Where I'm from, and What It Means

I come from the Northern San Joaquin Valley—about 90 miles east of San Francisco. But I was born long before people moved there because they couldn’t afford to live in the Bay Area. When it was still “Oklahoma with grapes.” It in fact reminded people of Oklahoma, and many of its denizens came from that part of the country, though we had no distinctive accent or regional identity. Rose Maddox and her brothers came from my hometown, Modesto, and had their first successes there. Wrestling was very popular. (My own forebears came from Iowa and Missouri; the Iowa people originally came from the Palatinate in what’s now Germany, the Missouri folks were from Ireland).

Recent Poetry, October 2019

The Holy Fools


Basil the Blessed sat naked,
On the Church porch,
Eating sausages during Great Lent.

Xenia lived in a graveyard.
And insisted in being called,
By her late husband’s name.

There were many others.

Their main message is to
Tell us that the Church is the ultimate
Finger-pointing-at-the-moon.

Their main danger is
Exactly the same.