Probation Poem 1-8-18

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

I arrive early. I want the best seat.

Front row for the front line

of shadows meted out as justice.

I whip out Walt (he’d of loved that phrase!)

and begin to read from “Song of Myself,” section 32,

the section Walt wrote with Bonnie and Clyde in mind:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,

They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

“How do you spell ‘application?’”

the young man asks me.

I close Walt.

I stop thinking about the tokens

of myself the dogs bring me.

This book is about those tokens.

He’s in the brown hoodie again,

always,

always greasy,

he asks me

without looking up from his phone.

I presume he’s filling out a job application,

or reapplying to become a human being again,

but then why do you need to spell ‘application?’

I spell it. Three times.

We talk. He mostly talks.

Talks about his darkening

marginalization,

into the dark unknown,

already past the black border

on one of the ancient maps

when the earth was flat

and sea serpents

gobbled up the explorers.

Walt was an explorer,

an explorer of the marginalized,

their poet, too,

their greatest poet,

but Walt is dead to them now,

and I use pick and shovel

to entomb him for them,

us.

In fact, the young man

is applying for a job,

a job processing crabs,

the ones about to arrive

in Astoria, the only job

allowed him (and me).

But we get to wield

the best knives,

sharp ones pulled

from the Internet.

There are no crabs in the restaurants without us.

I wish Walt could sing about that.

He’d know what to sing. I don’t.

The meeting convenes.

Bursts of advice. Almost in song.

A man praises his ankle revoke.

A man loves his new A.I.P (approved intimate partner).

(I didn’t make up A.I.P. The State did. There is a form.)

A man loves the old fishermen stories in AA.

A man is going to sea.

A man cut his friends like bait.

Some salty language for familiarity.

Like from the old salts in the hold.

A crew we almost are,

backslapping, drinking our stories.

Don’t call me Ishmael, though.

He’s the only one who survived.

I want all of us to make it,

and return one day

and harpoon our Ahab,

even though his soul

is already dead.

Let him eat crab.

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On Friendship

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Friendship is on my mind. In the past 20 months, I have learned a lot on the subject. It required no research. The knowledge sometimes accrued slowly in tiny bits. Other times knowledge blasted into instant meaning. I am no expert on friendship. I keep learning as I make new friendships and consider my lost ones and the mistakes I made that led to those losses.

What’s on my mind about friendship:

If you lost a friend, was the friend ready to be lost?

I like building driftwood forts with friends.

At one point do you give up on a friendship?

Can an old basketball court with a chain net on a rusty rim be your friend?

Should friends be cryptic with one another?

Why did it take me so long to need real friends?

Can a true friend have an agenda with you?

Is it okay to have friends you disclose certain things but not disclose these things to other friends?

My dad always taught me: you make friends where you are. I am in a new place, a new state of mind, so it stands to reason that I would make new friends, and that has happened.

There is nothing so thrilling as having a lost friend return from the past and just ask: how you are doing? I’ve had that occur to me several times the last year and it brought me great joy. I have tried to do the same but have been generally rebuffed.

Friends follow up with another.

I never had a best friend growing up. It was my dog, books and imagination. Did I miss out?

Can your partner be your best friend?

Are friends with benefits a great thing or not?

Do real friends repay loans?

Should you borrow money from a friend?

I’ve made the best friends of my life the past year, one of them while I worked one night as a custodian.

I was such a terrible friend to several people I professed to care about. I’m trying to make amends.

Is having a dog or cat as your best friend the same as having a best human friend? Do all humans need human friends?

What is the equation for a good friendship?

Disagreements between friends can sometimes strengthen the friendship.

Can music be your friend?

Do therapists have friends?

Can rain be your friend?

What is the bet way to communicate with a friend? I am finding email to be the worst way.

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Short Story from the City of Rain

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , , ,

Not a single person is doing anything else in the cafe but interacting with a computer, tablet or phone. I am writing in longhand on paper rescued from a fire, a fire doused by rain.

Dreamy dreamless lite indie pop plays on the speakers. Real human beings didn’t make this music. All in the ones and zeroes.

My coffee is expensive, fried. I miss Yuban, fresh.

I miss the poet of dandelions and hummingbird who works here. We once talked of Alphasmarts and the phony empathy of writers of published empathy. She got it. She won’t be like that.

Rain works its way here and there. No one pays attention to it. It’s not even an abstraction.

A man with a red, white and blue beard walks in carrying a fat book. So much for my theory. Theories are useless, particularly in poetry and therapy. Rivers and oceans don’t need theories. Neither do birds and otters.

Two Californians, the bearded man and the bearded barista discuss their California exodus stories. Everyone is coming to the City of Rain. It is rapidly becoming the City of Umbrella, something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. Things change. Things fall apart. Things cohere. I love the word cohere. No one uses it anymore. Just incoherent. Rain is coherent if you watch it, feel it, rub it in. An umbrella is a chastity belt. (I just ripped off from my rain book.)

I anticipate a meeting later today with a long lost friend, one of the most important friendships of my life, severed in recent years. Can we reattach what was severed between us, and pump some fresh plasma (saltwater) through it, hook it up to a rain IV solution, and let the collaboration function again? It won’t be the same, of course. There will be different circulations and movements. I’m nervous to meet this person. I feel like a different human being since I last saw her. I hope it’s raining when we meet. I’ll throw a little salt into the rain and pray for plasma for the transfusion.

Traffic, traffic, traffic. How it acts like a dark lord upon your soul. It is changing the City of Rain. It already has. I need a new map for the city I grew up in. The old one is gone. Chrissie Hynde wrote something about that. Did the Pretenders have a rain song? “Message of Rain” would have been a great title.

I just heard the word fiance from the bearded barista. It’s been a long time since I heard it. I thought it was dead.

My beard is the heaviest its ever been. I’m becoming a sea level mountain man. Give me some wood to chop or trail to clear. Give me some rain to drink.

Time to move out of the cafe and into the arid requirements wrought by people who are utterly bereft of all the clarifying benefits of rain and have no idea what plasma really is. These are the people who also press their jeans and hashtag for social justice.

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Oregon Tavern Age: Cowbell

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An OTA man dressed in tan Carhartts and a blue flannel shirt drank white wine at a table, somewhere in remote OTA country, nearly off the grid, so off the grid that the precise location no longer registers with me. The room was dark and an OTA man played guitar in a corner and crooned a decent version of David Bowie’s “Heroes.”

I sat a table away and drank an ale. There were five other people in the room.

The wine vanished. The bartender appeared and the man ordered a bloody mary. She placed a menu on the table. He picked up the menu and looked at it in the most curious way. I couldn’t fathom the reason.

Bowie drifted into Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” The bloody mary materialized and he downed most of it with a single gulp. He went back to the menu and I still couldn’t comprehend his reading method and I used to be a reading comprehension teacher.

It hit me: he couldn’t read. He was sort of pretending to read the menu. I’d never seen an illiterate adult trying to read, or faking it, let alone in a bar, but I was sure he couldn’t read. It was the way his eyes moved and his fingers traced the menu. I’d seen it before.

The bartender came over. The man handed her the menu.

“Why don’t you order me something you like?” he said.

“Oh sure, no problem. How about the club sandwich?” she said.

“Fine. I’d like fries with that and another glass of wine and another bloody mary.”

The singer launched into Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”

A few minutes later, another OTA man joined the man at the table. He was carrying a small black pouch. He ordered a beer from the bartender and then extracted a cowbell from the pouch.

I did a double take. I’ve seen a lot in OTA country over the years but the illiterate man drinking white wine had thrown me a bit. Now, I had someone who was going to sit in with a cowbell. How many classic rock songs would lend themselves to that treatment? Perhaps there was a whole set with cowbell as the featured instrument! Perhaps a 30-minute version of “Don’t Fear the Reaper!”

My beer was gone. I got up to leave and then immediately sat down. I was suddenly giddy to hear the cowbell and I also felt incredible empathy for the man who couldn’t read. It was a weird contrast of feelings, but contrasts create friction and friction fires interesting stories. I sat five feet away from one that was about to ratchet up, way up.

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Dogs Raining (reigning) in My Mind Part 5

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The first recorded dog story of all time is from the Odyssey and it set the standard for the next 3000 years. Odysseus returns after 20 years and his 20-year old dog Argo recognizes him in disguise, wags his tail, but is too weak to get up and greet his beloved master. Odysseus sheds a tear and Argo dies. Twenty five years ago I read a short story in an Istanbul library titled “Dog People” where a family who owned dogs turned them into vicious creatures that menaced the neighborhood. I have never forgotten this cruel story but have never been able to find it again, even with the help of the Internet. Emily Dickinson had dogs in her life but none of them made it into her poems. Odd. What is the greatest memorial to a dog in the world? I once saw a local man beat up another man, a tourist, on the beach because the tourist kicked the local man’s off leash dogs in the faces and hurt them. I did not intervene. The most harrowing dog scene from a novel that I have read is the opening sequence of Pete Dexter’s Brotherly Love. In it, a dog attacks a girl struck dead by a car, the girl’s brother attacks the dog, and then the car’s owner (a mobster) empties his revolver into the dog after carrying the girl’s body into her house, whose father is also connected to the mob.

The Nobel Prize winning author Thomas Mann wrote an unusual short story titled “A Man and His Dog.” It was published in 1918. It is a story about a dog, but more of a cryptic tale of how humans might be better served emulating the life of dogs. Mann wrote: “Animals are more primitive and less inhibited in giving expression to their mental state—there is a sense in which one might say they are more human.” A dog is more human than a human. Now that’s something to consider.

In 1922, Franz Kafka wrote a 15,000-word short story though the voice of an old dog titled “Investigations of a Dog.” It is perhaps the most metaphysical thing ever written about dogs, and at times almost impossible to fathom. Clearly, though, the dog is writing about humans. Here are some of the more arresting lines. As I read them, I realized they were precisely what my book about my adventures with Bonnie and Clyde was all about.

I began to inquire into the question what the canine (human) race nourished itself upon.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.

…change begins in the (human) soul before it appears in ordinary existence, and that, when they begin to enjoy a dog’s life, they must have already possessed real old dogs’ souls.

I still can’t believe Thoreau didn’t have a dog with him at Walden. I like to think Thelma and Louise would not have driven over the cliff had they owned a dog. I once had to break up a fight to the death on the beach between two of my dogs and nearly lost a finger. I still have a scar under my left eye where a German shepherd bit me in my youth. A Doberman pinscher almost mauled me in my youth.

One of my favorite lines ever overhead in an Oregon tavern: “I’d like to introduce you my dog that drinks up all my Jameson. It was an English bulldog and it wore an ascot. I don’t think Bruce Springsteen has a single mention of a dog in all his working class anthems. That seems very off to me.

Some of my favorite moments with dogs were around a burn barrel, usually alone, late at night, looking at the stars, listening to the fire, thinking about this and that. I was always present there.

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Dogs Raining (reigning) in My Mind Part 4

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I am 12 for 17 in rescuing stray dogs that randomly come across my path. Not good enough. I sprained my shoulder diving for a runaway greyhound on the beach. It was never seen again. I always carry a dog rescue kit in my car: leash, treats, water, water dish. The last piece of printed material after the American Apocalypse will be a Lost Dog Poster. I like dogs with American names from a bygone era, such as Fred, Irma, Mabel, and Ralph. I love wandering around disheveled cemeteries and seeing references to dogs that were once an important part of their owners’ lives, so important in fact, that their names or faces got etched in marble. I once marked Druid Dog Reformed as my religion on the census.

One afternoon not too long ago, I was overwhelmed by dogs, or I should say dog books that had been thoroughly dog eared. I was browsing in a humane society thrift store (supernaturally) because I only buy books (and clothes) in these type of shops when I discovered, within the space of ten feet, the following pack of titles: The Dog with the Old Soul, a Harlequin anthology of inspiring, non-sexy dog stories; Dog on It, a detective novel written by Chet, a dog owned by a forlorn private investigator named Bernie; Woof: Writers on Dogs, a collection of dog mini-memoirs by some edgy writers; Dog Crazy, a chick-lit novel about a bereavement counselor who goes looking for a stolen dog: The Dogs Who Found Me, a memoir by an acerbic writer who reluctantly rescues dogs; Die Like a Dog, a pulp novel where a detective has to dig up dead dog to prove a murder by poising case; and the novel Motel Life, by my former friend Willy Vlautin, a wonderful novel that contains an unforgettable scene where a young desperate man steals a freezing and starving dog off a chain in the dead of a Reno winter night, something Willy didn’t do in real life, and I know this because I asked him in front of my students when I had him talk about the novel, a novel the students loved and I taught many times strictly because it was a dog and human rescue book. Many years ago I had a dream where Rachel Carson wrote a dog book, The Dogs Around Us, and it was her best book, and changed the course of animal welfare in America.

I’ll never forget the moment when I was teaching a writing workshop to a group of men incarcerated in the Oregon State Penitentiary and I presented “A Dog in Your Life” as one of the prompts. The men just sat there, staring at me, and I felt instantly I had made an extraordinary miscalculation. They continued to sit in silence for what seemed like forever and then most began to cry. Then they started writing and five or so minutes later shared stories of their dogs. None of the stories had a happy ending. The only time I ever cried in front of my students is when I read a piece at the launch of our literary reviews where I described taking my dog Ray down to the beach one last time before I had him euthanized. I barely finished the piece and when I sat down in the audience next to a student, she said to me, in a whisper, “You’ve just taught me that family is more than just blood.” I’ll never forget that.

There are no dogs in Dog Day Afternoon or Reservoir Dogs. If only Butch and Sundance had had a dog with them. They would have made it. Jesus should have had a dog trailing him on his messianic wanderings. He probably did but the gospel fiction writers left the dog out because they thought a dog’s presence trivial. Big mistake. They would have sold more copies of the Bible had they rolled in the dog and had him help out with the loaves and fishes distribution. The New Testament would have been the ultimate Tortured Man and Dog book and the dog’s owner would have died (rather painfully) in front of the dog, an almost unheard plot development in dog books. Just imagine that scene with the dog looking up at his crucified master!

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