Material Conditions
And so he got busy with another pet project: the yard all dry dirt and rock,
a regular paradise of rubble. His.
He put in a lawn—one for the parents’ side
and one for the kids—
and then a huge patio—one for parents,
one for kids. He even added color
to the cement, I remember, working with our handsome neighbor Preston,
shirts off and the grinding, turning
mixer machine, but the tones in the concrete came out badly
and the whole thing went a little out of plumb
because it rained, they said,
just as the damp sandy substance was beginning to set.
He put in two nice lamps with bases made of stone,
gathered from the unfinished yard itself,
at the forward-most boundary of the patio.
The lamplight added a frail gold liquid
touch to it all, come tepid spring and dry-hot summer nights. He even had speakers
set out by the lamps, I think, underneath some shrubs,
so my parents’ Ray Charles, Ray Coniff (ugh), and movie themes on 33s
floated bluesily the neighborhood over
together with the smell of steaks—
filets or T-bones for the grown-ups,
some other cut for the kids.
Backyards, really,
were my father’s own and maybe only
canvas. He artfully left a couple big boulders
standing here and there in the yard. They were sandstone, I’m sure,
part of the natural truck and trickle
of the nearby Ventura River. I could see faces in
them. Once you see a face in stone, like that,
it never goes away. You can’t see the rock
as just a rock anymore.
Too, he used flat slabs of river stone
to make a path around the beautiful, multi-trunk oak
in the center of the yard. But he never finished it—the path.
I don’t know why. I talk about it, I’ve written
about it, I don’t know why. I don’t know why
he didn’t complete it nor why
I keep wanting to say
something about it, which I can’t. The circle of stone does not go
all the way around.
*
The river bed was always an issue in our house. We weren’t supposed to go
down there. But we did. It was another country
right next door. What kid wouldn’t
want to go? No river was ever there, however,
save for the very rare floods—unreal torrents
blasting down Matilija canyon.
Not at all like the slow-motion floods, more like “flows,”
up here on the far northern plains:
river water dreamily
inching up and up
till it spreads out slowly over land too flat
to believe, in the spring, making everything a lake all over again—
old glacial Lake Aggasiz, I guess.
People sandbag for days and days and days, watching the inevitable, in slow-motion,
get away with as much as it possibly can,
which is a lot. Where I grew up, water had some different
ideas. It was just absent
until it was present.
It blew down the homes of the poor or carried their houses off whole.
It wiped out the bee farms.
It reconfigured the whole Sespe canyon, or nearly.
Afterwards, things dripping and sparkling and quiet,
the stone fences which encircled
the state penitentiary up the hill
were full of gaps. I couldn’t even always tell
where I was
as we drove around town in the aftermath, exploring.
(The orange and avocado groves, somehow, if I’m remembering
right, were always left intact
with their buried artifacts and Chumash and southern European
conquistador heritage—someone, I seem to recall,
had even stumbled upon a sword? Or am I imagining
that? I’d be decimated, I’m telling you,
on a witness stand, my dream mind and my memory
can’t tell each other apart—) In this little town called Ojai, meaning “moon” or “nest,”
where I came of age and learned to swim,
drive, screw and write, floodwater
came from elsewhere,
up in the mountains. It boomed down
upon us. There was some elsewhere, see,
waiting to snap its fingers, oh,
whenever. Here,
where I am now, we anticipate flooding every year
from early winter on. And on. And on. The speculators
speculate, they measure the snowpack,
they estimate the ice jams. We pile up our sandbags
and the water rises around us.
Our houses become islands.
It’s like the river isn’t really ready
to be a river; it’s still busy trying
to be a lake. Northern Europeans occupied this region
violently and stupidly and arrogantly, of course—
but also too soon. When it rains, my garden
goes to sticky wet clay.
When it doesn’t rain, dust from the fields around town
rises into the wind—
you can see clouds of it for miles in the sky.
It settles even in houses, a thin silky film
over lamp shades and furniture, windows open
or windows shut. Rain, no rain, people up here
are always in trouble. The earthquake here never stops. It’s hard to make a poem
out of where I’m from. It’s hard to make a poem
out of where I am.