Kathleen Travers was crowned the 1st Poet Laureate of the Foothills on May 19, 2024 at the historic McGroarty Arts Center. A fourth generation Angeleno, Kathleen has lived in her 100-year-old historic home in Sunland (which she restored) for more than 20 years. With graduate degrees in Art History, Victorian Studies and Professional Writing, she has been the recipient of fellowships to the Prague Writers’ Festival and for post-graduate study at Cambridge University. Formerly a high school and university educator, she is a historic restoration expert, specializing in architectural ceramic. A preservation advocate, Kathleen authored the successful Historic-Cultural Monument applications for the Hills of Peace Cemetery and Cross of San Ysidro. She served as docent at Bolton Hall for ten years, where she co-curated the Foothill Moderns exhibit and lectured on local artist Margaret Morrish. She has read her poetry at venues as diverse as Maddingley Hall, Cambridge, England, and Gasoline Alley, the L.A. Times Festival of Books and the Iguana Café. She served on the board of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival in its glory years, and was a founding director of the Poetry Society of America in Los Angeles in the time of The Act of the Poet at Chateau Marmont. Featured in 49 local civic light opera and drama productions in decades past, and having sung with a bakers dozen of Los Angeles choral ensembles, her mezzo is currently in search of a choir, although she always has a song in her heart for life in Sunland-Tujunga.
The Mountain in My Yard
It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.
-Charles Baudelaire
I recall the picture, my grandmother
aproned Mode-O-Day at her kitchen sink,
I on the floor, above my toddler head
the makings on the counter of a pie;
behind, a craftsman balance of matched cupboards,
banks of drawers, archetype of my own,
but that above my kitchen sink and same
tile backsplash thinly lined in contrast –
mine white/red, hers green/black – a mountain.
She rises sharply through the soft fullness
of oaks and sage, cutting into sky
and dark against the lavenders and reds
and golds of California flowers. How
I’ve loved the mountain’s changing rise: from winter
lace, its white against the chilled gray dream
of sky as startling as my kitchen walls
against the tile’s mellowed cream; in spring
she warms to gold, a froth of light and brilliant
green that blooms and spreads, turning dark
and smoky like the drift of sage upon
the summer air; then crisp and brown with danger,
while autumn sunsets blaze reflected fire
on her face, embraced by purpling clouds.
I have never been amazed by what
we love beyond what moves and breathes,
hard-wired to attach by a million
generations of selection.
So when I received the notice of foreclosure,
though I knew I would, as when the cancer
victim finally succumbs, the jolt caught,
breathless ribs collapsed, the grief a shock.
For a moment I was back, watching from
the sink as Station Fire flames crept up
the mountain’s sides and all around, days
of dark red glow and heavy skies and air as thick
as sorrow – it took a year to wash the black away.
But even charred, my true north, the gentle arch
of her peak sliding down, curving up the next,
an odalisque reclining, her geography –
my Sun Land an ordinary magic that lulled
in dreams of poetry, while life went on in prose.
No, I have never been amazed by what
we love. And I have loved this house,
this place, this air, and Sister Elsie’s Peak.
As necessary as love is to us
is never a surprise as much as how
we will survive the loss; what will amaze
me is if I survive the loss.
The Currency of Childhood
for an afternoon at Descanso Gardens
Polished carob beans–
sun-dark grapes in clusters–
silky pods that split to gelled
trails, black on sidewalks:
these were the currency of childhood,
as firm and reliable
as our parents' silver certificates.
Such round and pleasing coinage
bought favor among concrete
blocks swelled by roots
and streets just steep
enough to speed bike-bound
wheels tracking green and worthy
enterprise.
Buddy's mother had sung
the witch in Hansel and Gretel–
a fact worth buttons
and honeysuckle
just in the reminding;
when you'd venture the treasure of other blocks
it was often just to see if you could dodge
the sound of the call on her diva voice,
crawling like notes up a staff
through the high arms of trees
and never enough streets from home
to flee the aria of his name.
But that was a magic you wanted no deliverance from.
It was coinage in an alchemist's mold
that never knew inflation
merely dropped from use
replaced by the standard
of the redder empire
of adolescence.
All grown too tall,
we bartered time
for bold and surfeit kisses,
sacrifice as legal tender.
And have spent years since
unable to count
all that has passed,
all that we have lost
or spent in the losing.
But today we traded shirts,
those skins we had fingered
to imprint the fabric of our moment;
inhaling you in this exchange,
I have found handfuls of that lost currency
which I will spend on the laced
limbs of live oak that sighed in God's breath
and bent to brush us with their golden cones.
I will feel time slip with our hurling
down slick blades before the long
arm jerk of the water wizard
through a sky recognized from other years,
a glow of purple stone worth everything
and a pilgrim's path to magic
in a smooth hard seed; ever after
it will open for us
to the feeling of a child
who from his mother never heard his name
but that it was sung.
Kathleen Travers
rg cantalupo is a poet, playwright, filmmaker, novelist, and director. His work has been published widely in literary journals in the United States, England, and Australia. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz where he studied under such luminaries as George Hitchcock, editor of Kayak, Gregory Bateson, and Norman O. Brown, and received his MFA in Poetry and Non-Fiction from Vermont College of the Fine Arts. His books of poetry include Involving Residence, No Thanks, Walking Water On Earth, The Art of Naming, Remembrances, The Endurance: Journey To Worlds End, (a lyric novel), Graces For The Wonder: Poems 1998-2023, I Will Not Die Here: War Poems 1990-2023, Never To Die: Book One: The Last Strigoi; Book Two: Love’s Body, Waking In Dawn’s Early Light, and Private Entries,You Don’t Know Me, (a five book young adult series), The Light Where Shadows End, and The Shadows In Which We Rise, (memoirs), American Patriot, Surviving Covid, and a number of plays and stage adaptations including the musical versions of “The Giving Tree” and “Where The Wild Things Are.” He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Stages in Santa Monica, a performing arts center. He served in the 25th Infantry Division as an RTO, radio operator, for an infantry company from 1968-69 and received three purple hearts and a Bronze Star with a Combat V for Valor Under Fire. His books can be purchased through New World Publishers or through the author at rgcantalupo@gmail.com.
Note: RG is taking a rain check as he missed the reading scheduled in 2023, due to unforeseen circumstances. We are happy to welcome him this coming month!
For A Young Poet
Already at seven, you’re naming the garden,
writing “rose”, “lilac”, “daisy” along the walkway
with colored chalk. We watch you, say how
this world we live in, this green patch in Angel City,
will be yours soon, then we let you take our hands,
guide us through your creations, show us how
even the prickly weed “thorny” has a home here.
Out beyond us, where our sight ends, are predators,
I know. I know. They peer out from inside shadows
like frightened cats, drive by stalking behind glass.
And that too, you must name, write in red so those
after you know what else lurked here. Remember,
even leeches rise in this earth. Remember also, how
yours must be the words we long for, for without them
there is only this dying garden without colors or
sounds to sing. Look at your fingers, green from
leaves and grass. Let that be your guide. Look at how
your eyes reflect the sun’s light. Just so. Just so.
Light is a prism there, shoots off sparks igniting
whatever it hits. Take it in. Take it in. Let your heart
be the diamond that bears our light.
Published in The Wisconsin Review
Scene From The Promenade
Evening, late, the lights
of the promenade
dimming to dark.
I walk out of a movie
into the reality of
storefront windows,
stop in front of a
billboard-sized snapshot
with the name J. C. Crew.
Shot in some exotic,
third world country,
(Guatemala maybe,
or Paraguay), it sells
adventure: an exotic tundra,
a dirt road leading to an
endless horizon, warm,
earth tones drifting off
into matching mannequins.
Up close, an enormous,
furry, white dog getting out
of a sand-colored Land Rover,
a man in khakis unloading
rattan suitcases, a woman,
also dressed in khakis,
standing nearby, smiling.
They are both rugged, slim,
blond, beautiful as angels
looking down from two stories
above. Below them, humans,
me, a homeless couple
vacationing in the alcove—
two writhing lumps
under a newspaper and
a gray, tattered army blanket,
grunting, then moaning
as I pass.
Published in The Willow Review
The Stars
The stars do not want me to write them sweet poems.
They have no desire to be “my heaven”, or “the flickering
embers of my love”, or “a theme park for aliens
saucering around the universe”. No, the stars
don’t want to be anything but stars, twinkling along
in their own reveries, going nowhere in particular.
They don’t even like being called “stars” really.
They’d much prefer a more feminine name—“astral”,
or “celeste”, or “estelle” say, though even “phoebe”
would be acceptable. They especially don’t like the way
we’re always pointing at them, calling them dogs,
or bears, or serpents, or soldiers, how we make up
scandalous stories about them like celebrities and then,
later, pretend they actually occurred. Nor do they like us
reading our future in their random configurations
as if we were reading tea leaves in the cup of the sky.
But what the stars hate most, is our ceaseless probing,
our intrusive cameras spying on them as if there were
some kind of conspiratorial plot to their vow of silence.
No, the stars would just rather be left alone, cruising
through the dark matter without a care in the cosmos.
Isn’t it enough, they ask, to fall like a teardrop from
the night now and then, to die out in a hail of fire
like a fiery god?
Published in The Southern Review
RG Cantalupo
Sunland Backyard, photo by Alice Pero