WASH ME ON HOME, MAMA. Pete Najarian

       Wash Me On Home, Mama

       Wash Me On Home, Mama

       Pete Najarian

       REGENT PRESS

       Berkeley, California

      Copyright © 1978, 2018 by Pete Najarian

      Paperback

      ISBN 13: 978-1-58790-457-8

      ISBN 10: 1-58790-457-8

      E-Book

      ISBN 13: 978-1-58790-458-5

      ISBN 10:1-58790-458-6

      Library of Congress Catalog Number: 9781587904585

      Originally published by Berkeley Poets Workshop and Press

      ISBN 0-9-17658-10-8

      Cover design by the author.

      This printing of this book was originally funded bv a Grant from the National Endowments of the Arts

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Regent Press

      Berkeley, California

       www.regentpress.net

      "Wash me on home, mama"

      — Song of the Kelp.

      Earth! Those beings living on your surface

      none of them disappearing, will all be transformed.

      — FROM Myths and Texts by Gary Snyder

      You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

      — FROM Letters To A Young Poet by Rilke

      I am not a home. I am these rooms of my longing like the waiting rooms of a ferry station way out in the boondocks where no one rides the ferry anymore, that round chubby boat bobbing over the waves to the rhythm of a tuba, the patient tuba who always sat in back of the orchestra until one day someone wrote a song especially for his solitude, The Song of Tuba The Ferryboat, pumping across the water beyond the Golden Gate where the soft coastal hills roll into the white and emerald sea… I am not happy. I am a man struggling, always fighting. I am a woman who reaches out and yearns for the opening of her dark walls that the birds of her heart may fly into the outside. I am a man driven by his own eyes. I am a wounded woman without a child. A man who can never say yes. A woman wandering to find a secret. A man who hates women. A woman behind locked doors. Unhappy men and women rebuilding engines, sewing zafus, trying to be great and simple with college degrees and job recommendations blowing in the wind as we run a few scams and hustle to Montana and New Mexico.0 my people, in the middle of life we make ripples in the spawn and none of them remain. Where is the ferry, the fat red and blue boat that is a baby’s washtub sailing on the waves of happiness? Does it appear on the horizon? Call to it and signal that we may hear again the joyful song of Tuba, the awakened one.

      But no, before I can sing I must cry. And tell again another story while we wait to leave for the other shore.

      Here then are the people inside me as they were years ago when I lived in Berkeley, California. As I begin to look at them they become like the lemons and the pineapple on the counter by the sink, different patterns, things, future Buddhas, and yet all one, all together in their separate rooms.

      First comes Dominic, my bald dreamer, who grew a beard in his mountain retreat and did not shave it when he came back to the commune in the flatlands. Now among the others he tries once more to join hands and break bread at the long table in the giant kitchen. After lunch he cleans up neatly (for he is one of the neat ones) and then drives the truck to the dump. The truck is loaded with the rubble of plaster from the wall e demolished yesterday. He knocked the wall down to open the space upstairs in this big old house that was once three separate apartments.

      CONTENTS

       DOMINIC

       NAOMI

       MARIAN

       MARIAN AND SAM

       BUSTER

       DAPHNE

       DOMINIC

       MARIAN

       SAM

       BUSTER

       DAPHNE

       NAOMI

       DOMINIC

       MARIAN AND BUSTER

       DOMINIC

       NAOMI

       SAM

       MARIAN

       BUSTER

       NAOMI

       DOMINIC

       DAPHNE

       DOMINIC

      We inherit space and fill it with our lives and our furniture, a long printer’s table scavenged from a bankruptcy, a bumpy sofa leftover from a grandma, flea-market lamps, garage-sale refrigerator, and scrapwood benches worn smooth and polished by everyone’s sweaty buttocks-things that will inherit everyone’s death. A cock roach crawls along the sink, ventures across the faucet, finds a precipice and retreats. How has this place come to be here, this labyrinth of pipes and wires, water and gas in and out from stone and macadam, telephone and electricity stretching from where, arteries and veins of what wanderers-? Follow the line all the way back and find the point, aperture of the primal cause.

      By the road to the dump low-tide, semi-circle of a tire and the willets picking in the mud, coots and gulls in the inlet, and the tall solitary egret delicately white amid debris. And then more gulls, gulls, an apocalypse of cawing gulls as Dominic stopped at the booth and paid the little round man of faded flannel and a baseball cap, and then entered the hills of garbage covered with new grass. In fifty years five hundred acres of land, land from the refuse