BACKGROUND AND CAVEAT:

In 1987 a singer by the name of “Licorice” McKechnie disappeared and remains missing today, presumed dead. My title is borrowed, with gratitude, from a song by the group The Incredible String Band, which she had left in 1973. Obscure as the lady herself, certain references in this poem are likely to be opaque to all but Stringheads.


The retrospectives sometimes miss her name,
Whether she was Chris-tee-na or Chris-tye-na—
That German sites have christened Caroline.—
But fey, she frolicked on the album jackets,

And cradled a fat toad or baby bird
In pale and slender hands. We saw her soar
Breezy and carnationed in a swing;
In wood and meadow, saw her in velour,

In liner notes, the candy soubriquet.
Pitched up in schoolgirl euphonies we heard
Her sing what merry Robin penned, “Papa
Would take me to the park to see the swans. . .”

Rose-browed, but whispered bare neath her chiffons,
Whirled through by dusts and potions, so they say,
A butterfly beneath the waking sunlight,
Moth at the dreaming sweet, black sticky flame.

And if some sandalwood and silken summer
Of plucked sitar, the spun to silver web
Of beads and bells sang different beckoning,
The coil of jasmine round about that wound her

Drew her to some other song, say the wren
Before the robin or before the heron?
Would still the girl mulleined and leafed in muslin
And Sunday school soprano, furred and cloched,

Have gowned like Guinevere and flower-crowned
Her glazy visage, sung off-key at Woodstock,
And mourned with “Darling Belle” in widow’s weeds,
Once reeked to soot in grey Midlothian reckoning,
Her woolens sluiced in housepaint and woodstain?



The narrative is hindsight at its best,
An August thing of maybes and what ifs,
How chance the Thetan grasp that more than tithed.
Or after copter flight past blocked off roads,

How mudding tent and torrent that first night
Of hidden stars and candles in the rain
Displaced gold Robin’s band and staged them up
Next day between Canned Heat and CCR

To underwhelm the half a million strong,
With coy sweet songs about “This Moment” whose
Legatos might have joined the shooting stars
But for the blotting clouds and weeping muse--

Not quite the meteoric rise to fame,
But just enough for three more years of tunes,
And then the spotlights yield to western sun,
The service trays and crockery, public bus,

Robin’s painted guitar. Inclined to sing,
Declined to teach “Old Songs and Cottages.”
E-meter’s golden tethered tantalus?—
Too high the plumping fruit, too low the water.

How did the rest evade their dotages?
One to nostalgia circuit bowed, and one
A mayoress, and one a Cardiff bard--
And three dismiss to death even her name,

Though unclaimed royalties may wait to yield
Solace for Perseid nights that passed unstarred:
To hell with Hubbard and with Yasgur’s field--
The children of star seed and beggars’ weeds
Had never loved her like the bud and blotter.



The folklore even disagrees on this:
Whether the last who ever knew her found her
Footprints nudging the Arizona dunes,
Giving the slip to Hubbard’s church. What if

They never find a ragged shawl or diary?
A scorpion in a skull, a tarnished chain?
A final letter, mailed in nineteen ninety,
From Sacramento, to a Scottish sister,

Was three years’ leave to fray the stitch of rumor--
"Shared open mikes in London in the nineties"/
"Impromptu a cappella Wiccan chants"/
"Asleep in batterer’s yard"/ "From hard park bench,

Pulled nameless to the steam of LA streets"/
"Took serious drugs and wore no underpants"/
"Abducted by space aliens in the desert
With Captain Beefheart"/ "Let a cult subsume her--"

I think we cut our cloaks to August promptings.
This month can hunt you down, pull you up short:
I think on August nights of men like Manson,
Who think on August mornings of blood sport.

I think, when summer’s hit the downhill sands,
I know a doomed thing when I see or hear it,
And downward wave’s as deep, so I suppose
That if, some brocade noontide, coppery bands

Of sunlight drew her west to other strands,
An island beach embroidering her clothes
With knots of sea wrack, blue-green stinging seaweed’s
Matty floss as richly might have gowned her,
As gauzy veil of Morpheus around her.

Copyright Briar Rose 2008


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses...c-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Collage: August Night Sky

The Lammas Men come jumping, bumping.
Booming and zooming, the Lammas Men.
Sparks in the sky, peaking, then streaking
To dark again, know the Lammas Men.
The Lammas Men from late July
Grasp summer as tight as ever they can
With opposable thumbs, cruising and boozing,
When sunset comes to the asphalt night.
And the Lammas Men are certain they
Might make the hot sweet summer stay,
If they put up a fight.

The Lammas Men with shiny cards
Are all twenty-one, and proudly exempt
From hastening fall and narrowing day,
And the corn is sweet in the southering sun,
And the stalks are tall, though leaves display
Heavy and dusty, beetled and galled,
Their edges rusty. And summer’s looking
A little unkempt but the Lammas Men
Make a valiant attempt, in mobs, to throbs
Of drum and bass, to stand their ground
Or mark their pace.

The Lammas Men catcall and brawl
Near dark, for a lark, rolling ambered with cheer.
And the Lammas Men lay a rough black arc,
And then another, of rubbery squeals,
To evening’s finale, from dirt road to alley,
The spray can, the ball bat, the downed mailbox tally,
With wagers and dares, and boasts and appeals,
And trying on death just to see how it feels.
And the Lammas Men’s jibes as the katydids call
Are the dialogues of the alpha dogs
Saying, Summer will always, will always be all!


Copyright Briar Rose 2008


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses...c-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Gates should be of wind chime and barbed wire,
Gardens of attar be of dewy green and bone,
Hearths should be the tinder and the fire,
Hearts be the alone.

The heart’s content is anything alone,
Hayloft or cave for home, or empty mill suffice;
Garret or seaward light raised up in stone—
Worth whatever price.

The bird who sings in dark before the dawn,
Warbling interdicts, pleasant with every tone,
Casts gracious boundaries about the lawn:
Happy on his own.

Though windward bell you hang out and intone,
To raggy trespass twist a rusty circle wide
Around the quiet center of the lone,
However many bide.



Copyright 2008 Briar Rose

Illustration: Glass-topped stone garden wall in Brazil--
flickr.com/photos/85941...00/695774244/

I discovered this eccentric, mutant-stemmed dandelion while I was out clipping the weeds in the neighboring vacant trailer lot. Beats hell out of the peculiar white-leafed clovers you sometimes find alongside house foundations. Perhaps I should look out my window when it's completely dark, to see if the seedheads glow?

Closing was today, and officers of the board signed the mortgage papers that put this mobile home park in our hands and under our management. With the knowledge that we've saved our homes and gained more control over our destiny, I expected to be more excited, but it's been a nightmare year of anxiety and factions. Believe it or not, some residents did not *want* us to save their homes; and we had to assume a couple of disheartening burdens in order to save any for anybody, but the acquisition is a done deal.

About a dozen of us sat around my living room and kitchen this afternoon with coffee, sparkling limeade and Asti, toasting the accomplishment--well, all except for our eldest resident. Ann's 93, pretty sharp, and sits on the Board, and she came back from closing too pissed to toast anything. Ann just sat and looked glum while the rest of us raised our glasses or mugs. She thinks we gave up too much to the former park owner, and I agree. For starters--the woman who inherited the Park, mismanaged it for decades, invested nothing in it, jacked us up for more and more rent to cover water bills and property taxes she never paid, and came within a day of losing the Park before signing a P&S with developers who were going to kick us all out. . .gets to live here RENT FREE for a year!

We had to give her that because that's in the original Purchase and Sales with the developers, which we had to match for Massachusetts to uphold our right of first refusal. And we ALSO have to pay to have an empty, uninhabitable trailer SHE owns hauled away. (She's actually scored a double play with that one--she already took advantage of a desperate couple full-timing in a little silver Airstream: THEY paid the heavy equipment guy who moved the big junk trailer to the back of the Park in the first place. Their campground was closing at the end of the season and they were willing to do *anything* for a lot to park their little home on over the winter.)

So already we're down one home's lot fees for twelve months in our make-or-break first year, when we know we're almost certainly going to run up against a few habitual late-pays who are going to test our eviction resolution even as they continue to thumb their nose at collection attempts by their former landlady. Who should have evicted them in the first place. We've heard she's put liens on some of the homes. Between her liens and our liens, I'm envisioning a contentious future! We'll be fighting over who owns how much of what home in here long after their inhabitants have been booted.

But the paperwork just says we have to let her live here free. It doesn't say we can't make her rue the day. Like when we show up with crowbars to take down her bigass tall stockade fence from that little private fiefdom she created so she wouldn't have to look at all of us hoi polloi. "Goooood morning, Marilyn! What? These? Why, we're here to dismantle the fence. It's against our Rules. We have given you a copy of our Rules. Surely you've read our Rules--'No perimeter fences will be allowed and all existing or proposed fences must have approval by the Board of Directors.' Your six foot fence [crrrack!] has *not* been approved [pryyy!] by the Board of Directors. Sorry, Marilyn, you're one of the hoi polloi now."

Or like when we show up with cement contractors to pour a foundation pad between her home and her best friends' home--the friends who lived here rent free and ran a garage here rent free for decades, and had all their electric usage, like the owner's, paid for by the rest of us all that time. They had somebody's home taken out at one time to give both *their* homes a bigger yard. "Goooood morning, Marilyn, hey GUESS what! Great news! You and Mel are gonna get new neighbors. They're bringing in a doublewide. Oh, hey! I know you and Mel love those bushes and flowers, so why dontcha think about digging them up and transplanting them across your big *back* yard, as a privacy screen--we're gonna be taking some of *that* next week for resident parking."

When we started down this path a year ago, prompted to save people's homes and preserve affordable housing, I figured just *getting* the property would be a long shot. I've never had any illusion about the hard work ahead of us to hang onto and rehabilitate this neglected, ill-favored little neighborhood. But somehow, I thought I'd at least feel a greater sense of relief and accomplishment on closing day. Triumph isn't like you read about.