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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 7: Slightly Bereft

Today's prompt was: slightly bereft.  The word bereft comes from germanic roots meaning to rob (which is interesting given the history of the Gravenstein apple).  I spent most of the morning looking at photos of the Gravenstein Apple Show which took place in Sebastopol from 1910 - 1915. It was quite a grand affair and over 25,000 attended the show that first year.  The show featured sculptures of historic places (like Fort Ross) and apple growing scenes.  What I discovered was that the show was stopped in 191 due to the onset of World War I when Sebastopol began to ship off many of it's young men as well as supply the army with dried apples for soldiers overseas.  I began to think about how strange it must have been to ship out down the Petaluma river, following the same route of the apples your family had been sending out for years.  Here's my attempt at a poem for today's prompt:

After the 1915 Gravenstein Apple Show

“The Gravenstein Apple has, above all others, proved to be the money winner in Sonoma County.  It is a healthy vigorous tree.  It always bears a good crop, never over-bearing, as many varieties do; is of the best quality of all known apples”
      –Luther Burbank

After the logging, after the plowing,
the planting, the yield, most hills stood slightly
bereft but ever producing apples.
To celebrate the escalation of
apples sales, the Sebastopol Apple
Growers Union raised a tent across from
the train depot, began the Gravenstein
Apple Show in 1910.  Photos show
uniformed boys lined in neat rows, women
dressed in white floor-length dresses, entering
the sawdust floored tent.  Inside, the warm air
swelled with the tart picked apples arranged in
sculptures that set into form history
of the apple, the town.  Fictions or truths
built out of the bittersweet fruit yielded
gristmills, locomotives, a gold ridge farm.
even Gold, a Petaluma river
steamship that shipped the apples down the slough
to San Francisco Bay.  Until war closed
the fair and that same steamship was loaded
instead with the cargo of men and boys,
their arms still browned from the season’s harvest
their eyes looking back to the golden hills. 

Day 6: Your obvious homage to your grandmother

Since my project thus far has been to write about the Gravenstein apple and the history of Sebastopol, I found today's daily writing prompt hard.  My grandmother never lived in Sebastopol and her only connection to Sebastopol is through myself and my parents.  But, my Grandmother has an interesting past.  She came to California from Oklahoma as a young girl in the dust bowl (she always told me she didn't think Steinbeck got it right when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath).  She was always eager to retell things the way they really were.  When she ended up in California she worked long hours at a peach cannery in Atwater.  During the 1920s many women worked long hours in food production plants.  And it was this thought brought me back to Sebastopol.  (There is always a road back, isn't there?)  After the apple industry took off, there were 100,000s of delicate apples to pack and ship across the United States.  It was women (like my grandmother) who worked long hours in these packing house jobs.  Here is my (not so obvious) homage to my grandmother's work and a little story she told me about reciting poems to stave off the boredom of such repetitive work.

Tending the Gold Ridge, 1920

Each day a new field was plowed and planted.
Each season production would swell.  Each fruit
handpicked into wooden crates, delivered
by wagon or truck to the packinghouse.
Then, the small, red-striped globes were placed
into shipping crates.  How tiring to
stand ten hours a day sorting good from bad.
It was women’s work.  Closed-doored, but
checkered with sunlight brought from high windows.
A dull, quiet work that could open or
close that quiet wilderness of mind.

Decades later, when their bodies had grown
old, when their minds strobbed memories—
that wilderness (however conquered) would
return.  In a few lines by Tennyson
about an old king who traveled far and
couldn’t return home: but every hour is saved.
How those words illuminate the musty smell
of the packing house, the ache of feet,
but also the ballet of young hands, the hum
of low voices staving off silence with
by repeating the few poems they knew by heart

Day 4: The cottonwood I lived in as a child was a comfort when I found out I couldn't fly

Fort Ross was the first white settlement on the Sonoma Coast and it is celebrating it's 200th aniversary this year.  It's also where many (including Luther Burbank) found the oldest specimen of the Gravenstein Apple tree.  In the early 1900s, they discovered a tree there that they suspected was over 100 years old.  I've been haunted by this fact, and the state Fort Ross would have been in when they visited Fort Ross to find the tree.  The Russian settlers were by then long gone (they left in 1849) and the buildings must have been run down.  The fort has been set aside as state land, but little had been done to preserve it at that time. It was just a bunch of rundown buildings stuck in a huge cattle ranch right on the Sonoma Coast.  There was one old house where (I believe) the cattle rancher and his family lived.  Today's poem which is written off the prompt: The cottonwood I lived in as a child was a comfort when I found out I couldn't fly.  As you might have guessed, I switched the tree to apple.  Here is my attempt at a draft.

Upon Finding the First Gravenstein Apple Tree
--Fort Ross, CA, 1912

By the time the two horticulturalists
Griffith and Burbank discovered the tree
it had been bearing fruit one-hundred years.
These days, few lived at the decrepit fort.
Only the cattle farmer, his family,
and the Pomo servants who cleaned and cooked.

It was a willowy boy who emerged
from the white clapboard house on the steep cliff,
who led them reverently down the thin worn
path to the tree.  A few red, shriveled globes
still clung to its bare branches.  Immediately,
the men were sure it was the specimen
they had been looking for and went to work.

They began picking the shriveled globes, and breaking
off cuttings to bring back to Burbank’s farm. 
Without words the boy flung himself into
the tree’s wide crotch then shimmied his body
out to the edge where he could see the cold
deep waters that frothed the bay below. 

He became so much a part of the tree
the men, busy in their work, mindful of the long journey back
to town forgot he was there.  When he said,
“This is the tree where I learned to fly” His
breath folded, effortlessly into the
rough wind that flapped their canvas pants like sails.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Late breaking addition (thanks to Mari L'Esperance who graciuosly sent me the picture and made my day).  Here is an actual photo of a gravenstein apple tree at Fort Ross (the photo was taken in 2008).

Day 3: A Tiny Love Poem

The prompt for today was to write a tiny love poem.  I'm still stuck on the discovery I made yesterday -- that Gravenstein Apples (the apples that Sebastopol, the town I'm from and am currently writing about) are originally from Schleswig (what is now Northern Germany).  They were brought there from Italy by Prince Carl von Ahlefeldt then planted in orchards around the castle.  A century later, some of the Gravensteins were brought to Fort Ross (near Jenner) and were later introduced to the Sebastopol area where they took off as a crop.  So, my love poem is about apples and an old cemetery near where I live called Pleasant Hill.  Here is my draft.  This project is turning out to be so much fun.  I think it's going to be hard to doing else but write poems all month! 

Pleasant Hill Cemetery, Sebastopol, CA
The old gravestones are tiny granite-tongued
love poems covering the dead who now
mix with the soil they once plowed and planted.

And all around the air-bound apple blossoms
still powder the air with possibility.

The arthritic trees that surround in straight
dirt rows are still fruit bearing. These days
children steal their delicate branches with
little cost (no more beatings from farmers
who saw what each blossom would become).

The children pluck the tiny white blossoms, carry
them carefully in their palms to the creek
where the blossoms float: white, barren fairies
in the still, black limestone bedded pool.

Day 2: Facing NaPoWriMo with a Plan

This year I'm facing my thirty day writing stint with a plan.  It seems to help to have a topic to fall back on when you take on a long-term writing project.   I've taken on writing about the history of Sebastopol, the small town where I grew up and currently live.  My first poem was about the early history of Sebastopol.  My second, traced the history of the Gravenstein Apple.  If you are looking for a prompt for today, here is the one I wrote off of:

Day 2 Prompt: Ossuary - a place or receptacle for the bones of the dead.

Happy Writing!