Want to Follow My Lyric Novel as it Unfolds?

This week, I unearthed something I wrote last Decemeber, 500 Days.  The manuscript is a lyric novel written about several women who live in Pithole, PA in the 1860s.  Pithole was an oil boom town in Western PA where extreme wealth was won and lost at high costs.  I became fascinated with this town while I was working at Clarion University and I found an "history" of the town written by the local newspaper reporter, Crocus.  There were so many fascinating stories about Pithole that I started to write a series of poems about the town.  But, after writing over 40 poems, I still felt like I hadn't told enough of the story.  So, that's when I sat down to write 500 Days.  500 Days tells the interlocking stories of four women: Amy, a young girl drawn to Pithole to work in a hotel who is instead enslaved in a prostition ring, Emmaline Rickets, the local washerwoman who discovers oil in her well, Diana, a working prostititue from North Carolina and Jane, a young prostitute from Grove City, PA.  Why am I telling you all about this story?  Because as I method of revision I am going to be posting it segement by segment on my blog.  In the hopes that some of your will follow it, ask questions, or give feedback.  So, if you read this and are interested in reading this story (told in many tiny bites) please follow my blog.

To begin, here is the prelude to the lyric novel... hope you enjoy!

Prelude

When you walk the streets of Pithole dust and mud will cover you.  It will pour into every part of you until you no longer recognize who you have become.  At first, we were a town of settlers.  Small army-issued tents freckling a green field near the derrick on Thomas Holden’s farm.  Those were the days when Mrs. Holden still made three meals a day for the workers in her sunlit kitchen.  We'd sit, a dozen, then two or three, at the table, or on the wide front porch.  Our meals pitched on our laps.  She always made something warm and filling, only asking for a dollar a meal.  We were grateful.  We who had begun to live the derrick life.  The up at dawn to the rhythm  of oil’s passage.  The field was wide and all around it trees crowded.  These were the early days.  When we believed we were temporarily there.  Mrs. Holden's dinner bell would ring marking the passage of time.  At seven am, at noon, then again at six.  We carried out our tasks still thinking of the homes we’d left behind.  Still haunted by the battles many of us had fought.  But the oil was relentless.  It poured and poured out of the well.  And the more that it poured, the more the American Oil Company executives smiled and visited.  Soon, the blue prints for the next well were made and circulated.  With the expansion, more manpower would be needed.  So the Oil companies put ads in the papers, luring young Civil War veterans, with promises of OIL! RICHES!.  Within two weeks of the second well, the place was overrun with new prospectors.  There were tents everywhere.  And those who didn’t have tents, used blankets, broken barrels, whatever they could find.  Poor Mrs. Holden couldn’t keep up with the demand for food in her kitchen (even after hiring a few young girls to help her serve and cook).  So, a wagon started serving beans and stew twice a day.  Soon, there were men everywhere.  The trees began to be chopped down and split into lumber while they were still green.  When Prather came to town he hired a few men to rope off lots across the field just over the ridge from the Holden farm.  Then he sold off the lots.  The building rose in what felt like hours.  Still green and dripping sap and quickly filling with what we needed: hotels, general stores, bars.  But we didn’t care.  We were grateful to finally have shelter.  Straws beds were rented out.  A restaurant went in.  The trees receded farther and farther back.  The streets were thick with oil and mud.  There was never enough water.  Every well we sunk filled with oil.  We were so thirsty.   We were so lonely.  More streets were carved out.  More wells were dug.  More men came to town.  The teamsters took over the oil shipments making us pay outrageous amounts for hauling the oil out of town and down to the river where they could be floated down to Pittsburgh to be sold on the open market.  No one had ever seen this much oil so fast.  No one believed it would stop.  Especially not the oil executives.  More and more of them would visit each week.  They stuck out like sore thumbs – dressed to the nines in white, crisped shirts.  When the girls started arriving in town we were so grateful.  It had been so long since we’d seen anything except dirty young men, desperate to make it rich, that we lined up to visit them, that we’d pay any price.  But just as there wasn’t enough food, or water, there weren’t enough girls to go around.  The only thing Pithole seemed to have enough of was mud.  It stuck to everything.  Even after the plank sidewalks were thrown down to make walking easier the mud would seep through.  So when the girls began to become younger and younger we didn’t care.  We kept fucking them when it was our turn.  We wrote letters ferociously.  Dear --- All is well here in Pithole.  I’ve been working hard to earn enough money so that we can buy our own farm when we get married.  We lived in-between our lives. We drank insatiably.  The bars were always full, day and night.   Young men sat on wooden stools, some slumped in corners unable to stand up.  Almost every night there would fights in the streets.  One man stole a whore, or a beer, or a bed from another.  The world was ten by ten blocks long.  Oxen and horses pulled sleds laden with barrels of oil that were being brought to the Teamsters wagons, then carried down the hill for sale.  Those animals were by now hairless from being overworked and constantly coated in oil and mud.  The walked down the streets looking like animals driven from hell.  Each week, stage coaches and open wagons would pour into town filled with more and more men and more and more niceties they’d begun to desire.  The hotels were built and lined with carpets, their windows filled with velvet curtains.  Those who struck it rich, or those who were rich and were just visiting their investments in Pithole filled the most lavish hotels.  Ate lobster or roasted duck and drank champagne.  Inside the hotels they’d dress in starched cleaned clothes, at white-tabled clothed tables.  They’d hold balls and dance with women (not our whores, but other women, they’d brought in from neighboring cities and towns) dressed in floor length gowns.  We could see them through the cracks.  As we sat across the street in the muddy-floored bar, or as we lay down next door with a child whore on a straw stuffed bed.  We’d write false letters home about the comfort, about counting the days until we’d see our girlfriend, or our wife, or our children who by now must look so different.  And the days would pile on our chest thick as stones.  Until when we’d hardly know ourselves.  Winter burned off into summer.  Summer swelled into the fall.  Then snow started to fall again on the lean-tos and derricks.  Snow would fall through the cracks of the buildings built of green wood.  Soon, we’d been lost in Pithole for over a year.  When we looked in the mirror hung behind French Kate’s salon we saw men who were no longer ourselves.  We saw men who no longer came from small towns in New York State or down the river in Beaver.  We saw what could be carved out and drained out like the land we sat on.  We saw the eyes of those hairless horses as they trudged down the muddy streets carry too many barrels of oil.  We saw the distant faces of the girls we fucked.  We saw no way to get back home.

Inspiration in a time of drought

I'm a firm believer in the law of 3s - meaning, if I come across something three times seemingly randomly, I assume it is a sign I need to look more deeply into it.  What has been floating across my realm of conciousness lately is the idea of writing every day.  Now, I think many of you know I'm a bit of a poem-a-day junkie.  In fact, most of the poems in my forthcoming collection Gold Passage were originally written as poem-a-day excercises.  But, the idea that's been nipping at me lately isn't as complex as commiting to write an entire poem everyday.  In fact, it's a lot simpler. It's the idea of giving yourself an hour a day to write.  There's no word count, no excercise.  All you have to do on a daily basis, for an hour, is sit at your computer (or your notebook) think about writing and hopefully write.  I think it's a brilliant idea and I'm going to try it.  I am a deadline driven person, but whose to say having an hour with no actual deadline attached to it won't get me out of the begining of the semester slump I seem to be facing? 

But here is the catch -- what project should I embark on?  I've got a number of projects that I'm dying to dive back into:

• Finish writing my series of poems and short lyric fiction piece on the history of the Gravenstein Apple
• Finally finish editing my lyric fiction piece about four women living in Pithole, PA circa 1865
• Write a new series of poems and essays tenatively called, "Mean Mommy"
• Finish writing a book of essays and poems inspired by the history of Jack London State Park

So, there you have it: my list of writing projects.  I list them in part to make myself accountable (now that they are on-the-record, I need to finish them) and partly to hear back from you.  Any input as to which one I should dive into an hour a day for the next few weeks?

Wish me luck!  And come join me if you like!

Reading with the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Pre-Order Gold Passage

Last night I had the great honor to read with Terry Ehret and Katherine Hastings, but also to read at the Sonoma Museum of Art in front of an exhibit of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's stunning art work.  His work is haunting.  If you get a chance to head to Sonoma before the end of September, I highly recommend stopping by 551 Broadway to see the show.

Also, just found out you can now pre-order my forthcoming book, Gold Passage.  To order visit here.

July 11 - It was not an emotion I knew by heart

How does that saying go?  A day late and a dollar short?  Well, I'm back with yesterday's prompt.  I spent a wonderful afternoon yesterday in St. Helena working on the Napa Valley Writer's Conference.  I'm going to be helping out the staff this summer and am really excited to learn the ropes.  What I've learned as of late is that I was a bit ambitious thinking there would be time to write a poem a day all through July. So, I'm switching this poem a day project a day up a bit and will only be posting periodically throughout the rest of the month. 

Also as a last side note, my essay, "Haven" is up on the Whistling Fire web site today.  This is an essay about when I was hit by a car in New York and teaching writing at Goldwater Hospital.  Hope you enjoy it.

I find today's/yesterday's prompt fascinating.  So much of what I have written so far this month has been about trauma.  I thought today I'd shift to talk about the power and strength one gains from a job well done.  Apple harvest back in the late 1890s was a slow, intense process.  For today, I tried to think about what it would have been like to bring that first harvest into town and sell it to market.  To watch it taken away by train toward Petaluma and to return to an empty orchard.

It Was Not An Emotion I Knew By Heart

For weeks we had picked and stacked and boxed the fruit.

The thick sweet smell of ripe fruit followed me everywhere.

Yellow jackets swarmed the fallen fruit.

Days swelled thick and bloated until they blurred one into the next.

Then, the lightening came.


The way the wagon's wood base rose without the weight it had carried once the apples were sold.

The way my body unwound over miles, and  finally settled

The way sleep spilled deliously over the dark night like a dark, overpowering joy.

July 10 - When I die, do this with my ashes/bones/body

It's hard to see a prompt like this and not think of Jack London's famous quote:

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out

in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom

of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.

I shall use my time.

But the characters I'm writing about were not reading Jack London.  Who know's if they would have even known of the possibility of cremation.  Chances are they assumed they would be buried on their land or at the Pleaston Hill Cemetary in Sebastopol (where the hold the amazing cemetary walk each year).  I started thinking about the last conversation my main character would have had with her husband as he lay dieing after the train accident.  Or, even considering if she had had that conversation, or maybe had just sewn together scraps of conversations in her mind.  Based on all of this I came up with this draft.  Any one out there still trying to write along?  If so, send me a note!  I'd love to hear from you.  And if you haven't been writing along, today is a good day to start!

When I Die, Bury Me Where the Fog Rests
I can’t remember where I was when he last spoke. Time was stained-glass shards glistening in the light. But fragments drift in memory like a low fog:

When I die I want my body buried here where we’ve worked so hard to build our place.


Were these words spoken over a campfire as we travel west under press of stars?

Or did he breathe them through swollen lips as his body lost its strands of life?


If I go first, bury me close to you and Joe.


And so we did. You can see the wind-washed fence that surrounds his grave from the stairs landing. Each wooden picket is covered in lichen. But I can still smell the turned earth of that day each time I step to it and kneel.


When I die bury me where the fog rests.


How I wished to follow his body into the grave. How only Joe’s tiny body clinging to mine kept me from letting go.


This is a hard life. Marry again. Don’t be alone.


Had he known when he spoke these words how impossible they would be? Seasons soar past. The bare trees burst into blossoms, green out and then fruit. The plentiful harvest. Then bare again and again.


When I die I want my body buried here where we’ve worked so hard to build our place.


I still walk each row wearing his old work boots, my arms sinewy with sun and work.  My heart gone stained glass, but mended.  The way an apple graph takes - one branch grows into the other and carries on. 

July 9 - Gather around the fire

This idea is so central to the community of the time period I'm writing about, it's almost too obvious to write about.  I immediately started to think about the idea of a hearth.  How fire was where people gathered at night (instead of a television).  How it was where the day was sorted out or stories were told.  I wanted this to be a place where the speaker and her son could build a history.  Here is my draft:

Life Gathers Around the Fire


The breeze that gathers today whispers in the bay and oak leaves of the forest that surrounds the orchard.

I am walking the rows. Looking at the way the bulbs swell on the tips of each branch. Small tart orbs ribbed with red stripes.

Harvest looms ahead. The sweat and then relief of it.

Tonight the fog doesn’t come in and Joe and I sit outside off the porch tending an open fire and watching the stars slowly emerge.

We gather around the fire and tell all that has happened in the day.
The Allen boys with their news of town.  Who crashed their buggy on the racetrack.  What opera is playing in the opera house in town.  Who has fallen sick or died.

Then Joe leans back placing his strong arms behind his head and says. Tell me a story Ma.

And I giggle.  It is the same story each time.  Another chapter out of the Odyssey.  Only we don't stick to the plot.  In our version, Odysseus never did find his way home but continued journeying on.

Island to island.

And so it is each night and so it has been since he was just a boy. I dream up another island out of air and we step upon it under the starry night.

July 8 - Consistently Wrong

I got off to a late start writing today because we went away for a night.  Today's prompt made me immediately think of the orchard this woman would have been tending and how hard it would have been to take on the tasks her husband had once done.  Here is my draft for today:

On the Days I Was Consistently Wrong


The first few weeks after my husband's death the Allen brothers would come by every other day.

Their tall willowy bodies tethered me to the earth and to the task of watering and plowing the rows.

On the days they weren't there I tried to walk in their shadows, tried to match footstep for footstep, task for task. But I was always consistently wrong.

The coffee would burn. Joe would howl. The dust would take to the air in clouds.

And each tree looked impossible to trim back. I couldn't see the lines.

Pretend you are looking at the stars, I’d hear him whisper. Remember how you could never see the forms when we first started off?

And I’d repeat to myself under my breath: Virgo, Pleiades, Cassiopeia. Remember how the powdery stars became the shapes he described, as I walked each leafy row.

Until by body learned the motions of the ranch. Until the shapes emerged from the trees.

July 7 - For Purposes of Spirit Lifting

As soon as I read this prompt the idea came to my head to finish the sentence so it became - "For Purposes of Spirit Lifting We Visited the Sea."  We live just a fifteen minute drive from Bodega Bay  (the place where Alfred Hitchcock filmed the birds).  The coast line is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life: rock cliffs, gray-blue water and we spend a lot of time there.  So, it made sense to me that someone seeking spirit lifting who lived here would pack up her wagon and head over the hill to Bodega Bay. But in a wagon it wouldn't have been such a quick, easy journey.  What for us is a fifteen minute drive took most of a day in a wagon.  So, it would have been a luxary to go.  Something that even though it was close, you could only do every once in awhile.  Here is my draft where I imagine what it was like to finally arrive at the sea.  

For Purposes of Spirit Lifting We Visited the Sea

Joe and I rest on the rocky sand in bare feet. He is restless.  He jumps up and runs as far down the shore as his tiny body will carry him. I let him run. 

I'm too tired to move and he is too filled with joy.In a few momments I see him, a tiny speck, racing the sandpipers as they run back and forth with each lace of wave.

A flock of heavy bodied pelicans soar over us.

The day is clear. So clear that everything seems possible.

My fingers find the debri that's washed up around me: blue flat stones, smooth driftwood, a single piece of abalone shell that seems to gather sun.
Sitting on the flat beach I see the rock lungs open and close with breath,


the cold blue expanse of sea rolls out with all that is carried under it all the way to the blur of horizon.

July 7 - How do you teach pain?

We were completely fogged in today.  And I woke after the dawn chorus had ceased so it was a quiet morning that greeted me.  There wasn't even a blue jay staring in at me as I wrote.  Just silence and a misty world out my window.

Today's prompt made me think about the story I've been telling and about the mysterious disappearance of the woman's husband.  The town I keep mentioning in the poems, Freestone, had a railroad station dating back to the 1850s.  And anywhere there was a railroad, there were likely railroad accidents.  There is still an old collapsed tunnel a few miles away from my house and it always haunts me as I pass by it.  There is something about the collapse of a tunnel that is horrifying.  I started thinking about the memory of the accident and how she would have been able to feel the accident as if she had been in it.  This poem explores that idea.  Here is my short draft:

How Do You Teach Pain?



Look deep into the delicate shafts of dark railway tunnels and forget the light. Remember the press of dirt. The way air burns away.

Gather blue stars of forget-me-nots, constellations of Queen Anne’s Lace, the sweet smell of wild pink roses.

Listen to a wooden house ache in winds that sweep up at night.

Follow footprints before they are swept away.

July 5 - And then I saw it blink...

Today was a hard writing day for me.  I woke to a fogged in morning and couldn't find a story I wanted to tell.  So I started with the fog and tried to write myself out of it.  Where we live, and where these poems are set is a place between two towns.  Officially, our home is located in Sebastopol, but we are actually closer to the town of Freestone.  Freestone is a wonderful little town now which boasts a fresh bakery, a spa and an excellent winery.  But once, it was a rough settlement and then a rough quarry town located on the railroad.  When you drive through the town today you can still see the old building facades for the hotel, and the general store.  Today, I wrote about going over the hill to Freestone and tried to imagine what that town would have been like in the 1880s and 1890s.  I also tried to include one of the town's oldest stories about James Dawson who upon finding out that his housemate left him off of the town deed, sawed their shared house in half. Here is my draft.  Hope you'll write one too!

Cañada de Jonive


Some days I wake to a world blanketed by fog. A single sound – hammer striking rock, or hawk’s cry, reverberates in the bowl of valley until it sounds intimately close.

It’s these days when I know I need to find a path out. Hitch the wagon. Gather Joe and head down the rutted hill toward a town.

We live between two settlements.

Over one hill lies the sandstone quarry town, Freestone and farther on Bodega and Bodega Bay where the dark blue sea breaths.

Over the other hill lies Sebastopol and beyond the expanse of the Laguna, Santa Rosa.

Today, I choose the closes route and we are drive up the steep hill toward Freestone where there is a railroad and a general store.

We can check the post office for any letters from back east. We can eat lunch at the hotel and watch the weight of the metal railway engine pull away.

As the wagon rolls slowly through rutted redwood groves the sounds around us sharpen. Our horse whineys. The summer creek babbles.

And Joe’s voice startle’s me. Mama, he whispers. Yes? I say, eyes still stretched ahead, hand’s steadied on reins. Why are we a lone?

In a place like this I don’t believe in lying to a child, even a five year old.

We aren’t alone. We are stitched together me and you. I say, cracking a smile. But it’s just me and you because Papa is gone.

He pulls his small body closer to mine on the buckboard, so close that I can feel his heart.

The day we found our homestead was the first day we entered this town. Once called the Cañada de Jonive. It was rough settlement. A place where if they weren’t solved things were cut in half.

The man at the hotel had told us about Dawson and McIntosh. How Dawson had cut their shared house exactly in two with a saw because McIntosh hadn’t included Dawson on the deed.

The deer leapt out of the bushes suddenly, spooking the horses. Joe cringed into me. My heart leapt into my throat. The wagon bed rocked, nearly tilting on the steep slope.

And then I saw it blink. Our life, however run down it had become, stared me in the face like a wild animal and I loved it even if I couldn’t tame it or catch it.

The deer passed back into the dark trees. Our horse snorted and steadied. The wagon creaked back into place and Joe and I held each tight and breathed.

July 4 - How to be Enigmatic

For the past two days our hillside has been filled with the cries of young hawks.  They have recently been kicked out of the nest and are learning how to maneuver the thermals of our valley.  Each year when they begin screaming I get worries and think.  Oh no.  Something has happened to one of the birds.  But, I'm always wrong.  They are just vocalizing their lessons as they learn them.  There is so much story in these animals lives around us that we'll never truly understand.  I started thinking about that: about the enigmatic lives of the animals we live with that we try to unriddle but when we do, we always come up short and merely begin personifying or finding reflections of ourselves.  Today's draft plays with this idea.  I hope you all have a wonderful 4th of July.  Don't be afraid to write a poem too and share it in the comments.

How to be Enigmatic


The young red tailed hawks must be learning to fly. Their piercing cries reverberate across the valley loud and without cause, as if they have just found their voices.

But their small feathered bodies take to the velvet summer air effortlessly. And we watch their bodies glide as if on ribbons.

How many seasons have we watched the hawks rear their young in the tall pine, teach them to fly the line from pine to pine above our home. How many seasons before we found this place had the birds been here?

Then there are the red faced foxes that dart, low to the ground across the field at dawn and dusk. Some days they carry a catch in their mouths. Some days they return home empty.

And the coyotes who howl in packs at night.

We still carry ourselves as if we are borrowing this place.

Even that first season when we labored for five days with the hired Allen boys laying the foundation for our home. Long swollen days of hard work and desperate thirst.

Then with the boards set, we lay on our backs on the hard wood bathing in the light of a full moon, listening to the unseen residents around us move and settle into night.

How we realized then what we now know, that what we see and hear are tiny glimpses of what lies hidden underneath.

We cry and cry like the young hawks to an audience of air trying to find our home, our center, when all we need to do is glide.

July 3 - Hircine

Today I took a bit longer than normal to find time to sit down and write my poem-a-day, but for good reason.  I had the wonderful opportunity to donate some time at The Sitting Room in Cotati. A wonderful local resource where anyone can go and enjoy a quiet place to read and write.  It's also where early next month I'll be teaching a workshop of writing about local history.  But enough about delay, let's get back to poem-a-day. And boy, was today's prompt a tough one.  Hircine means of, pertaining to, or resembling a goat.  Goats are (and were) often used to help clear land around here.  Especially during the time when early settlers came.  I imagined the first day the couple came to the land they had purchased and what the task of a hill covered in large bodied oaks and tall pines, limestone and scrub brush looked like.  It must have been overwhelming.  This draft imagines that day and the idea of buying some goats to help with the clearing of the field. 

 A Hircine Hillside


The day we found it the hillside was stone laden and dense with tall pines and thick oaks and scrub brush.

There were no human paths. Only the careful thin trails of deer wandering like cursive in and out of brush.

“The man in town say’s we’ve got to dig all the oaks out. Even the roots. Or they’ll cause our apple trees to rot.” He said.

So on the first day we sat on a limestone outcropping feeling the weight of it all: the bodies of the tremendous oaks we’d need to fell and split. The scrub we need to clear.

For a week we dug until our backs tightened and ached. At night we sit side by side by the small fire pressed down by the powdery stars.

He thought of the goats first. Why not? He asked.

The next journey into town we loaded the wagon with flour, salt, sugar and two full-grown goats. I’d traded my mother’s coral cameo for the lot.

Each day we’d tether the goats to a new patch of shrub and they’d eat it clean as a washed slate. Each night the stars would loosen their powdery stare.

The bodies of oaks fell with a loud crack. You could feel the weight of them carried from the soil to your knees to your heart.

It’s the wood of those trees we used to build the house. Each one carefully sanded down.

Some days looking out of the house toward the hillside now covered in trees I still see that wilderness pressing back in. Some days when the fog is low I still hear his voice as if it is trapped.

But the words I begin to use to answer back are made of air. Are left lingering in the tops of redwoods.

July 2 -That's when I gave him/her my________

When I woke this morning the edge of the horizon was smudged with fog.  This is typical July weather in western sonoma county.  Fog in the mornings that will either burn off by late morning or linger.  Yesterday my son Max and I went to the creek in our backyard.  It's a place I've played since I was child.  A part of this property that is hard to forget.  While we were there yesterday, while Max sat in the limestone belly of the creek trying to dig out old leaves and sticks to make the water flow a flock of blue jays took to the trees around us, frantic with warning.  It was so strange and went on for fifteen minutes or so.  The birds jumped from tree to tree above us, calling to one another.  For today's poem, I went back to the pioneer couple I envisioned in yesterday's poem.  I imagine the wife coming to this same creek with her teenage boy about this time of year, a month before apple harvest.  I imagine times of leisure like this, especially for a single mom and her son were few and far between.  But, I imagine when they happened they healed.  They etched into their whole weary bodies a kind of solace that is hard for us to understand.  Here is my attempt at a poem today.  I'm so excited that a few of you are writing poems as well!  Keep them coming.  It's such a pleasure to virtually write with you!


Under Warning of Birds

The fog lingers in the corners of things: crotch of hill, the edge of blue sky left smudged.

Yesterday, under the oaks and pines blue jays erupted into a dapple of sound and warning.
When I looked up to the spinning trees, every one rustled with their weight and sound.
We had gone to the creek to find solace from the heat, from the work of the day, but we found only warning.
I could feel time coil itself like a snake. That’s when I gave him my memory like a doppelganger.

The place is like that, I say. It's a place to linger and forget. He giggles. Already able-bodied as his burried Pa.

A simple S-shaped bend in the creek. Limestone-bedded. The gentle trickle of a summer waterfall.

If we listen to the birds, if we watch the sky, if we follow the press of guilt and duty, we’ll never see what is hidden in the dark water.

It only takes a few found sticks. A willingness to find the hidden life of salamanders and crawfish to clear the creek of what keeps the water from flowing.

Dead leaves, silt, a tree branch, stones.

In a few weeks, the harvest will begin. Already the tart green orbs burn from the fingers of trees.

When we plowed the field, dust veiled our life. Even this morning I was still sweeping dust from the wooden floor in front of the stove.

Even under warning of birds, joy enters our bodies at the corners, smudged and unbidden.

July 1: The House of Yearning

This morning I woke up to a fog covered hillside.  Everything always feels muted on days like this.  The prompt for the day, the house of yearning, made me think of the way we construct places before they are even found or built.  There are so many old farmhouses around the Sebastopol area that were built by the early settlers in the late 1880s and 1890s.  Those families traveled very far before they constructed those homes.  I started thinking about how they must have dreamed those boards into place as they sat in slow moving wagons willing the miles to pass.  And how, for some, tradegy would strike, leaving them only with what was built in their minds.  Here is my poem for the day.  If you write one, feel free to post it as a comment!

This is the House of Yearning


This is the house of yearning where fog-combed skies muted the cries of red-tail hawk.

This is the day when the wind carried salt, lavender and rosemary.

This is the day when it was dull enough that memory light the mind like a tiny lantern.

A long journey in an open wagon. Dust. Flies. The reel of clouds overhead and the slow stories they’d unwind over days that stretched wide as a sea.

The hard boards on our backs lying down in back. The ruts in the road as seen through the cracks and every once in awhile the bright shock of a wildflower.

The smell of fire and smoke. The sound of fire. The press of bodies around it. The way the fire quieted then glowed like a red, sunken star.

How each day we’d speak of the house. Build it with shared words. You’d say: hillside, open. I’d say: water whispering, dappled woods.

How always there was an orchard, a garden.

And the miles wound under us. Flat swaying seas of grasses becoming thick-knuckled mountains. How the air tightened and grew crisp.

By the day we sat at the blue-eyed lake we’d constructed everything out of air.

As we bathed in the icy water. As we washed the dust and flies and miles from our bodies we were submerged in the shadows of birds.

Today the house is made of wood. The orchard stretches 20 trees deep. The garden writes itself into the soil.

And you are not in it.

Good News and Another Poem-a-Day Project

Last month I got some incredible news.  I got word that Trio House Press and judge Ross Gay had selected my manuscript as the winner of the Trio Award.   It's still really hard to believe!  My book will be called Gold Passage and will hopefully be published later this year or early 2013.  More details soon!

The month of July I will be writing a poem-a-day thanks to the wonderful Promptess  Lisa Cihlar and coordinator Molly Fisk.  Much of my forthcoming book was written as part of simular poem-a-day projects.  So, if you are ready for a summer challenge, follow my blog and write a poem-a-day with me! I'll be posting Lisa's prompts on my blog everyday I write a poem. I'd love the company!

NaPoMo Wrap Up!

I always feel a bit sad after NaPoWriMo is over.  Especially after finishing a big project like this one.  What fun that was!  And what wonderful leads I still have to follow about local history around Sonoma and Napa Counties.  (If you have any ideas, or old stories you've dug up, please do post a comment and let me know by posting a comment!)  I'm taking a couple of weeks off and then I'm diving back into my project until it is book length.  So look out!  More history-based poetry is coming your way.  I may even be teaching a class this summer on writing historically-based poetry/creative non-fiction at The Sitting Room in Cotati, CA.  So, if you are interested, stay tuned for details!   Most importantly, though I've had to take a few days off toward the end of the month to prepare for an interview at Napa Valley College.  As most of you know, I love teaching.  But, I love teaching even more in an environment that is student-focused and filled with colleagues who share a joy of teaching.  I've found such a place at Napa Valley College. It is the kind of place I'd like to teach at for the rest of my career.  Tomorrow morning is my final interview.  Wish me luck!

This past month, thanks to National Poetry Month and World Book Night I got to share some incredible literature with my classes.  If you haven't already, check out these free programs that help you connect students with literature:

•  World Book Night, which gives away sets of novels for the purpose of getting more people to enjoy literaure.  I gave away a class set of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou to a group of students who have just begun reading their first novel.  And I gave The Secret Life of Henrietta Lacks to another group of writing students who had read many books in their lives.
• Poetry Magazine which gives away whole class sets of their April edition (with a teaching guide) for teachers to use in their classrooms.  My students loved getting a copy this year.
• Poem in Your Pocket Day where you can find out about one of my favorite days of the year!  A day when you can walk up to complete strangers in the supermarket, and hand them a poem.  I give my students extra credit if they take a handful of poems and take photographs of themselves passing them out across campus, or in town.  The students are always skeptical at first, but most really, really enjoy the experience.

Below are a few photos of my students with copies of their books! Hope you enjoy!

Finally, I will be posting results from my Big Poetry Giveaway later this week!  Stay tuned!  

Day 28: That Which is Needed

Before there was a town, Sebastopol, (first known as Pine Grove) was a place where a road passed through.  It was a spot on the road between the Russian River Valley and the mouth of the Petaluma River where the great felled trees would be stacked on boats and floated down to San Francisco.  I started thinking about how the town was first only that which was needed: a few shops catering the travelers who passed through before some of those travelers (such as J.H.P. Morris who founded the town) stopped and that which was needed increased to support those who stayed. Here is my draft for today:


At Gateway to the Russian River


When there were just the two worn ox-cart ruts:
a road traveled between the lumbering
camps in the Russian River Valley and
the mouth of the Petaluma River
that which was needed was built roadside
a few salons, blacksmiths, a general store.

The few who stopped were welcomed by the scent
of the tall pines that crowned the hills above
and the wide prairie of the Laguna
where oaks rose offering majestic shade.
What the town would become, months later, years
was still written in the minds passed through

Body stiff from too long sitting at helm
of the massive cart, the mind wanders, spins
cities out of fields, spells fortune out of stars.

Day 27: This is a Rare Thing

I can't believe so many days have already passed in my poem-a-day project.  What a pleasure it has been to dive into the history of Sonoma County.  Today's poem takes a short break from diving too historically deep.  I had a big day (interview) and wrote this as my students were taking their in-class exam.  It all centered around images I had seen on my incredibly beautiful commute to work: the grass dancing on the hillside, a lone swan splitting a field pond where normally I only see ducks.  Then, a host of brightly colored hot-air-balloons seemed suspended over the college before I walked in.  Here is my draft for today:

Stepping Over into the Rare of Now


How landscape beckons me into it:

first light and already the grasses dance
under wind’s breath, a lone swan in a field pond
opens a line in the dull-eyed water
with its feathered buoyancy. But the dream
of the snake was rare. (Had I seen it or
read it first?) Before the long body stretched
across my known path in the golden field?
It was a gopher snake, not poisonous,
just fat on too many gophers, soaking
sun into its cooled brown skin as it lay
still. But fear shimmered high in the bay leaves
breathed heavy on the gold stubble of grass
until his body became vinculum:
To step over was to hush the leaves and
wind. To step over was to risk passage
into another life.

                              This morning when
bright pink and green hot air balloons hung in
the sky above now like hope, I knew to
close my eyes and step over the dreamed snake
into the rare chance of what lay beyond.

Day 26: Say a little prayer

Today's prompt hit close to home.  I have a big event tomorrow - an interview for a job  at the college where I am currently working part-time.  So, I have a lot of prayers of hope I'm whispering under my breath.  But, when I turned to the natural landscape to reflect I saw the apple trees that just a few weeks ago were blazing the hills in radiant pink have begun to disappear.  I saw them scattered on the ground in the fields and felt they looked like the end of a party.  Then, I looked at the trees, still wet from a light rain we had last night and saw how they had puffed up (almost overnight!) with green leaves.  Here is my draft for today:


Prayers for Trees
At night the light rain whispers prayers through
the tin roof of our barn; prayers not meant
for our sleeping minds or motionless forms.
They are prayers for those last scattering
of pink apple blossoms strewn across fields
like the forgotten confetti of spring
as the gnarled trees stand steady against wind
in the wide green field.  Prayers for those trees
as they thicken with green leaves, the promise
of tart, ripe fruit.  By morning, the storm will
be gone, the tree near bare of blossoms
and we will wake without knowing about
the prayers whispered in the dark of night.

Day 25: Salvation can be found_______

Today's prompt started haunting me the moment I woke up.  I get up early to prepare my lessons and write and this morning as I walked out of my office it was still dark, but a dawn chorus had erupted.  It was amazing.  I could hear everything from song birds to wild turkeys.  Then, an hour or so later on my drive over Roblar road the green hills were bathed in syrupy sunlight.  It was so beautiful, it was almost too much to bare.  It got me thinking about what it must have been like to live there (as the Coast Miwok did for centuries) and not be willing to give it up to anyone.  This draft is about the story that haunted me as I drove to work today.

There’s a Ghost in This Machine of Air


Salvation can be found before light comes

the dawn chorus tightening the fogged air

then sun rises to reveal the massive

green flanks of hills rolling back to the sea,
a lone black calf, itching his shoulder on

a telephone pole, or a rotting barn

commanding a hill’s sharp crest. There are ghosts

that flit past my car window as I pass.

The Irish immigrant who settled here

built a cabin on crane creek, planted wheat,
was surprised by the young Miwok men who
ran bare-chested down the flanks of the hills,

their arms elongated by fiery

sticks of tule that hissed and burned. The settler
would escape but his cabin and wheat fields
burned to the ground. He never returned to

the rolling green hills, the dawn chorus, that

had hypnotized him because he understood
why one might run, arms aflame, to save this.

Of course, it was only a matter of
time until other white men came to take
Kota’ti. But each day until the next
The hills rolled green to the sea, and the men
watched the fog roll in silently at peace.

Day 23: An Invisible Thread

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of walking on the beach in Bodega Bay. The birds were out in full force - pelicans circled the dark waters looking for dinner, sandpipers swarmed the breaking surf. Today's prompt got me thinking about how animals around us continue with or without or historical events. How distant relatives of these birds were likely here to greet the tall ships. Here is my draft for today:


An Invisible Thread

Is stitched between yesterday and today.
Some days when pelicans fly over in
Tight, impossible formations, when sandpipers
Stitch the delicate lace at wave's receding break,
I believe our past is malleable as paper lost
To water or time. Circle back a stitch
And find only remnants, stories re-told
That are as chameleon-like as the sea's surface.
But hope is deep and wide. Who says I can't
Decipher the hidden threads that bind us.

Day 22: A Rueful Moon

This prompt brought me back to Friday night, the benefit reading we did for the Laguna (our local wetlands) that our community has begun the long journey back to restore. Here is my draft:

Moon Over Laguna de Santa Rosa

It is a rueful moon that drifts over
Laguna de Santa Rosa tonight--
River that flows both ways carrying
History heavy on its back. Those who
First recorded what they saw were in awe
Of the wooded plain, ripe with water and
Animal life. But change was drastic. First, the cattle ranchers cleared and burned the Live Oaks
Leaving their ominously blackened bodies girdling the golden tule fields.
Then the Gold Rush increased the price of game--
white and grey geese, ducks, deer antelope, elk
Even the few grizzlies that had survived
Were caught and sold for outrageous prices
on docks of the Petaluma river.
The remaining oaks were split and corded,
or reduced to charcoal. Then channels dug
To drain the cattle farms. Then the sewage ponds
Dug and filled. Today, the moon hangs low in
The sky. Not full, just a thin fingernail
Illuminating a single path back
past the remaining oaks, past forgetting.

Day 21: Alate

Well, there is always one day when one falls short in a poem-a-day exercise, right?  Since yesterday was that day for me, I aim to "catch-up" today.  Yesterday and the night before were packed with inspiring events.  First, I had the great pleasure of reading Friday night with the talented poets Gwynn O'Gara, Phyllis Mesculum, Terry Ehret, Bill Vartnaw, Penelope LaMontagne, Larry Robinson and Judith Stone in an event called, "Poems of Sacred Geography".  I read selections from the poems I've been writing this month.  It felt risky to read what is just written.  But, I'm glad I did.  Then, the next morning was Sebastopol's Apple Blossom parade.  The parade is still a big event in our town.  Main street is shut down and we all go out to watch the marching bands and floats roll past.  It was the hottest day we'd had this year (it seems like the Apple Blossom festival always is!) as we watched modern Sebastopol interwoven with the past: an Wells Fargo Stagecoach, and 100 year old apple sprayers that once pumped arsenic and lead on the apple trees to keep the pests away.  This parade, which was once the Gravenstein Apple Show (1910 - 1915) continues long after the apples are less and the main crop grown in our town.  Then, in the afternoon, we had a wonderful fundraiser for California Poets in the Schools - the organization I teach for where we teach poetry lessons to children in K-12 classroom.  Students ages 6 - 16 got up and recited from memory or read poetry in front of a large crowd.  It was a powerful event and thankfully, a successful fundraiser.  All of these events left me without much time to write but contemplating the prompt.  Alate means winged. It come from the latin alatus - meaning wing.  On these bright days it seems most everything is winged.  But the parade is where my imagination was centered yesterday.  One woman kept walking up and down the mile stretch of the parade route.  She was an older woman and she was wearing golden wings that she danced up and down the route flapping.  At first, her appearance just made you smile, but then when she continued to show up: dancing next to the high school marching band, or the town fire trucks, she made you question why she was there.  For me, she became a symbol of the town's history. A golden winged pest that continually returns and makes us question the present.  Here is the draft I wrote today, for yesterday's prompt:

The 66th Apple Blossom Parade, 2012

The whole town seemed over-exposed in bright
new sunlight on the day of the Apple
Blossom parade. We stood four-thick watching
our children in uniform marching bands
pass by, the shined up fire trucks throwing
handfuls of bright candy, and the old men,
who continually ride their old tractors
or apple sprayers down the parade route.
Arcs of water spray out of old machines
that once carried lead and arsenic to
keep an orchard clean of unwanted pests
and the hot parade watchers beg for it.

All along the parade route the alate
woman appears. She spreads her golden wings
and dances next to the marching band. Then,
re-appears in front of the fire truck.
We laugh at her. Shoo her off. Think her a
fool. But she returns, dancing and smiling.

When the parade stops, we gather children.
The streets are swept. We go home to fallow
fields still freckled with unpruned trees still warm
from sunburns, still thinking of what’s passed us
by as the fog rolls in and sedates us.

Day 20--How to be Zen about NOT losing weight

Today's prompt was a tough one to fit into my project.  But it got my associative mind thinking about how my colleague was talking about Napa once being called, "the breadbasket of the Goldrush" for all of the wheat that was produced in that valley before the grapes were brought in and Napa became famous for wine.  I started thinking too, about how growing up in Sonoma County leaves you spoiled by the abundance that is every where.  The produce alone can ruin you from being able to live anywhere else and be satisfied.  I also started thinking about the idea of weight.  What weighs a place down.  What weights you to a place.  Part of finding out who I was as a writer was coming to terms with how important it was for me to have a relationship with the place I lived because writing about place is such an integral part of my writing process.  Finally, driving home from Napa on this beautiful day I couldn't help but notice all of the remnants of the past that surfaced as I drove home: the old Adobe (which was recently almost shut down), the old railroad line of Railroad avenue, the Washoe House on Stony Point, the numerous old farmhouses that stand dilapidated or remodeled.  How do we stay "Zen" with the weight of history as it hides and reveals itself in our daily lives.  How do we appreciate the abundance of where we are right now?

Day 20: The Weight of Abundance


On days when sun blazes hills awake, when
still damp earth aches dark possibilities,
when crooked teeth of dilapidated
barns, and crumbling stucco of lost missions
hum with stories they cannot forget
I look at my freckled hands, try to find
a cartography for this desire to know
that seems stitched into me, into any
that live where one wakes to a horizon
that is continually blurred by low fog.
Stories are as abundant as the trees
and vines that are continually heavy
with fruit. What to dig up? What is enough?
In a garden so thick with weeds, sustenance
bleeds with what is pressing upon it. So
days slur past, fat and happy, until
the eye sights it driving past, or the hoe
upturns the hidden artifact, revealing
another history or desire buried.

Day 19: I Have Envy Enough

For today's prompt I was thinking about the old farm houses around Sonoma County.  You've probably seen them before: wide porched, shuttered homes that usually crowned by two palm trees and a wooden water tower.  (My favorite of these homes is located on Lakeville Highway).  This draft of a poem has one of those old farmhouses in mind. 







I Have Envy Enough

I have envy enough for the net of

swallows that skim and dive through golden air,
for the place their fragile bodies protect:
the white shuttered house already shadowed,
the water tower, the two lonesome palms.

Envy enough for the ridge of tall pines
that seem to hold the wide blue sky aloft
by pointing their crooked wills toward ascent
for the hawks nests they carry year to year
for that searing cry, for the dark lean of

shadows over the house, over the steep
graveled drive that follows the creek out.

Day 18: I Must Go Out and Find Something Else to Hate

Today, I was thinking about what it would be like to leave a place you'd worked hard to farm.  I drive the same back roads most mornings on my commute to teach at Napa Valley College.  They are winding roads paved over steep green hills.  This morning as I was driving I started thinking about what it must have been like to drive on a road like this in a wagon.  Then, when I passed an orchard filled with trees that hadn't been taken care of for years, I thought about what it would feel like to leave an apple farm you've put your sweat and blood into.  Here is my draft for today:

I Must Go Out and Find Something Else to Hate



Besides the pink-petal blossoms that flag
the untrimmed trees that continually line
the passage of potholed roads carrying
me away from their embrace and this place.

I must find something that is more deadly
than arsenic and lead to kill what spreads
uncontrollably: mistletoe, cankers
mildew, flies, and my need to always look back.

I must watch the green hills roll out toward
somewhere else where the fog rests. I must
site a single tree rising on the hill’s
green, broad back, and know it as a sign

Even as the wagon slows, even as
the dust rises to blind us of hope.

Day 17: The density of dreams is made from________

Today's prompt got me thinking about the way dreams are made of the ideas we are afraid to think about while we are awake.  They are where we work out the under workings (or back-end) of our emotional lives.  This idea got me thinking about how if towns could dream their dreams would be like muddy rainstorms that carry a towns history from one place to different place and how that shift would haunt a town.  One of the most famous stories about Sebastopol is the naming of the town.  The story has been told and re-told 100 different times.  But, the gist of it is that two guys got into a fight and one man ran into the general store.  The other (blocked from entering the store by the store's owner) stood outside for hours waiting for the other man to emerge. Passersby called it a standoff like the one that was then being held in Sevatopol during the Crimean War.  This draft reflects on this story.

A Storm-Minded Town

The density of dreams is made of mud
and rain.  The storms that can wash through a small town
and clear it of dread.  Waters so deep
and swift they roar muddy loud from far off
woods.  So strong they roll stones effortlessly.
Then, leave them stuck in the mud of desire.

Dreams are built of new lumber: still sticky
with sap, still fat with water  What you build
in dreams retracts--shows cracks--places where wind
licks clean.  This town dreams its name again and
again.  When the two men stood face to face
on the main road, they were up to their knees
in mud.  The dream (that airy house) is what
happened after: one man running away
into the general store the other following
but stopped at the door by the shopkeeper.
"You ain't coming into my store" he'd said.
So, instead the man paced the muddy street.
For hours his feet rutted the deep mud.
Until passersby named it: the battle
of Sevastopol after the standoff
with stubborn British troops. And the name stuck.
Now, we hardly remember the battle
or details about the standoff between
two men.  A story with the density
of a dream still travels down mud-swollen
creeks of our town when it rains hard enough
when we're up to our knees in the mud of
it searching for lost stones, houses built of truth.

Day 16: Unfettered Joy

Today will be a short post.  No big project.  Just what I call a breather poem.  I wrote a short draft of a lyric about the joy of landscape here in Sonoma County. 

[We are writing these things so that our joy might be complete]
Unfettered joy is hard to tether down:
sunlight sifts through fans of redwood branches
rolling hillsides blazing in pink blossoms
tang of bay, smell of deep forest wet earth,
surprise of what rises from what is left.
Joy that carries on wind can rise again
and again. Joy stitches words in passing
clouds. Even in the leaden hour, dark spot
growing on the horizon, to become
history. Joy spreads itself thin as sea
to cover everything in the salt of truth.

Day 15: Crying in the Face of Rain

Today's prompt should have been titled, crying in the face of taxes!  But rain it is and after finishing my taxes today (GULP!) I dove into the prompt.  This morning my friend Martha Wade mentioned to me that she remembered how the fog really held onto the scent of flowers and seemed to intensify those scents.  I couldn't agree more.  Here where it is often foggy, one smells not only the sea, but also the smell of the lavender and rosemary plants the cover the hillside, or the earthy smell of redwood or tang of bay.  For the past few days I've been wanting to write about Luther Burbank's experimental garden which is located just up the road from my house in Sebastopol.  It's a lovely place where you can walk the paths and see some of Burbank's original trees and plants.  At the back is the Mother Tree.  The fruit tree where are graphs were tested.  This draft incorporates that tree and Burbank's gardens:

In the Face of Rain

A low fog will gather the aromas

of lavender, rosemary, whatever

lies blooming in its path. Whoever walks
by smells the specific potpourri of
place: sea and salt mingling with what grows.

When Luther Burbank arrived he declared
Sonoma County nature’s chosen spot
He sold the rights to the first Idaho
potato to fund his long journey out. But,
once arrived success took to the soil.

Visitors to his Experimental
Farm in Sebastopol weren’t encouraged
(due to threats of thievery). But Shasta daises
still grinned big toothy grins at the front gate.
And rows and rows of plants and trees glistened
still coated in rain in the morning sun.

Toward back, near Pleasant Hill cemetery
the Mother Tree loomed full and large, always
bearing fruit, always bearing another
graft or possibility. Under brace
her branches seem threatened even in
a light rain. Her arms extending over
the fence as if beckoning ghosts back from
the earth, back from the fog as it burns off
leaving only the potpourri of plants
some known, some yet to be dancing in the air.

Day 14: I have been____

Today the prompt took me on a journey.  I tried to follow in my mind the immigrant's path from Europe to Sebastopol.  What it felt to plant that first crop and taste that first Gravenstein Apple.  When I was leafing through the book I'm reading on the Gravenstein apple I came across a photograph of one of the first Sebastopol families the Roberts.  I had this family in mind as I imagined this journey.



On Gold Ridge

(for the Roberts family)


I have been on steamships crossing cold depths where the horizon slurs away to a blue blur of what is left behind.
I have been in seas of tall grass that sway with the song of wind.
I have been bumped and roughed slowly in a wagon for days that are longer than the sky.
I have been across great mountains that jag the sky.
I have been to where the edge of the world rests and the sea tries desperately to reclaim it.
I have been up and over hills of redwoods and oak, looking for clearble land.
I have been behind a donkey pulling a plow slow through cleared fields until hope forms.
I have been knee deep in that new dirt, in the scent of it and the stain of it.
I have tenderly nurtured the seedlings when the rain worried, when the wind ripped off the sea onto the newly cleared hills.
I have watched seedlings widen into trees.
I have been the man who sits on the wide porch waiting for things to grow and open as the stars sharpen and come into view.
I have seen the hint of pink buds peek through like perfect tongues.
I have seen the hillside ignite in pink blossoms.
I have nervously paced the wooden porch as clouds formed on the horizon.
I have cursed the rain.
I have propped branches.
I have walked the rows like a child unable to wait.
I have readied the bins and ladders.
I have slept out under the tree just to keep the deer off.
I have picked the first perfect fruit.
I have tasted all of the sunsets and sunrises, the limestone studded hillsides, the tang of fog and salt, the rot of bay and oak and redwood on my tongue and it was good. It tasted like hope.
I have picked the apples until I feel asleep underneath the very tree I had bared.
I have lost myself in that shade and earth.

Day 13: Pay Heed

Today's prompt was ominous.  I thought about it as I drove from Sebastopol to Napa on my commute to work.  It's a lovely commute, all country roads, one of which is Old Adobe which stretches across the foot of Sonoma Mountain and offers a gorgeous view of green rolling hills.  Today the shadows of the clouds in the sky were cast unto the green hills.  It was beautiful and troublesome at the same time.  I started to think about the fate of the apple industry.  About how to the apple farmers of 1920s and 1930s the industry seemed destined to continue to thrive.  How one can never see the future that looms.

Pay Heed

Shadows of clouds passing over green hills
reveal a barn undone by time where cows
linger during rain showers.  There was once
a Gravenstein apple tree that bore more
fruit than any other.  Here, on the ridge.
In the photograph the giant tree fans
out in a screen of leaves big as a house
behind the Arnold family: Minnie,
John, E.W., Meta and Vivian.
Pay heed the future looms in the sky –
spells out in the trees massive shadow
of leaves on the loose dirt below.
 

Day 12: Fowl Weather

Every month when I write a poem a day the wonderful poet who dreams up these daily prompts includes a chicken poem -- a prompt that somehow includes a reference to a chicken.  It's always heartening to get the chicken prompt.  This year the chicken prompt was subtle, but still fun.  Last night we had a bit of "fowl weather" - a massive rain storm that woke us in the middle of the night.  My family and I live in a big barn with a tin roof, so whenever it rains, we hear it vividly.  I love the sound of rain on a metal roof, even when it is a storm.  That sound was still in my head when I began to write today's poem.  In it I started thinking about the lives of three women in the apple industry.  A migrant worker with children, a beauty queen who stepped out of a giant apple at an Apple Show and an apple rancher's wife who works the fields by day and cares for the family by night.  Here is my draft:

Three Hybrid Women in the Apple Industry

“When I die, if I go to a place where there are apples, I’ll know it won’t be heaven.”

1. Winterstein

I remember how rain punctuated
the night in the tin-roofed barn where we slept.
How the wind howled through the drafty old barn.
How the children, still tired from picking
woke and howled too. In between—gossamer
frescos were painted in our dreaming minds:
sitting in the quiet shade undisturbed
without the weight of work, ahead, behind.
Before light comes, the rooster screams us awake.



2. Red Maiden’s Blush

At the 1915 Apple Show, tent
air thick with warm sweat, dust, rotting apples.
Luther Burbank stood elevated on
a packing crate. Ta-da! He said cracking
a foolish grin and waving a wooden
wand at a gigantic Gravenstein apple.
Then the apple opened, revealing two
half-moons of white flesh and painted on seeds,
and the young pretty girl who stepped out of
it bewildered for a moment, as if
she’d just awoken from a restful sleep,
before the smile spread across her tight lips,
before the applause poured over her.

3. Bonita

After the tractor cooled and dust settled
come in to house gone cold, stoke fire’s coals
peel and slice the windfalls thin, brown sugar
a lemon plucked yesterday from the bough.
Roll dough cold. Cover. Bake an hour. Gather
the children. Coax read words or written. Stir
pot hot on iron stove. Wash the earth from
crooked carrots and beets. Slice thin into
caste-iron skillet. Stir with yesterday’s
slaughtered chicken. Wash the young faces. Scold
the one’s who know better. Divvy chores: set,
serve eat, clear, wash, scour, hot steam boiled. Lay
the children down. Look for quiet enough.
Sit beside the glowing coals, song pouring
back into the fire what’s burned out.

Day 10: The Geography of____

Yesterday, we all had the opportunity to board and sail replicas of the tall ships that once entered Bodega Harbor.  As you can imagine, this experience was extraordinary!  Below is my draft where I try and imagine what it was like to get off one of those ships after months at sea.

Geography as Seen from the Tall Ships

Two hundred years ago from lull of dank
wet wood and passage, too many bodies
pressed together;  our clothes bleached and worn thin
from sun’s glare and wind’s incessant blowing.
From the sway that had pooled and gathered in
us like a brackish bilge until we were
unable to understand land, that line
of shore defining an end, then from it
the green hills pouring back into what we
were meant to discover.  From the weak legs
that strode from the small boat into icy
surf came uncertainty and doubt.  The weight
of cargo carried across then dragged off
the ship and over the grassy dunes
to the waiting wagons.  There were no maps.
Only ideas and a strange man standing by
the wagons. Still wet we gathered again
close, but far away from what we knew of
ourselves in the rough wood cabs.  Two rutted
tracks leading a dusty path out from months
of salt and sway, over the roll of hills.

Day 9: Here Lies the Thing I Most Desire

This project has been an incredible journey so far.  What an amazing thing to get to dig and dig into the history of the community I grew up in!  At it's root history means to ask.  The fragility and disparity of history is easiest to see in local history because you are so close to the source.  What is history but a lot of people telling stories.  I guess the writers job is to unwind a few of those yarns and look at them more closely before they fall apart.  Today's prompt brought me on an interesting journey.  I was researching the immigrants who founded the apple industry here in Sebastopol and came across an interesting story of what happened to Japanese-Americans living in Sebastopol when they were interned during World War II.  We are lucky to have an incredible Buddhist Temple in town named Enmanji (which means garden of fulfillment).  The temple was built by the Manchurian Railroad and displayed at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.  After the fair the building was donated and shipped to our town.  There were many familys effected by the internment.  For some, neighbors harvested their fruit and paid the tax on their lands to keep them afloat (like the Furusho family), for others (like the original heirs of Fountaingrove the Nagasawa family) everything was lost.  For today's draft, I tried to think about what it would have been like being stuck at the desert internment camps, so far away, listening to stories of worries and fear and not knowing what to believe.

There Lies the Thing I Most Desire
            for the Furusho family

Dark oaks spun their crippled fingers over
the star-slurred sky the night our family left
our apple orchard for internment camp.
Now, we live in horse stalls where air is stiff
and void of fog.  I’ve paced these wooden planks
worrying futilely over the harvest
we left behind day and night but there is
no wind here strong enough to carry my
prayers back to our temple Enmanji.
Now its name, garden of fulfillment, stings,
like a face slap.  Letters from the Holte and
Williams boys promise to pick and sell our
fruit but trust is difficult to plow here
each stall where whispers root and spread their rot
wood to wood just as the oaks roots carry
fungus that left will kill your apple trees.