Shoot. I am a dj, I am what I play… but I wander in the woodlot. I look at a hickory that took sixteen years to mature. Oaks that Beth and I planted here, twenty feet tall. The hickory has nuts, but the butternuts don’t. The walnuts finally crowding out box elders… Turkey foot grass — big bluestem — and prairie dropseed, and woodland sunflowers… did I finally kill the glade mallow, or did the deer help this summer? I have red oaks fighting with dogwoods, spruces, firs, pines, a lonely hemlock ripening up… cup plant prairie dock compass plant

You know there’s a walking in the woodlot blues in me mama, just trying to emerge.

Photos by Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945. Poem by Allen Ginsberg, 1978.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again…every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

— Walter Benjamin

Nagasaki Days

I — A Pleasant Afternoon

for Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup

One day 3 poets and 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chau-
tauqua tent in Aurora
listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating
words singing by in mountain winds
on a pleasant sunny day of rest — the wild wind blew thru
blue Heavens
filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central City to Rocky
Flats, Plutonium sizzled in its secret bed,
hot dogs sizzled in the Lion’s Club lunchwagon microwave
mouth, orangeade bubbled over in waxen cups
Traffic moved along Colefax, meditators silent in the Diamond
Castle shrine-room at Boulder followed the breath going
out of their nostrils,
Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths
& noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the
tent flapped happily open spacious & didn’t fall down.

June 18, 1978

II — Peace Protest

Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
– am I going to stop that?

*

Rocky Mountains rising behind us
Denver shining in morning light
– Led away from the crowd by police and photographers

*

Middleaged Ginsberg and Ellsberg taken down the road
to the greyhaired Sheriff’s van –
But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein
Come back!

III — Golden Courthouse

Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent
Prisoners, witnesses, Police –
the stenographer yawns into her palms.

August 9, 1978

IV — Everybody’s Fantasy

I walked outside & the bomb’d
dropped lots of plutonium
all over the Lower East Side
There weren’t any buildings left just
iron skeletons
groceries burned, potholes open to
stinking sewer waters

There were people starving and crawling
across the desert
the Martian UFOs with blue
Light destroyer rays
passed over and dried up all the
waters

Charred Amazon palmtrees for
hundreds of miles on both sides
of the river

August 10, 1978

V — Waiting Room at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant

“Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!”
the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk
– whap!

*

A green-letter’d shield on the pressboard wall!
“Life is fragile. Handle with care” –
My Goodness! here’s where they make the nuclear bomb
triggers.

August 17, 1978

VI — Numbers in Red Notebook

2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born

Summer 1978

Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg sat at a great distance from the sorrow, and though a great poet, the poem was ultimately about him and not about the reason so many gathered at Rocky Flats, the dull horror of a yellow hazed day with hot radioactive winds blowing, so many dead and the wind burning the very marrow out of the living.

China Cat Sunflower (1972)

I Know You Rider (1972)

I’m worried that Molly is running out of drugs. How codependent is that? Today marks the sixth week since she was tumbled under the ambulance, broke her hip, lacerated her hind quarters, bruised god knows what… The first few weeks after, she didn’t move much. The next couple of weeks she showed that the hip injury and the right rear leg were really painful. The Vet. put her on Deramaxx and the relief she experienced was amazing.

The fourth week after her injury, she scarcely could put her right foot on the ground. The fifth week we were traveling and left her boarded in a kennel. They cared for her, kept her quiet, and when we picked her up she was using that leg. She still favors it, but she runs up and down the stairs, plays with her dog friend from down the road a little, tosses her stuffed toys around the living room. She’s recovering and she isn’t in pain. But she’s still on the Deramaxx. The prescription runs out in a few days. The drug has side effects. Worry, worry, worry, worry…

She’s doing better. After getting rolled under the ambulance on June 22nd, suffering major deep lacerations, bruises, abrasions, and a broken hip, Molly is returning to her normal irrepressibility. This is not all a good thing since she still needs time to heal the hip. Chasing rabbits may slow her recovery. When we returned from vacation and picked her up from the kennel, she was using all four feet, something she simply didn’t do a week earlier when we dropped her off at the kennel. Even so, she mostly favors the right rear leg, and has learned the three legged farm dog gait. I hope another month of recovery will have her back on all four all the time.

* * *

In other Molly Bloom news, there’s a beauty of a new blog by Molly Ditmore of Molly Golightly that I’ll be following… Molly Bloom knows style. I wonder if she’ll eventually integrate StyleFeeder and get Halley some ROI for all the BlogHer schwag. But no, StyleFeeder is still part of the TopTenSources bonfire. As the touts at TechHunch point out, it isn’t really monetized yet.

Excellent memories of Mount Shasta and the Reading Creek Ranch will soon find their way to my Flickr account. Meanwhile here I sit in Larkspur Landing, checking email, getting ready for a dash across the bridge to PJ’s Oyster Bed and then from there down 280 to San Jose where some rest and relaxation will ensue.

Last night’s meal was a quirky surf and turf with some fresh salmon that Sherwood had just hauled out of the Trinity River, and a London Broil fresh from a Scottish highland longhair steer whose name I forget, but whom we remembered gratefully before digging in.

Say "Tillamook Cheese", originally uploaded by Paynt Ball.

No laughing. No reading.

Last night the Heathman Restaurant treated me to the fresh taste of crab in a salad unique in my experience and the most delicious crab concoction I have eaten. The chef pressed a generous couple of cups of crab meat into a cylindrical mold four or five inches in diameter. He then packed in a mixture of bite sized mango chunklets and a crushed avocado. The layered mixture was unpacked from the mold onto the plate like a child’s sand bucket upended at the beach, the plate was drizzled with a delicious citrus vinaigrette, five or six selected round arugula leaves were placed as garnish atop the tower, and the salad was served!

Ronni would have loved it!

We called Ben. He suggested Lucy’s Table. Lucy’s is closed Sundays, so we headed for a highly touted fresh seafood place, Jake’s Famous Crawfish. At Jake’s my laziness cost me. Beth and I are Dungeness crab fans - in the fanatic sense of the word - and they are in season. She ordered a whole crab. I ordered a Crab Louis, plenty of meat, no labor involved breaking into a crustacean. In my defense the choice was also influenced by a desire for lettuce. We had earlier had lunch at a Chinese restaurant near Reed College (a park like place that I’ve heard nothing but good things about all my life). There were several luncheon specials and I went for shrimp lo mein. The lo mein was tasty, and they served it with hot and sour soup, egg roll, fried wontons, and a hefty serving of pork fried rice. At $5.95 a plate, we hadn’t expected such bounty so we also ordered up an appetizer of crab puffs. Plenty of fried food, plenty of carbohydrates, generous fat and protein allowances, but the meal was short on leafy greens - which brings me back toward Jake’s, our dinner destination.

I had my first crab louis at a little diner on the square in Concord, California in 1964. Dave Brubeck was still kicking and serving up white folks jazz in those good old days. The salad comprised a generous helping of dungeness crab on a bed of fresh lettuce, slices of cucumber, fresh tomato wedges, a hard boiled egg halved and a straight-forward thousand island dressing that probably came straight out of a bottle. I’ve had the same salad all over the Bay Area and it’s simply the best.

Imagine my disappointment last night when my salad was served and they’d stylized the dressing with the addition of cumin. I suffered a classic case of menu envy as I watched Beth crack her crab and dip the meaty chunks in butter and savor every bite. To her credit, she shared a few bites with me, and to ease the burden of this disappointing review, one should be aware that Jake’s had served us the best fried calamari appetizers I’ve ever eaten before the disappointment of the Crab Louis. They served them with dipping sauces that included an oddly sweet pepper and marmalade decoction. And I had a cup of the best new England clam chowder I’ve ever tasted. Out of reflex I asked the waiter for Tabasco sauce, but I didn’t even open the bottle because I didn’t want to spoil a single smoky creamy meaty bite of that chowder.