In the early 1980s I was homeless. I didn't think of it that way because to me, at the time, being homeless meant living on the street, which I never did. I was a lost soul, living for days or weeks in other people's homes. At one point I spent three weeks on the UC Berkeley campus, participating in a nutrition study, which gave me room and board and a stipend. From there I moved into an SRO, a Single Room Occupancy, also known as a "residence hotel." I worked at the desk there for my room and board and created an editing and typing business for spare change. I operated a switchboard that had survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and met women who had been shoved out of mental institutions by the Reagan policy. I got to know women from China who were studying for a six-week stint at the Van Ness Business College. I talked every day to a woman who had made the hotel her home since 1936. There was a chiropractor who had lived there for fifteen years. There were transients––tourists from Germany, Ireland and Jamaica, a young lesbian couple coming to the Promised Land from South Dakota, staying in the hotel while they sought jobs and someplace permanent.
In October of that year, I decided to return to New Mexico and the larger Southwest. I could hardly wait. One night, shortly before leaving, I wrote a poem I called "nightsong" about my joy to be coming home. Yet, I would still be homeless for many more months. It was New Mexico that was home and the Navajo Nation that was Home-Not-Home. I was going back to both.
While I was packing to leave New Mexico for Iowa, which I will do a week from now, I found that poem. I didn't know I still had it. So, although I'm leaving my New Mexico home now, it seems fitting to share the poem that tells of my deep connection here.
nightsong
rain tonight in san francisco
past midnight on the narrow bed
in the dark
hear water slapping cement
drainpipes chuggalugg
missing you
hours talking eating laughing
in our kitchens
playing cards til 4am
hearing willie nelson on the road again
i am coming home i am coming
blue sky
red rocks
green chiles
mutton stew
lazy brown mud houses
brown skins
i am coming home
the red earth wild animals howl at harvest moon
dry corn cracks on Canyon floor
i am coming
my self wild wide deep and voluptuous as
The Canyon
i am coming home
golden yellow aspens
smokey blue mountain ravines
dust clouds down the road
i am coming home