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.