Fionna Perkins, Point Arena Poet Laureate

A poet, journalist, writer, wife, feminist, environmental activist, animal lover, one-time bookstore owner, and library founder, Fionna was honored as the City’s Poet Laureate at the turn of the century. She moved to the north coast in 1962 with Richard, her husband, an Architect, after opening Mendocino Village’s first bookstore, Fionna’s Bay Window Gallery. Her own book of poetry, The Horse Orchard, was published in 2000 by Floreant Press, Copyright 2000 by Fionna Perkins. Her love of nature is reflected in written word, with a particularly warm spot for horses. She takes pen to paper in recognition of recent events, including Point Arena's Independence Day Celebrations, Kite Day, and the fall harvest and has honored us with inspirational words in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. Our Poet Laureate is a true gem and a local treasure.                                                                                                                       

 

Text Box: FIRST DATE Rather than finding a name for the small tea bowls we held in circled thumbs and forefingers, kept refilling, I discover trained monkeys in The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook scaling the highest peaks in all china to pick tea leaves growing closest to the gods, dried, infused and sipped later as Cloud Mist or to credit the workers Monkey Pluck. Another instance of how often I start in one direction, end somewhere else, like buying the cookbook at a kitchen-store closing when I went there for pasta bowls and a new spatula or being long rooted into the North Coast when my dream was to travel the world beginning with China. Instead I agreed to a date with the young sailor who claims I was two hours late, while I admit to one, remembering he out-waited me and wasn’t supposed to so here we are fifty-four years later still sitting across a round table from each other as we did in a curtained booth upstairs on Grant Avenue. When the Chinese waiter brought menus, a pot of tea and the two little bowls the young man looked as if about to be crucified or now that I know the look poisoned by the first Chinese meal of his life, owned up to years after. We didn’t ask the name of the tea, must have been Eyebrows of Longevity. ©2000 by Fionna Perkins     Text Box: HARD TIMES FOR WOMEN Listing my chores for the day, the decade, the next century, I note that the planet needs saving--by screaming, I suppose, out on the street like a rabid banshee, hoisting a placard, shaking a fist, when I'd rather ride by in a carriage, smiling and doing my queen wave. I hate being jostled by bodies, roared at, hassled, arrested, going limp in debris --a disgrace to my mother, a public nuisance--how often I'm told, and at times I agree. If ever a man did as he promised, to cherish the ground I walk on—our earth--I'd never again stall his traffic and hear myself cursed. I'd rather be home in my garden, pruning and pulling weeds. Yet it's still the same as always, whether wanting the vote or saving the world, stopping a war, needing a pay raise or care for the children, out in the street with my banners and bitches marching and going to jail. ©2000 by Fionna Perkins                                                                                                                     

    Text Box: RUMORS RUMORS Like the man goin’ round in a song on an old record we used to play, a rumor keeps circulating that this town, this little two-square-mile city spread over a slope between hills a mile from the sea, this Punta Arenas, so named in 1792 by a passing explorer and map maker, is now said to be dying-—oh, yes, dying, if not already dead. Understandable if such a rumor first surfaced in the anxious April days of 1906 after the earth reared up and threw all of Point Arena’s brick store buildings into the street, while a few miles to the north a dairyman watched the Garcia roll out of its banks onto the land and roll back twice. And on another farm the barn behaved like a rubber ball, down and up, down and up—wild! Wouldn’t you think anybody with any sense would grab a few provisions and hightail it to somewhere more stable? Instead, they picked up the bricks to use for a post office, later Bookends, now artsDesire. Ah! The City’s treasury, a perennial source of alarm. In January 1909, five times the size it is today, Point Arena sailed bravely into its first full year of official cityhood with what we’d call a paltry sum--$36.16. Some years the men laying gravel on the roads had to be told they’d be paid when the taxes came in. And, there was the time the City’s cash on hand was down to a dollar-fifteen, which Joe Scaramella discovered scanning the old records and still remained an ardent advocate of what this little town has had and claimed since its beginnings in 1858, a single store and a few settlers—Home Rule. © May 27, 2003 by Fionna Perkins   AND BE THANKFUL

Do you ever envision the earth's curve under your feet as you stand on it, sticking out into space and don't fall off to go hurtling through satellites and stars and vanish as Hale–Bopp did?

    Isn’t that a miracle?

And washing your face do you try to catch a gush of water to hold in your hand, see it slip away leaving behind only a few wet spots? Yet without this colorless streak of movement, you couldn't live.

    Another miracle.

Like the air above and around that you're standing in, crisp and clean off the Pacific, and if you stop breathing it in, you'll disappear as the water does but not as fast if we get the ambulance to you in time, for you there watching the parade alive inside your skin--

    You are a miracle.

And let me tell you of a miracle I saw one April afternoon when late rains had turned our hills a blindingly brilliant green, so beautiful you daren't close your eyes.

    The whole coast might vanish.

Come south with me past Port Road and the city limits, up the S-curves shadowed by brush and high banks and along the open sweep of cow pastures to where the highway starts to drop--

    This my miracle.

Overhead giant snow pillows moving in a cerulean sky and below the green green hills rising to forested slopes, the swerving ribbon of highway edging the bluffs and at their base the forever sea. That instant it's as if God has pulled open a curtain, saying, Here is your world, look at it. Love it.

    And I do.       

 

The End

At the Parade, July 4, 2003, Point Arena, California

© 2003 by Fionna Perkins