Baja Travels
March 2018
Malice Point
A shard of land
Aimed carefully
Ready to be flung
Or sprung
Or catapulted
Or thrust into a bay
Where bones of whaling vessels
Molder
Or vessels meant for war
Lie waiting for commands
Nothing Here is Natural
San Diego
Restored declivities
Controlled and managed
Two miles from the border
Where languages cross over
Neighborhoods
With wind
Like plastic bags and candy wrappers
Minimum Hourly Rage
I’ve earned it
After a day on the sea
His bones blinked a deep blue-green
Throughout the night
The Museum at San Ignacio Cathedral
A barrel vaulted ceiling
Of stone and masonry
A garage sale museum
Filled with unused
Perhaps usable things
Maybe someday
A wooden chair
A Harmonium
A Christmas wreath
A broken woodens cross
Bottles
A chandelier
“Everything is useful… This pebble for instance. If I knew, I would be the Almighty who knew all. When you are born, and when you die… Who knows? I don’t know for what this pebble is useful but it must be useful. For if it is useless, everything is useless. So are the stars.” Il Matto in La Strada
Desert Museum
Rib bones of a mammoth
Skulls
Dusty bottles
Dry weeds
Skeleton of cactus
A rusty chassis of a tractor, or a car
Shells from somewhere,
Not here
Faded photographs of someone’s grandparents
Old postcards, perhaps prints of handcolored pictures
Giant ammonites
Collage
Pastiche
Postmodern sensibilities
No provenance
No discernable order
Uncatalogued
Sign the guest book
Make up your own stories
Have a coffee
Advice from Silko
“It is essential that the story be told, and that someone go on telling it.”
Migrating Words
I went traveling one March day
In search of migrating words
To watch them return to their lairs
And make new meaning.
Drab words gave birth to bright ones
Dark words wove brilliant coats for young ones
Words from far away or deep inside
Migrating words
Some words, like sand, carried impressions of
A heavy heart
Tread lightly on these words.
They contain thoughts and dreams
And everything that ever was or is
In every grain.
I stood on the bay
Waiting
And they came flying in:
Great swarms of them
Already diagrammed and ready to be used
Short words, long ones
Hovered together near the shore
Some with many syllables took to tree tops
Sometimes there are too many on one branch
And then it breaks
Some of smaller words nested on the dunes below
Some sought ponds or great lagoons of ambiguity
These liked the feel of mud between their letters
The damp beneath their verbs
Some sought brackish water
And from their formed stale metaphors
And salty rhymes.
Some knew how to herd
Unruly paragraphs
Some used guile and tricks
To lord it over nouns
Words with actual feathers
Eccentric words, so seldom used,
Made odd choices
Defied punctuations chasing after them
No one knows how they know
Just where to go or when
And when they leave,
Sometimes one gets left behind
Or crashes into rocks
And slips into the wrong story.
A Lifetime of Whales in One Day
…one of us exclaims.
We’ve been playing among them
Like children
Singing, whistling
Giggling, laughing
Importuning.
Assigning motives to their every move.
All for a touch, a lip, a kiss, a tongue
But there is a border there, too,
A line we cannot cross.
Painted Cave
Strong arms held out before us
Make a handhold
Rungs of flesh
To help us scale
The rock strewn incline
Loose pebbles on sand
Scatter like bbs beneath our
Feet
We scramble on and grasp each arm
But not its language
Nor it ours
But then, one by one, we reach the top
And crouch low to crawl into a cave
And look into the shadows
And behold
A hundred painted
Notices from
Messengers we’ll never know
Whose story is this?
A language even more impenetrable.
“Go ahead, turn around. See the shape of your foot prints in the sand.” Silko
