Revision: The Nature of the Place

For this week's prompt we were to again go back to a poem we wrote this past year and revise it.  I chose to go back to one of my Laguna poems that was still driving me crazy.  And thanks to the feedback from my writing group I trimmed and trimmed and came up with this.  Hopefully, what I trimmed away was right!  This poem is about the egret specifically and how the Audubon society was actually formed just to save this one bird that was being decimated by the plume trade.  But, the poem is also about how even though (thanks to their hard work in the 1920s) the egrets are back and thriving in the Laguna, we still are stewards to their destruction.  That the damaged we've caused to their habitat will last forever and though the Laguna may now look better there is still damage lurking underneath.  Here is my newest attempt at a draft!

The Nature of the Place

"The nature of the place—whether high or low, moist or dry, whether sloping north or south, or bearing tall trees or low shrubs—generally gives hint as to its inhabitants."  --John James Audubon

Today, on the Laguna, one can still see
the shock of a white, plumed body
punctuate the space between raw, golden field,
and the open question of sky
because somehow, the Great Egret, the Snowy Egret
and the Cattle Egret have survived.

Once the Laguna pulsed, the heart of the plume trade.
Desperate hunters climbed high into scrub oaks and willows
to raid the egrets’ giant stick nests
for aigrettes, white waterfalls of long, thin feathers
used to adorn fashionable hats
because an ounce of feathers was worth
double the price of gold.
Soon, spotting an egret became so rare
sightings were printed in the local paper.

Until the Audubon society was formed
to rescue these ghost birds from extinction.
to slow the pulse of the plume trades
and slowly the egrets numbers began to rise.

But, the nature of the place –
the lack of steelhead and salmon
swimming in the deep, green lagoons,
the felled oaks and cleared willows,
the waters gone thick with sediment –
tell the story of its inhabitants
not just of the birds, but of us.
We are stewards to the destruction we’ve caused forever.

So when you walk the smooth paths of the Laguna today
and sight the white arrow of an egret piercing
the camouflage among what is water, earth, and sky
remember the hunt that still pushes from the ground up,
and how beauty must survive.

Laguna Continued - Finding Ballard Lake

For this week's prompt, we were to write off of this amazing poem "Troubled Asset Relief" by Robert Ostrum which offered us a fractured question and response model to dive into.  I am still in the process if completing my Laguna poems, so my questions and answers (or attempts at answers) circled around a lost lake from the Laguna that was previously called Grays Lake or Ballard Lake depending on the time period.  Here is my attempt at a draft for this week:

Finding Ballard Lake
What you said was we ruined the water
not we rewrote the land with dynamite
and the pulsing, yellow jaws of backhoes.

When I said rev up your mind, what I asked
was for you to contain a lake--call it
Gray's or Ballard.  Let it spill forth

over half a mile.  Let it straddle
a hundred yards of earth.  Cover its banks
with exclamations of ash and oak and willow.

Dig it deep enough that catfish and bass
linger in the shadows.  Then let doubt
fill you like a balloon.  Go belly up.

Try to recall the blue bloom of sky seen
from this angle.  Dark, cold water pressing
no holding you up; warm sun on your face.
Know that to know is to dive deep into
the sediment of what isn't possible to find.

Wait at the closest train station: Mt. Olivet
for someone who has a memory made from
spun-sugar clouds whose footsteps can stitch

back the lost route of Mark West Creek
whose sediment was used to fill in the lake,
the acres of low spots on the ranch.

So that when they ask you who ruined this place
you can answer with a tongue made of peach peels
and a mouth full of sewage.  With eyes backlit
with dynamite and the smooth shine of dirt.

Laguna Continued - The Linguist Staff

This week we went ekphrastic, meaning we wrote poems off of art objects.  The piece of art that struck me was a staff from Ghana called Linguist Staff and Top Representing an Elephant  because it struck me as such a metaphor for how we should proceed forward talking about history and understanding the present, always with our hand touching the ears that remember the past, that are listening to what we are saying. 

The Linguist Staff
 

is covered in ears. Not real ears, but carved,
extruding, so each grip reminds fingers
that the ears exist.  No need to pour these
ears onto a table to illustrate
a point.  Instead, through touch, the linguist speaks
through the ears. When he holds the golden staff
and speaks he knows the ears are listening. 
This is a way to proceed on the rutted path
of history.  If we keep our fingers
locked tightly on those golden ears perhaps
we won’t forget that the past listens, and
expects us to circle back and look under
what we think we know even if the path
is overgrown, impassable, or lost. .

Laguna: The Lesson of Mud and Potatoes

This week, I had trouble writing from the prompt we were given.  It was a great prompt: to write off of Kim Addonizio's poem "What Women Want". But, difficult can be good, because it can make you split something open that you've been stuck in your ways about.  I find when I'm writing a narrative-based project like the one I am currently working on, the Laguna de Santa Rosa, I need to be shaken up.  I need to have someone pull the rug out from beneath me.  Not sure, if I found my legs afterward yet, but here's my draft of a poem for this week.  It's still on the Laguna, but it goes in a bit of a different direction.

The Lesson of Mud and Potatoes

“History comes in many forms — some of it, apparently, edible.”
 –Gaye LaBaron

What a citizen wants is to peel back
the skin of history that shields a place
the single story that survives record.
Time offers its own flood—washes out roads
of thought no matter how deep the ruts run.

To ask what it was like to be a passenger
on Bill Tibbet’s bone-jarring stage coach ride
from the docks of the Petaluma River
to the potato mines of Bodega
where nutty-flavored red-skinned potatoes
thrived in the salty, mineral soil
until blight wiped out the crop; until we

forgot to tend the road between then and
now.  When landmarks like Spud Point
loom mysterious instead of marking
the story they once told: a barge too full
of potatoes that sunk at the spot.

How to still imagine each stop the stage
took in 1860 after winter rains
left roads nearly impassable
mud to our knees, wheels stuck in ruts but the
Laguna swollen and fertile, offering
a passage across in the steam engine
ship Georgina or later the Pride of the Laguna.

What questions should a citizen ask to dredge this out?
So we can dig up a few forgotten tubers of those lost potatoes,
so that we can find that tin-rusted hull of a ship,
to carry us back to a place that speaks
in more than one voice, that we continually
rewrite and remember.

 

The Laguna Continued - The 100 Year Flood, 1986

This week, we were to write about an uncertain memory.  I chose to write about the way we often remember natural disasters.  I was twelve in 1986 and the flood that swept the Russian River, almost completely submerging the town of Guerneville, and flooding many parts of Sonoma County (including the street where I lived).  My Uncle and Aunt and cousins lived and had a shop in downtown Guerneville.  So, for me, this natural disaster looms as one of the biggest and closest of my life.  But, this was a disaster that happened before news media was reactive and everywhere. So, those who weren't here then, have a hard time understanding the brevity of it.  For them, the history of Sonoma County (as Gaye LeBaron puts it in the quotation below) begins the day they arrived. Part of my Laguna poem sequence is based on helping foster that remembering.

The 100 Year Flood, 1986

“But people are like that about natural disasters.  Everyone believes that the history on any place began the day they arrived.”  --Gaye LeBaron

Memory is as uncertain as islands
that rise in a flood—you don’t know what lurks
underneath. A silver boat can split this
seam of water: even gone muddy, gone
untold for so long. Disasters rise and stay
like high water marks in the unconscious
and each day after is checked against it.
What do we have to fear?  The worst already
happened, couldn’t happen again.

But the river, like a muscular animal,
overtakes the banks, chews up asphalt, rises
more to fill stores and homes.  Until
the whole Russian River Valley is filled
with her muddy, pulsing body
regardless of what history you remember.

The Laguna continued - The Nature of a Place

For this week's poem, we were supposed to try and write a New Yorker poem.  We listened to the Poetry Podcasts and the buttery, smooth voice of Paul Muldoon introducing and speaking with such great poets as Sharon Olds and Phillip Levine.  I tried, but, I didn't write much of a New Yorker poem. Instead, I went back to the Laguna series and wrote about egrets.  I was inspired by the stories I'd read about the inception of the Audubon Society and how their first work was to save the egrets in the early 1900s.  I hope you enjoy this draft. I think the Laguna series is close to being done.  Just two or three more poem-sections to complete the cycle (I think!).

The Nature of a Place

"The nature of the place—whether high or low, moist or dry, whether sloping north or south, or bearing tall trees or low shrubs—generally gives hint as to its inhabitants."  --John James Audubon

Today, on the Laguna, one can still
see the shock of a white, plumed body mark
the space between a raw, golden field, and
the open question of sky because
somehow, the Great Egret, the Snowy Egret
and the Cattle Egret all survived their beauty. 

By late the eighteen hundreds the Laguna was
the heart of the Bay Area plume trade.
During breeding season when egrets grew
aigrettes, a waterfall of long thin feathers
cascading off their backs, hunters would raid
the giant stick nests built high in the air
in the eaves of oaks and willows to get
$32 –double the price of gold--
for an ounce of feathers used on women’s
fashionable hats.  Spotting an egret
became more and more rare until a man
who had spent his life watching birds, nest, and
eat and rise to flight, who had sat all day,
knee deep in brackish mud, and drawn what he
saw so vividly that it came to life,
was honored with the Audubon society
which was formed to eradicate plume hunting.

By the 1920s the egrets had
begun to return. But, the nature of
the place – the lack of steelhead and salmon
that swim in the deep, unseen waters, the felled
oaks and cleared willows, the waters gone thick
with sediment – tell the story of its
inhabitants.  When you walk smooth paths
of the Laguna today and sight the
white arrow of an egret remember
the quiet, unforeseen hunt that continues
and still threatens his beauty today.

The Laguna, Part 8 - The Impaired

Here is the latest installment on my Laguna poem: section 8.It is still very much a draft, but thought I would post it anyway to keep myself going.

Impaired

This 14-mile wetland, this 254-square mile watershed that’s spread between four cities where history’s left over sediments are still being removed. By 1990, 92% of the Laguna’s riparian forest was gone.

Left arm reaching into Copeland, Washoe and Blucher Creeks. Right arm reaching into Santa Rosa, Hinebaugh and Five Creeks.A mouth that breathes into Mark West Springs Creek.A backbone made of the Mayacamas and Sonoma Mountains. 

In summer months, the Laguna wastes into a silver ribbon of water threaded between hills.
In winter months she spills and swells back into what she once was: a series of lakes that lead to the sea. 

Considered a national treasure. Listed as impaired under the federal Clean Water Act for sediment, nitrogen, temperature, phosphorus, mercury and dissolved oxygen.

Which system is miraculous?   The plentiful before or the rescue of what’s left after?  

When you walk the smooth, grated paths that now rib the Laguna, hear a thousand oak leaves rustling in the light wind. and remember the miraculous ghost of what was once there.  

Laguna Part 3 - A Double Sonnet on The Llano de Santa Rosa

Here is another draft of a section from Laguna de Santa Rosa.  This one, a double-American sonnet focuses on the first land grant to Joaquin Carillo (son of Maria Carrillo and brother-in-law of General Vallejo) called Llano de Santa Rosa Rancho.  The map pictured here is from Calispehere - an amazing resource for historic photographs and documents.  This is a survey map of the Llano de Santa Rosa Rancho (which did run out near what is now Llano road). 

Llano de Santa Rosa Rancho, 1843

Joaquin Carrillo was granted three
leagues of forested delta or llano
thanks to his brother-in-law, General
Vallejo. Soon, acres of oak forests
that seemed to breathe light into dark were gone.
Land cleared. Lakes drained. Crops replaced sedge with corn,
wheat, and barley. Trees were burned for charcoal.
An adobe home was built near Analy township.
But even as the trees thinned the plain still
teemed with large game: great herds of elk forged lakes,
mountain lions paced their territories
and grizzly bears roamed at will.  One day when
Joaquin rode across the eastern edge
of his rancho, one such bear followed him.

His horse, wild with fear, stumbled into
one of the many sink holes that had opened
up from the changed land and it was in that
dark hole that the three tangled into a story.
From which a bear would emerge unharmed.
From which the man and his horse would follow
what dark commerce was executed to
obtain this outcome is unknowable.

When settlers arrived after the Gold Rush,
Carillo began to sell off pieces
of his land.  Farmlets of 100 or
so acres of hops or cattle.  Trading
post went up. Whatever was in the way –
water, or animal, decimated.

Canvas - A Prelude - The beginning of the Laguna de Santa Rosa poem

I guess you could say I am obsessed with finishing this poem about the Laguna de Santa Rosa.  But, it is slow work.  This week we were to write a poem called "Canvas" in response to a stunning poem by francine j. harris called "Canvas".  Here is the re-written opening section of my poem, tentatively called "Canvas - A Prelude".

Canvas - A Prelude

Begin by  walking the cracked, chamomile- paths.  Let the path stretch across a wide stubbed field. 
Fill the air with the sounds of birds.  Fill the air with fat bees and the machine hum of insects.
Post appropriate markers that mark miles and decades but not the truth..

Try to contain the fissures of time in each quick step. When you walk under the lone oak that still, like the last visible star, constellates the field, smell smoke.  See the ghosts of the hundreds of other thick oak trunks that once crowded this space.  Hear their lost leaves rattling in the wind.

When you reach the man-made lake made to replace the natural lake, walk the perimeter.  The cattails that cage the floating bodies of seven white pelicans who have stopped here to rest on route back to the sea.

Look out across the drought dry field and imagine an chain of hundreds of lakes linking their way back to the sea.  Drain them for the good soil underneath. Fill them with soot.  Fill them again with feces and urine.  Cover what’s left of them in brambles. Get tangled in the sticky blood of berry juice.

And when you near the last of the water, the floating pontoon bridge, and the sounds of children playing baseball on the chalked diamond, let a red-snake T-bone the trail.

Let it open in you a wound that at it’s center is a mouth.

The Laguna poem - Revised and Expanded

In honor of my friend Paula Koneazny, I'm continuing work on a long poem I am writing about The Laguna de Santa Rosa which she had greatly helped me on.  There is still much work to be done on the poem, but here is the draft of a new section I've written to add to it today:


Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America, 1874

The whaling captain Charles Scammon left
the ragged, rocky cliffs of Maine's coast for
San Francisco in 1849.  He led many whaling expeditions
But what those large bodies lent instead of
flesh and oil was a path to a luminously blue,
Baja Lagoon where the whales stilled their bodies
to give birth.  The first day he arrived
at the open-mouthed bay his heart shifted:
a locked wooden chest left open and bare.
He learned to observe for a different
purpose: not to hunt, but to know
what the dark bodies could spell into him.
When he left that unpredictable sea to write
it all down he settled with his son on the edge
of the Laguna where the sea still speaks
in susurrations of muted fog.
 

A longish poem on the Laguna de Santa Rosa

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on a long poem about the Laguna de Santa Rosa, a natural area near the town of Sebastopol where I live and grew up.  It's a complicated place for those of us who grew up here, because though it was once a natural treasure a vast wetland and series of lakes that was filled with wildlife, during the 1970s it was a raw sewage treatment center.  Now, thankfully, the Laguna is being restored (thanks to the hard work of the Laguna Foundation).  These sections are the first few sonnets in a series of sonnets I'm writing about the Laguna.

Laguna de Santa Rosa

Prelude

We walk the cracked, Chamomile-bedded paths
stitching times passage:  willing a wide field
transform back into its original form.
Song birds chatter.  Bees fatten. A red-snake
T-bones the trail like a godamned saint.
What water flows is deep; hard to see through.
And what’s beyond that, anyway?  A blocked
waterway surrounded by the roar of
small-town little league games.  To believe in
wilderness is to suspend your belief.
Let it float on whatever pontoons were
thrown down on this dark matter.  Let the thick
trunked oaks drag their knuckles in the water.
And try to spell a path to the past.

History 1

The largest of the lakes were made into
resorts. There are photographs of young
women with parasols, sitting erect
in boats afloat on the large lakes; wooden
docks where bodies hang and thread arms against
a weightless dark.  All was for the taking.
Until 1895 there was great
bounty and no limits. Any man could
pull a hundred fish from the Laguna’s
chain of lakes.  San Francisco was hungry
for fresh game.  A bushel of mallard ducks
brought a gold nugget. For those who stayed to
farm, lakes on their land became land reclaimed:
drained for the rich soil that waited underneath.

The Body
 Left arm reaching into Copeland, Washoe
and Blucher Creeks. Left arm reaching into
Santa Rosa, Hinebaugh and Five Creeks.

A mouth that breathes into Mark West Springs Creek.
A backbone made of the Mayacamas
and Sonoma Mountains. A 14-mile,
sinuous body that holds together
an ecosystem.  Spread out between four
cites where the setiment left over
from history is still being removed.

History Lesson 2

The land was first the lands. Then, the Pomo,
the Miwok and the Wappo lived on it.
Then, triblets of the Konohomtara,
the Kataictemi and the Biakomtara.
For 10,000 years, the Laguna was
unchanged.  Then, the first Mexican land grant
occurred in 1853.  The time
when we took ownership of the land.  Then,
the oak forests, the cool dappled shadows
that seemed to breathe light into dark were gone.
Land cleared. Lakes drained. Trees burned for charcoal.

History Lesson 3

We awoke to the shout of wake up
It had rained continuously for three
days.  The newscaster’s thick mustache barely
rose as he warned: floodplane, 100-year
flood, prepare for the worst at high tide.
When we walked to the window we could see
the backyard had been transformed.  The chicken
coop roof an island in a fast flowing
river.  Then, the adult hand on shoulder
leading us across a wet, muddy floor
toward the gaping frown of the front door where
water licked hungrily at the front step.
Just over the threshold a small silver

boat stuttered on the frothing brown water. 

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 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.