Promise of a Song

NSP Meditations, Poetry

I wrote a song for her 33 years ago.

Her first name and last name initial the title.

I’d never written a song for anyone before—or since.

There won’t be another one.

A three-chord (A-G-D) guitar song somewhat in the hypnotic style of the Velvet Underground.

She saw my mediocre rock band perform it in a dive bar,

hearing for the first time,

standing in the front row,

sweat soaked,

wearing yellow,

tattoo dancing.

You are lucky if you ever get to see a face like that.

Part of the chorus:

Once was a cheerleader

now she’s just okay

Gonna go out and

change the world one day

Why does promise dissipate slowly or disappear suddenly in so many of us?

I’ve written so many poems exploring this subject of late.

What came along to entomb, waylay or derail?

Were Americans like this in the 70s and 80s?

Perhaps dissipation and disappearance

have always been there.

Maybe I can only see it now

because of confrontation with the past as you age

and what three decades the Internet has wrought.

I know I fulfilled my promise

when I became a writer,

unearthed and published lost Oregon stories,

restored wrecked watersheds,

re-materialized after personal extinction,

took care of my dying father,

read eulogies for men

who had no one to eulogize them,

rescued another dog,

learned how to become a friend,

got my homeless friend Mark into housing.

Whenever I play the song today,

it sounds like a dirge.

Maintenance of Bad Company

NSP Meditations, Poetry

She sat down in a floral chair my mom gave me when I moved out.

Smells sneaked in from the Thai restaurant below my second story apartment.

Across the street, a crack house cracked in the Portland afternoon.

She produced a cassette with legerdemain from the rear pocket of her jeans: Bad Company’s Greatest Hits.

Her top came off.

She wanted Bad Company playing loud.

She wanted to wear one of my shirts.

She said she wanted to drink whiskey from the bottle.

She said she wanted absolute control.

We repeated scenes like this, off and on, for 35 years.

Then, grievance needled inside her, festered.

We dissolved.

What is the best verb to describe what happens when you stop stuffing a Bad Company cassette in your back pocket?

Erode?

Sift?

Squander?

Drain?

Ossify?

Petrify?

Bury?

Sell?

Forget?

What is the best verb to describe avoiding the disappearance of that cassette?

Maintain as in maintenance.

Spirit, body, teeth, soul, roof, car, yard, caulk, lust, love, bridges, roads, shipyards.

The hardest thing to do in American life.

Look at all the substitutes for substantial maintenance:

Trips, gadgets, baubles, therapy, superstitions, recriminations, fads, fantasies, media, mendacity.

Did I just write the first poem in the recent history of American literature on the subject of maintenance?

There should be thousands.

Soul music has ten thousand songs about maintenance. They define the genre.

She’s still out there with that Bad Company cassette somewhere, ready for that back pocket again. I believe it.

Frito Lay Delivery Driver

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations, Poetry

A purple and orange sunrise illuminates Coos Bay.

A Frito Lay delivery driver, a young woman,

wearing a ponytail

half a blue uniform,

rolls up the squeaky back door,

climbs inside the truck,

goes to work.

She’s delivering to my grocery store

every Wednesday morning.

Elmer and I walk past every week.

She occasionally nods.

I nod back.

I’ve been writing a lot of poems of late.

Finding others forgotten, mothballed, frozen, stuck in the mud.

One hundred and forty-five for this collection.

The image of a woman carting a tote of potato chips,

a purple and orange sunrise glowing overhead.

screams silently for a poem.

I haven’t written a single poem in 30 years

about the working class.

Here is one staring me in the face

and I can see her face.

What do I know about the working class

to attempt a poem about them?

American politicians know nothing of this delivery driver and her work.

American poets even less.

We turn the corner at the tackle shop.

How did she become a Frito Lay’s delivery driver? What is the job like? What does it pay? How many hundreds of pounds of product does she carry into stores on her route?

What about the woman down the block making donuts?

The woman in Subway slicing turkey and ham?

The meat cutter vaping something on a break?

The drywaller spackling paste?

The crew at the automotive repair shop up the block who fixed my car?

The elderly school bus driver driving her route?

The gas station attendant who plays Charlie Parker?

All these people are working within a hundred yards of me—right now.

I can see them at work.

Poets don’t write poems about them.

Walt Whitman did. He celebrated their lives in wild verse.

No, I don’t care who they voted for President, or if they even voted.

That story has already been told by white sharecroppers who sided with plantation owners

and enlisted in the Confederate Army

or the Dust Bowl farmers who voted for Herbert Hoover and Wendell Willkie

and cursed the New Deal.

That’s a futile exercise in journalism

and sometimes I prefer mystery over journalism.

Not in this case.

I want to meet this Frito Lay delivery driver,

tell her I want to write a poem about her, the job.

Just walk up and introduce myself, Elmer,

take my shot.

A sunrise like this morning might help the cause.

Fried Chicken at Dawn

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations, Poetry

A homeless man eats convenience store fried chicken at dawn from a bench overlooking Coos Bay.

A homeless man discovers a container of convenience store fried chicken at dawn on a sidewalk,

examines it,

sits down on a curb, eats.

A homeless woman carries a drumstick of convenience store fried chicken at dawn in her right hand.

Another drumstick protrudes from a back pocket like a colored comb from the 70s.

Remember when men and women wore them in the back pockets of their flared jeans and never used them?

I count three discarded but not completely empty containers of convenience store fried chicken at dawn during a walk with Elmer to the mudflats. One rests atop a mailbox.

Leftovers for smart crows and meandering humans.

We know where the sustenance will take the crows.

What about the humans?

What’s going on with all this ubiquitous convenience store fried chicken at dawn in my neighborhood?

Marvin Gaye asked something similarin an era

when the red and white bucket of KFC, (original recipe)

with all the fixins,’

Colonel looking on,

served us Friday night dinner during the school year,

when my single mother treated us,

too exhausted after teaching second grade to cook.

The beagle instantly recognized that bucket when she brought it inside

and waited patiently in the basement for skin and gravy.

The recent juxtaposition of fried chickens past and present

deep fry something very portentous inside me,

and elsewhere.

Epistle to J

NSP Meditations, Poetry

Dear J:

We sat on your deck overlooking the Salmon River estuary,

once wrecked,

now resurrecting.

Some people do smarten up,

see the errors,

make it right.

It might take decades.

Snow fell lightly at dusk.

Sliding glass door open

because it was 80 degrees inside your house

courtesy of the wood stove fire you so expertly stoked.

I have never seen anyone demonstrate more expertise with a wood stove,

especially in the nude.

You, a combination of Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” and Alannah Myles’ “Black Velvet.”

Snow falls like this once a decade on the Oregon Coast.

The moment must be seized.

We drank red wine out of glasses with enormous bowls holding a half bottle each.

They were a novelty and we put them to novel use.

My invalid husky slept inside. How you loved her. Painted her portrait.

Your living room an art studio, a gallery of your art.

Easels, frames, canvases, paints, palettes, brushes, vises, clamps, tools, thinner, rags, drop cloths.

Everything strewn around in happy disorder.

We were going to collaborate on a children’s book, your idea.

I loved the outline.

You said you wanted snow to fall on your naked a body, a fantasy.

You stripped and it became real,

snowflakes landing,

melting on the fittest body I have ever held.

Fitness from a chainsaw, post-hole digger, mowing fields, slaying blackberries, chopping wood and cleaning vacation rentals to finance art, originality and independence.

You asked me not to drive home to Astoria in the morning.

A possible foot of snow on Cascade Head.

You asked me to stay.

I had no work site that required my presence.

I left in the morning because that’s who I was back then.

You made me French press coffee to go.

As I crested Cascade Head, I fishtailed, spun a 360,

but somehow stayed in the same lane.

All I had to do was turn around, slide downhill,

to you, that fire, that fitness.

I would have never left.

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