Alderpoint, 3/30/88
John and I teach poetry workshops at the Hoagland-Zenia school, not quite a one-room school house, but close. We teach poetry to three different groups of kids. The soccer ball becomes a metaphor of the moon. We toss it around the room. We play catch with the sun and moon.
At lunch we talk of incest and child abuse, the eighth grader I took photos of earlier, couldn’t take it anymore and shot her mother after graduation, that fine hair trigger. The toy uzis at Geoff’s door brings it all back home, a life I could’ve had, living on these rough mountains in the middle of nowhere where the smallest denomination of barter is a $50 bill. We accept an ounce of buds and leaves for services rendered from Geoff and consider it payment for working three hours, about $200. Not bad.
Geoff points out, you see the lights, that farthest ridge is Zenia. What I learned from the Davis household was to fill a haunted house with music and with laughter. Putting on words, you feel them deep inside. The magic all over my body tells me the memory of hands going up and down, is never far off, and I can’t find my way. The what if‘s don’t come as strong, but the same basic attraction pulls us into a vortex with ex- and current lovers and unalterable destinies. Geoff’s arms are massive logs. Not the slender boy I once knew growing up.
There are no streets in Zenia, there is no town. The only phone for miles looks out over the ridges and the postmistress reads the mail in the farmhouse perched on the cliff that serves as a general store, post office, message center for the folks miles around. It is either that or drive miles of winding gravel road to Kettenpom or Alderpoint.
Zenia, Xenolith, strange rocks. Does Zenia mean a place of strangers or a place where strangers lived or are all of us strangers here or is the strangness related to the fact no one is here and we’re all alone. The wind reads my book on rocks and minerals in no time at all. There are rare rocks here that grow nowhere else in the world, the gift debt of the San Andreas Fault, sheet silicates. In my rock book there’s a special section on sheet silicates, the rare rocks of the north coast. Rare minerals in blueschist and serpentine. For the first time in my life I am reading everything I can lay my hands on that has to do with geology of the north coast.
At Hayfork, there is a suspension bridge, fences divide the valley and at Irene‘s café, once the old high school we eat boysenberry tarts. Hayfork is miles from Zenia and we are more than a half a day’s journey apart in both times, and worlds.
No comments:
Post a Comment