20th century sabbatical in California

Escape from the frost zone
Californian Pictures, Menlo Park Scenes

I (1)
Evading the English winter, we came to California
to Menlo Park, salubrious setting for six months' sabbatical.
Not a holiday, insisted to my European clients
but nevertheless, went light on the work load
intending to take full advantage of what the west coast offered.

So I signed up for university courses, in slight trepidation
(it was years since I'd written a scholarly essay).
chose, without realizing how finely they complemented each other,
Language and Gender, Shameless Hussies, and Fiction Writing.

Il
Back on a bike, recalling Oxford days, pedalling to lectures
Basking in the beauty of a campus recalling a dreamed-of
Spanish university town, somewhere like Salamanca
only not such intricately carved sandstone.
Still, the golden stone arches were there
and the sub-tropical vegetation
palms and camellias and bougainvillea
an outdoors too bright for the eyes
space dancing in too much sunlight.
So into the stone cool of cloistered walks,
lecture rooms, and splendidly appointed libraries
combining ancient leather and treasured books
with computers for instant access to webs of information -
who was Sappho, or what is a centipede.

III
Intoxication! Worlds never knew about
are revealed to me, unembarrassed, frolicsome!
The classroom is bare-walled and the seats are small and not user- friendly
This is irrelevant
In front sits the professor, perched on a high stool
slim and young and eager
with her soft American drawl and her coy laugh

She's enjoying this, she wants to tell us all about
what fun it is, how the Hopi speak,
how the Malagasy invert the expected gender speech roles
of the West, how the hijras of India, the outcast eunuchs
use a language mixing male and female elements,
how the white middle-class women constantly apologize
in their speech, for being alive (for being a woman).

The class on women's writing is in the evening
The first time we met - a large group -- we made a huge circle with our
chairs and told each other who we were
why we wanted to know about Shameless Hussies
what had brought us to this place.
was on a high after that -- the people in the class (two men, the rest women)
became multi-dimensional, the place was a Gauguin painting,
full of bright plants and figures, no longer a bare room.

One huge thick book was our reader, and we were
given a few hand-outs. Hours spent in preparation,
studying matter that so far had swerved on the peripheries
of my life. Black womens words - Sojourner Truth -
'And ain't I a Woman? Voices of the daughters of immigrants
struggling in a new country, in the cold of winter.
'I being born a woman, and distressed...'
Raising my cautious head recognize how little
I have questioned in my life, how much too tamely, too resignedly,
accepted. Oh, good to be middle-aged! Courage is mine now.

IV
One of the people I get to know is also a refugee
here on a two-year scholarship, but grown up in south England.
Unmarried, in her late thirties, she tells her story.
The only Asian girl in a white middle-class school
very clever, pretty, but definitely brown
She smiled and smiled, she says, pretended not to hear
the taunts, the coldness, the rejection.
When she gained an Oxbridge place, no one cheered
and her classmates stopped speaking to her.
So she shut herself off, no longer ate with her family,
retired to her darkened bedroom every day
shrivelled inside, and failed her A level exams.
No Oxbridge. Her father, a professor and a gentle man,
was kind and supportive, helped her retake her exams,
was happy when she went to a redbrick university.
There, she reports, they coddled her
(they must have known her history) and they cared,
and when she gained an upper second degree
she tells me her professor hugged her,
crying with delight, and she felt everyone was glad.

She went to Cambridge for her PhD
small and shiny-eyed, beautiful
but inside always hearing a beating drum
reminding her that she was insignificant
a minority on every count
a single woman and a black.
So what did the good grades count?

Tough, she was tough. Despite the depression
struggled on, complained, resisted.
Did brilliant research work, was a star young academic.
But she stopped singing. She had sung since she was a little girl
humming around the house,
then in school choirs and as an undergraduate
taking voice lessons, filling herself with music.
Stopped. And she was afraid of the dark.

V
There is so much to be told
And don't want to leave out anything
There is the abalone and the artichokes and the
delicious juicy garlics that we ate crushed onto brown toast.
The Thanksgiving turkey, stuffed with a vegetable recipe
I'd inherited from my father (used every Christmas)
and ground chestnuts in the other end.
And fresh Dungeness crab, bought from the fisherman
at Half Moon Bay. We drove there one silver Sunday
and walked along the harbour edge
accompanied by a young seagull with a damaged wing;
He strutted along beside us occasionally opening wide his beak
to utter a reproachful gutteral complaint
(and chase off any competitors).
So we found the boat with its label 'Fresh Crabs'
and indeed they were still quietly, gracefully
flexing their claws inside a bucket, recalling cold salt water
not that of the boiling pan.

VI
Our house. It's Phil's house really. It's a mini Hearst Castle
It's an eclectic's dream. The shelf in the kitchen is full of demi-tasses
from renowned European ceramic factories, Rosenthal, Spode, Sèvres.
And outside, slender silver birches, squirrels and cement frogs.
With a tile-walled swimming pool in the garden
over which arches an orange tree
glowing lamps in a dark night.
It was so quickly home, the word came naturally.
We cleaned the dust-marred windows, sanded a fine old oak bureau
then varnished it outside in the hot dry air.
We fixed the splendid double oven, and cooked wondrous meals.
We held dinner parties, and read poetry on pre-arranged afternoons.
In the study above my desk (the beautiful oak bureau)
hung two large posters I'd acquired at the ALTA conference,
two poems translated from the Chinese, and the Japanese,
transporting distant worlds into suburban California,
one song of love, one titled 'Sorrow - a succinct wording of grief.
Whenever glanced up from my laptop or from my reading
there they were, white pages with their tales in sober Times Roman font
reminding of that place where words leap from one language to another
twisting and plaiting, retaining old fibres and gaining new odours
that ever-present smithy in my head, beating out, hammering out
sound-shapes, sentences and songs.

In my memory we had no quarrels in those walls.
We who had roared and raged in former years,
swallowed elixir before we reached this place.
Over and over, came home in this house, knew peace.
And subtly, unremarked almost, the pain seeped stealthily away.
The first weeks kept having sad dreams, and every morning would waken
heavy and aching, unready for the day.
AII that old history, all that slime and filth
to wash out of my ears, out of my mind.
And then the pain was gone- one day woke with the pale gold light
outside fingering the shutters of the bedroom windows
some faint birds twittering and the mournful Caltrain wailing
knew that memory and grief had been transmuted
swimming through clear clean waters towards an unpolluted shore.

VII
Watching the TV, l see an ad with someone coming home from shopping
In their arms they carry a large brown paper bag, articles bulging in it.
They come in from their car and plonk the shopping down. Familiar scene.
My favourite shop was Trader Joe's where would strike up conversations
in any language that knew, about literature (once we saw Wallace Stegner,
someone averred, in the line ahead) about the latest films, or the
play to be performed at Menlo Park Theatre.
Such a wholesome emporium! Organically grown fruit and veggies
Cakes containing no preservatives (so eat them quick!)
Endless varieties of dried fruit and wholesome breakfast cereals
and the sweetener all cane sugar. There was also Whole Food store
where I was overwhelmed by containers boasting thirty types of macaroni
and grains I'd never ever heard of - quinoa, amaranth, and bulgur.

VIII
The landscape
Driving through this huge state we pass through flatlands planted to the
horizon with strawberries and artichokes, low accommodating orange and
lemon trees, while on the fertile hillsides, the upstart vineyards preen.
We took off at Christmas and drove to Death Valley
awesome desert in southeastern California
the roads growing more and more deserted
until there were only sand dunes on either side of our thin asphalt strip
and crazy Joshua trees twisting absurdly into the air
and at sunset the pleated mountains catching glory from the reddening sky
then mauve, magenta, amber, purple, dark.
One morning we took a hike, planning a canyon exploration
crunch crunch our booted feet over the seashore track
(millions of years ago this was the ocean bed, the waters sculpted these rocks
giving them grotesque exhilarating forms)
Only rocky walls, furtive plants pushing out of cracks, occasionally a rapid
lizard rushing from shade to shade.

We reached a wall of rock where we could go no further
end of our pilgrimage, muscles aching from the climb we rested
seated on a rocky outcrop, and heard the tremendous silence
pounding in our ears, muted memory of the waves beating
in an inland desert where no bird sings.
As we left a few days later, once again winding roller-coaster through dry
land
we saw Elijah's ravens croaking hoarsely, recalling water, reminding of
springs and rushing creeks.
In the summer this is the hottest place on earth.

IX
She is a poet living in Menlo Park
driving a Cadillac called Garnet, which blushes deep mahogany when the
bloom of desert sand is dusted off its hood.
A coach for kings to ride in, spacious and upholstered in plush.
She comes to read her work; her magical words tell me about scenes
I know of from my dreams.
It is a box of richness, colours and textures resembling full-blown roses
in a centuries-old garden whose drystone walls border an ancient sea.
I find another sister, someone who listens to my voice and hears
what I intended with my words.
Recognition, utter gratification. It is as if
we have always known each other, and as if
things had always been this way. Tea in the afternoon
pistachio nuts after the poetry
music, musical metamorphosis of the mundane air.

September 2000
Catching my breath in California, to write
a poem maybe in a whirling world
Yugoslavia has just got rid of its dictator
but in the Middle East no one sleeps peacefully
Here in the US, we eat okra for supper and
contemplate old age, pretending it's still far away.
learn at least three new words every day
some in my first language, some in another,
facets for the crystal quartz pattern in my mind.

The sunsets are extravagant, outrageous,
proclaiming Armageddon
but then comes a cold and moonbright night
a shooting star swoops into the still Pacific.
And not the grey owl, but the Caltrain hoots
melancholy mournings as it rushes past
consuming the vast spaces, the unbounded,
beyond the duckpond and neat residences
that line these safe suburban streets.

X
Next time is too long from now
Let me live now, not too much one foot lagging, though a little
regret's inevitable - for the delight of yesterday,
that sweet melancholy for lost youth, and old dictions now sounding stiff
or rusty on the tongue,
sonnets and nightingales and how sad steps oh moon.
Capture the strength of new, but not forget
my Anglo-Saxon sailors in the mist
who heard the gannet's call over the grey sea
in that old world to which I now return.
Soon to be here again, I wonder? Here is the place of onward
where genetic manipulation promises modified babies, so the expert
predicts, in about five years' time,
and already fear panics the uninformed with allergies and diseases
previously unknown, and evil shaped like biological warfare
makes fearsome monstrous terrors in the air.
The small girl in the shop wept for not having the delight she'd seen
and her mother, half consoling, spoke the cliché
'You can't have everything you want in this life.' And suggested
that next time they would buy her something nice; she sobbed,
"Next time is too long from now.'

January 2001. Downpour in Menlo Park
It's sheeting down, the ducks are all delighted
and leave their yellow waters to strut around
joyously pecking at grubs in the soggy ground
row upon row of them - I love the notice reading
"Please help keep these ducks wild and free"
and laugh each time I see it because
these creatures are friendly and suburban and
a trifle pompous, though I must admit
in sunlight their colours gleam magnificent
purple and amethyst and emerald, a royal glory.
Just round the corner from the park I see
the level crossing's out of order
two guys in waterproofs are public servants,
patiently hold up the paralyzed gate at a 45-degree angle
flagging through reticent cars, which slow down
seeing the red lights flashing, flashing
continuous warning. Small electrical inadequacy
in Silicon Valley. But good the cars are going slow
for should the wild free ducks decide to make an
expedition, crossing the park and then the road,
in measured waggle, unconcerned, jubilantly quacking,
slow speeds might avoid slaughter.
When I return, my friends the ducks have skated back
onto their pond. I am relieved. I look up and see
the translucent raindrops hanging trembling
on tips of branches, the sky billowing grey subtleties.
The rain has stopped, the friendly air is damp and cool upon my cheeks.
I remember England, spring, the fresh earth.