Rift Zone

Poems

Tess Taylor

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781597098625
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Brilliant... Rooted in the shifting California landscape, this elegiac yet hopeful book is... dedicated to grieving the world as we know it." —Ada Limón, author of The Carrying This collection of poems traces literal and metaphoric fault lines—rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Tess Taylor's hometown—an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault—these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful history of Japanese internment. Taylor's ambitious and masterful poems read her home state's historic violence against our world's current unsteadinesses—mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink—equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious—a fearsome tremor of a book. "Taylor vividly and memorably renders the complexities of an America of violence and rifts." — Publishers Weekly "Unearthing and sifting the seismic layers of her own East Bay locale, she's created a haunting American elegy." —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective

IV

We wrote this book for those friends who want to learn a bit about the geologic foundations of their surroundings . . . we avoided the more rarified topics that only geologists enjoy.

We did our best to avoid crossing the delicate line that separates simplification from oversimplification.

—Roadside Geology of Northern California

RAW NOTES FOR A POEM NOT YET WRITTEN

—San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito, CA

I walk by the
Japanese
ruins
gated
behind
cracked pavement lot
where the bare hills
“a riot of poppies”
frame
little sh
wild lupine

geranium

hothouse thorns

They never came back

their white neighbor saved

(not all)

of their business

in the windows

torn rice paper

half a Shinto shrine

Sixty years later
toppled
where they were taken

last of those buildings

downin
O my town.

We perch on
what was done here.
My best friend’s grandmother
myfirstboyfriend’sgrandmother
I knew it later
they never spoke of it—(to me)—

whiskey crates

& damp mold

of abandoned places

Coyote bush rattles: seems

to be asking

who will they take next

when are they coming?

ONCE AGAIN AT NONVIOLENCE TRAINING, 2017

Because the white supremacists are coming
because the threat

becauseCharlottesville
& if you don’t who will

& you never know what baton what chemical
we are marching.

We plan chants.
Make signs at church.

Large assembly: bodies, linoleum, soup.
Cardboard & markers & salt fog drifting.

We bear forward our fury and sorrow.
Estuary sanctuary room for our hope lights.

HATE IS TOXIC TO ALL LIVING CREATURES.
Shalom, salaam. We root our anger.

Are alive together.
Must now be shields to one another.

& John said: Be a witness.
We brace one another. Plant our feet.

In fog, promise
to stay together.

We will not raise our hands. We are not leaving.

LOMA PRIETA, 1989

then in chorus up the risers rose
& for a moment we were riding

high & tottering on the bareback crust.
We were girls

preparing for our concert
so even when the raw ground buckled

& bucked us up we went on singing.
Our conductor led us into the courtyard

& in four parts we sang a poem by e. e. cummings
even as we learned that all around us

whole neighborhoods & a freeway had collapsed.
Baudelaire wrote under von Haussmann

that a city’s form is always changing
faster than the longings of a mortal heart.

As the sharp quake kicked our lungs
we learned again & for the first time what

it is to live on things
bound to collapse. Later I’d read

Roadside Geology of Northern California
funny yellowing book my father treasured:

I’d learn rift zonesubductionslab pull—
Then as October dusk drew down we sang

although the very bridge
that was our pathway home had sandwiched

between its decks a man a fleet of cars.
Later I watched dismantled piece by piece

the last of those 1930s girders—
week by week torn down as I assembled

the cells of a new daughter in my body.
That night as upthrust settled

we sang on, still children
alive inside the music’s oxygen. Even in the face

of devastation
we must make art: This was the lesson

Beth Avakian offered then
without a way of knowing

how much it would mean to me
these years later. In the space

the freeway was, is bay.
The new bridge glitters.

They named the quake Loma Prieta,
which means ‘dark hill’—

it represents a great collapsing,
though in my heart & memory

i...