The New Land

         Our friend Mark emailed me old photos of Detroit.  I could figure out exactly what year it was in one of the photos by recognizing the model year of the cars in the parking lot, which I can do because I'm from Motor City. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that the photo that most resonated with me was the menu of F.W Woolworth's soda fountain.  I think I ate everything on that menu that didn't have ham in or on it, at these low prices: 
BACON and TOMATO…………… 50c
  Toasted Three Decker Sandwich
(I had an agreement with God that bacon was OK outside the home if there was lettuce and tomato and toast with it. Alone it would be traif - unkosher).
That photo of the menu brought back this memory:
Deep winter, my friend Karen & I walk all the way from Greenlawn and Curtis to the State Fair Grounds on Eight Mile and Woodward to ice skate. Coming home at 4:30, it's getting dark, and even our layers of clothes won't protect us, it is so cold.  We are a little more than half-way, and there, finally,  is the Woolworth's on Seven Mile & Livernois.  We come in pulling off gloves, rubbing our hands, galoshes stomping the wooden floor.  

Renovated Woolworth Soda Fountain Asheville, N.C.

      We sit down on a red stool and take a little spin - just to make sure we have a good one. ( We will change if we don't.) We look out the window at snowflakes falling through the colored light from the neon sign. We watch the waitress make our order. And there it is in the photo of the menu
HOT NESTLE’S WITH WHIPPED TOPPING & WAFERS  15c
    
   It is remarkably strange to have grown up in a vital “city of the future”, characterized by dynamism and industry, and know it is now a post-industrial wasteland.   

                           

William Livingstone house photo by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

   Have you seen the photos of the ruins of Detroit? Empty high- rises, the ghost of the  Beaux Arts Michigan Central Station, decaying mansions, and the population halved since I left. There is a general atmosphere of despair -
but a strange and rather wonderful thing has been  happening there.  

Let me tell you about it with a poem.
 The New Land

You’ve heard of that city
It had an affair
with concrete and steel 
the machine was their lovechild
they named it Advance
and how could it not
be the future?
That city was my first home

     Have you heard it’s in ruins?

Next to 40 stories of abandoned smashed-glass skyscraper
and the startled remains of a Beaux-Arts station where
the 20th Century Limited pulled in and men and women
in hats and suits hired porters in perfectly shined shoes
Next to that  
                     long blocks of empty lots   
I’ve been gone too long to know how the day-to-day goes  
But it’s a Black city now   no supermarkets settle in 
and nothing fresh comes from a liquor store
So the women go to the vacant spaces   clean up the shards  
the bullets    the needles
hoe   plow  weed  seed and feed the ground that belongs
to no one   put in tomatoes  corn   greens   potatoes   
And the earth knows they are listening
says “Barter”   says “Seed exchange”     says “Saturday market”

Outside of the churches   among the early sprouts
they say prayers for the crop   grandaddy’s hymn and Gaia hip-hop
arms reaching  not skyward
but down 
toward the rich  reconsecrated land
of Detroit
 

                                
 

   

   

The Plane Tree & the Woman Born of a Doe

Plane Tree in Winter  Bill Fulton Photos

       Every year the Plane tree across the street re-leafs later. It's May and there is just a bare hint of that new early chartreuse. Every year I ask myself "What if there were no new leaves, if the tree couldn’t do the labor of creating buds any longer?" I love the Plane tree's canopy. It spreads across the street where I have lived for 20 years, and gives such an abundance of green. It reminds me of the street where I grew up in Detroit, the elms forming a long meet-in-the-middle tunnel the length of the block.  Here in California lush greenness is spring-brief, then the rains stop and the hills slowly turn brown.

       Yesterday a neighbor said Peter-the-Tree-Man wants to take the tree out, it’s sick, it’s old, it’s dying - and I am close to tears. The neighbor says “So things die, trees die, they’ll plant another one”, and I give him my try-smile, say “See you later” and walk away.  I’ve learned that trying to get this neighbor, who loves all art that tribes create, to care deeply for these plane trees, or take in what they mean to me, is a poor use of my time.  

     Bill & I have dealt with diseased plants. We were able to save our pear tree. When the blackened leaves that give the disease its name, ‘fire-blight’, appeared, we knew we would not give the tree up easily, and we treated and pruned and special-fed - and yes, talked to it (sang actually) and it lived. It seems to be hard for me to remember that plants, as living things, have life cycles and illness - they are not forever, as art can be, though even art is subject to decay. A few years ago, at the temples of Angkor Wat I wrote:
                                     

Tree Growing out of  Temple  Bill Fulton Photos

 The silent struggle of rock and root.
Huge trees growing out of temple stones.
What doesn’t grow cannot free itself.
What cannot die will outlast roots.

     And speaking of art, I’ve been working on a poem based on Kiki Smith’s art. Again. I hadn’t looked at the book of her work for a while and felt that it still held another poem. Ah the bronze of those sculptures, the endurance of metal. One sculpture is a woman stepping out of the body of a wolf,  the other is a woman born of a doe, her feet still held in the deer's birth passage.

Kiki Smith, Rapture, property of the artist/Pace Wildenstein Gallery

 

Kiki Smith, 2002,  Born, Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund

They are preserved for as long as what-cannot-die doesn’t succomb to rust. Perhaps that is a part of my love of art - its endurance. The ability to conserve, to preserve, to restore, to renovate. Unlike the tree, there is no given limit to its time. But then I look again, and I see that the woman stepping out of the wolf is just on the brink, but can never be fully free, and a woman has been born of a doe, but that silent, fleet beauty will hold her feet forever.

      The visual arts are caught at the moment, in the metaphor, as a symbol. The beautiful butterfly Smith has created in one sculpture will remain - but the butterfly's power for us includes the stages it went through on the way to becoming. And of course all art is not beautiful. I am reading David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land. It is an anguished tale that gathers you into itself and takes you on a journey that is fraught, and one doubts the possibility of redemption before the journey ends - and should the journey/book even be completed?


     I cannot abandon the natural world for art, though I know many have done it, and I taught alongside them.  I cannot abandon art, cannot stop reading what I need to know, because it may cause anguish. I must live in both worlds, and suffer the pain I will feel when Peter tears down that tree limb from limb. When I’m walking I will not see that canopy from a distance, not see the winter sunset between its bare branches, when the sky is stained glass and the tree is the black leading.

    Just as I must both suffer what is happening to the earth and still enjoy the beauty of the planet. I must hold the opposites.  Over and over life gives me more possibilities to learn that. To practice it. Who knows what the next challenge will be.

  Metamorph  ising


                           for the artist Kiki Smith


Metamorphosis means more than once
as it is with egg  larva  pupa  butterfly
as it is with some lives when larval stripes
and slow ripple are shed again and again
then comes the mimicry of dead leaf
till finally chrysalis splits  and out flutters
wet-winged splendor

I saw a woman born of a doe
I saw a woman step out of the body of a wolf
There is return

Gaia I know you are wounded
it is hard for you to breathe
I dreamed you shed your scarred
strip mined surface
and underneath was skin
the pink of healing

Now you must rest
and all of us   wolf  doe
woman  man  become pupa 
In our silk cocoons
we wait
suspended
                                               
    
                                                                                      
               
                                            

Lynn & Leah: A Dialogue in Art & Poetry

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Images

        I had the pleasure last month of spending an afternoon in the gallery of Lynn Alicia Franco's home, among her multimedia sculptures.  I wrote about her art, which had captured the heart of my sometimes finicky muse. We decided that I would do a blog of her art and my poems. 
              Lynn Alicia is a Jungian psychoanalyst, and besides her private analytic practice, 
              she teaches, supervises and consults for The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley, 
              and for candidates and interns at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.                                                                       


                Alchemerical

Bill Fulton Photos

What if you could sculpt whatever you dreamed?                        
What if your voice spoke in clay
the way some speak in numbers  
the way I siphon ink from tears and the sea?                                
What if all that you dreamed
couldn’t be shaped in clay 
couldn’t be fired?
What if it needed grain
needed the density of a growing thing?
What if you could also carve wood  
and join wood to clay 
as earth is joined to tree   
and still keep the fire?
        

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Image

                A Good Catch

     Of course you sculpted the pelican
     with a fish in its mouth
     golden fish   treasurefish
     Of course I must write
     about hunger
     about the skimming flight   the dive
     the misses  
     
     His fishline arcs  goes taut  
           tight pull of lifestruggle
                golden fish   treasurefish
                     bringing it home
               

           
                                     
                                           

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Images


                   
                



            

                                  
                     Cloth-in-Clay

             You travel among tribes
             where weavers star
             in the play of identity
             and O those intricate designs!
             You sculpt a man with a ceramic belt
             patterned in a hieroglyph of clay bits
             Is this a code? Is there a key
             to your language?

   
  
 Naked  not nude 
 
    What is the difference?
         A man paints  sculpts   gazes
               at nudes
             A woman makes herself
                   naked
                 To make a self
                    And here you are
                      a bare Medusa-headed
                         surf rider on a drift of wood
                            with seashell pink
                                 ceramic wings 
                                    Or are they fins?
                                         Either way
                                               you fly!                             
                                    

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Images

                                                                                      
                                                                                             
                                                                                    

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Image

A Pair of Ravens
Medievals believed 
the pelican                         
pecked her own breast
to feed her children
Bird as symbol   bird as Christ
Here one raven pecks 
the chest of another 
till the heart is exposed
And we humans know who does that
don't we?

                                                        

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Images

                                                 Death & the BuddhaBabe

                                                           The clay hand
                                                       large enough to hold
                                                      a cracked human skull
                                                         has soiled knuckles
                                                             dirt under nails
                                                            as if it dug   hard
                                                              and gloveless
                                                             into the grave
                                                                  Facing
                                                             hand and skull
                                                              a roselipped
                                                                blue-eyed
                                                               BuddhaBabe
                                                             and on his cheek
                                                                a crystal tear

                                                            Oh  I almost forgot
                                                          the BuddhaBabe’s arms
                                                            are raised in surrender                               

Bill Fulton Photos

          Arcadia

Part goat  part man
Lynn’s Pan                 
relaxes on the mantle                                                   
one leg crossed over the other
shaggychested  shaggyhoofed
and yes the lower arms  the hands
are hairy   but what about the….
I get up and
look between his legs
and he’s all man
Pan  pandemonium  panic
I  call it
wildhearted glee


   
                      

       

Edgewalkers* and the Wild Heart

 Many years ago I wrote:
“We walk upright and apart
 divorced from our wild heart”
and though it says “we” it was my own wild heart I was lamenting.

     Recently, in the rain forest of Chiapas, I rediscovered my ‘wild heart’. I called it ‘alegria’, and experienced it as a sweetness and joy and freedom and presence in the moment. And fearlessness.

     I will be 70 next year. I want to live the rest of my life open to my wild heart. I ask myself what I have to change, what I have to give up, and what does wildness really mean?                                                                
The cultural ecologist David Abram says that
“Wildness is the earthy, untamed undomes-ticated state of things - open-ended, improvisational, moving according to its own boisterous logic. That which is wild is not really out of control, it is simply out of our control. Wildness is not a state of disorder, but a condition whose order is not imposed from the outside. Wild land follows its own order, its own Tao, its own inherent way in the world.”    

     That last line strikes me. Couldn’t it be rewritten to apply to ourselves? The wild heart follows its own order, its own Tao, its own inherent way in the world. Isn’t that what Jung meant by individuation?

     And what does it mean to write from a wild heart? Does it mean you are free from the collective, free of influence?  I never want to be free of empathy. 

'Figure with Black Torso'

     Recently we saw an exhibit of the ceramic sculpture of Stephen de Staebler. When he was young, he was guided by a love of ancient art - Egyptian sarcophagi, Mayan temples, medieval funerary art.  He discarded these influences as he began to explore his own personal imagery and history. His work fuses rock and remnants of sculpture with the human body. His art became freer - it soared! He was creating from his own wild heart.             
  
     Must we begin creating from the Outside? I think of our friend Lynn Franco, who, from the beginning of her work in ceramic sculpture, created spontaneously from her dreams and psyche. It isn’t all ‘alegria’.  When the wild heart suffers, the inner world opens.        

'Broken Lady'

     Inside. Outside. Some of us are at the center of our fields, our art form, our social and political work, and some bring change in from the edge. I learned a great deal about the role of Outsiders from Linda Schele.  

  In a taped interview she talked about how her contributions to our knowledge of the Maya came about.  When she first visited the temples of Palenque in Mexico, she was an artist who taught studio art. She fell in love with Palenque, with the Mayan world - and changed her life to study and
understand it.

     At that time the central figures in Mayan archeology and epigraphy, academics from Yale & Harvard, were unable to move forward. There was no real progress in deciphering Mayan writing,  history or mythology, because their Standard Model couldn’t be challenged.
 
     It was Linda Schele, along with a few others, who broke the Mayan code, interpreted the history of the rulers of Palenque, and discovered the astonishing fact that Mayan myth is a mirror of the constellations in the  night sky.

     Linda called herself an Edgewalker. Edgewalkers push the box, and change its shape. They may do their work in more than one field, or straddle two cultures. They are the ChangeBringers, who force people to ask different questions, and provide answers that were never considered. Their lack of Traditional Expertise is the very qualification that allows them to break through to new territory.
 
     Linda Schele had a wild heart. She had a passion for the Maya, and the fearlessness of an outsider unafraid to trespass on the center’s accepted truths.

      I have always been an Edgewalker, and I think of the Edgewalkers I know or know of: David Abrams,  Carolyn Raffensperger, an attorney and founder of SEHN, whose Precautionary Principle is influencing the center,  Mel Mathews of Fisher King Press, my visionary publisher, Terry Tempest Williams, writer, poet and environmentalist, and so many others in the arts, science, politics……..
 
     I worry less that Yeats “Center does not hold.” I am counting on the wild-hearted Edgewalkers to take us forward.

Sha Sha Higby Artist/Performer

 * The term Edgewalker is the title of a video interview of Linda Schele made in 1998, and released in 2010. A book with that title was published by Judi Neal in 2006.

                             
 

 

           

The Gods' Tale: A Fable

     There are ceremonies still held at the Mayan temples of Palenque in Mexico. Some are secret and some are Officially Sanctioned. The Lacantun people guard the frescoes of Bonampak given to them by the State. The Maya surround the site of Chichen Itza. But to get to Yakchilán you must travel to the end of the country, to the Usumacinta, the river that separates Mexico from Guatemala. 
You have to hire a launch and go down the fast brown river and climb the high bank. When you arrive at the center you will feel the handwoven blanket of grief over the temples. The Rain Bringers, the MaizeSeed spirit, the Burden Bearers, the Yum Kaax, spirits of the forest, have been abandoned. There is never smokerise from the painted censors.The palapa-altars that the shamans still build are never constructed here.

        But the gods still take the voice of the birds, and Yax-kom mut, the green firefly bird, lands on a branch and begins:  
    "All day, and almost every day of ever year, the launches arrive.  At first we were hopeful. Sometimes, after war, everyone left, but they always returned. We heard the voices and thought our people were coming back. They arrive in boats without paddles. A new, loud power moves the boats and cripples Silence. They move faster than the river, almost as fast as the birds. Their skin is not brown, their hair is not black, their features lack the elegance of our people. 
      It took us so long to realize they knew nothing about us, that they were strangers. Strangers because they couldn’t feel our presence - even when we poured rain on them, when we turned our power over to the stones, and their eyes followed us up the stairs of the temples.     

     They never stay for long. They return to the boats speaking of where they go next. We have never received a blessing. Not a wisp of smoke.
         O great trees. Holy trees. You who are beyond wanting.”
                                                                    

                                                              




      

   
 
                                           

                          

Traveling the Road Not Taken

Misol-Ha, Chiapas

                           

      In 1963  I traveled and worked in Chiapas, Mexico.  There were  rumors of waterfalls,  blue-green rivers,  a Mayan city on the banks of a river that could only be reached by motor launch,  and a newly discovered temple with painted frescoes, days away from San Cristóbal.  

       All of these places were unreachable. The forest was dense and roadless, and two young women traveling alone with machete-wielding chicleros was not a good idea.  The road from San Cristóbal into the mountains, which occasionally turned into a track, ended at Tenosique. Or was it Ocosingo? To get from San Cristóbal to the Mayan site of Palenque, we went back to Tuxtla, the capitol of Chiapas, and flew with a bush pilot, who barely rose above the mountains and deposited us in a ditch.   

Temple of the Sun, Palenque   (all photos are mine)

       In Mexico, I became who I am - or who I can be.  Adventurous, curious about everything to do with culture, with textiles, reading everything, fairly fearless - and, at that time, with a never-before-free spirit. 

     Though I longed for adventure and discovery, I did not become a field anthropologist, living in a tropical village and learning a native language. I did not work on digs hoping to find something as exciting as the burial chamber in Palenque, with its jade-masked skeleton of a deified ruler.  I became a community college instructor, and remained in the same town, and worked at the same college, and that was my calling, and I called myself fortunate.

         Over the years, I would read over the names on my aging map of Mexico, watch documentaries on the people of Chiapas, and read everything I could find on the cracking of the Mayan code, and the Zapatistas, the revolutionaries among “my” people.   

     Several years ago I bought a new map of Mexico. Red lines for major roads went to Palenque and all the way south to the Usamacinta river! I retired, and we began to travel…..

     And then, this January,  we were there! Careening vans opened the landscape of Chiapas to us. Here was the rumored and murmuring waterfall, and here was the how-can-it-be-aquamarine river,

Agua Azul

and there were the great trees that hid the ruins of Yaxchilan on the high cliff above the wide brown rush of water.

    

    When we came to the turn-off for Bonampak, we switched vans, and a long-haired Lacandon in traditional white toga drove us through miles of  one of the last remaining Preserves of uncut rain forest. We walked up to the temple, and there, finally, were the frescoes!

     It was as though all the locked places in myself flew open.  My dear husband opened to these magical places as well, and of course I wrote constantly. Here are some of my notes, on the way to becoming poems:

    Oh the trees    the magnificent    magnanimous trees   the odd and slightly sinister  the bearded tree and the one whose branches  are braided    and the flowers that flourish in the shade  

El Chanpan

           Each path is a seduction 

     Palenque: Traveled the world for 7 years and this is where I most wanted to be   elegant temples in the rainforest   

a watertumble of creeks that sometimes river     

Palenque

     How happy I am in the lush greening patterns of light and shade and water running   running over rock    then rock becomes hillock   becomes cliff
Is there no end to higher?  

     At Bonampak I am  so moved as the Maya white stone grey stone world   turns colorfresco and lives   oh, oh  like a Mayan Sistine chapel  
 

           Mountains covered in forest and the desire to penetrate    

  to go inside  
Always wanting to go
                                    inside…..

Yaxchilan

          


 
 

  

     

         

       

                               
       

It Began with Mother Goose

                                                                
      I received a question from a woman with a three year old daughter. The child walks around rhyming to herself out loud. The woman wanted to know how to encourage poetry in a child. Did my parents do anything to encourage me? My answer was that it all began with Mother Goose. 

      My mother read me nursery rhymes. and I turned pages and looked at pictures. I mem- orized them and walked around the house sing-songing “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean.” I thought I was Little Miss Muffet and worried about spiders, and I tumbled down a nearby hill like Jill of Jack and Jill.

                           
It was a living world, but I created my own world as well:
 
They teach her the easy trick
of a tricycle
she imagines her way
around the block
she’s the sheriff
and the bike is her horse
she tracks down bad guys
and rescues a child
dressed in her own clothes

       My mother  taught me how to read and write on a blackboard easel when I was 4. She was a great believer in thank you notes. Bernie Birnbaum, our pediatrician, made house calls for measles, chicken pox, ear infections, and each time he came I was encour-
aged to write a thank you note on folded construction paper covered with stickers and stars - and those notes, with mother’s help, became little rhymed verses. Not that this is unusual. Those who teach poetry in the schools know how naturally creative children are with language.
                
      But there was aloneness in my childhood too, as there were no other kids to play with until I was eight, and I was sent outside to play by myself.  I say aloneness rather than loneliness, because it did not feel bad to be alone.

She is left in the yard
that is nowhere
and there is nothing
but the mist and the vine  
she sees herself
in a morning glory  
and hears the sound of a train
it is calling her  
she thinks the whistle
must be her name

      The ability to tolerate and even enjoy being alone - to turn it into creative solitude - is crucial. The most talented young poet I’ve ever known hated being an only child, threw herself into social life in high school, and has not written since. I’m hoping that someday she will be captured by the Muse and carried back to poetry.

      Before I started kindergarden I had my own library card, and later I went to the Sherwood Forest library once a week on my blue Columbia Paratrooper, (it folded in the middle, the handlebars collapsed, and it was a child’s version of the bikes used in WWII. As it aged, it would fold in the middle while I was riding it.) 

I brought home 5 or 6 books. In winter I hoped for new snow to track through as I walked to the library muffled and galoshed and gloved.
                                              
      We did not have a television until I was 8, and I already had the habit of reading. Until then we listened to the radio. With books and radio you have to fill in the missing visual and or auditory dimen-  sions to have a satisfactory experience.  TV and video do not require the imagination for sense or enjoyment, and continual activity seems to fill kids’ lives, so I’m not sure how the imagination develops now. I do know that my college students who never read for pleasure could not visualize the narrative or characters.

      I was given a diary with a lock and key when I was 8, and I used it to write stories, and play with words, and confide secrets, and I created names for myself in pseudo-Indian languages, since
I did not like the anglicized version of Leah my parents insisted on using.  I don’t remember the name I gave the diary, but it was my Best Friend.

     And I still keep a journal. Sometimes what begins as a couple of lines in my journal turns into a poem.  I can add images to Pages, and I’m often inspired by art, and music, neither of which were a part of my parents’ lives. I told the woman who asked the question which began this blog, that art, music, and nature, introduced early, will not disappear. And even if what is experienced is lost, there is always the chance it will return later. Sometimes I believe that nothing is ever lost.

The poems in this blog are from my chapbook A Flash of Angel, published by Blue Light Press.