A birthday walk in the great green fields

This piece was featured first on Apr 17 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

First, I apologize for the tardy newsletter, but it was my birthday this week, and I took a couple days off. I also got to interview one of the great artists of our time, Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States on Tuesday night. You’ll get to hear that on KQED in the City Arts and Lectures series some day soon.

In the meantime, let me tell you a little about it. Limón has a new book out, Against Breaking, a version of her farewell address as poet laureate. It’s also her short book length answer to the question, “In times like these, why poetry?”

I structured our conversation around different passages of the book, teasing out their themes—praising this broken world, public poetry and democratic belonging, the expansion of our human vision to include a broader set of living beings. Then, for each section, I picked a poem or two from Ada’s oeuvre that speaks to these issues. Which of course they all do.

Limón is a daughter of Sonoma. She is the natural poet of the landscape of the Valley of the Moon, with its oaks and madrone, grass and ash. In this vein, one of my all-time favorites is her poem, “Salvage,” from The Hurting Kind. It begins:

On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western
slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone
tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive
from nature’s need to propagate. One side
of her is black ash and at her root is wha
tlooks like a cavity that was hollowed out
by flame. On the other side, silvery green
broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter

That poem came back to me on Wednesday, when my partner and I arrived in Sonoma for a quick birthday excursion, and there on Google Maps was Mount Pisgah. And I could imagine that tree up there (Limón told me there is one individual tree she was thinking about), the real thing and this metaphor for the burned-but-alive, the making-it-work.

After a great dinner at the girl and the fig and a delicious egg sandwich at Valley the next morning, we took a quick drive up to Sonoma Valley Regional Park and did the loop that people do there through the great green fields. The day was bright and just this side of crisp. Perfect walking weather. As we crested one ridge, the calls of woodpeckers rang out. We focused our eyes on the surrounding oaks, and saw one, then two, then threefourfixsix birds. They were all around! Looking at the trees, they’d stitched acorns into the trunks, flitting between them raucously. Of all the places, this was the woodpecker ridge.

A few minutes later, we encountered a madrone, cool, even cold, to the touch. And the last lines of “Salvage” floated back into my mind:

I have
been staring at the tree for a long time now.
I am reminded of the righteousness I had
before the scorch of time. I miss who I was.
I miss who we all were, before we were this: half
alive to the brightening sky, half dead already.
I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool
and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize
to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

What a poem of regret and acceptance, of gratitude and nostalgia. Now, I can never touch a madrone without thinking, “I miss who we all were.”

And at the same time, newly arrived at 44, I am glad to be rid of righteousness. I am glad to still be half alive. Some of us need fire to grow, and I don’t need unscarred bark. After all, how much more fun to have acorns etched into us all. How else do we become a home for others?

We finished the walk past Suttonfield Lake. The hillside was a mosaic of greens. A cormorant posed. The breeze blew across our skin. We were alone together on the path back home.

There are moments in my life that I know I’ll return to: a boat rocking gently in the ocean, a summer night in New York, feet in the sand beneath a swing, a running child on the bluff path at sunset. I have never been one to love blowing out the candles, but these moments are the notches on my life’s timeline, and I can feel them embedded in me, hard and complete, like seeds.

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Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum