·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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In the last month I have been teaching a “seniors” poetry workshop at the On Lok Center. It’s a non-residential site where folks who are elderly or impaired come for food, social and recreational life. Most are delivered by vans. Most are between 70 and 90 years old. This Center is located in what’s left of the heart of The Fillmore. But that’s another story.
The folks in my group are a mix of black and white, mostly emigrants from the poverty of the south and southwest, those who came to the Bay Area in early 1940’s to work in war related industries. I am at home with both groups. I grew up across the Bay in Richmond among African-Americans and poor-whites. By the time I was ten, it was impossible not to have a ‘rural ear’.
Working with these folks has taken me right back into that world and its origins. And it’s a delight. It’s a room full of much heart, directness and honesty, and no little imagination, including memories ready and articulate.
It’s been the dark end of the year. In fact, we lost somebody last week, Ruth Daniels suddenly died. Must have been in the air - she was absent and we had not heard - but somehow we got into talking and writing about winter and ‘the spirits of the dead’, or just plain spirits. Everyone seemed to have a story of the dead and the spirits that surrounded each particular appearance, and/or leave taking.

In honor of winter, we started the class with a collective poem a ‘call out’ to the spirit. “Just pretend winter is a person or character with whom we can have a conversation.” That was the instruction. And so it began:

Winter

Could you give me time to sleep comfortably until Spring?
Give me a break and not be too cold. I have no heat.
Lend me your ear. Hurry and finish the season.
Go back home. I want to see some sunshine.
Please be gentle and step lightly.
Don’t take down my bank account.
Don’t wreck my roof, flood my garage
Or tear down my fence.
Don’t cause accidents. No fires. No car wrecks.
Don’t bring me infections.
Don’t bring me no flu.
Don’t bring me soggy or wet shoes.
Don’t chill my feet.
Don’t fence me in with cold.
Don’t hurt my livestock.

Collective poem by Betty Lu Kara, Betty Lu Koon, Edward Dillard, Ira Finely and Natalie Barnett

Then we moved on to individual accounts, which is to say, encounters with the dead. Each person took a turn at speaking, while I wrote it down. Because I am one kind of poet, I broke their lines in concordance with speech patterns. Here goes:

Spirits of the Dead

The lady down the stairs in Room 201.
She was married. Her husband came to On Lok
Until he died. That was four or five years ago.
There house was in Rosa Park Housing.
She left his clothes, old cheese, and cereal in boxes
In the apartment bedroom. She just closed and locked the door.
JoAnn, his wife, was a trouble maker. She liked to watch wrestling
On Friday night.
People started hollering about the smell.
When they opened those boxes, mice and rats
Were chewing through everything.
When someone dies that’s why
You should always cleanup.

Betty Lu Koon

Ira’s Ghost

I was sitting in the courtyard in Hayes Valley, San Francisco.
The sun was shining. It was about seven in the morning.
All of a sudden this light was coming toward me.
The colors were red, green, blue, yellow.
It was shaped like a spirit, or a ghost with a human shape.
It came and went down into my body.
It felt like I was being frisked, like it was looking for something,
Like it was wanting to say Hello.
Then it came out and faded away.
I had a warm feeling.
It did not scare me.
I’d like to see it again.

Ira Finley

The Arm Toucher

I was telling the nurse. Several times now
It came and gripped my arm. Just for a second.
Then it goes away. Nurse says it must be
Somebody I knew. Don’t know who it is.
That’s all.

Edward Dillard

Great-Grandpa

When my great-grandfather died, my great-grandmother,
She began thinking about him. She could feel his presence.
He repaired carriages for a living – inside and out. He lined the insides with velvet, green cloth, black or brown leather.
The house had a wraparound porch. She thought she heard
Someone walking. When she looked out, no one was there.
She went to his closet, took down his clothes and put them
On the bed – everything that he wore, including his shoes.
She took her hands over the clothes, rubbed and made over them.
She loved him. She felt his presence then.
Finally, she gave the clothes away.

Betty Lu Koon

I hope you are pleased, even amazed, as I am with this work. These people would be the last to say they are ’special’ in any way. I find what they have to say, special in so many ways.

I am sure, as with many, I am in a real state of shock. kiri had recently emailed me that her heart was not doing well, ‘congestive heart failure’ was the phrase for it. I had no idea the edge was so close. She had hoped to come hear me, Rodney K. and Amanda Davis, when we read recently in the Artifacts series - but was still suffering from fatigue. And then a few days ago, a note that she had received a somewhat positive medical analysis. Apparently not.

Not fully informed, I don’t want to dwell on whether she received the best medical analysis, or whether it was limited for whatever reasons that account for the way many poets who live on the margins with so-so access to the medical system (let alone 44 million folks who have no medical insurance at all, as I am sure she would readily point out).

I prefer to think or imagine that her heart was overtaken by too much - too much going in, too much going out - and that it had reached a breaking point. I suspect when we know the whole story of kiri edwards -which I do not - we will fully discover a person of immeasurable courage, as well as the commanding poet whose generosity with the word is alread familiar to many of us. Her “transdada” website - with its attention to the magnitude of issues, confrontations with violence, fears and hopes of the transgender world - is easily evidence enough of a person fearless in her intake and out put of ‘the news.’

The kiri I knew I always found kind, open and expansive - a spirit that extended warmly to her life partner, Fran. In no way separatist or essentialist, her parnership extended to the world. No matter how many times threatened or broken, she kept a faith in all of us to make things ultimately right. Her writing and poetry lived on the adventurous frontier of this proposition. The more and more her work becomes manifest, I believe generations will continue to absorb and be shaped by its force, compassion and insistence on change.

In the meantime, I will miss her presence, terribly.