For Chris
The river from the bridge seems undisturbed
Closer, near tussocks of needlegrass
we can barely watch the striving in the riffles
can barely imagine how silently the grains of sand
move from one glassy intestine to another before
the muscled fins give up their vigilance and catch
the current to their final room, powerful bodies still whole
one eye, hungry hooked mouth,
staring down millennia of ouranian gods.
On the northern shore two windburned men pan for gold.
On the western side of the bridge fathers in slick waders,
uneasy children strapped to their backs, trample the redds
to take pictures of dying salmon with digital cameras.
Later they give their babies milk from plastic bottles.
The small fry slurp greedily between the cars,
carriers planted firmly in the oak duff.
We sit until our bones ache on the dry gravel,
trying to talk away the grief of small, self-made disappointments,
trying to extract from the spirit of a fish, chopped in half to show
it has been counted, pure striving without reward, without a nugget
in the pan, the award-winning shot, or gratitude of fry
consuming the last shreds of sac before beginning their own journey
swimming with and against the current, testing its strength,
before they come to the wide mouth of the river, emptying into sea,
their bodies changing as the sweetness of home waters
grows salty in the deep.
Rev 09/30/04
A mother drives her son over the canals, the aqueducts,
past the farms, dairies, orchards, military cemeteries
to the place the padres and soldiers rested, los banos,
the baths, overgrown with yerba mansa, white flowers
with a spattering of red that makes her think
of Indians escorted up the creek and over the range
to their barracks at Mission San Juan Bautista or San Jose
the twisting trunks of olives lining the anguished paths
to a new god who liked fountains and reredos, who preferred
his prayers in Latin or Spanish, who understood no Indian words
for oak or elk and had no affection for these seer hills
fluid as the sea yet golden, fragrant with tarweed and sage
dazzling with the lightbreaking awns of needlegrasses.
The soldiers would tie their thumbs together and when they
stopped, they stared at the contorted bodies of rocks or the pools
beneath, many for the last time, helplessness whipped into movement.
Did their mothers follow from a distance?
Where did they leave their grief? Would they ever understand
this god with an appetite for sons? Their life was unraveling,
and there are those who say that had the victims read Hegel or Marx,
had they known the least thing about GDP's or the future of crude,
they might have adjusted better to their role in history
would have worked harder at synthesis
would have become useful vehicles for whatever they could smuggle
into the new order, smudge sticks or yerba mansa cures
for the festering wounds of the civilized
surely, then, they could forget
two centuries of hunger, of singing old songs
or being beaten for remembering them,
could be more grateful for the stipends their great grandchildren
were now getting to relearn their almost dead languages
from the two or three elders with one foot in the grave
and the other so tired, so very very tired
of marching to the tune of progress
Rev 09/30/04
Is there one without its coat of blood varnish?
Without the bodies floating in stagnant pools,
their sparks circling, circling the earth, seeking the godhead?
They sit for decades in a darkened room at a large desk
bloated with hours stolen from spouses, children,
their conversations unshared, sobs stifled, land
left unwatered, light doing its best to comfort
with its dappled tongue.
Despair is the child who cannot keep up,
who wears out her heart playing, playing,
even as the benefactors run their long,
painted nails along the belly of her violin
whispering their velvet depravities.
Rev 09/20/04
l.
The plant that killed Socrates will save me
I pull its twisted root from the ground
I pile it high in mock harvest
Awaiting a tall and consuming fire
2.
I may be confusing him with someone else
Nothing personal, I tell him:
You have simply sprung up
In the wrong place.
What are your lacy heads doing
among thorny quail bush
Flashy cottonwoods
And meek willows?
Your seed
Wants every corner
Of the world
Every foot of soil
And moisture drop
You have gone too far
And now they come for you
The reapers
The reapers who show no mercy
3.
Not that the reapers are anyone special
Though their ears, lips, nostrils
Fill with poison juices and dust,
They marshall on, knowing only that
This brings relief, the illusion of space
And control, the pretense of a plan
O Apollo
4.
Middle English hemlok
Old English hymele
Hop plant? A little hemlock
beer for a wedding?
Let its essence become a part of you
Fight the poison with a little reckless dance
Help, o lethal Dionysus!
5.
It is hard to say
Whether this work
Shows profit
Clumps of coyote bush
Mule fat, fringe of cattails
Hold their comely lines
Until the next vernal
Obliteration: hemlock
And cocklebur, yellow star
Thistle and pepper weed,
Johnson grass-all the greedy
Colonizers not to be outdone
By some sweet ideal of a marsh
6.
Conium maculatum, the parsley family.
Who would have thought such an upstanding
family could produce a tall renegade,
offspring that will not protect
A single nest?
7.
When is a poison not a poison?
When it is a sedative
When it smiles before it kicks
8.
This is no bedtime story
Your throat constricts
Rashes bloom on your hands
Yet your hands will not stop
Chopping, cutting, sawing
Its hollow stalks
There is never a question
About its removal:
You can't see through it
Nothing is safe there
It leaves room
For nothing else to grow
9.
Even as you rip it out
The next generation
Greens up in the duff
Between grindelia and wild rose
Between blackberry and willow
Anemopsis and alkali sacaton
10.
What god ordered this mingling of two worlds?
Oak and eucalyptus, pipe vine and broom
Thistle and tule as if Lucifer and his legions
Were doing battle once again
As if momentous things were being decided
In populations of weeds
In acres of dueling plants
Their divisions and battalions
Their infantries rising to the call
Even as you sleep
11.
Lock the door
the gate
the attic
The weeds are coming
12.
Was it really hemlock that killed Socrates?
Or was it Plato and his idea of a marsh
Without hemlock?
Rev 09/20/04
By TINA ARNOPOLE DRISKILL
Public service and private scholarship [are] compatible activities, beneficial to both the public and the scholar by generating thoughtful advocacy for the public good.
— Lillian B. Vallee
Lillian Vallee, author of the Stanislaus Connections column "River of Birds, Forests of Tule: Central Valley Nature and Culture in Season," is a lady of many talents and passions. Born in Hamburg, Germany, to Polish parents displaced by World War II, she grew up in Detroit Michigan, has lived in California most of her adult life, and as a 19-year resident can be counted among those who champion California's Central Valley.
An active poet and essayist, she has published over 170 poems, translations, articles, and reviews and has given more than 90 public talks, lectures and readings on a variety of subjects from natural history to contemporary Polish poetry. She is one of the featured poets in Highway 99, A Literary Journey through California's Great Central Valley, and has authored three chapbooks - "Vision at Orestimba", "Erratics", and "handful of snow", tributes to the natural and cultural heritage of the Central Valley and to her upbringing as the daughter of Polish immigrants.
The Modesto Junior College instructor of composition, poetry writing, critical thinking and women's studies, whose courses incorporate "interdisciplinary and 'regional' flavor," has earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature and Master of Arts/ Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Poland and later served an apprenticeship as a translator with Polish poet, Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. During the last two decades she has been honored with numerous prizes for her translation work, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Translation grant.
She considers herself an amateur naturalist devoted to the Central Valley bioregion. Over the past eight years she has volunteered with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, under biologist Dennis Woolington, on restoration projects that have accounted for the planting of more than a half million trees and the elimination of an equal number of noxious weeds at the San Luis and Merced National Wildlife refuges, in an attempt to restore some of the Valley's legendary wetlands, so crucial to migratory wildlife.
Vallee has traveled and studied throughout Europe and into Mexico, most recently in Lithuania and Poland to do dissertation research. She reads and speaks Polish, Russian, French and German and has teaching experience with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, UC Berkeley, MJC, Merced Community College, and Modesto City Schools.
She truly has been a strong voice in the Central Valley worlds of poetry and literature, education, and environmental and social activism.
