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.