Poetry Magazine, Poet for Peace: Frances Payne Adler, September 2002

Poetry Magazine

Frances Payne Adler

USA

Poet Frances Payne Adler is the Director of the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University, Monterey Bay. Adler is the author of five books: Raising The Tents, a collection of poems (Calyx Books), and three collaborative books with photographer Kira Carrillo Corser, When The Bough Breaks: Pregnancy and The Legacy of Addiction (New Sage Press), Struggle To Be Borne (San Diego State University Press), and Home Street Home, (Red Cross). Her new book of poems, The Making of a Matriot, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Adler's poems have appeared in Poetry International, Fiction International, Prism International, The Progressive, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Women's Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Bridges, Centennial Review, Women and Politics, and Blood To Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, among others.

Adler and Corser are nationally known for their social action art -- collaborative photography-poetry exhibitions: "A Matriot's Dream: Health Care For All," (1993), about health care reform; "When The Bough Breaks: Pregnancy and the Legacy of Addiction," (1990), about the inter-generational cycle of drug and child abuse; "Struggle To Be Borne," (1987), about lack of access to prenatal care; and "Home Street Home," (1984), about the homeless. The exhibitions have traveled the country, showing in galleries, state capitol buildings, as well as at Harvard University and the U.S. Senate. Their most recent exhibition, "A Matriot’s Dream: Health Care for All" can be seen on-line at http://www.kiracorser.com/matriot/exhibit/index.html

Adler's awards include a California State Senate Award for Artistic and Social Collaboration, a Margaret Sanger Award, a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award. She was also a Western States Book Award finalist for Raising The Tents.

Poet June Jordan, in a Ms. Magazine article about contemporary women poets, selected Adler for her work in Raising The Tents, as "one of seven willful sisters…rocking the boat."

MATRIOT

During the Gulf War in 1991, I was sitting at my desk and heard on the radio
that our defense forces had invented a missile and named it the ‘patriot.’ That
evening, I invented a word, asking myself, what does a ‘matriot’ look like?

Matriot (ma’ - tri – at) noun 1. One who
loves his or her country. 2. One who loves
and protects the people of his or her country.
3. One who perceives national defense as
health, education, and shelter of all people
in his or her country. (Orig. FPA, 1991)

A year later, I interviewed Helen Vandevere, 87 years old, and asked her
what she would do if she were in charge of the national budget.

There's not much that's important at my age
except making the world a better place.
What would I do?

I say we damn well better
get out on the streets again.
Everyone has to put their hand to the wheel
and get out and get off their butt
like in the sixties. We had compassion then,
and we've lost it. It breaks my heart.

I've lived through two depressions,
two of them. Everyone at that time
was just sick about the way things were,
just like now, only it's worse now.
I see things falling apart --
People, starving on the streets.
Children, beaten in their homes.
Sick people without health care.
Imagine this, in a country
that spends so much on the war machine.

I'd spend the money on health instead.
I'd see that children are born healthy
and make sure they stayed that way.
All children no matter what age.
I'd clean the air, the water. I'd take away
all that polluting shit they put on vegetables.
I'd promote the use of sun, sea, and wind
for natural energy. I'd save the forests,
especially the redwoods. I'd ban firearms.
I'd take away every nuclear device man to man.
No more wars, ever. Now we're talking health.

How are we going to pay for all this?
No one ever says we don't have enough
money to go to war. No one ever says
we don't have money for national defense.

This is national defense.

© Copyright,1992, Frances Payne Adler.
Publication credit, Progressive, 1995

POSSIBILITY

In 1991, Fort Ord, a military base in California for 80 years, is closed down.
In 1994, California State University Monterey Bay, opens on its grounds.

Who would have thought it possible, to call the troops together
in the mess hall one morning, Monterey fog not yet burned off,
and say we’re closing down the base

Who would have thought it possible to load guns and missiles
into crates, artillery onto trucks, cannons onto flatbed railroad cars
to board up the windows of the barracks

And the grass grew long and quickly took over the fields,
thousands of soldiers marching down Inter-Garrison road
dwindled down to twelve then none

Who would have thought it possible to transform the chapel
that held the Panama coffin of Sargeant William Delaney Gibbs
into a music hall that swells with the sound of the poetry
of Sekou Sundiata and the sax of John Purcell

Who would have thought it possible to turn a
blood bank when we go to war we carry with us our own blood

into an environmental research lab. And students,
after the microscopes and studies, marching
against strawberry blood laced with methyl bromide

Who would have thought it possible to board up the officers’
club with its great oakwood bar and glass walls leaning the ocean
at Fort Ord, named after a general "famed as an Indian fighter"

And, two years later, for Andrea Woody, a student
in the Institute of Community Memory, to dig down, to research,
to call her Cascade grandmother back to her, to hold her
photograph, her letters in her hands

Who would have thought it possible
to transform jeep and tank garages into public art studios
the radio transmitter station into state of the art computer tech
the artillery vault into an on-line library
the battalion headquarters into the president’s office

Who would have thought it possible
to transform a survival training station into a child care center
to turn parachutes into small sweaters hanging from hooks,
gas masks into little laughing shoving mouths at the water faucet

Who would have thought, in the unused rooms of the campus,
soldiers’ beds would be piled, years and years of soldiers’ beds,
mattresses still ticking with cigarette burns

Who would have thought
students would now walk back and forth with their books
past these boarded windows, and inside, the eyelids
of the war dead would open, flutter like hummingbirds

© Copyright, 1997, Frances Payne Adler.
Publication Credit, Gold Coast Review, 1999

HOME, WHAT IT COSTS
"I’m not good at closing doors," you once wrote me, "and when I see you,
it’s not so much the memories of our life together that surface,
but rather the feeling that we’ve strayed so very far from home."

The drive to camp in the desert alone is not without fear, the dirt roads
can wash out, I’ve been warned, and the forecast is for rain, but the car
is packed, and my obsession has teeth. The road into the canyon is red
rock chips and clay. I go slow, at first, against the brutal bumps, then
take my foot off the brake, hold the wheel hard, ignore the car’s rattle,
and go ahead, go straight ahead. I am heading home. I have forgotten
where home is.

Years ago, I left our life on First Avenue, left you tending tomatoes
in the back garden, rooted to a life that no longer included my growth.
You wanted marriage, my undivided energy. What I wanted was you
and a home and to write poetry, to teach, to earn enough to support myself.
It was likely I’d have to move. Perhaps it is easier to leave someone you
no longer love.

I have come alone to this canyon, a grieving woman, to visit the homes
of those who lived here a thousand years ago. I’m not sure why. I have
learned to listen to the risings under my skin, the pull. The ancient ones
who lived here built their homes out of sandstone rock and pine trees,
and for those trees, had to walk more than fifty miles. They would cut one
down, leave it to dry on the mesa, one year later, return, carry it home.

It is six in the morning. Here in clay soil, I build a fire, boil tea, the sun
gains weight in the sky. I climb the ruins, the ancient ones teach me:
in their kiva, they germinate seedlings of corn. How perfect, to seed
corn in a sacred room. I learn I must plant the seedlings of my new life
in a round sacred place. How does this fit? When I think of home,
I still think of you.

The night sky fills with stars, each distinct, separate. No moon.
I wake in the night, the full moon has risen. It has liquified the stars,
they stretch the sky in waves. I rise, walk bare across the red rock
I dream you are a tree. I am carrying the loss of you home.

© Copyright, 1995, Frances Payne Adler.
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

THE WOMAN SHE WILL BE

the woman she will be
already has the woman she is
by the arm, she has been climbing her
down and up the gorge of two generations
losing the shape of the woman she
was constructed to be, becoming
the woman she is

the woman she will be
has been growing her these last
eighteen years, eighteen for chai,
for life, she has been sharpening her
eyes, educating her mouth, they have
become the deer bone of her spine

she has been growing her
for the coming evolution,
growing her to fluidity, long
languid lines, wide
love, arms thrown back,
moving belly open belly