama sign still hanging
on barn - no one took it! Tonight the taurus moon
rose in a lapis sky, like a bucket full of gold spit.

Fall Hunger

The deer have thus far eaten
the Valerian (a sedative), the Motherwort
(a heart tonic), and entirely all of the Italian
Basil (a popular Calaveritas intoxicant).
They are now getting to work on the Angelica,
who happens to be the guardian of my
garden, so they'd better watch it.

Naked Ladies & New Birds

Through the walkingness of evening
two new peacocks step inside the cerulean
footcreases of their forebears & rustle up
astonished bugs. Yes it's true:

Cousin Casey has brought back
the totem animal of this town. And already
the male is risking life & wing to admire
his plumage in the car bumpers. Keep
all chrome away from him.

In the last two weeks I've been robbed
& rear-ended, and someone marauded
my sugarbaby watermelons. I feel sorta
like a marauded melon myself -- seedy,
pulpy, cooked by August.

So water & belongings retreat. The creek
pulls in like a pantleg, dangling turtles.
Rocks the color of fog. A sift of wind.
On the edges of dried things naked ladies
pose, whose muscular pink flowers seem
to erupt fully-formed from leafless stalkings.

And there are still blackberries, whose roots
once cured an entire Indian village of dysentary.
Above-ground they form walls, viney railroads
ferrying fruit, & also fortresses for the coveys
of quail who land in them at nightfall,
wheeling, musical.

Hanging laundry at 11, the moon
red as a pink tomato: I put on
a damp dress while I fold.

As the old yarn goes, "It's 107
in the shade and there ain't
no shade--"

Well, today there wasn't
any shade but that's because
there wasn't any sun.

Smoke snuck in
like a gray wildcat, drove
all color outta town.

But hot enough to suck
water from the creek's
mouth, straight.

Dancehall Garden

Will the Last Person in Town

please put out the lights?

There is a strange quality after a party.
No people, but still the sound of speaking.
Flattened parts in the grass as if deer had
slept there. I wander through the garden,
on a lazy scavenger hunt for glasses, plates,
cowbells. I find some in the lilies. But the full
& lonely feeling makes me want to keep these
things where they are, to leave the tablecloths
on the line. A mysterious dog ambles through,
and both of us wonder where all the people
have gone again, the ones who came back
for the longest day of the year - to chew their
wine, sip their blood sausage, & do the work
it takes to make a place. Thank you.

Do You Want the Bones?

Today a cow was killed for me.
A black angus heifer, who grew up
on this land. Neither Verny or I had
the guts to watch the slaughter, which
was done by a husband & wife team.
Already the butcher has called to ask
how I would like her cut up (so many
names for flesh!) & wrapped.

When my grandmother ran the cattle
she knew all of her cows by sight.
She'd hand over the "cow counter"
while she pushed parcels of hay from
the back of her jeep. We would click
& click, watching intently, increasingly
confused, finally deciding there were
twice as many cows as there were.
Yet she never wanted to eat her own
animals, so this will perhaps be the first
time in many decades that a Calaveritas
cow will be eaten in Calaveritas.

Tonight I am having mixed feelings
about the death of the cow, so I walk
up to the barn with a handful of mint.
Everything is drying now, but there
are still lavender brodeia dangling
from the hillsides, & down by the water
lime-colored blackberries are pushing
through the fur of spent stamens.
The place taken in by the warm pockety
night, jangle of crickets and stars.

Down the Crick

This house had not seen a baby
in such a long time. Through the hot
moony nights the sounds of birds &
floorboards amid the succulent squawks,
squeaks, midnight milk-beckonings.
During the day mama carried her through
the stunned garden, in a bonnet & one
of my grandmother's old napkins like a skirt.
The baby sanctified everything: leaf-filled
fishpond, gate made from cupboard doors,
Heavenly Hots cooked in the morning.
While she napped her papa took a rusty pan
from the cellar & as if he'd been here
his whole life left for the creek. Slipping
his hands down into the cold holes
underneath the stones, where other men
had been before but not for a long time.
He came back with ruined boots ("Didja
find gold, honey?") & a pan full of water,
so that he could show us the movement
of the finest grit, ambulations of iron filings
settling according to their weight. There!
he says, & points to a scintilla of a scintilla,
one gilt mote, which we can hardly see
but persuade him to eat for breakfast.

You Look Sharp, But Who's That With You

Lavern Cuneo, my main angel & lefthandman, has just turned
a noble 80. Who would believe it, looking at this crumpled &
hand-colored photo, of him at 8 or so, next to his own uncle,
a workworn Antone Costa, and surrounded by squirrely white
goats. They're standing against the old rock wall behind Rosie's
cottage, which is where he grew up.

Keen fencefixer, cowherd, & gentle wrangler of feral cats, Vern
shows up every morning to make sure I know what I'm doing.
When we're through convening he says, "Well - I don't know
nothing else." And I say "Nope, neither do I." Spry as a calf &
sharp as a new tack. Just don't ask him about the keys locked
in the running truck, he's still sorting that out.

the 100 backyard dash

(Oh, would that it were wet...)

Like an old-time country doctor, Papa Lou vaulted to town
late tuesday night, ready to perform major surgery with only
a few tools and a notepad. By dawn he had grasped the
galvanized innards of the house, peered into its lead guts
& rust-clogged valves. The click of a sprinkler head could
be heard, like an omen, from the early morning ground.

He left 30 hours later, hands dyed blue from pipe glue &
knees embossed with Calaveritas grass. In his wake the word
hero floats through the parched streets, and Nana's spirit
is smiling. Basically, he fixed a whole mess of things, & what
he couldn't fix he jerryrigged in the authentic local style.
His diagnosis, though, made us flinch. We are going to have
to call in the experts, the men with the big tools.

But for now a green garden hose bypasses the ancient, invisible,
totally essential but totally corroded line of pipe that has long lain
buried in the foot of dirt beneath our quivering old floorboards.
I'm imagining it like the tube of muscle underneath the tongue;
it makes you nervous to even think about it.

One thing though. While he was here he drank only raw milk.

cloven ghosts

Last night a light swath of rain:
first in a wide stretch and perhaps
the last in a long. Weather is cool
and people are out in their yards
forking the final tines of heavy winter
brush into meaty flames, orange flapping
up against the gray room of the sky.

Dogwood is still blooming, some of
the fig leaves are beginning to be
about hand-sized, and the small yellow
birds yanker happily over what's
left of the moisture. Some sweet peas
climbing the fence, heroically.

I took this shot a few days ago with
my plastic Holga camera. The holga is
a medium-format cult toy, equivalent in
price to about 3 rolls of film. It is
the perfect Calaveritas tool, good for
thwacking around & capturing hoofed
ghosts.

Calaveritas White

Things don't stay white-white long in this ghost town.
Any linen leans toward bone, rust cavorting & settling
down in the seams. Paper is fungal, earthy, like a chantarelle.
Our well pulls iron into the drinking water, and from
the guts of our gardens enormous flaking sawblades
emerge, thick and dark as bars of chocolate. These we don't
eat, but keep around like silent presences, toothy, rotting,
fertile.

Yet there is a mushroom that appears in the early spring
dubbed Cowboy's Handkerchief. It is clean & brilliant like the white
of an eye, slimy as snot. A single one of the chickens next door
lays pure white. The innocence of these eggs is particularly astonishing
to me, and I have begun making photographs with them, using
their absorbent white to capture color and the imprints of other
equally fleeting objects. The dye I've made is of black walnut -
from the tree next to Frank Trenque's bench - and the patterns
on the shells are poppy leaves, intricate weeds, borage.

Down To The Wire

Well, they repainted the white lines that mark
out our winding stretch of road yesterday.
We feel very smartly svelte now, curvaceous.

Also, I drove in to the county office to pay
our property taxes smack on the due date, just
in the nick. Apparently a lot of other people
took this tactic too, & the lady informed me that
there are 44,000 parcels in the county. Some of
our parcels are so tiny that they don't even
bother to tax us for them. Isn't that nice. & I'm
just now remembering the story about Louis Costa
& Columbo Cademartori (is that right?) perenially
arguing & cane-waving about "the lines."
Always the lines, round here.

No Baby Yet

9 Aprile & still waiting for rain. The Almanac predicts hottest summer in 100 yrs.
I predict this will be my true Calaveritas initiation...

Returned from Oakland today & discovered that my bucket of mulch leaves for the Already Famous & Mysterious Indoor Compost Toilet has begun to sprout - bright yellow shoots from the dark cakey layers of fall leaves. Although I haven't yet seen them, I can hear that the cows are back in the flat, again wearing their bells. The sound like a song sung to the few folk who live here, missed when absent.

Sunset now approaches the hill next to the barn. A pelican has just flown over with a teary, paperlike cry. On the roadsides weather-cooked acorns have descended their rootlet tentacles into the earth, pale oakshoots emerging. Amazing that these beings begin so tenderly, at the edges.


* NO BABY YET is a traditional Calaveritas idiom. Something you (along with maybe the whole town) are waiting for but it's not yet come.

first post

I'm sitting on a licheny rock down in the corral below the barn, a pair of scissors in my pocket & a foraging bag of stinging nettles to my side. My hands are itching & howling as a I write; forgot to bring gloves. I discovered this patch of wild nettles while in pursuit of the spring watercress which Doug Joses told me he & his wife have been picking from around the small green pond, the one you peer down into as you take the great shoulderless hill down into the thrumming, bewitching heart of Calaveritas.

RIght now the meandering pear trees are releasing virginal white blooms from their old grey branches, stretching out like little doves' fingers, & the maidenhair ferns have been creeping down to the creek at night to drink. I myself am heading home to cook up the nettles & watercress, with a couple of Casey's faintly turquoise eggs.