Gualala and Guarero

There’s a lot of world in a small change,

A lot of range in a phoneme or

A mere date. My older grandmother

Was born the same month as Anita

Loos, albeit on the opposite

Side of the same nation’s continent.

My younger grandmother’s dissolute

Father abandoned his family

For a pack of cigarettes the same

Year that Anita Loos abandoned

Her dissolute husband for a pack

Of hat pins. By the time Anita Loos

Was world famous and unhappily

Anchored to her second sick husband,

My older grandmother was widowed

With ten children, the youngest just born

Three months after her husband had died,

All living on a subsistence farm,

While my younger grandmother, who had

Copies of St Vincent Millay’s poems

And Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, both shelved

In a guest bedroom where I found them

As a bookwormed grandson, decades on,

Had just married her one and only

And honeymooned at Niagara Falls

In a secondhand Ford Model T.

So much from April of eighty-eight.

In April of twenty-twenty-one,

On the day Anita Loos was born,

I read a news piece on Guarero

And the nightmares of Venezuela

Dissolving into bandit kingdoms.

Intending to look up Guarero,

I noticed my map app was open

To Northern California, and there

On the coast was a fly-speck small name,

Gualala, which I’d never spotted

Before, though I must have driven through

The middle of it at least ten times

Along PCH 1, up and down.

So I ended up spending half an hour

Reading the story of Gualala,

Indigenous toponym, which once

Was the home of a Pomo people,

Handed to General Garcia

Of Mexico, who ranched it until

It was taken from him in the name

Of the California Land Act

And sold to settlers, who made a town

With an industrial lumber mill

That took out all the old growth redwoods

Until the hotel and mill burned down,

About the time Californian

Anita Loos was getting into

Writing scripts for early silent films

And my younger grandmother was born.

Down in Guarero, indigenous

Wayuu people who weave and raise goats

And who recently made a living

Trafficking goods and gasoline

Through the border to Columbia,

Now decimated by violence,

Have come under the improvised rule

Of Marxist ELN guerrillas,

Who have managed some local order.

Better than chaos, say the Wayuu.

Up in Gualala, California,

A mostly elderly tourist town,

Indigenous Pomo seem long gone.

Anita Loos, Northern Californian

By birth, died some thirty years ago,

In a decade left between the deaths

Of my older, younger grandmothers.

All this goes on, has gone on too long,

Events echoing, lives for details.

There is too much world in a small world.