Oregon law says I don’t have to pump my own gas.

Oregon law says I can’t be charged more if I refuse.

I always pull into Full Serve,

exit the car to greet the men and women who pump my gas

in a locale where it can rain 70 inches a year.

They see Elmer standing in the back seat and here come the dog stories.

One Chevron attendant in Empire

plays DJ with his phone,

music channeled through speakers.

One morning, “Your Love” by the Outfield played.

I made a remark about the song.

It was once the absurd love song for me and Michelle.

He said one afternoon he awakened in a field

of a county fair in Central Oregon,

still drunk, stoned.

The Outfield were on stage playing the song.

The other day he had Charlie Parker going,

in a gas station in Coos Bay for chrissakes!

In all my years of not pumping my own gas in Oregon,

I had never heard jazz playing at a gas station.

I asked him about the selection.

He said a choir teacher in middle school turned him onto to bebop.

I guess teachers can make a difference.

Or the female attendant at the same station,

who had to kick serious ass across the street

after homeless miscreants burned down a boarded-up camping trailer

rotting on an abandoned lot, then kept on squatting on the property.

“So you were kind of like a Sheriff cleaning up Dodge City,” I said.

“Fucking A!” she said.

Better directions than satellite maps,

savvier than fools on Yelp

tricks to avoiding Charleston speed traps,

best Chinese joints,

hot lines about the molten MAGAs

bitching about high fuel prices but too stupid to admit their stupidity.

And when the surprise window washing occurs,

I tip big,

bigger at Christmas.

She called it Philomath wine,

a four-pack of Cook’s champagne mini bottles

purchased at a gas station in Philomath

before driving Highway 20 to see me in Newport.

She’d swig one, possibly two,

on the road that annually racked up the most human and elk fatalities in Oregon.

Tokes on the joint with a roach clip, too,

as Portland punk rock thundered on the stereo.

We met at a Derrick Jensen reading,

made out on Nye Beach afterward,

lost contact after that.

Three years later she called me on my last land line.

She’d found me in the last phone book ever printed with Newport listings!

“Let’s meet,” she said.

We did.

A dive bar on the Bayfront.

She showed me the first (and only) page of her novel called The Writer.

I read it at the table.

She watched me read and relished the moment.

It was a love letter to me,

written with professional skill,

of an untamed (thankfully) novelist.

If only I still had it to quote here.

Sometimes I didn’t know she was coming, although usually I did.

She studied acupuncture,

dreaming of opening her own shop in New York City,

a place she’d never seen.

We talked, talked, talked for hours on the front deck.

Drained cases of wine.

She never checked her phone.

We ate greasy Sunday breakfasts and drank bloody marys.

Salty Dog in Waldport or Timbers in Toledo.

Once she ripped off her dress on the beach, sprinted to the ocean,

dived in, jumped up with her arms raised high, flexing.

Once she punched me in the shoulder

so I wouldn’t interrogate a man reading the Bible

on a driftlog with his back to the ocean.

I just wanted to know which testament!

Once she dragged me off the couch to celebrate the Fourth of July.

I ended up saving a dog spooked by fireworks.

She always wore the same flimsy dress when she visited.

I think it was the only one she owned.

A squall blew that dress off her body in front of a Thai restaurant.

We were trying to enter but the wind barred the door.

She tip-toed to the dress,

slipped it on,

and we got the order to go.

I verged on asking her to move in after she graduated,

start something novel, explosive, possibly scandalous.

I didn’t.

Later, she moved to New York and opened the shop.

I rambled to the ocean this morning.

Waves rolled gray and white.

The husky brought me a stick.

I played before work.

That’s where I am now,

my classroom, before the show.

My job, a high school teacher.

The Republican Convention unfolded last night.

I read the news today.

There wasn’t one person in attendance

who cared about the ocean.

How do I know that?

If any delegate cared about the ocean,

they wouldn’t have been in Tampa,

frothing in a hall

of fears and fantasy

of farmed salmon,

fake empathy,

of a God that never created the ocean.

“Phonies” Holden would have called them.

I say let the ocean hold its own political convention,

undersea,

at the thermal vents where tube worms writhe,

choose a candidate for President,

a blue whale perhaps, a keyhole limpet, kelp,

coral—

no, a manatee!

The party of water,

uniting us all,

a platform of salt and gills, walking upright.

Think of the press conference.

In the general election,

every creature gets the franchise.

Plankton too!

Think of the landslide!

Then we’ll inaugurate the manatee and her vice president the stingray,

and start that new country up.

The majorities of the deep in Congress will pass all the laws.

The scaly Supreme Court will uphold them.

For once the currency will look cool.

We’ll have a humpback whale sing the national anthem,

floating upside down,

after he spits out Steve Bannon.

We won’t need another election after this one.

I dynamited us. I lied.

However, you never told me how you really felt.

You, the anglophile,

always cooking Italian,

always said

I was wasting my time teaching.

Over and over again.

You were right.

Blue Moon bar.

Blue Jetta.

Blue v-neck.

I think you wore blue lipstick.

You suffused the antithesis of the blues and I blew it.

For what?

Nothing

You gave me a thick book of short stories before I left to teach in Turkey.

You asked me not to go.

I only told you “I love you” in my journal.

I think I told you I wanted to become a writer.

I wrote a hundred letters to you from Turkey, but they were abstract.

The book is long gone. I ripped out the inscription decades ago.

It read: Thanks for a wonderful and terrible summer. 1992.

You reached out 31 years later,

called it a midlife crisis with your girls gone away to adult lives.

You gave me a glimmer, a sliver of an opening.

You reached out, then retreated.

US Grant always said, “advance, always.”

He won.

On the eighth day,

someone, not God,

created her drool.

Yes, this poem represents an ode to a woman’s drool,

perhaps the first one in the history

of world literature.

It’s about time.

I remember the first time I saw it.

She snorted with laughter,

there it appeared, drool.

She didn’t know it was there,

no need to wipe it away.

Gone right there.

I’d never seen anything so beautifully haphazard: the hilarious saliva of life.

There’s a name for that. She should invent it.

Now look at us. Here we are.

Thirty-one years later.

There’s no more time to waste.

That’s for procrastinators who have

never walked a salmon-bearing stream on a freshet,

smelled a juniper gin and tonic gurgling downstream.

She told me about her one-tent stands

with biologists in the wild.

There’s a book in them, perhaps even us.

We just have to start living it together.