Poems For Labor Day
Every Day Is An Act of Resistance: Selected Poems by Carol Tarlen (Mongrel Empire Press) edited by Julia Stein and David Joseph is the first poetry book by Carol Tarlen, a San Francisco radical poet who died in June 2004. Jack Hirschman in his introduction says that in North Beach in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, Tarlen was writing some of the best poetry around.
Detroit poet Jim Daniels says about Tarlen’s work, “This book is simply a treasure. Carol Tarlen’s poems bring the human and political together in rich, heart-felt ways….”
Janet Zandy says this about Tarlen: “Tough girl, quiet Quaker, brilliant poet, worker for the working-class…. Her luminous poetic voice is large, direct, high-steppin, and justice-driven. Go ahead … read her poetry, teach it to your children.
Julia Stein wrote an obituary/biography, “Death of a Poet,” which was first published in Pemmican and then on the blog caroltarlenlives. If you want more background information about Tarlen’s life, work, and death
The book can be ordered from the Mongrel Empire Press website:
http://www.mongrelempire.org/Mongrel_Empire_Press/Poetry.html
THE LIBERAL BOSS
It was, finally, all she wanted
to be alone
in the back conference room
her empty desk mocking
her silent telephone
her supervisor’s anxious face
desperate to delegate
a rush job xeroxing
twenty-three travel vouchers
and their supporting documentation
the privacy to shed tears
like undergarments
before embracing
a lover who politely disappears
when the alarm rings
without demanding a cup of coffee
why are you in here
the chairman asks
and why are you crying
he clasps a bulging
manilla envelope
because, above my Premium II
386SX/20 megahertz computer,
there is a hole
in the ozone layer
the size of my heart
slowly opening up to heaven
which isn’t all
it’s cracked up to be
and besides, my friends
are dying of disparate diseases
my fingers no longer
grasp pleasure
or caress pain
I never sleep at night anymore
the sun is my enemy
I am an unwanted planet
without a moon, in fact,
without an orbit
I see, he says, is there
anything I can do
he waits the length of time
it takes
for the rhythmic contraction
of a heartbeat
by which blood is forced
onward, then asks
if she can transcribe the tape
he has placed on her desk
so that he can sign the letter
and she can get it in the mail
before noon
AS AN EMPLOYEE OF THE UNIVERSITY,
THE CLERICAL WORKER ACKNOWLEDGES
TRUTH AND BEAUTY
every day is an act of resistance
she thinks as she looks away
from the blinking green
alphabet and out the window.
streetcar wires cut the sky.
she likes movies about subways,
calls them underground flicks.
her word processor is beeping.
if she presses the message key,
“incorrect tab stops” will flash
across the screen’s bottom.
she refuses, stares at eucalyptus
leaves rippling in the wind.
when asked if she has bought
cookies for the faculty meeting,
she laughs and does not
turn away from the trees.
THE RECEPTIONIST SITS AT HER DESK
AND HUMS SOLIDARITY FOREVER
we will bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old
I am the large gold fish you peeked at
through the cold rain
into the algae green pond.
My flesh has seen the four corners
of the earth. I am succulent.
My scales gleam into your
watery gray eyes.
I am the carefully placed objet d’art
that makes your phone calls,
types reports of your tax deductible
winter cruise,
greets your clients with
an oleander smile.
When I sit in my newly upholstered
swivel armless chair,
I dream of exotic locales,
walk in vast landscaped parks.
In midst I see myself
bent and old, a scarf around
my narrow shoulders,
digging in smoldering ashes,
but then I see
that I am wide hipped, tall, strong,
legs spread,
birthing.
INFLATION ACHIEVES A SINGLE DIGIT
UNEMPLOYMENT RISES TO 8.9%
Our hands complain of protein deficiency as
David slices more than his ration of ham
5-1/2 lbs of meat per person per month in Poland
Pass the navy beans, please
They are pale pink and slushy
Legumes are good for the soul
The free enterprise of well-balanced amino acids
The dialectics of eating
Alicia denounces bland cabbage soup
History gets a C- at our fashionably
Bourgeois Butcher Block Table
When the grade drops to D+
We steal a loaf of bread
Then we build barricades
TODAY
Today I slept until the sun eased
under my eyelashes. The office phone
rang and rang. No one answered.
Today I wrote songs for dead poets,
danced to Schubert`s 8th Symphony,
(which he never had time to finish),
right leg turning andante con moto,
arms sweeping the ceiling as leaves fell,
green and golden, autumn in Paris.
I sat in a bistro and sipped absinthe
while Cesar Vallejo strolled past,
his dignity betrayed by the hole
in his pants, and I waved, today
and the dictaphone did not dictate
and the files remained empty
and the boss’s coffee cup remained empty
while the ghosts of my ancestors
occupied my chair and threatened all
who disturbed their slumber
today, when I sat in bed, nibbling
croissants and reading the New Yorker
in San Francisco, and I did not make
my daughter’s lunch, I did not pay
the PG&E bill, I did not empty the garbage
on my way out the door to catch the bus to
ride the elevator to sit at my desk on time
because today I took the day off.
And rain drenched the skins of lepers
and they were healed.
Red flags decorated the doorways
of senior centers, and everyone
received their social
security checks on time.
And I walked the streets at 10
in the morning, praised the sun
in its holiness, led a revolution,
painted my toenails purple,
meditated in solitude,
today, on this day, when I took,
with pay, the day off.
Comments
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
