Julie hand-crafted this volume of her poetry, The Tinker & More, in 1986. Poems from this collection have been cited in academic papers,1 2 and a copy is known to reside in the Special Collections of the University of Oregon Libraries.3
The full text of the collection is presented below, but you may want to view the book HERE at the Lesbian Poetry Archive in order to see this work as the author intended. (alternate link)
The Tinker & More
Poems by Julie Hopp
Roseburg, Oregon
The Tinker
The Tinker
A clatter and rattle approaches,
Pans and pots jangling, perhaps,
In the wooden frame of a tinker's cart
Jolting along the rutted track.
Hunched deaf and shoeless over the footboard
Death the tinker sags.
Her burlap sack, half-full of bones,
Slumps across the cart's worn boards.
A femur rattles against a sauce pan,
A clavicle dents the ladle's cup.
My limbs tighten around the tree;
Her bole is slender one hundred feet above the earth
My armpit clenched over pitchy branch,
Fingers goring the bark's cleft;
A dead limb explodes under my foot --
My left leg pedals in the air.
The limb’s fall muffled by the needles' net,
The cart's approach, and the clamouring
Of pans and lids for more dead limbs:
Kneecaps. My knucklebones.
Tree, I beg you:
Hold me safe, hidden in your branches.
Let her pass.
I'll leave the cones I climbed to pick,
I'll strangle squirrels,
I'll eat the bark-chewing beetles,
Chainsaw loggers,
But protect me here,
Cheek and nose smashed against
Sticky bark,
Eyes poked by needles,
Fingers scored by spiny cones --
Don't drop me.
Tin and pewter rattle for a ball-joint socket.
My skull
Tinker! Mother Death:
There can't be room!
The wagon moos with stew pots
Axles low beneath the cauldrons.
My left foot digs in more securely
I listen again to the death rattle:
Cow bells.
-- Plumas National Forest
Fall's Web
Stretched from white-bellied hemlock
To pine’s furred arm, a strand,
The skein spun from flocks grazed
On the smallest wisps of thistles
Dried in September's thirsty sky.
The sheep drunk on algae from a rusty tub,
Lip glazed porcelain and water green
In the noon-sun.
Their fleece carded on barbed wire,
Its metal still so dew-heavy in morning's mist
As to consider, for a moment,
Unfurling its barbs and letting forth the flock
To roam, dazed, among the firs
And, finding other webs,
To leave behind on bark or branch
A silvered strand to compete with spider's art
And catch the light.
As a window's crack
Steals the whole pane's due,
Binding it in a gleaming thread,
To melt the gravelly Umpquan waters
To a dry October bed
-- Flournoy Valley
October 1985
Oak in August
Oak, ponderously lobed and twisted,
Hoists her weight between a sky
Parched and cloudless,
And long grass petrified in bright shards
No neighbors limbs graze her branches,
Shading neither grove nor knoll,
But bleached and open pasture,
Deer-crossed, hoof-pocked.
A thousand arms lifting in supplication
Her bitter corns have
Drawn no clustered seedlings
To white oak grown huge in centuries' resignation.
The weight and heat of uncompanioned summer
Are only blades of grass tickling the thick bark,
But swords enough to pierce my naked feet.
-- Flournoy Valley
October 1985
for Stefi
Orgasm
If, after the waves,
Comes death,
Labyris gleaming,
I will not resist.
-- November 1985
Liz
Small bones
Small house
Small horse
Eyes shine
Through round glasses
My heart grows large
Cliff View
Dwarfed from above by winds
And the grudging gifts of rock,
So from below the twisted cedar
Shrinks to nothing.
Our eyes fail us.
The farm below unfolds as if a map,
The plums in rows,
The garden square,
Corrugations of barn roof
Written in light and shade.
Clearly seen, the past appears,
Irrevocably arrayed.
The doubts so tangled
From the view of hay-strewn floor
Are from above reduced to folds and creases,
Boundary lines.
-- Callahan Ridge
Oct. '85
A Present
Cats drag in moles, small shrews.
I come trailing scraps of paper.
Verses dripping with intent
Expressions of love as peculiar
As the trailed intestines of mice and birds
to Liz
Oct.’85
Liz
The mouth upcurved in sleep,
The sweeping line parting
The dry lips.
A temple falls revealed
Under the dark hair's ragged cut.
One white strand in the soft, short
Sea of black.
A vein beneath the crosshatching
Of knuckle's cover; the hand twitches
And the reins of night tighten.
Outside ponies nicker.
Glasses lie unfolded on the table
Against the shirts worn smooth with their rubbing
I lift my head to let it drop again
Into the crook of arm's warm bend.
-- Nov. '85
Bound
So small a space--
Less than arm's reach
The table's edge,
The carpet's aisle
A foot’s half swinging in breadth;
Too little space to drop the gaze,
To summon stillness from
Table leg or carpet-tack,
To contain the fumbled, slowdrawn words;
Tumbling, belly-flopping down from
Palate's top to stomach roped in knots
I bind myself:
Twine fingers,
Lower eyes,
Chew cheek and tongue,
Lest the outfly
Of sobs and sighs,
Moans and whimpers,
Obtuse questions,
Absurd replies,
Hungry stares
And teary eyes,
Outswell the doorframe,
Curtain rods,
Crack the windows and
Warp the frames,
So that, like rearing pony,
I am banished,
With harsh words,
To bare and muddy ground.
-- Nov. '85
Two Boys
I hear my death invoked -
"Bang! Bang! you're dead!"
The cap-gun's crack
Called down by boys outgrown
The twisting off of cricket's legs
And warming now to the scent of blood.
Soon, the shotgun's blast,
The flurry of wings,
The buckling of does
Will not be enough:
A worthier opponent will be sought,
One who’ll comprehend the pointed nuzzle
And frenzied eyes,
One who'll beg and scream and fight
And then upyield her essence, her force of life,
All that gun steel lacks and such men's lives.
--Melrose
Nov. '85
Open on the earth
Mouth agape, red veins running
Sun-fallen: a plum
-- Jan. '86
Two pails of water
Thick with oil and salt:
Gull's wings -
How distant the sky!
-- Bandon
Jan. '86
Full moon pulls away
The spring tide to reveal the stars
Purple-fingered
-- Bandon
Feb. '86
Like small, wriggling fish
The seedlings in their silver wraps
Fall into the earth
-- Tree planting
Rainbow's End
Feb. '86
Deer nibbling at moss --
Your lips graze among my hairs
To reveal the bud
-- For Fran
Feb. '86
Anal Sex
Dig, until the pools of iris
Fill with tears, and beating against
Her rib-walled cage
My heart pounds wide
The humid corridor and airs
The soils of night
To the Crooked furrow of
The oiled, three-jointed plow
-- For Fran
Mar.’86
The Desert Is Humming
Winds have shaped the granite
As the breasts and buttocks
Of huge women pressed with sweat
Together on the sands, as on beach towels too small.
The squat cactus bursts with deep hues,
Smelling, in the dry land, of ripened watermelons
Under the sands wait the tortoises,
Above them run the hares,
And through the rocks run dikes:
The quartz-filled veins exuded
In the joy of heat and pressure --
Stones milky as clouds
And crystals empty as the sky
-- Joshua Tree
Apr. '86
Lesbians are Natural Phenomena
I saw myself
Standing at the edge of the sea,
Wet and wanting to get wetter
I cried out
As the ocean sent another wave
Crashing over me
Deeper,
I ask her to cover me,
To keep me smeared with foam,
Rocking in her wake
She is a wave,
She throws herself upon the sand
For a moment
And in that moment I dream:
"Ah, she is at peace, she will stay here,
Licking gently at my toes.
And I will scratch her sandy back."
But the sea draws herself up
And pulls away.
The sand beneath my feet receeds
"She draws back and the earth goes with her,"
I panic,
"The whole world is leaving me,
I must follow her,
must drown myself in her waves.
But the sand holds me
And i settle a little deeper into the earth.
I think of standing at the edge of a woman,
Wet
And wanting to get wetter.
I cry out as she sends another wave
Crashing over me.
Deeper,
I ask her to cover me,
To keep me smeared with foam,
Rocking in her wake.
She lies down beside me
For a moment,
And in that moment i dream:
"Ah, she is at peace,
She will stay here,
Kissing at my breasts
And I will stroke her back."
But she draws herself up
And walks away.
"The earth is leaving me,"
I panic,
"I must stay with her
And hold her.
There will be nothing left
For me to stand on.
But the earth holds me
And i settle a little deeper
Into myself.
1. Sandilands, Catriona. “Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature.” Organization and Environment. vol. 15, no. 2, June 2002, p. 144: excerpt from “Two Boys”. doi: 10.1177/10826602015002002. link ↩
2. Santana, Elana Margot. Old Growth Feminism: Arboreal Agencies on Lesbian Land. January 30, 2013. York University, Master’s Thesis. p. 102: “Oak in August”. link ↩
3. Hopp, Julie, The Tinker and More, 1986. Tee A. Corinne Papers, Coll 263, Box 303, folder 15, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. collection; folder ↩