Unknown at the Jetty

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , , , , ,

This is a simple piece of writing

promulgating a simple,

obvious known message.

There are no unknowns in it.

Know that!

I went to South Jetty

on the Columbia River,

formerly a river

of the vast unknown,

now officially known,

dammed, diked, dredged,

to take the unknown out of it.

I went to see

the aftermath

of the King Tide,

a tide known

by all the predictors

of tide-knowing things,

the King Tide

that swept a man

to his death

north of Depoe Bay

because he knew

it wasn’t going

to happen to him.

He knew not.

Did you know

that in pre-colonial America,

the verb “to know”

meant to know someone

through carnal knowledge?

“I have known you sir,”

Abigal said to John Proctor,

“you sweated like a stallion.”

Is that the way to know someone?

Should you know them before you know them?

Does a hashtag# of knowing

know anything?

Stand on this jetty

during a King Tide

and you might know something

and that something

might be that

you know

nothing at all.

On the way to the jetty,

I listened to sports talk

on the radio

and the jock said

the consistency of

Starbucks,

Uber,

and McDonald’s

is what the world

truly wants.

Nobody wants the unknown.

At the jetty,

a bald eagle pirouetted

above the rocks,

bringing to mind

the immortal Rolling Stones

line from “Rocks Off,”

“She always comes when she pirouettes on me.”

That juxtaposition was unknown to me.

I picked up a piece of driftwood

to do my arm curls.

I curled…

20, 30, 40. 50.

I was pumping wood

with the bald eagle

dancing overhead

as my trainer.

That fitness regime

was unknown to me.

A sneaker wave snuck ashore

and blasted the jetty.

It sent up a wild spray

that drenched me

all the way down

to my corduroys.

I tasted salt

on my sea level

mountain man beard.

That taste was unknown to me,

specks of salt on corduroys, too.

There is only one known thing,

that one thing.

Do you know

what that is?

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

January Meditations Overlooking Youngs’ Bay

Astoria, NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History , , , , , , , , ,

“The rivers are our brothers,” said Chief Seattle. “You must give the rivers the kindness you would give your brothers.”

There has been very little kindness offered to the Columbia River.

I am making new friends. I am trying to reconnect with old ones. I am going to take a special new friend to the rivers of my current life and share what they are about to me. I am thinking of teaching a river-themed writing workshop. Would that attract any writers? Do writers prefer writing topics to topics like Kindness, Faces, Rivers?

Rain is forecast all week.

I am putting my house up for sale.

I am approaching 90 failed job applications.

The broken record simile is dead.

The elk are on the move.

I haven’t built a driftwood fort in a month.

I’m reading a book about a talking and singing book who wishes he had hands.

I recently reread some Edward Abbey. He’s not holding up as well as expected.

I met an exciting new poet. Our meeting has re-energized my passion for poetry. I am seeing more poetry around me.

I met a new author and literary entrepreneur who has good ideas for the Oregon Coast.

The beard has gone where no beard of mine has gone before.

I am thinking about my friend Glen and his kelp soup. Yes, I know someone who harvest kelp on the beach and makes a soup from it.

The crabbers broke ranks and some took a lower price from the processors. Marx always said: “Own the means of production.” The crab price dilemma on the Oregon Coast is a delicious story of would-be socialism and worker collectives and capitalism and strike-breaking and all of that. It’s still the frontier in that industry.

Charles Bukowski wrote: “What interests me is non-dullness.”

Rum and rain go well together.

Where is that writer on rain who sent me the cryptic note on graph paper?

I am putting together a writers’ collective. We won’t break ranks.

My great collaborator and I might collaborate again.

A friend from the past contacted me in a supreme act of rapprochement.

I made the most wonderful black eyed pea soup. I am sharing it with friends. I didn’t use to do that.

My dad goes in for major surgery on Monday. It occupies my mind.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Oregon Tavern Age: Double D New Year

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , , , , ,

“What’s new with me?” the OTA bartender at Winchester Bay’s Double D said to the OTAs aligned at the bar. She was gunning shots of well whiskey for her crew. Five shots in a haphazard line.

“Well, I discovered plum sake. Jesus. I started with three pina coladas, two bottles of chardonnay, then the sake. Oh yeah, I dabbed too. I was so fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked up.”

Her crew laughed. They shot the shots.

“Apparently, we were shooting off guns at midnight.”

She waited. (What timing!)

“The cops didn’t show up. Or maybe they did. It was New Year’s Eve. Nobody cared!”

An OTA man walked in and sat down at the bar with the crew. He said, “I’ve got four hundred bucks on me that’s supposed to go to rent. But it’s not going to rent. I’m going to drink and gamble right here.”

The crew laughed. Story time commenced. The bartender gunned another row of shots. It was the first Thursday afternoon of the New Year.

Bonnie and Clyde Files 38

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , , , , ,

My brief hiatus from the sanctuary ended right after the new year. I arrived in rain, a hard rain, and not expecting my usual exuberant greeting from Bonnie and Clyde.

I pulled in the driveway and I heard their barking and howling and pulled myself together. Or should I say they pulled me together.

Several weeks earlier, I had felt utterly pulverized as a human being after an animal shelter denied me employment as a grant writer and then denied me the opportunity to walk the shelter dogs because of my status. When I heard the news, it was the body blow of a lifetime, the worst, worst than the pillory by the judge or the public stoning via social media or the loss of friends I truly loved.

I had the skills and passion to save this shelter from bankruptcy. I could write and save dogs. I could find purpose and save myself.

No. Fear ruled. Fear crushed me.

How can I possibly lick that?

I went to the gate and released the dogs. They avalanched me and I cried. My pea coat was stuffed with treats and Clyde tore at the frayed pocket. Bonnie went over and said hello to the moldy gnome. At that moment, Bonnie and Clyde reset me as a human being. They were fearless in their acceptance.

Bonnie had recuperated nicely from her recent laser surgery on the torn ACL and had a new goofy hitch in her gimp. As I watched her bound through the pasture, I wondered if I walked any differently after everything that had happened to me. How could I not?

I talked to the dogs as we made our way to the river:

“I’ve missed you, you rain hounds! Did you miss me you treat hounds?”

The river was running with incredible gusto. The red bra was still hung up in the willows. Mud had piled up two feet thick in some areas on the banks. I noticed new driftwood here and and there and evidence of our disposable culture, ultimately our undoing.

I fed treats to the crew and watched rain splatter the current. I looked at their old faces and recalled their struggle in a shelter. Someone had come along to help them. That someone was Jacque. Look where her good work had led. It had found me.

My mind drifted back to my terrible rebuke. I was a human being in severe distress who turned up at an animal shelter trying to help severely distressed dogs and was turned away by human beings who love dogs. Is there a word for that? There should be. There should also be a new word for what Bonnie and Clyde provide me. I will devise one.

It was time to head back even though I had all the time in the world and rain felt comforting.

Jacque met me at the gate and I told her what happened with the animal shelter. She almost started crying and just shook her head at humanity. Fortunately, she wasn’t a part of that branch.

And for that I could thank her for helping save my life. And I did thank her.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Coaching Service for Aspiring Authors Launched in Astoria

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History, Writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Writers:

I have officially launched my new author coaching service. If you or anyone you know wants to write a book, please read below and perhaps I can help you.

A memoir. A crime novel. A family history. A children’s book. A collection of poems.

Many people dream of writing a book. But what goes into writing one for a first time author? And then if the manuscript is completed, what happens next? Does the author try to land an agent or consider publishing the book on one of the many self-publishing platforms now available? What many aspiring authors need is an experienced coach to help guide them through these challenging questions.

Matt Love, Publisher of Nestucca Spit Press, and author of 19 books about Oregon, has launched a new and expanded author coaching service for aspiring and established authors in and around Clatsop and Pacific Counties who want to complete a book and bring it out to the world. “So many people have a desire to write and publish book but they often don’t know how to get started and need consistent encouragement,” said Love. “I can help with that because I was once there, too.”

Love, the winner of 2009 Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, has worked informally with many aspiring authors in recent years, including several who went on to produce bestsellers in Oregon. He teaches a bi-monthly writing workshop in Astoria that has attracted writers from the coast, Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. He’s also taught workshops at Portland State University, University of Oregon, Pacific University, Clackamas Community College, the Sou’wester and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

“I’m currently coaching several authors in Oregon and Washington and want to work with more because I find the experience so creatively and personally gratifying,” said Love. “One client is wrapping up a YA novel set in coastal Washington in the 1970s, another is compiling a collection of poetry from 50 years of writing, and another is writing a novel set in the Vietnam War. These are all going to be great books and I enjoy helping the writers achieve their dream.”

The service offers a range of editorial and marketing services to emerging writers and poets seeking an independent and innovative approach to finishing, publishing and distributing their books. These include an initial coaching consultation about a potential project, manuscript review and evaluation, and the ins and outs of publishing and marketing a book in multiple formats. All services are offered via a combination of email, telephone and face-to-face meetings. For more information, visit Love’s web site or email him and get that long-awaited book project going.

Probation Poem MLK Day

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , , ,

Walt Whitman worked on the Underground Railroad. He wanted to create a new America that lifts up everyone, extols the labor of everyone. No one goes unseen or unheard.

I will no longer take things at second or third hand; they are staring me in the face with their faceless faces. I can smell them.

I weave a song of ourselves. Why am I here at this juncture? What can I offer? How can I work? How do I help? I will be your poet because I am here! What better reason is there! A river rushes through me and I search for the water-washed diamond of compassion in a river of judicial sin.

Unscrew the locks from the shattered doors of misery. Unscrew the doors of misery themselves from the marble jambs of injustice.

If you are degraded, I am degraded.

If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your
sake and we are both officially degraded.

Why can’t America understand that?

If you remember your foolish and outlaw’d deeds, do you think
I cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw’d deeds?

If you carouse at the table I carouse at the opposite side of the
table…

Well, I don’t exactly carouse at the opposite side of the table in the meetings,

but I record everything. I cannot forget anything. I will never forget these faces.

Why what have you thought of yourself?

Is it you then that thought yourself less?

Is it you that thought the President greater than you?

Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you?

I see in your faces that many you cannot think anymore. You are tired and living under bakeries and in culverts. You cannot think because you are dying.

Souls of men and women! it is not you I call unseen, unheard,
untouchable and untouching,

It is not you I go argue pro and con about, and to settle whether
you are alive or no,

I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns. I will accept nothing less than democracy for us and I will call out in songs and broadsheets those who deny democracy and degrade my fellow Americans.

Writing and talk do not prove me. I will act.

All truths wait in all things. And I will act to prove the waiting will reveal the truths about us.

We are a leaf of grass, a journey to the stars, but now there is only fake grass and black bureaucratic holes that swallowed us, our past, our future.

You will never notice it until you are inside it, a windowless, soundproofed, parched room, colored a dirty cream color, with shelves of workbooks and VHS tapes and walls of homilies, and with golf pencils to record your demise or beg permission to crawl.

I cannot fail. I cannot travel with you. You must travel the road alone and for yourself. (A dog is fine.)

You will find a few good Samaritans and birds (if you notice) to assist you and many detractors hidden under their slimy rocks or burrowed in their worm-riddled woodwork.

You will stray. No one is coming to to find you like a shepherd going after the lost sheep, all of whom have GPS chips in them, thus ruining the parable forever.

But I am out there with you, in spirit, in body, with the trunk of my car laden with goods to tide you over until the next high tide washes over you and leaves you splayed in a mud flat. Think of my hand pulling you out, because you are a man and a woman, and the hand must always be extended to help you up if we are to remain human in these perilous American times of non humanity.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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