Poetry on the Mind

NSP Meditations, Poetry

A month ago, I decided I would publish a collection of my poems later this year, probably in the fall.

I have never considered myself a poet, but over the years, something unique occurs, and the experience prompts me to write about it in poetic form, rather than non fiction. I have no theories or approaches to craft of writing poetry. Indeed, I loathe the word “craft” in any association with the act of writing. It’s so pretentious and the province of poets who write obtuse poems for other poets, tenure, awards and grants.

Since I made the decision to publish the collection, I have been sifting through the poems I’ve written the last 25 years since I got the writing going when I began my service as caretaker of the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

I have also been gripped in a frenzy of writing poetry, seeing moments from my past and present in poems, not prose. I also dug deep into the archives and rewrote or re-imagined a few seminal experiences in my life as poem, not prose. I think this process is helping me become a better writer for all genres.

The manuscript is growing. This is the only book of its kind I will ever publish. No title as of yet. I do have a cover in mind. I discarded a lot of earlier poems because they were written specifically for a certain person or occasion and have no wider appeal. Interestingly enough, every one of the poems I have written for someone, always related to love, have utterly failed in reaching the heart of that person. Perhaps that means I’m a bad poet, or perhaps it means poetry really doesn’t matter when it comes to real matters of the heart. Only in the magazines and journals. Did Shakespeare’s sonnets actually accomplish something for his personal life? Were they meant to?

Should you write a love poem to someone with a specific goal in mind?

Yes.

Will I keep writing them even though they have all failed?

Yes.

Wood Cut

NSP Meditations, Poetry

She’s not here.

But she is.

Long ago,

she danced upon a rock

not far from where I sit,

on the beach,

writing these words

while the old husky squints and sleeps.

The waves break green and white.

I want to dive in with her,

go under,

go deep,

jump up,

embrace,

kiss,

laugh,

at those clothed city fools,

and plan our collaborative work of art,

otherwise known as life.

Out to sea I see pelicans fly.

Lope is a better verb.

A helicopter hovers.

Someone is lost at sea.

I see clouds at the midline,

frayed at the edges.

I can’t name them

although I am reading a book on clouds.

Sometimes naming drains magic in the world.

Writers name too much.

I don’t want to be that writer.

She’s an artist, not a namer.

She always follows her fluid intuition,

which is how we met.

We didn’t try to name why.

It was wine that night on the rock,

or whiskey.

I can’t remember.

I remember everything else,

The dance, her outstretched arms,

The creek, the ocean.

And that way of dangling over me.

Dangling! What an action!

She’s a wood cut in my mind.

Sand Dollars

NSP Meditations, Poetry

Have you ever known someone

who performs a victory jig

after discovering a perfect sand dollar at low tide?

I have.

She once flew 3000 miles with LSD stashed in her ass

to cook me a special psychedelic lasagna.

She once made me eleven mix tapes

and titled them The Fuck Truck Series.

Polaroids included.

She once cleared the house of my dead husky’s things.

She once collaged a birthday card for me.

She once translated rain for me.

We once drove over a magisterial bridge on the Oregon Coast

singing Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise.”

She sauntered into my life

wearing

a green negligee,

a purple choker,

and struck the rock

with her staff of mystery,

whereby the water

of my creative mind

burst forth.

I betrayed her,

for a frivolous, dangerous ass

I never touched.

I’ve stopped eating lasagna

and never listen to the mix tapes.

Every time I discover a perfect sand dollar,

I pick it up,

admire,

and leave it behind.

Dream On

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations

An elderly homeless man wearing a white floppy hat (Gilligan style), day-glo sneakers and an Oregon State University faux letterman’s jacket entered the public restroom at the Empire Boat Ramp and locked the door.

Elmer and I wandered around the parking lot, admiring Coos Bay at high tide on a weekend afternoon.

Moments later, I heard Aerosmith’s “Dream On” rocking from the restroom.

I knew the song well. I had swayed slow dances to it in the 70s, sweaty, awkward embraces in Oregon City’s Gardiner Junior High’s multi-purpose room with the mirror ball twirling and twinkling overhead.

We went over to investigate. Investigate what?

Well, the downward trajectory of this power ballad in American culture for one reason. From innocent teenage romance to a 70-year-old homeless man taking a shit in a public restroom in Coos Bay. That descent is the story of my times and is about the only story that interests me to write about.

Dream on! Dream on! wailed Stephen Tyler.

Some readers may be asking: why write about something so scatological in connection to the homeless crisis?

Because the scene was incredibly funny to me and if I can’t find some occasional moments of levity in my interactions with homeless people, write about and publish them, I will descend into depression or cynicism or worse, indifference.

The sound emanating from the windowless restroom was formidable and I was standing outside 50 feet away. Imagine the level inside cinder block walls and a steel door! You just know the man had seen the band in its heyday, probably at the Oregon Jam in the 70s.

Aeromsith rocked and rolled through the din and I vaguely heard hosannas and worship that typically accompany a pleasurable bowel movement experienced by elderly men (do women do this?) who relish such movements. Indeed, they often present the sublime highlight of the day, and occasionally, inspiration for a poem.

But Aerosmith’s “Dream On” as the soundtrack for a homeless man’s dump? How does one make sense of that choice?

And no it wasn’t a radio station playing tired classic rock hits. Because after “Dream On” ended, there was an interruption of music as the man dialed up a post ecstatic dump song.

The song came on. Reader, how about a creative exercise for you in these troubled American times?

You guess the song. It was classic rock, it was perfect, and I sang it all the way home.

Return of the Fort Master

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

There I was with Elmer, building a driftwood fort at Bastendorff Beach at the south jetty of Coos Bay (pictured here). The sun was out on a weekday morning. Twenty-five foot waves smashed over the jetty sending up blasts of cannon fire and sea spray.

Elmer was doing his thing while I built. Occasionally, he’d help drag a piece of driftwood to the construction site and sit down inside the fort as it grew and grew. What a dog!

More cannon blasts and sea spray. It was easily the most intense setting for any driftwood fort I’d ever built, and we’re talking well over a thousand by now in my 25 years living on the Oregon Coast.

What a fort I was building! A tepee—30 feet high—with lattice and with enough interior room for a fire, sexual shenanigans or a tarot reading.

I’d labored on the fort three consecutive mornings. I actually looked forward to rounding a dune and seeing my creation of art and shelter. There is no more cosmically satisfying way to begin a morning than building a driftwood fort. Everyone should try it once and see for yourself.

On this third morning, it occurred to me that I was becoming a fort master again after a four-year hiatus in Portland and caring for my father until he died.

I had this fort going at Bastendorff, another on Coos Bay, three at Whiskey Run Beach, and one at Seven Devil’s Beach. The weather this winter had been unusually dry and it was easily the best accumulation of driftwood along the Oregon Coast I’d seen in over a decade.

Yes, a fort master again! What a way to empty one’s mind. What a means to a Zen moment. What a method to withstand the current American cruelty and madness.

I worked for half an hour and quit. A driftwood fort is never finished, nor will they ever last.

We would return the next morning for round four, adding, bracing, shoring up, fortifying its called.

The next morning we rounded the dune and…no fort. It had been burned to ashes, and whiffs of smoke still emanated from where it stood. All that remained were embers and six charred cans of Keystone Light.

No, I wasn’t angry. I was overjoyed. Something had gone on inside the fort before the conflagration. Maybe a tarot reading and fellatio. Maybe some folk music and rotgut wine. Maybe an existential epiphany. Maybe someone even got laid. Maybe all of the above!

The Lucky Star

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations

I sat at the bar in the tiny lounge of a Chinese joint in Coos Bay called The Lucky Star. The main dining room was packed on a Friday afternoon. This little take-out lunch was a present to myself for doing absolutely nothing of consequence this day—so far.

A cook prepared my vegetable chow mein and shrimp rolls order. As I waited, I sipped a well gin and tonic and wrote in my notebook. Behind me, two men played the slot machines and kept losing.

No music played. The TV screen was blank.

I examined the liquor selection. The usual suspects. Who drinks Black Velvet or Canadian Club anymore? I checked the drink menu displayed on the bar: $11.75 for a Long Island ice tea. Who drinks those anymore?

Sometimes I ask myself: what the fuck am I doing in Coos Bay? The answer is germinating, I think.

I returned to the memory of my last visit to The Lucky Star. A female bartender a few years younger than me thought I was one of the stars of True Blood, some HBO show about vampires that came out…when? I’d never watched a single episode and didn’t recognize the name of the actor. I told her she was mistaken. She looked up the actor on her phone and showed me his picture. Sure enough, there was a striking resemblance.

The bartender was certainly giving me the heat. She was practically lassoing me out to her sedan for a three-minute assignation disguised as a smoke break!

Well, it didn’t happen. But it might if I ever saw her again.

My order arrived. I finished my drink and left. Elmer and I would hit the beach for the third time this day. He’d run mad, then start attacking me, we’d mix it up in full view of all the people vaping weed in their vehicles, staring out to the bay. They would see this man-dog spectacle and think were nuts.

Later, I would crack open the fortune cookie and perhaps the secret to my future in Coos Bay would be revealed.

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