After nearly 30 years, I’ve recently moved back to my home valley in California. I should say, not just my home valley, but my hometown, and not just my hometown, but the house that I grew up in, from ages six months to 15 years. Memory has, to say the least, become all the more surreal. I’ve turned my childhood bedroom into my office, and it’s where I’m writing this now. Time has shifted. It’s both horizontal and vertical.
Over the past 25 years, I’ve written at least 100 poems about this valley, this place, and now it feels as if I am living inside my own poems. Here’s Dunbar Road, and Henno Road, and here is my secret creek, my first most beloved tree, and here is where the fire started, and here is where the fire went out. Where I used to point to pages, I can now point, in real time, to the places that made me. This might be the very definition of the lyrical present. The poem has happened but is also happening now.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Recently, after a short but dramatic bout with rattlesnakes on our small hillside plot, the local snake guy, James, wearing high leather boots I later learned are actually called snake boots, was in the crawl space in the garage. As he was under there looking for signs of snakes, I made the mistake of shouting, “Oh my god.”
He slowly removed himself from the crawl space and said, in the serious low tone of someone ready to spring into action, “What?” I had discovered my name written in my own handwriting in the cement floor of the garage: ADA 1983. I was delighted.
In hindsight, one should probably never shout “Oh my god” while someone is looking for rattlesnakes. But I remembered writing it in the wet cement when my grandpa and my dad finished the second-floor addition. I had been looking for it ever since we moved in. I would have been seven years old. I’d thought one of the previous owners had undoubtedly paved over it. But here it was: evidence.
Did I write my name to be remembered? Did I write my name as a way of owning this specific place? I don’t think so. I think, even then, I wrote my name as a way of belonging. As a way of hoping I belonged to this land, this world, to this time, to this now, as a way of knowing I existed at all. I am always figuring out how to exist, and writing, poetry in particular, is one of the few things that offer proof that I am here. I write toward reciprocity, toward connection, toward offering something back to this wondrous suffering planet. Writing is a way of saying, Yes, I am here, but also we are here together, all of us, how rare, how miraculous, how awful, how utterly strange.
I remember sitting by the low stone wall behind the house and learning from my mother how to sketch the stones, how they existed in shadows. If I look now, I can see myself then trying to study as hard as I could to see how the world was made: shadows, light, green and growing things, the seasonal creek filling and drying up over and over. I didn’t know yet that the world was full of violence and cruelty that would seem sometimes unstoppable, but I knew I wanted to find a way to remember as much of this life as I could. I write to know the world and, in turn, be known by the world itself, which is of course ridiculous and impossible.
I write to know I am a part of this time, this particular ecosystem, these old valley oaks, these dark-eyed juncos. I write to say thank you and to say I’m sorry and to say I don’t want to miss any of this life, and always to say I love you, I miss you, I love you. I write because we die, and because that is something I have never gotten over. I write to remember because not only do I want to hold on to this life, to everything I love, but I want to behold it, wholly.
I write to receive and to notice the receiving. I write to cast a protection spell. I write toward joy because joy is rebellious. I write toward rage because rage can fuel action. I write because, no matter who thinks they are in charge of our bodies, we all have the right to scratch our own names in the dirt, to know that we belong.•
