Introduction: Deja Vu All Over Again

Hi everyone
Tomorrow I'm heading off to Big Sur with Eleanor and Carla (for Easter Vacation, no less). On Thursday night in preparation for the trip, Carla and I drove to Oakland's lovely Paramount Theatre to check up on Dylan who was playing there with Merle Haggard and the oldest beer joint band in the country. The decibel level at which Bobby plays these days is an assault on the senses...talk about WMDs. Moi, I'm pretty sure the guy is stone deaf. Yesterday, Carla left my house and went to visit Rus and after their walk in the redwoods I got an urgent phone message on my machine from Rus saying that he and Carla wanted to post a painting and poem TODAY on Vintage 64. "Time is of the essence" said he. "We think today is the one year anniversary of Billy's passing". I am wondering what made them remember this? Were they walking through a darkened grove and a shaft of sunlight stirred memory of passing time? Did it come to Carla in sleep, her ears still ringing from Zimmie's firing squad? Or to Rus, this morning as he made breakfast for Carla's visit?

So here we are, full circle, and yet another ring has been added to this giant old tree of our lives. And we gently come together in our own ways...Doug and Celeste had tickets to the same Dylan show in Seattle (at Seattle's Paramount) last week, Danny and I are still chatting online, I hear from Tom and Noi (in Phuket) regularly, Lew's sweet voice was on my machine last week, checking in...

So, swearing at Rus' message **%#@&###!!! "I don't know how to post images!!! I went to me trusty imac and lo and behold I did it. Blogger rocks and keeps evolving! I put this blog up awhile ago as an experiment I never followed through on. It came out of many conversations we had last summer about writing to a "theme". Getting out of Dodge was one of a few themes that emerged (really from some conversations a few of us had about individuating from the "scene" that developed around here in the late 60s, early 70s). Another theme is "Visions of Sur" which Rus is currently developing in his painting. (Carla recently sent me an inspiring book on the history of sur written by her cousin)...So I thought I'd just throw this all out there for discussion - (we can do it on the blog) and see what sticks. I'm sure there are myriad ways to start...maybe just checking in with what has been happening (or not) creatively for anyone. I was going to create a "new" blog but the bloggods wouldn't let me...so there you have it.

My two cents is this: I think our history is important in how we reconcile the past with the present and enter the future with hope. (This is badly said--help me out). I love a good story. I love how it feels to work together and I have a deep longing for some collaborative creativity...

Last Ride, R. Brutsche, Acrylic, 2005

Last Ride, R. Brutsche, Acrylic, 2005
Posted by: mdorenzo.

A brief flame,
Fierce and bright,
Riding hard on rough roads,
Well into the moonless night;
Sleek, low chopper speeding
Toward the hungry dawn,
Long hair streaming back,
Your face alight as daybreak comes.

--CARLA STANLEY MOSER

Soquel Cemetery

Soquel Cemetery
Posted by: mdorenzo.

Today I wanted to visit your grave and be
with you awhile under the spreading oaks,
to sit by the side of the Old San Jose Road
and place a bunch of Bachelor Buttons
and Sweet Williams by your headstone.

As soon as I read that you were gone,
I looked for you there. Before I knew where
they laid you, I walked around at dusk in
Soquel Cemetery through familiar territory
of uneasy grief, over the ground where we used
to walk, a lifetime ago when we were young.
I visited Billy Dean again, one of the first of
your roguish band to go, a gypsy rocker with
too much heroin in his veins and enough
amphetamine to bring him back, if only his
wild heart would have held. He's lain here
for over thirty years now at the edge of this
plot of earth overlooking the stream that
ran by your house up on Olive Springs, up
the winding road past Castalegno's store.

The same stream claimed Yoshimi's son, so
many years and so many deaths later. When
Jude went missing, he left his backpack
in the driveway with his notebooks and little
bindles of cocaine and weed, a breadcrumb
trail for family and friends to follow. They
searched the woods for three days until the
dogs finally led them to the secret, shady
hollow with its darting fingerling trout, where
Jude left his body, face down in Soquel Creek.

I walked over Stacy's grave, and recalled the
futile gesture of a mother's hands fluttering
like two white birds in windy flight, when
at last, she knew, it was time to commit her
copper-haired girl to the ground. Stacy, broken
and tired, took off her clothes and laid down
to rest on the cool kitchen floor. Her long red hair
fans out like a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, floating
just beneath the surface of life. Her laugh, grown
raspy, is quiet now. Her freckled hands lay still
and in my mind's eye, hold a child's bouquet of
violets, tea roses and forget-me-nots.

I've known this place forever, even before the
musicians and mountain folk gathered around
Billy Dean and tossed liquor bottles and reefer
into his grave while you silently watched.
I can almost see you kicking around with Tom,
year after year among the toppled stones and
granite angels, your boots dusty, motorcycles
parked in the shade, can hear the ticking sound
of their cooling engines. I know this ground,
you taught it to me, and death, that relentless
old teacher, continues to instruct.

The old cemetery at dusk calls its broken
children home and offers them a kind of peace
for poets and misfits, lays them down by the
old highway through the Santa Cruz Mountains.
It offers its bit of dirt in the margins of time,
its plastic roses and makeshift crosses growing
amidst weeds and walls of crumbling stone in
unpretentious array. Today, I want to sit by your
grave while the dappled light around me fades and
be a visiting ghost who remembers the dead.


Late September 2004