Diana Saenz was born in Los Angeles, California. She lived for a time with her grandparents in Fresno, California. She recounts her memories of Central California as among her most powerful memories, specifically recalling of the scent of Oleanders that proliferated in her grandparents' neighborhood, in Fresno.
Diana Saenz is a playwright and poet who has been writing for 35 years. Her fifteen plays have been produced in California, Massachusetts, Texas and Maine. She has written three books of poetry, and numerous articles and short stories. Saenz founded "The Boston Poet," an event calendar for poets.
A number of Diana Saenz's plays are centered in various parts of California. Her only autobiographical play, "Baby Goats", takes place in the back seat of car between four young children as they traverse from Fresno to Los Angeles.
Diana Saenz maintains a webpage at http://homestead.juno.com/poettalk/ on which her work is showcased.
I.
below lies Antonia
And as they talk
Above, Tlazolteotl
in Antonia's sober face
We don't know if anyone
wake up!
in my grandmother's parlor
In the grandchildren day
Tlazolteotl, a most peculiar goddess
is the old Aztec moon
who hovers overhead
her stone face a grimace of childbirth
as she pushes out Tlazolteotl,
the new moon
deep in a coma
her kin gather outside
speak in the hushed tones
that kin do when Death is near
as if not to stir the air
or bring her eyes to them
one story segues
and that story segues
so that one comes away
thinking, Antonia is
a wicked wit
with a distaste for the waifishness
of small children
who to purify the Earth
eats the filth
we leave behind us
as we live
and when we die
She has come to eat the
body goods of bad Antonia
the Goddess's somber features begin
to inhabit
the gods don't dine like human beings
eat us with mercy Tlazolteotl
though no mercy shows
in your bogeyman eyes
has offered prayers for Antonia
the thought is lost in the debate
for her collection of crystal
and golden things
Tlazolteotl whispers into Antonia
see there--who cares?
then flies off swift as spark
unsated
To everyone's, and again
to no one's surprise
Antonia learns to walk again
and of course to reject those
whom she has rejected a half-century
of Aztec Yellow Autumns
that seemed to begin
my father's sister
pinched and coifed
cross-legged sat
cocktailed, acerbic
keen on her site
of my grandfather's garden
that was once a desert
under the Bird of Paradise
slept a plaster Mexican
and by the driveway
the montrous cactus
that sometimes caught us
as we ran by
Ruben Kierkegaard
Who was I?
Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard
Ruben?
two headlights
after-hours bard
would fall into Black idiom
when Parker, haunting the slow-down of bee-bop
moments of guilt would pick up the riff
spin it like birdsong
and the time was two hits to take-off
and who Kruppa, Krupskaya and Kerouac?
I didn't know
bartending was an art-form
and Zapata was someone who'd been betrayed.
I was the face
who hadn't thought about the place in time
the oppressed imperialist girl-mate of Indonesian civil war
already willing to people the world
with bastards of trouble
got the wedding guests drunk
left his mother
dusty and wise in Delano
picked the grape
lived by the grape
came crying drunk-crazy by the grape
in story-telling Black idiom
that woke up Lenny, Beat, and fifties kind of junkies.
He was opaque eyes, todo Indio
Moorish Black duck's ass
and huero
astraddle a small fold in time
like the true Dr. Gonzo.
learned to tend bar at seventeen
his daddy murdered by gangsters a long time ago
where the shade trees
leaned over the valley's fine dust
and the muddy water from the wide ditches
broke over the vines at 2 p.m.
And the children of pickers loved there to stay cool
never wrote a single line
the time of Homer was dry English class
But Kierkegaard--a man trapped like Beast
made word -music by KJAZ candlelight and sloppy sticks
Howlish dramas
loving this troubled mistress
collapsing veins, collapsing stars
there aura blinking down to face you
coal, Baby
lapsing into diamond things
When we are infant cousins
How do I know you from
Look up
we bath together
One summer everything begins to change
years later at a family reunion
from the desert cities of our growing up dreams
we run breakneck to the candy store
they sit you
five months younger
beside me and take a snapshot
as you topple into my lap
your brown face
concentrated on the fall
the confidences whose contents are not
so much a memory as a feeling
the blackbirds
inked notes on the telephone wires
One takes flight
arches against the white sky
the whole time
I keep my eyes above the water
Dylan sighs in his old guitar voice
we play him till the 45 hisses
we feel ostracized, strangely betrayed
when each of us brings home a date
I see you, dressed in black
watching behind dark glasses
triple by-pass surgery under your shirt
I hear a promise confessed:
I hear the wry inner-monologue you run
we who once said, you were my first love
look at one another, nod
but do not speak
the damp nights remembered as a
strung together lot of midsummers
the music and your father cha-chas
our grandfather's house at the top of the hill
there was once an average young man
the young man was so appalled by his future self
everyone else's life dwindled in subtle concessions
he thought to go as Oedipus
but because of the donkey god he knew we have a single destiny
how often did he wonder
and so time passed, slowly then faster
but the donkey god was not finished and arranged for him
who annoyed the donkey god
who in punishment, arranged for the youth to meet the man
he would be in thirty years
so disappointed by the lack of luster, he wept
his self perception suddenly obsolete
he had been swindled
to face oneself without introduction or time was inhumane
to chart a futile course and attempt to change his fate
wasn't it the good we set out to do
that determined our character?
and he had met his
if this was the work of a devil or an angel
he could not answer as both have wings
that fly over mortal heads
until one day he realized, he had grown older than the man
he had met as a youth
he would have cried out in utter surprise
if he had not worked so conscientiously
to become who he was
to look up and see an average young man
who for a moment stared at him with great intensity
the man thanked the donkey god
for this doppelgänger curse
and turned to reassure the youth
but the youth was gone
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway 2000. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for
copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to theiroriginal work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Diana Saenz 2000.
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