Greater Chaco fundraiser

 

Me and Daniel Tso at Chaco fundraiser, Santa Fe Art Institute

I read my poem “The Tour or Fracking is Fracking” at the Greater Chaco fundraiser, Saturday May 12, at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Thank you to Jules and John for the anthology and for donating copies of Water to the cause. Daniel Tso invited speakers and one poet. Such an honor.

“The Fracking Reality Tour” is led by Daniel Tso and Robert Tohe, supported by the Diné Cares organization, with assistance from the Sierra Club NM. Many many groups have gone out with Daniel and Robert to see the horror of fracking and the destruction happening on Navajo Land since Lena and I went with them three years ago.   40,000 frack wells and counting.  The wasted methane is burned into the growing toxic cloud. Neighboring states participate in the methane capture program, but our governor continues not to enforce the capture rule. Too bad, as the profits from methane sales can go directly to school programs. Colorado models this behavior as NM continues to burn up 40-50 million dollars a year in wasted, polluting methane. Hah! This issue is an on-going battle. Not to mention the toxic particulates the fracking releases into the air and water and bodies of those who have lived there for generations. Daniel’s clan has inhabited this area since the beginning of Time. He spoke of the sacred energy under the surface of the soil, energy that the money-mad oil and gas companies are seeking in destructive ways.

And some of that is in my poem p.108 in Water. The basket containing the copies of Water, some seeds for hope, and a few gift cards, went for $250. Thank you, again, Jules and John.

Here’s the poem

 

The Tour or “Fracking Is Fracking”

 

We headed south at Counselors, NM, 17 miles west of Cuba

the quiet red rock, pastoral beauty,

known as Sisnataal,  ‘wide belt mountain’

 

Rains have turned Navajo land green, but

off the highway, fracking for oil is everywhere, even in

the velvet, hut-like hills Georgia O’Keefe dubbed The Black Place.

Coal in the soil colors the mounds that look like

whales or hundreds of igloos in grey rock.

Red soils layer yellow, dappled with green on the cliffs.

The badlands are beautiful from El Niño surface water

The elder named Daniel sits in the back with me

to tell stories of fracking and drilling in the land where

the horse spirit was created, as told in stories, he says,

through the generations. He told us how his mama spanked

him or his siblings if they ran on the shifting sand hills.

I think of O’Keefe, and her Stieglitz in NY

making his fortune on these hills,

wild flowers and cow bones, her craggy face.

 

The piled up “blue pipes in the ditch run domestic water,”

Daniel says, to the parched lands of Dinétah.

More, perhaps, “in case, the acquifer in use is ruined.

This project is federally funded.”

Fracking water awaits injection into the land

in ominous metal bins at each site. Each site painted an earth

tone to match as closely as possible, the surrounding colors.

Each site just one of thousands, unmanned and likely to leak.

The initial fracking cocktail infuses almost a mile into the earth

then a mile horizontally in two directions, releasing wasted

methane to burn off, seeking crude oil, creating poisoned water.

The methane lost in this last year could have heated 350,000

New Mexican homes all winter long.

Oil trucks like wooly mammoths rampage

soft dirt roads, destroy tarmac on highways,

create traffic on the dusty paths used by families,

farmers, and school kids in busses. Many passed us that day.

The royalties and taxes from selling, not wasting the methane

might have gone to schools. All 42 million of it.

 

Each landowner or allottee gets a royalty check when

the oil hits the well head. It’s

not enough for the ruination of sacred land,

a people, their history and future, but it is a huge

amount of money in hand. Our neighboring states

capture and use their methane.  Our Gov wants

our methane burning up into the methane clouds.

 

Exhausted from the bumpy ride and the sorrow, heading back

I ask Daniel questions about the sixties, the seventies

in Navajo Land.  Two elders can talk like that.  He tells me about

his brother hanging out with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Taos.

I ask him if LSD hit the Rez. He smiles. We remember the days.

I won’t forget, the fracking stations,

the squat, toad-like silos of oil, gas,

and the misleading term “produced water,”

the euphemism for poison, awaiting injection back into the Rez.

There is a creek that will burn if you put a match to it,

a woman from Di-né Cares said on Gene Grants’ news show.

 

 

 

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swimming upstream NaPoWriMo #30

Slatted blinds, oak, broken, dog chewed,

replaced last year with European lace. “Old lady

curtains,” my daughter said. But I love them.

 

The house is our heartbeat, our job

like vagabonds given blossoms

to bathe in, dust and roses, prim roses.

 

We tend plumbing drips,

drying paint on window sills, fruit trees

we planted over the years: apricots and figs,

dates, apples. peaches. The sweet survival.

 

Why do I always need an escape plan?

My body leans like coastal trees

toward wind-blistered solitude,

a depiction of nature’s dominance.

 

Why return to the sea? I love people here,

the desert, my friends, family, the trailer

that sits for free in our driveway.

 

I never meant to get old, to run out of juice

for energetic gardening, for sharing.

But I can see it coming

sure as the tides are rising.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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For Eleanor NaPoWriMo #24

For Eleanor, a confabulation of stories

April 23, 2018 by merimee

 

She really did look pretty with the angora shawl

arranged around her turquoise top

It brought out the blue in her eyes that must’ve made many a man swoon

and so she tucked her hair into the beaded butterfly cap

grabbed her book of poems and wheeled down to the nurses’ station.

 

Anything, anyone to distract her from the sleepless night

the whole day in the awkward plasti-coated bed causing

her to dread the many hours of another starless, endless, frightening night .

But “Yes,” he said, “Of course you may hang out with me here,”

and she mentioned her poems, the book open on her knees;

he was the best one at lifting her, with her good leg now healing, and

so she lifted him with her gift of words, patient, vivid memories of her past.

A gentle giant, she called him, a man with hands twice the size of hers;

she’d gushed like a girl in love telling of the kindness she’d found.

Rehabilitation facilities are famously full of incompetent youth,

attempting to care for the suffering elderly, but just not getting it.

 

And yet, the night nurse, neither young nor elderly, Lamont we’ll call him,

was a knight of magical powers who seemed he could, if only he  had his

valiant steed at work with him, he would have swooped her up

across his horse’s back and galloped her into the desert for

star-gazing delights.

 

Just out of reach, just out the door, and

so, she read him her poems as he sat and listened entranced,

at 2 AM, just the two of them, but first, and after, he held her hand.

 

The pain and fear left as he magnetically took it from her;

from her fingers and palms he let the anguish pass into him where

he tossed it like lightning out into the ethers, his mighty arms

giving a great fling, and what she carried had diminished as her gratitude increased.

There are many ways to love;

Lamont the night nurse was Eleanor’s gift of the illness, the gift of love.

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NaPoWriMo #19

So what the fuck has kept me alive these 72 years?

well, almost 72, come Gemini time

My husband?  the one who anchors? makes us eat

makes me love him even if our love is like a staring match

Hah! gothcha—you blinked—so one of us has to put out

something—a meal, some food from god knows where,

old song lyrics, the silence we both understand

 

We can hear

each other’s thoughts, after 37 years, hyphenated by the

time we married other folks,

avoiding the imperfection of us, but damn.

 

The heat melts then comes in  warm wind

every now and then

like a blue moon

like Haley’s Comet—

 

Sheer obedience to the inner guru

keeps us glueing ourselves

so far, set up and vice gripped into integrity.

Tony Mares told me, too, to keep on writing.

 

I write to amuse myself, and others.

He works to amuse me and himself.

We’re a silly, quiet pair of gloves.

The kids show up to remind us of

the work we did to feed and clothe,

educate, play and entertain. It was grand.

 

What is it now about my body slowing?

Nature has invaded my drive

and I tread water in place,

waiting to be useful. Finish a poem.

Read others’ work. Check the weather.

 

Visit the less fortunate trapped

in hideous, inhumane facilities

and a half-way house.

What the fuck is a half-way house?

It’s either a house or it isn’t.

That one isn’t. It’s jail, no bail, no bond.

 

Opining lets me know I have time to sew—

a pretty thing for one of the girls.

We bought the fabric long ago. I will start that

goddess-willing, on the morrow.

 

 

 

 

 

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NaPoWriMo 18

Those paths you’d rather not take?

 

Well, someone’s on them. A woman in a fake hospital,

a medical money collecting agency that squeezes every dime

out of crime against the ill: negligence, incompetence

unkind roughness—lifting my friend by her arm

making her cry. Abandoning her, bed bound, 14 hours at a time.

The nerve of these guys. Don’t spoil a pretty day by looking

too close at what we do to the isolated few, or the ones waiting

to die. Oh God, line up your friends, you do need help if old and ill.

The lovely patio sits unused as no one is assigned to wheel

patients outside for sun and air—the look of desperation is

despair. It’s come to this? Rehab for a wound in a prison-like

atmosphere. Shame on us and our for-profit care.

 

Meanwhile, over at the half-way house, those waiting

for prison and those just getting out, mingle in a half-jail

a half-house half hell, some held indefinitely, without

bail, without trial. Nine men to a dorm room,

no open windows allowed.  Yes, be careful of that, don’t

let an illness out of hand send you there for your what-fors.

 

I might be frightened of this crowd of tough guys and

hard-looking women, but I know them from my teacher days,

the kids against the wall, the kids in dark clothes, the ones a little

hungry, a little confused. It’s them in their adult versions.

They’re worn down now, tired of the mess of it, the rules

and bedtimes, the petty spite of the not caged toward the caged ins.

Not fun.  Not fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nonsense NaPoWriMo 11, 12, & 13

Nonsense

“Ensanguine,”he said. We wanded fingers
over personal screens: “To make bloody or crimson.”
Those crimson sheets and panties, all-engulfing sex, life
gulping reason, dying for thirst. Drink my blood,
look, slowly now, then, in lusty crayon crimson.

Optimistic, really, floating as we do, in blood,
optimistic that blood is good, good red blood
good blood between us
blood sisters for life

bloodied husband and wife

Exsanguinate—hah! Deflate the memory, dissolve
the vibrancy, turn me teal upon arrival.

Don’t let me down, No, please, don’t let me down.
Lets anticipate the dream in vivid palette.

 

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Hippie (NaPoWriMo #9 & 10)

Hippie, well, yes, but

by Merimee

I wasn’t a very hip hippie—

imposter—I liked beer and Louie Martini

more than Acapulco Gold.

I loved vintage clothes

living freely, impulsively, loving

whom I pleased (myself) to love.

 

I liked the living differently, the burn your

own path, bake your own bread,

knit your own socks, live out of the free

box. I loved my parents who lived

on planet normal but didn’t express

love. I tried to make up for their

lack of by having enough of my own.

Sunshine, the parks, the feel of cloth

for making things, the beads I never really dug

but tried. I didn’t much like shoes so

mostly, in California, barefoot was just fine.

 

I wasn’t very hip. I knew there was so much

I couldn’t do. Only because I thought I

couldn’t. I’m hip to that now, in my 8th

decade, a little hip. We’ve lost our way

as we knew we would with the moron

on high, the grand Poobah of them all.

Loving is a tough practice, not for sissies.

 

It’s fun to see the footage from back then:

the Haight, the Dead, the hair and pretty women.

I was saddhu enough; no make-up for me, no shaving,

or bras, au natural. And those pretty boys

dead and gone, most of them now. Oh I was so

bad, so self-concerned, so shy and inept. Such a dufus.

A dufa. A dollop of chocolate on a stick. Silly days

of love and music, competitive hipness, hipper-

than-thou turning too many to booze and hard stuff.

 

Thank the Goddess for my babies; my little teachers

who made a woman out of me. xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

RIP George, Jamie, Steve, and Michael. I wanted

to know what was bad about bad, and you guys,

you taught me a thing or two.  I guess I liked you

cuz you weren’t good to me,

made it so I didn’t owe you a thing. Survival it was;

took a while cuz, I couldn’t stand much aloneness. But

that was the gift from all of you, solitude. Thank you for that.

 

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Embrace #8 NaPoWriMo 2018

Embrace an English teacher today.

At least think about it:

her eyes like dos puntos: period period..

His member an exclamation incarnate!

The vehicle of Interjections!

Speculate on ellipses and spaces:

drafting, practice, practice.

Imagine an English teacher, Mr. So and So, his khakis

creased, his loafers left at the door;

he is polishing his hardwood floor

with the whitest of socks, uncovering his tattoo which

says, “Embrace the pen, use me as your muse.”

 

Imagine a stack of books all poetry;

where would we be without our teachers?

Just a hand, a moving ghost at the street light,

all text turning to symbols, hurdling backwards in

time to hieroglyphics,

caveman cavewoman did not punctuate.

 

Can an English teacher easily be replaced by say, the school bus driver

between picking up and dropping off ? —just read, kid.  Sit down and shut up.

Just write the sentences and don’t ax no questions—easy—

shut up—you hit that kid and I’ma put you on the corner, and I don’t

care if your mama ever find you.  Shut up—no hands out

the windows; class dismissed.

 

So who cares about books; whole books take too much time.

Who needs Steinbeck and Tim O’Brien, Willa Cather, Rita Dove

and Randall Jarrall?

Mary Oliver? —who needs English when we have French and Greek,

Lorca and Neruda—who need periods and semi-colons?

Ever heard of semi-colons anonymous?

It works.  Keeps the focus on you and not those problematic little scratches on pages

Fuck English teachers, we want soul stories, soul poets. Who needs to communicate clearly

when we can say how we feel right here?—who needs the page, age, writing, speaking clearly?

Lawyers maybe, not you and me.

Engineers, sure, not you and me. And so the bridges fall.

Who needs English teachers?  fuck em—

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#5 & # 6 NaPoWriMo 2018

#5 & #6                        April 6, 2018  mm

The year of my first daughter, Jorie Graham’s Erosion—

I still have little time to read the stacks and piles, glean

an education that in the end does not surpass the births,

the babies who dropped from my closed heart, their

little fists wrapped tight to me like holding parachute strings.

 

More important, the breeze of each day, than who

had written what, before or around me, while I nursed,

cooked, wrote on the fly, little notebooks on Sunday

morning escapes, and the father, self-entertained, cooked

the pancakes and allowed these moments of walking free.

 

Bursting my skin with feminism I wouldn’t move far from

university, the geese and grass for them; the hallowed halls

and pedigrees for me. Released unto the world to twirl

my ways and words as—waiting minds lined up. Kids

one and all; the piles of books now whisper welcome lullabies.

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#4 New Flame

Have I secretly been saving them up to look at later

The women who made it into the grind and out the press?

 

Oh that my dad had shown me Maxine Kumin those years

he was stuck on Ralph Waldo and Joseph this ‘n that.

 

I must be my own husband the therapist said, and so

In honor of my father I fall in dervish love again, rarely

 

with some mortal man of tedious tending but the Goddess’s

of the pen, La Plume, the fortune of womanliness to spend.

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