Christmas Morning 2014

Astoria, NSP Meditations, Poetry

I took the old husky

to the beach.

It was probably our last romp

of 10,000.

Ten thousand!

Rain ripped through Astoria.

I love rain; not this time.

The beach was different.

Fresh erosion sheared the dunes.

We’d have to climb down.

I wasn’t sure she’d make it.

Erosion is like that.

Erode—to erode—an action verb.

Sonny eroded the coarse, uncaring

contours of my heart in our 17 years together.

We made our way south.

Huge piles of kelp looked

like dead kraken.

I took photographs.

One might be the last one.

A rainbow appeared.

It seeped through the gray.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

They write poems about these moments.

Sonny ate up the sand with gusto.

There was gusto in my grief.

We left.

I stopped at a convenience store in Warrenton,

for wine or coffee.

I don’t remember.

I was still reeling from the Christmas rainbow.

A student of mine was eating a convenience-store burrito

for breakfast with his mother and sister on Christmas morning.

I wished him a “Merry Christmas!”

He wouldn’t look at me.

I put my hand on his shoulder.

He didn’t introduce me.

He gave a funny laugh.

To our left, an old man played

blues on harmonica.

He played the blues,

I had the blues,

my student lived the blues,

and Sonny was named for a great bluesman.

My Short Oregon History with Richard Brautigan

NSP Meditations, Poetry, Writing

  1. Revenge of the Lawn on the free rack inside a Coos Bay community college library.
  2. Sandwiched between a mathematics textbook, PowerPoint for Dummies and dozens of useless studies of American literature.
  3. Contains my favorite short story about Oregon, called “A Short History of Oregon.” It’s about hunting a deer in the rain. I illegally included it my book about rain. Sue me.
  4. Later I wrote short stories called “A Short History of an Oregon Prom Night, “A Short History of an Oregon Seventh Grade Football Season,” A Short History of Christmas in an Oregon Logging Camp,” and “A Short History of Love Inside a Culvert.”
  5. No one’s checked this book out since President Reagan began destroying the nation.
  6. No one reads you anymore. Certainly not community college students in Coos Bay in 2026.
  7. A collection of your short stories from 1962-72, published in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Ramparts, Playboy and Mademoiselle.
  8. It retailed for $1.95.
  9. The extinction of the dinosaurs seems nearer than that era of American fiction.
  10. The cover features a brunette sitting at a table smiling with a huge chocolate table in front of her. Why? Because you were fucking her and you always put the women you were fucking on the covers of your books.
  11. How you sat at the counter of San Francisco bistros wearing fedora hats with feathers stuck in the bands and corduroy three-piece suits, drinking Dago red from glass goblets, trying to pick up women, reinventing a stereotype now sadly out of favor.
  12. A book of your poetry given to me by a high school creative teacher in 1982. They’d incarcerate him for that today.
  13. I am ashamed to say that I never introduced you to my creative writing students. Your short story form, terse, direct, one to three pages long, perfect for today’s attention span.
  14. I’m taking you home. I can’t leave you on this Devil’s Island of a shelf, imprisoned, fading, forlorn, decomposing, soon out with the recycling, resurrected as playground balls.
  15. I’m not ready to let you die yet.

Speaking in Tongues

NSP Meditations, Pioneer Pride, Poetry

There she was,

pulling cash out of an ATM,

wearing jeans, yellow halter.

It wasn’t my ATM but I pulled over.

I had never seen her alone before.

We barely knew each other,

a few hellos, dubious eyeball flirtations

in the halls of Oregon City High school two years ago.

A champion swimmer

who wore this one invisible white dress,

no underwear.

I knew all her routes around campus,

intercepting with clandestine inspections.

Fear and apprehension gripped me like a vise,

Exponentially unnerved.

She vaguely knew who I was.

This was no mere crush

like the Columbia is no mere river.

I’d written hundreds of words of lust and longing

about her in my journal the first semester of my senior year.

I’d never written like that about a girl before.

I called them Sightings as if I was on safari and she was the big fox prowling the savannah.

A few lines:

She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I guess there is a God.

Those eyes. What is it about them? I wish I knew.

There is an aura about her. It’s the presence of complete sexuality.

I would love to meet her without the high school surroundings. Will I ever get the chance?

I’ve been making discreet inquiries about her. The reports have not been promising.

We crossed paths with each other in the hall. I was walking ahead of her acutely aware of her presence,

hoping she would come up to me. She did!

We conversed at the ATM for ten minutes,

ended up in her apartment.

She drank a pint of rum and cokes in 15 minutes,

popped a pain pill stolen from her doctor father.

Loverboy played. Then Night Ranger. Journey.

She slipped off the halter and jeans.

She took off my clothes.

We ended up having sex in the bathtub (her idea)

and she started speaking in tongues.

I got her out of the tub,

put her to bed before dark,

left a nice note with my phone number.

She never called.

My first feral woman,

noir to the bone.

They make great literature (they’ll never read)

but usually burn you in the end

or so I’ve found out.

We met 30 years later at a dive bar in Portland.

She walked in wielding a cane, body wracked by MS.

She had approval from her semi-husband to fuck me.

We could use her best friend’s house in Oregon City.

I told her about the journals, she loved that.

I told her about the white dress.

She asked why I never said anything.

I told her one does not approach a Greek goddess between classes.

She really loved that.

She didn’t recall the note but did recall the afternoon.

She apologized for getting so wasted.

Her eyes still the same.

That squint that could block a total eclipse.

We had a gin and tonic each.

I walked her to a cab.

The cab drove her to the friend’s house.

She died a decade later at 56.

The online obituary never revealed the cause.

She left behind the husband, children, grandchildren.

The obituary photo unrecognizable,

even the eyes gone.

She must have chosen that photo

and I’m glad she did.

Perseverance one the best of human qualities.

Vastly underrated.

Never on display, few ever notice.

Not a single comment left on the memories section.

This poem will have to do.

I think she would have loved it.

Recipe For Gray

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History, Poetry

Ingredients:

One remote part of a continent.

An ocean.

One small mountain range.

A direct hit of a black latitude and white longitude.

A perfect cloistering between ocean and mountains

creating a geographical claustrophobia,

bringing

clouds, rain

and a perpetual color

that never appears in landscapes.

Directions:

Live here

Look up

Walk into the gauze and steel.

Now it’s slate.

The seven shades,

within the multitudes

of gray on the Oregon Coast,

sometimes beautiful,

sometimes something else,

never sinister,

that leads us to the blacks and whites of our lives.

Why not live in grayscale?

Much more interesting.

Shakespeare by Enema

NSP Meditations, Poetry

Jesus, what a day teaching Senior English at Taft High School in Lincoln City!

I taught Shakespeare by enema.

I rammed the Bard right up their ass,

a Romeo and Juliet suppository.

Wait, enema, suppository, isn’t that a contradiction?

That one rocker kid, Chris, burnout, surly.

He demanded why he had to read this stuff.

It wasn’t going to prepare him to repair a kitchen appliance.

I told him.

He shook his head, rolled his eyes, first out the door.

He’s probably the one who left the note: we fucked on your desk during the assembly, you should lock your door Mr. Love.

Show Claire and Leonardo and get the fucking unit over!

No one will know I quit.

I raced home over Cascade Head in the pickup after work and loaded up the dogs.

I wanted to hit Nestucca Spit and run to the end before dark.

We hauled ass. I turned my head west and saw a dolphin jump!

I stopped dead in the sand, trained my vision to a porthole in the waves,

yelled at the dogs, “Did you fucking see that?”

Yes, a dolphin. Do they swim off the Oregon Coast?

I know the politics of oceans

but not much about mammals smart enough eons ago

to forgo land and return to the ocean

where they’d never be ruled by such a colossal human fuck up

as the current President of the United States.

Sometimes I wish I could return to water to live.

I’ll have to wait until I die.

The dogs and I ran faster.

Sun gone.

Dusk three shades of gray commanded the stage.

I recited lines from soliloquies,

knowing I’d keep shoving Shakespeare up their asses tomorrow morning.

I never quit in the classroom.

We returned to the truck in darkness,

light rain landed on my face.

The ocean’s scent strong.

Brine up my nostrils.

I dropped the tailgate, the dogs jumped in.

We came together as a team.

I petted their wet heads,

used my distinct funny voice for each dog,

told them what nuts they were.

All hail the power of a Nestucca Spit enema!

Hey, fuck you Taft High seniors!

Get ready for a cold water high colonic in classic literature.

Wait until we read the double suicide scene aloud

and CM plays Juliet and I play Romeo!

Parent Teacher Conference

NSP Meditations, Poetry

I sat at the window table of the Sandbar Lounge

on a gray afternoon in February

reading essays and stories from my students.

Second semester three weeks old.

Amanda tending bar,

ponytail flying,

ready to flagellate a chest,

Popeye arms,

confirmed rumors of her punching out

dipshit fishermen.

The Great Recession was wreaking destruction in Newport.

Evicted families tented in campgrounds, crowding cheap motel rooms.

Hundreds lined up at Walmart to apply for one job.

Students inhabiting my classroom before dawn,

for heat, electricity, running water, toilets, Internet

and hot coffee, hot chocolate, donuts, fruit, energy bars and bagels I served every morning.

I spent $7200 that year,

worth every penny.

Amanda came up to my table, a first.

We’d always conversed at the bar.

I had a tiny crush on her, but did nothing.

My first rule of Oregon tavern life: don’t touch the bartenders.

She knew I was a teacher at the high school.

She said her son, a fifth year senior recently moved in after many years with the father,

was enrolled in my creative writing class.

His only class.

He needed one credit to graduate.

She said his name.

Oh yes.

Her son looked like a young Bozo the clown without makeup, wearing glasses.

Sweet disposition, loner, didn’t say a word,

but always paying attention.

Never missed class,

never turned anything in.

Amanda asked me to please pass him.

The deal: free drinks for the semester and I could fuck her once a week. She had a little crush on me.

Certainly the second most beguiling offer of my teaching career.

I refused.

A weekly parent/teacher conference ensued at the Sandbar.

We plotted how to motivate him.

Carrot and stick.

Something worked.

He turned in one piece,

a riff from a fantasy novel he wanted to write.

It was damn good.

The riff made it into the literary review.

I brought the book into the Sandbar, handed it to Amanda with her son’s piece bookmarked.

She opened and cried.

I passed with him a D+.

Amanda and I never got together.

I wonder if the diploma made any difference.

They often do and don’t.

I bet he finished the novel.

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