Dear Sebastopol -

I've been working on finishing a new manuscript called, "There's a Ghost in This Machine of Air" which focuses on the history of Sebastopol.  For our assignment this week, we were asked to revise a poem and change the "you" who is being addressed.  I did revise this poem, but when I tried to shift the "you" away from Sebastopol, I lost the heart of what I was trying to do.  So, I switched it back.  (The mural pictured here is the actual WPA era mural that is still in our post office and that I refer to in the poem.) Here is my revised poem.

Dear Sebastopol –

Hard  not to get dizzy, here, under tides of scent—how they grade and terrace the air:

salt thick tang of wet earth fat with limestone against sweet rot of wind falls.

Pine sap town built on stolen ground.  Wagon rutted streets.  Hills once lush

with redwood and oak, cleared to the root for embroidery of orchards.

Century-wide berths of scrub oaks smoldering in the Laguna.

A train that carried its screaming weight down main street.

But the WPA mural on the post office wall still frames:

the hard won promise of rows of apple trees flanked by white chicken coops.

Once your accepted story swallowed me under its bell glass sky.

Now, I wake slowly. Learn to waver in the air above what history we've learned

sense what’s pushing up underneath.

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 3: A Message to Myself So I Remember Who I Am

For today's poem, I returned back to a series I'm writing about an imaginary woman who lived on the property I live on now, but back in the late 1800s.  I started the series two years ago as I was writing poems about the history of the town where I grew up.

A Message to Myself So I Remember Who I Am
Wagnon Road, 1898

Removed from the troubles of everyday
life—the mind opens like a sky stirred by
sea wind.  Memories blow in, thin and pale,
then bloom up into cinematic stained
sails like ghosts.  What message does each carry?

These days they only cloud.  I imagine
the jagged crown of dark trees on the far
ridge can hold them back.  As if mercy were
fair.  But it’s likely only tiredness
that inks my mind clear of the hope’s fireflies.
Some days, like a phantom limb I can still
feel to itch, I can feel his soft lips on
mine, his strong arm around my waist.  And all
the dead days since his death are heaved off,
thin clouds that they are, and driven back to sea.

Day 21: I gotta to see a man about a chainsaw

For some reason today the prompt made me think of all the old historic buildings around here that perch on hillsides and sag and then slowly fall down.  What lost stories are falling with them and who will take the time to dig them up. 

Salvage

The old school house rested on the crest of
hill near the restless blue-breath of cold sea
has finally collapsed into itself.
Time is in the wind that picks up over
rocky cliffs. That slowly eased the redwood
planks apart until, tired skeleton, it
sank. For weeks, no one stopped their car, no one
witnessed. Only the ghosts remembering
what their footsteps spelled when they were in flesh.
Until a big man noticed. Eddied out
of traffic to pick through what was left to
gather what wooden stories the dead have left.
It was there, sifting through the planks that the
box was found. Unbroken belly of black
age-tanned wood. The man shook his head at his
discover. Feeling the ache of what
lay hidden inside. Silenced voices, dark
words that would rush into him once he let
them out. Once he did. Once he found a man
with a chainsaw and opened the musty
box his eyes washed clear as deep as the sea.
His path opened by the truth.

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.