SUMMER 09, VOL. 2
Hiding Out with Joanne Kyger, Poet of West Marin
Steve Heilig
Modern poetry is for many readers something like the emperor’s new clothes. Although we are supposed to “see” and appreciate it, few of us do. The abstraction, the willful difficulty and obscure references prevalent in much “good” poetry are like medicine we suspect must be good for us simply because it tastes bad. So while many people profess to like it, few regularly read good poetry. Thus it’s all the more rewarding to find that rare poet whose words are neither a clever labyrinth of abstraction nor simplistic pap, but something that allows us to see things from new angles—and even to laugh while doing so….
Igor Sazevich, Point Reyes Morning Spaces, 2008, pen-and-ink drawing 7 ½ x 5 inches
Bolinas Lagoon
William Keener
Sink into a salt marsh. Walk out
and stand on black fragrant mud.
It will hold you, suck you down
with its slow viscous grip
until your rubber boots succumb.
Let your gaze go where it’s deep,
past cordgrass and pickleweed,
where curlews press their runes
in newlaid silt, and bivalves
leave their bubbles in the ooze.
Watch the clouds cream up
in a cerulean sky, as the light
comes gliding in from the west
to land like a flock at your feet.
The ebb tide’s last remaining
lamina of water makes the mud
a mirror where the avocets walk
with ease, each bird tipping
down to touch its upcurved bill.
And you can’t take another step,
transfixed in the sumptuous muck.
Kathleen P. Goodwin, South from Sculptured Beach, 2003, watercolor, 9 x 12 inches
Tomales Bank Robbery, 1996
Blair Fuller
...In 1990 I bought a house on “Maine Street” in Tomales. The house had been built before 1876 and was dilapidated, unpainted for many years and not lived in for ten or fifteen. The family that owned it had put it on the market five years before.
Tomales was then a seen-better-days small town. It had been founded by Irishman John Keys in 1850 when he discovered a usable port up an estuary from Tomales Bay. Ports are rare on the northern California coast, and Key’s small schooner, the Spray, could sail north from San Francisco and within two days turn south into Tomales Bay...
