I plan a way to escape from this chaos.
I don’t have a backpack, so I wrap
a cheap army-surplus sleeping bag
around my shoulders, and wearing
sandals instead of boots, I find a ride
to mountain peaks called the Pinnacles.
No tent.
No knowledge.
Stretched out on wet earth, I shiver
while common northern California rain
turns into a rare event—snow.
Hunger.
Why didn’t I bring food?
Forest peace by day, frozen fear
at night.
Fragments of conversation
with groups of hikers, strangers.
By the time I reach
the Tassajara Zen monastery
I’m so grateful
for one tiny cup of hot tea
offered by silent monks
that the meaning
of that common word—gratitude—
grows into something enormous
and marvelous.
EXIT INTERVIEW
The counselors don’t seem to care
why I’m covered with poison oak
or why I’m dropping out of college,
but they’re expected to ask, so I tell
the truth, my freshman experience
has been too frightening,
with nothing but threats,
insults,
riots.
I thought I was brave,
but I’m scared.
The panel of three counselors
all nod, shrug, grin, and agree, yeah,
lots of other freshmen are dropping out too.
They don’t ask where I’ll go
or what I’ll do
to survive.
Drifting
1969–1970
ANONYMOUS
I’ve lost my identity
no longer a student
my face in the mirror
this dropout
a stranger.
India?
Borneo?
Peru?
Not enough money.
Home?
I no longer know
what to say
to my parents.
Move across the bay
into San Francisco?
Maybe.
ANY BREEZE
The future is a dry leaf
weightless and floating . . .
so I agree to the first offer that comes along
when another dropout, looking for a roommate,
invites me to join her.
Why not?
Her hair is ice-blond, her name Scandinavian,
her goal so simple: find an apartment, get jobs,
live like grown-ups.
A TANKA POEM MADE OF STOLEN HOPE
bold B.
teaches me to shoplift
but I only
do it once, the guilt
so deep that I almost drown
THE JOB MARKET
Bold B. finds night work in a topless bar
while I keep applying
at the post office,
city offices,
library,
stores,
anywhere
with daylight hours that would end
before the depths of my sinking mind
turn dark.
SEEKER
I can’t find work.
I’m penniless.
I can’t pay my share of rent.
So we part ways, Bold B. hunting
for a rich man to marry, while I drift alone
toward Golden Gate Park, Oak Street,
Haight-Ashbury, where I move into a commune
of strangers who behave like a family,
brothers and sisters, not lovers—
sharing expenses, cooking, housework.
I’m glad to have my own corner
of the rickety old wooden house,
a quiet room with a window seat
beneath a strip of stained glass.
When I open the window, I hear neighbors
chanting Buddhist prayers, but when I try
to join in, I discover that my restless mind
wanders toward daydreams, unable to grasp
the peace
of meditation.
MOODY
At first I work as a street vendor
making tie-dyed dresses
to sell in the park.
But it’s not enough—all we eat at the commune
is rice and beans, so I find a job as a nanny
for a chubby baby
whose cheerfulness
makes my gloominess
bloom.
Where does his mother go every day
when she leaves her fancy apartment
dressed like a professor, carrying
an elegant briefcase?
How much college would I need
to become
so confident?
WEAVING
I take a bus to a wool broker’s warehouse,
where I buy an entire fleece, newly shorn
off the sheep, this odor of lanolin
pungent and ancient.
A ritual of cleansing
by boiling
must follow.
Then I learn how to dye clean strands
with onion skins, wildflowers, and cochineal
beetle shells.
It feels satisfying to straighten tangles by carding
with nails punched into a block of wood,
then spin the colored fibers into yarn
by twirling a dangling spindle.
Building a simple wooden loom isn’t easy
and weaving blankets is even more difficult,
each failure a way
of daring myself
to try again and again
until I succeed in producing
a few crooked works
of woven art.
If I can’t graduate from college
at least
I can return
to a time in history
when degrees
weren’t needed
to make useful items
out of animal hair.
MY REAL SELF
In the commune, women end up doing all the work
while men recover from the trauma of having
fought in Vietnam.
Draft dodgers on their way to Canada visit too,
escaping the fate of serving as soldiers in a war
that strikes all of us
as unjust.
Adventurers, transcendentalists, magic realists,
as soon as I plunge into San Francisco’s vast library,
I feel at home in stories from other lands
and distant times,
a world filled with pathways
made of traveling words
on smooth paper.
Am I only myself
between the pages
of strangers’
memories?
MOON LANDING
A Quaker I knew from high school,
always angry, his draft number looming,
conscientious objector status rejected
by the military
because he doesn’t attend
Society of Friends meetings
and can’t prove
he prays.
Together for a few months, and then
when we break up, he speaks of leaving the country
while I go on vacation with my parents and sister
at a cabin
beside a wild river
where we watch
an astronaut take
his famous step
for mankind
on a lunar
landscape
that looks
quite a bit less desolate
than news photos of war zones
down here on this wildly spinning,
orbiting, soaring, impossible-to-understand
earth.
Yes, space travel is a scientific marvel,
but I still believe that the miracle
we really need
is peace,
not just technological
progress.
MUSICAL MADNESS
Even before the moon landing,
I’d started hanging out at the Family Dog,
an old building at the beach
where Jefferson Airplane
sings about white rabbits,
volunteers, and somebody
to love.
Free concerts.
Loud protests.
Stoned friends.
College, travel, peace,
and all my other daydreams
are so far out of reach that with
my patched jeans and ramshackle heart,
once again I choose the wrong guy—
a wanderer, Romany, with no plans
to stay.
Together, we roam out into the countryside
toward the green hills of Altamont
where the Rolling Stones are about
to perform “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,”
a song I danced to all the way
through high school. . . .
but the promise of music
is quickly ruined
by Hells Angels, the notorious
motorcycle gang
of tattooed men, who perch
on top of a truck
and hurl full beer cans at my head,
their drunken aim
the only thing that saves me
from a concussion
or death.
VIOLENCE
Knives flash.
A man dies.
Murder
instead of
music.
When I witness a killing
in those beautiful green hills
it makes me feel like no place
will ever be safe.
Never again will I hear a Rolling Stones song
without remembering fear
and sadness.
VOLUNTEER
Sober in a commune
of stoned friends,
I walk across
the tranquil park’s
narrow panhandle
to a house with phones
where people take turns
answering questions
about hopelessness.
I never would have guessed
that I—who can’t even begin to see myself
as an optimist—could end up feeling useful
as part of a suicide prevention hotline,
offering lists of reasons
to live.
THE HOUSE OF QUESTIONS
All sorts of strangers pass through the place
where I volunteer.
Researchers come around
offering doughnuts and hot chocolate
in exchange for answers about why
hippies drop out of college.
I answer in exchange for free food,
and even though the sociologists promise
to locate me again in thirty years, just to find out
how I turned out,
I know
they won’t.
By then, they’ll have moved on to other
more urgent subjects, studying teenagers
of the future, the children of people
who survive.
This country is so violent.
Surely I’ll die young.
THE HOUSE OF SURPRISES
Volunteering for a hotline is tricky.
Some of the questions are unanswerable.
One day there’s a girl who shows up
on the doorstep, crying because she misses Cuba
even though she’s not una cubana.
Venceremos, she explains—We will win.
It’s the name of a sugarcane-chopping brigade
for young foreigners who want to help the island’s
revolution.
The girl says she just returned, and wants to go back
and stay forever, but the Cubans won’t let her,
because they think North Americans need to stay home
and face our own problems.
So much time has passed
since I spent childhood summers with my relatives
that I’ve almost forgotten how desperately
I used to dream of living
on the island.
REMEMBERING MY OTHER SELF
Is she still there, my invisible twin,
the girl I would have been if we’d lived
on Mami’s small, wave-tossed island
instead of Dad’s
vast
rocky
continent?
WANDERING
I can’t go back to Cuba
and I don’t have money for India,
so I leave the city on a whim,
roaming north into comforting
redwood forests, where people
live in makeshift shelters—
water towers
tents
log cabins
on ranchlands. . . .
By the time I return to Haight-Ashbury,
babysitting, and my volunteer job
encouraging sorrowful strangers,
I feel capable
of wandering
anywhere.
ANOTHER STRANGER AT THE HOUSE OF QUESTIONS
Is this love? Hate?
Foolishness?
Playing chess at one of the tables
in the house with the suicide hotline,
there’s a bearded guy my age,
eighteen.
He’s dressed like Che Guevara—dull olive-green
army fatigues.
I should be
suspicious.
He tells me I can join a Venceremos Brigade.
All I have to do is go to New York.
Sign some papers.
Escape.
launch a journey all the way back to childhood,
but there aren’t any legal ways
for US citizens
to reach Cuba.
The travel ban is specified
inside every American passport.
Not even those of us with relatives
on the isolated
island
are permitted
to visit.
ACTOR L.
My life seems to swirl in circles,
always returning to similar mistakes.
You don’t need money, he promises,
just hitchhike to New York and join
the Venceremos Brigade there,
where everyone is signing up
to support one revolution
or another.
He claims he’s an actor between roles,
a relative of famous Italian Americans,
movie producers, says he has Mafia connections, but
it’s impossible to tell whether he’s telling
the truth
or a story
from a film.
I should be
less trusting,
but I fill a knapsack
with camping food,
throw in a peasant blouse
and a skirt, ragged jeans,
and all the money
I’ve managed to save:
sixty dollars.
Abuelita,
my grandma.
Los tíos y primos,
uncles and cousins.
La finca,
the farm.
When I arrive on the island,
will anyone
recognize me?
CROSSING FROM COAST TO COAST
I can’t be sure whether Actor L. is playing a role
or telling the truth, but I go with him anyway,
hitchhiking
thumbs up
begging for rides
in Nevada, Colorado,
endless desert, then mountain roads,
the soil changing color as we travel,
accepting the kindness of strangers.
I give the drivers gas money,
pay for their food, sleep in churches,
basically homeless, my throat on fire with strep,
this crazy adventure quickly changing into mere
survival.
By the time we reach Cleveland
I can barely sit up, and a few days later
I’m waiting in the emergency room
at Harlem General, surrounded
by men who bleed from stabbing
and gunshot wounds.
HOPELESS?
New York City terrifies me.
I should have stopped
in one of the farm states
and taken a job
milking cows
or hoeing weeds.
Skyscrapers horrify me.
Too much shade on the street.
Where’s the sun?
Shrubs? Trees?
Homeless in Harlem?
My last twenty dollars
are stolen out of my bag
by someone seated next to me
in a church.
STREET PEOPLE
I’m one of them now
the drifters I used to fear
in Berkeley.
Once my money is gone
I’m no use to Actor L.,
but I run into him again
on the campus of Columbia University
where students are rioting, outraged
by the secretive US bombing of Cambodia.
With no place to sleep
I join a crowd of marchers
who seize an office in the administration building,
but I’m not willing to get arrested, so I find
a gentle Puerto Rican poet
who agrees to rent me a room
on credit.
Now I need a job—the Venceremos Brigade
will have to wait.
LOST
Discouraged.
Dis-couraged.
Missing home.
Wishing
for
a future.
Is bravery
the same
as hope?
PAUSING TO SEARCH FOR MY LOST SELF IN BOOKS
Once upon a time I believed
that poetry was a river where anyone