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.
 

Emily Dickinson Mash-up

For today's exercise we were to write like the first poet who influenced us.  Quite humbling, to say the least! My first poet-love was Emily Dickinson. I started reading her in 7th grade.  Here is my attempt at a draft:

Emily Dickinson Mash-up

That leaden hour when morning fog will block
the automatic warmth of a robotic sun. 

A wire caught – nosed and laced through
air’s translucent ribbons – writhes and snakes

until the dawn is stuck to brood in  
the zero hour.  Too much for the swallows

tired throats to attest.  A golden pressure
that winks against the barrier of glass.

What keeps me in, waiting –
for the lift, the dry field,
day purged of fertility of night.

Mean Mommy

After a few weeks off getting the semester started, I've finally drafted a poem (YAHOO!)

Mean Mommy

You wake to the liquid dark. You wake to
the new container of your elastic
body.  You wake to cold sweats, small femurs,
and wrist bones fossilized into your flesh.
You wake to shadows breathing in corners
of what could come what could enter and take
away what you love.       Days slur drunkenly
by --fat with syrup and homemade pancakes
(FROM SCRATCH!).  Days made of: diapers and wipes and
mismatched brittle laundry.         There are days when
you look head on at your face in the mirror.
When you can see through your elastic skin
into what’s underneath: geometry
of bones and at its center a hearth of rage.

You wake to the dark empty before dawn. 
You wake to the slit of night light.  You wake
into the new routine of meal to meal. 
The bend down and pick up the wrapper on
the floor, check the laundry on the way out.
Some mornings you wake before the others.
You open the door into the yawn of
dawn into the deafening chorus of
sea birds and raptors and blue jays into
the air that is fresh and possible with
fog and you feel the perimeter
of your own body return to you.

But footsteps THUD! into closer  into
the open belly of the house. And night
slurs into the noise of day. The stuffing
of bodies into clothes and the packing
of (NUTRITIOUS!) lunches.          These days when you
look head on at your face in the mirror
and see beyond the bone cage, the raging
belly hearth to the bedrock beneath:
 a mountain lake gone slack and cool.   
A lake that burns with its origin of ice.

Into the Hybrid at Luther Burbank's Garden

I'm working at Napa Valley Writers' Conference this week, which means in between helping to run this incredible conference I get to sit down and hear poets like Brenda Hillman, Kazim Ali, Camille Dungy and Brian Teare blow my mind with craft talks about various topics.  This draft of a poem happened while listening to Brenda Hillman discuss the various types of courage it takes to engage in the poetic space.  It's a meditation on Luther Burbank's Garden in Santa Rosa and the way we hold history to a specific line, even though it is all subjective. 




Into the Hybrid at Luther Burbank's Garden


Mounds of earth like open graves
grammared by stones, guarded by toothy daisies.


The medicinal garden, the sensory garden
the garden of starts and failures contained.


To question history is to watch the chaos of its particles
glisten into discernible patterns in the air.


We loosen embedded stones with our toes
amongst tree that grow into each other.



We ask--where is he buried?
Light caught in the fingers of lost cedar.



We ask--where are the unattested species recorded?Indecipherable writing in notebooks
sketches of leaves, a seed big as a child's fist.



Please do not record insidePlease do not disturb  outside: the war of air.



What's pushing up--
ache of earth against this litany of breeding air:
mind to mouth to mind to mouth.



This breeding between what was, what will be,
and what will be left to believe.

Prayers for Arborglyphs

For this week's prompt we were supposed to write a prayer for something.  I've been grading creative nonfiction essays all day and one image has been revisiting me -- the image of an arboglyph: an old aspen tree that's been carved into over and over for decades we see each time our family hikes from the valley to the high camp at Squaw Valley.  My students have been writing incredible essays and all day I've had to hold myself back from writing. So the tree stuck in my mind.  It stuck there as I drove the boys to the dentist, or as I drove by myself in the car listening to a man on the radio talk about his journey raising his autistic son.  And when I finally sat down I knew why that was speaking to me and my family about: it was the long journey we've just traveled.  The metaphorical wilderness we've found our way out of.  Here is my draft. 

Prayer for Arboglyphs

“the Basque sheepherder humanizes an otherwise unrelentingly pristine natural environment. Thus, whether wandering through an aspen grove or contemplating a stone monument he enjoys a certain illusion of not being alone. Rather, despite his solitude a man can commune with the ghosts of past generations and enjoy some small sense of purpose as he leaves his own mark as a legacy for future herders.”

— William A. Douglass, Basque Sheepherders of the American West (63)

The trail rises from the valley—vein to
sky—sometimes granite bedded, sometimes hushed
 by pine needles.  When we walk it, we walk
for hours. We try to remember each
turn, each nook.  Try to find the unmarked way. 
Blue skies bury us in expectations.

The creek that threads us up waxes and wanes
between full bellied summer and the ice
 of holding its breath.  There are days when we
walk through the pygmy pines, wind whispering
like the waves of a lost sea.  We giggle
like dryads.  Other days the jagged maw
of granite islands swallow us whole
until we can no longer find each other, our way.
Echoes that bend our voices apart.

We aren’t the first to want to annotate
this passage of wilderness no matter how
steep it has become.  Half way up, black scar
of Arboglyph screams from the curved belly
of an aspen tree that we aren’t first, or alone.
God bless the tree that remembers the wound written into the wound.

So that when we return to the level
valley floor we hold that carved wilderness
in us—static whisper of aspen leaves,
the course we found, the hope like a hawks scream
that pierced us until we carried on.

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.

School of the Dead

For this week's prompt, we were to write a faux translation.  I stated with Vallejo and somehow ended with Helene Cixous Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. This is one of those haunting books, we have the privilege to read just a few times in our lives.  I first read Cixous when I was on the precipice of becoming a writer.  Or of listening to myself enough to realize I wasn't going to be anything but a writer.  Reading her again today, is both haunting and luxurious.  Here is my attempt at faux translating Cixous:

School of the Dead

A passage way between two jagged shores 
Dark water is dark because it holds more
oxygen   There are two ways to clamber 
downward:  plunge deep in
to earth or forgive your air to the sea.  
They say truth is down below with the dead 
– weighed down by what we've let ourselves forget.

We are a storm of living particles –
fireflies that aim to light dead static
of air.  So when the ash falls it is
deafening. To be human, you must first
lose your world.  The way the sea will wash 
you out of stance and breath. The unknown waits. 

Lunch at the Luther Burbank Garden, Santa Rosa

For this week's prompt we were to write a poem about our surroundings at lunch.  I spent my lunch hour on a tour at Luther Burbank's home in Santa Rosa.  Here's the draft I pieced together.

Lunch at the Luther Burbank Garden, Santa Rosa

History seems bricked in—but the soil
remains rich between the cracks, where the big-
toothed grins of Shasta daisies can spring forth.
If something doesn't suit you than graft it
to something else. Sometimes, a potato
seedpod small as a fingernail can sprout
ten futures thick with eyes; the largest sold
for passage on a train to another
life where the fields pulsed. Where onion skin-thin
paper journals were used to trace the shape
of each creations potential, weighing
risk against what could bloom against all odds.
When you leave, you must empty your pockets.
Let the wind unwind the lost paths to home.

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. 

At the Edge of the Uncanny Valley

Today,  I'm just happy to be back writing.  I'm a little off prompt, but I don't care.  Just happy to be writing again.  The title for this is completely unrelated, but the idea of it struck me. Here is my draft:

 

 

At the Edge of the Uncanny Valley

Elements that rise to meet the river’s edge:
knot of tule marsh, sponge of ground

black and red winged shock of blackbird taking flight
knotted oaks with arms so long they scrape the ground

and hills soaked in an ocean of grass whose sway
who sway you say will save me.

Sea birds whose screams sear through us
like plates scraped against each other.  

Violence  near enough that it might rise up
molten and unexpected.  Still the cars park

Hands clasp plastic baggies full of stale bread
Sea birds circling, greedy, fat with the knowledge

there will always come more—That somehow
wherever we stand, we stand by the sea
and all that we know to do is to feed it.

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 16: Valley of the Moon

For today's poem, we were to write off of the word, pilose (which means covered in downy hair). For me, this was a tough prompt.  But, here is what I came up with.

Valley of the Moon

At eye level, the field is pilose, dew-
dappled grass rich with the scent of wet earth.
And the soil here hums electric--since
1920 Sonoma County has been
top ten in agricultural production.
So much available land on which to 
plant crops of hops, grapes, prunes and apples.
Already the apple trees stand their hills
clad in green gowns and vineyards hold back
in the maze of their arms. At night, the air
is fresh and alive with all that desire--
A fox screams her needs into salted air
night after night as we beckon sleep to
bring us back to the time before life throbbed and thrived.

Day 15: After The Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil (1100s)

I had to take a few days off from my poem-a-daying, due to life's unexpected surprises.  But, I'm back and certain I can make up for lost time.  For today's poem, we were to write about an artwork. For some reason, this piece from the 1100s depicting heaven caught my eye. It's featured at the Getty right now and is from an old scroll.  Here is my draft about the painting above:

 

The Divine Liturgy of St. Basil

 

Of course in heaven are a hundred birds
Each eave of the onion-domed home hosting
colorful families of air-boned hope:
red-throated, or whirling turquoise feathers
they coo and twill and prance their shock orange
claws on snarly gargoyles stone cold eyes.

 

And of course this place is a dappled thing:
made of new grass green and summer sky blue
points of light, gather like a cloud of witness

and swarm above our minds. We stand on
carpets woven from wild roses and
violets, sedated by the breath of
hyacinths.  Watching the light strike crystal
chandeliers and swallow us in rainbows.

 

Day 10: Grateful for Future, Whatever it May Contain

I am officially a day off.  But, for a good reason!  Last night, I got to read from Gold Passage and The Flying Trolley (and my manuscripts "500 Days" and "There's Ghosts in this Machine of Air") at Copperfield's Books.  What a pleasure to get to read to so many dear friends at a book store that I love!  It was truly a great event.  But, today, I am determined to catch up (instead of work on my taxes, or grade papers, which may or may not be a wise decision!)  The prompt I was supposed to write off of for April 10 was "ungrateful about my future".  But, since, after last night, it was impossible not to be grateful, I ended up writing about that instead. Here is my draft:


Grateful for Future, Whatever it May Contain

Hard to predict the future when you wake
to a fogged field at dawn echoing bird
song. Hard not to spend your day trying to
follow a straight line: long roads divided
by broken lines, contrails that dissipate
from the sky, a blue, shimmering pool still
unparceled by lane lines. A clock you doubt
the accuracy of.  But, the future
is funny, isn’t it?  You have no choice
but to watch it slowly emerge from fog
like a lone muscular buck.  Quivering,
unpredictable and surrounded by
the feathered hope of song.

Day 9: PLUVIAL DREAMS

Today, we were to write about the word pluvial which means of or relating to rain.  As a Californian, rain is something I think a lot about.  How we either have too much of it or not enough and how the rainfall is always on our minds.  Here's my draft for today. 

PLUVIAL DREAMS

Growing up, when we doubted time, we dialed
P-O-P-C-O-R-N, heard the cool fact delivered in
a soothing accurate voice.  Important
in a place like this: built on faults, rainy
season that is always feast or famine.
What pluvial dreams will bloom from a mind
that sleeps beneath the staccato tap of rain-
drops on a tin roof.  Who feels the thirst of
the parched golden hills and the nervous willows
whisper even from under fog’s cover.
Once, this river swelled far beyond its banks
you can find those muddy rings marked surge.
Others, you could walk across the water.
You can find those muddy rings marked as now.
And still the river aches and winds toward
the salty mouth of sea with certainty.
No matter how much rain.  The waves will crash
into what the river’s got to give up
and that’s time’s secret.  Dial.  Hang-up.  Dial. 
It will always pass.
It will always continue to count.

Day 8: Broken

For today's prompt, I had to use the word broke or broken and write a violent poem.  I'm not sure I got to violence, but there are ghosts! Here's my draft:

Day 8: Broken

The hills are scattered with rotgut. Houses
or barns left for winds picking – paint sun-bleached
and peeling.  Windows shot or shattered, broke
like history.  A garden gone feral
in the front yard; generations upon
generations of kale and fennel knuckling
out of the weed infested ground.
My friend says when she dies she’ll come back as
a ghost and haunt us all. I don’t doubt it.
Funny how a life is looking back, how
it grows long as an afternoon shadow
how it doesn’t blink out but lingers on—
like a bleached house on a hill half covered
in blackberry bushes where memory
however broken or faded grows on.

Day 7: Self Portrait at Lake Tahoe

Day 7: Self Portrait at Lake Tahoe

Some days, ordinary some days crowned
by snow-capped jags – mountainous teeth.
Some days legs like reconstructed fossils,
joints where jeweled hummingbird wing-beats fan pain.
Relief can be as cool and deep as a lake.
Dive under the surface and pain dissolves
like fine sugar. Swim far enough under
and the body, however sparked, will numb.