CPITS Journal, Alderpoint, 3/30/88

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.

• ZENIA as prose poem (corrupt text) 1984
• HORSES RUNNING THROUGH THE STREETS OF ZENIA AT NIGHT

Northbay Poetry Series at Copperfield’s with John Oliver Simon, Jorge Lujan, Maureen Hurley

The Abraham Lincoln brigade

Ed Balchowski, the one-armed piano player read his poems with his daughter Zelda, at Garbo‘s. He tells us he was in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, fighting fascism. He said an army of civilians, a politically conscious People’s Army traveled to to the Spanish Republic. The communist party workers in Spain needed to fight fascism, and International troops sneaked into Spain. He tells us of a nurse named Selma O’Reilly, women ambulance drivers and everyone made up stories of why they were going to Spain. Some posed as archaeologists, others as doctors, nurses. It was a five-hour hike over the Pyrenees. There was a US embargo, Roosevelt refused to support democratic Spain  and sided with Franco. He saw the republic as a communist threat. Even the Catholic Church supported Franco while the Germans bombed civilian towns, Madrid Guernica Bilbao. It was not very glamorous, not like in the movies. The lies. Mañana that all familiar cry. We ran out of munitions and medical supplies.  He sings Spanish Civil War songs. Ed says no pasarán, with the stump of his left arm orchestrating the air. They subsisted on mule meat and garbanzos. The government went with the embargo to Spain and people in America protested it, there was tons of food and clothing waiting. We put pressure on Washington to deliver the goods. In 1938 the US embargo lifted, we were there with no arms, pre-World War I weapons, Napoleonic? He mentions his comrades in arms—Hemingway writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, he mentions Langston Hughes, he mentions Lilian Hellman and Paul Robeson—all who spent time at the front. He said the USSR was the only country to send arms to Spain. We were truly an international brigade, Americans, the English, the French, the Italians, the Poles,  the Russians, all part of the international brigade. He raised his right arm in a salute. Fascist troops drove the brigade to the sea. Hitler invaded Austria and 70% of the Lincoln brigade was dead or lost. For every action there is a reaction 3200 Americans died, half the victims return to the United States and continued to fight the war in the US. So much sorrow, we were defeated but we won the war against fascism, D-Day 1945. When we returned home, we were harassed by the US Army and McCarthyism was a witchhunt. I didn’t look ahead, I was doing what I wanted to do. I didn’t think of getting killed. I don’t regret the loss of an arm. It seemed like the right thing to do. Aye Manuela The Abraham Lincoln brigade.

Steve Torre Workshop, Mark West School Poem fragments

BOLINAS RIDGE

I remember finding charge stumps
still glowing with red eyes.

I had no way of knowing
if they had been smoldering
from a recent burning,
or if they had kept a fiery vigil
all those years
long after the loggers were gone.

3/17/1988

in the morning sun
we watched the old guys
split the cedar shakes

Thwock!

Turn the stump

Thwock!

Turn it again turn

To keep the grain even, he said

The sweat drizzled his whiskered cheeks,

And I sank deeper into the lake.

Like loggers we rolled the logs
below Shafter Dam in the greening pond.

Have you ever noticed the fields by the coasts
punctuated with charred stumps?

Machines with spiked teeth
stripped the bark from trees
as if they were made of eggshell,
instead of wood.

I abandoned my own farm
and a friend runs cattle there now.

The horses they chewed on the barn
until it fell back into the earth.
Unseasonable sawdust
and the mare, Binty choking on that splinter.
Poetic karma.

long shadows of barns

straddle the thin peninsula 

from Tomales Bay to the Pacific 

On Tomales Head 

walking along the windswept land 

the lonely whitewashed barns 

cattle and rocks grazing 

on the windswept grass 

We are losing a landscape of culture

look to your place in the landscape 

your childhood 

I never found the wilderness 

though I spent five years looking for it 

until I realized I was looking for my lost childhood.

What I've lost is like a Kodak snapshot 

with its off blues and deep reds of the 50s 

my mother's carmine lipstick, 

the floral skirt that later became pillows for the couch

People living solitary lives 

personal history 

skin changing imagine

Along the windswept land
solitary whitewashed barns
rocks and cattle grazing
on the matted grass.

Long shadows of barns
straddled the thin peninsula
from Tomales Bay to the Pacific.

Families nailed row after row
of abalone shells to the sides of barns,
not realizing they were finite.
My aunt remembers how the car,
lost in the fog, was also nearly lost
to the sea on Tomales Point.

The horses would chew the sides of the barn
until its back broke and fell back into the earth,
broken spine and unseasonable sawdust
the final splinters lodged in the gray mare's throat
fell her as well.

Schools of tule elk
the extraordinary curve of horn
ancestors
a coyote pelt nose down on the wall

Our shadows watered the sawdust
our eyes all bloodshot
our hearts like a blast of wheat
through the clear ribs of morning
light sank through my body
like alder and pine
and sheep biting the red clay
as the huge cable snapped
gutting the darkness
 and I saw the sun standing
in a pool of ravens

there is no bridge in Hayfork
the big bowl of the Valley
is surrounded by mountains.

3/18/1988

Stephen Torre workshop 

Matanzas field trip, poem notes

 
Matanzas field trip fragments

Bradley brings wax from the mission to the house of Vallejo.

Spring arrives, sporadic cold growling in the shadows.

Luis tells Nicholas, if you kiss a frog that’ll give somebody words.

A small newt slithering to sneakehood in the slow evolutionary crawl.

Small boys squeal and tease scorpions from under small rocks.

Lupine turns field blue in anticipation of evening.

Children gather locust pods, feel they have gained a fortune.

Mikey tells me of the speckled trout he knows in a pool below Spring Lake.

One kid, zippered up backwards in his coat, patiently waits for all this to end.

In the barn, wicker willow cages, rawhide strips, harnesses.

Blue Willow plates, a massive bowl carved out of a single tree. 

Stone mills, tule elk skulls, graceful curved horns.

A coyote pelt on the wall, facing nose down.

3/14/88

Dan Hauser letter on offshore oil, arts day & my poems