Day 17: Freestone

For today's prompt, we had to write about the word "hope" as a topic, but we also had to use as many of another list of words randomly throughout the poem.  As the month goes on, I have drifted back to writing about the history of Sonoma County.  Today's poem is about Freestone, the town I live closest too and a place that's been transformed dramatically just in the time that I've known it, but even more so from it's earliest history when three men named James built a sawmill there.  Here is my draft:

Freestone
Hope is a town quarried from easily
worked sandstone.  First, a general store
selling button candy, and dry goods
then a black-aired salon that gathered
like a compass, and then the architect
built the two-story hotel.  This is before
the train drew a silver line between product
and the deliveries made possible by
the Sausalito Ferry.
                                 Years before
when the chorus of frogs still sang from
Salmon Creek, three men named James were
gifted the land by General Vallejo
and they built a sawmill on the creek's stony jaw. 

It's a story that often ends in flame:
three men drunk on land, red-faced, chest to chest
over the names written on the deed to the mill
Instead of fire, one of the James saws the mill
in two, splitting the new wood right down the middle. 

But, even hope, like a field of sleepy-headed snapdragons,
can be grown from this, and keep coming back Spring after Spring after Spring.

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 4: "There is a knack to flying. You must throw yourself at the ground and miss." -- e.e. Cummings

After you left, I let the Woods Speak for You

We landed here swollen in belly and
mind; threw our backs into it—
cleared the land until it was tamed into
rows.  But the perimeters, those dark woods,
push in, gathering back what we’ve claimed.
Some nights, when the moon pools through bubbled glass,
thin walls seem to fall away to let in
a chorus of coyotes.  Their song feels close and permanent.
As if all that we’ve hatched down and sorted into rows
will be dug up and reclaimed by morning.
As if my loneliness has finally
found a voice—a duet to sing against
the moon’s haunting silver pool. You should have
never taken the work.  There was enough.
On that last day, driving the oxen up
the steep climb toward Freestone where the tunnel
would collapse and take your life, you turned back
and waved.  Your hand white, like a flag
an offering toward what would pursue us
for so many stitched together days.

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 7 - How do you teach pain?

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

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

How Do You Teach Pain?



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

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

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

Follow footprints before they are swept away.

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

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

Cañada de Jonive


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

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

We live between two settlements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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