They kicked Don’s ass out after he cheated at cards,

tried diddling his invalid cousin,

farted up the trailer.

He stumbled down Widow Creek Road

in the dark,

no street lights,

no flashlight,

no moonlight,

no phone,

sauced on peach schnapps.

He made it 587 yards before tripping on a pothole,

rolling down the embankment.

Why did Don’s family wait two hours before calling it in?

Why didn’t they go looking for Don themselves?

Why did authorities wait until first light to search?

Was a conspiracy in play here, for Don’s assets?

They collect insurance if he dies by misadventure?

All he owned were guns, knives and country records.

Were flintlocks worth anything?

Were Ferlin Husky albums worth anything?

Don grubbed on blackberries,

(a few still clinging in October)

didn’t cry out,

played a little pocket pool,

shit himself good with that soggy Hamburger Helper served for dinner.

What did dead drunk Don

think about while imprisoned by blackberries,

his faced raked bloody

until he fell asleep forever?

What else?

It was that time he fucked a coked-up Tanya Tucker

in his van after running sound for her at gig in Fresno.

A man could die happy thinking about that.

I didn’t understand her love of James Salter’s fiction.

She lived the antithesis of his vacuous, fragile female characters of decoration.

She:

played volleyball

drank beer

mourned the death of homeless man in her neighborhood

never used an umbrella

wore thrift store crochet clothing

commanded silently when she wanted to ride on top

helped friends move

She drove three hours to help me load the U-Haul on my last night in Newport.

We packed that truck like pros while drinking IPAs.

Then we dipped into midnight whiskey on the front deck.

I told her I wanted to kidnap a mermaid statue marooned

a block away in a weedy rock garden of a house vacant for five years.

I just couldn’t leave the mermaid there,

facing away from the ocean a block away,

tasting sea spray.

She was game.

I pitched the caper.

She made excellent modifications.

We unscrewed the lights to her license plates.

I set out on foot.

She followed a hundred yards behind,

nudging through a ghost town of a neighborhood

that had no through traffic,

rarely any traffic at all.

I walked up the dark driveway,

snatched the mermaid,

walked away.

Seconds later,

I held the mermaid in my lap

while she drove us home, laughing,

slapping the steering wheel.

Thirteen years later,

I write this poem for her,

staring at the mermaid,

named for my accomplice,

reading James Salter again,

thinking about what happened

when she clawed into the world,

if she fulfilled her extraordinary potential.

I confessed my infidelity resulting in abortion.

After listening,

she bolted from a desk chair

in my bedroom,

and destroyed without words,

everything on the walls,

smashing the floor lamp as the finale.

She moved to Seattle within weeks,

gone forever from Portland.

A few weeks later she mailed me a poem:

I’ve kept the poem for 40 years.

It began on a terrace bar overlooking the Willamette River as it scissored Portland in half.

She sat at a table next to me.

Then she sat across from me.

Summer 86.

An art student in LA

on break to see her family and fiance.

She performed a perfect imitation of Rocky’s voice from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.

She sprayed me with melting ice from her drained gin and tonic

without any provocation,

laughing, saying I needed cooling off.

We slept together later that afternoon

in my $132 a month studio apartment.

She wasn’t engaged after that.

We climbed Saddle Mountain,

threw a football around,

rammed each other in bumper cars,

played tennis, air hockey,

floated Lake Shasta on a houseboat,

floated the Clackamas River on a raft,

splurged for a night at the Heathman Hotel,

celebrated Christmas together decorating a tree with cans of Rainier,

saw Robert Cray before he exploded,

drove my Valiant at breakneck speed

belting out songs from The Cure

thundering on the the cassette player

she helped me install.

I revealed my desire to become a writer.

But I was going to teach instead.

She said don’t do it.

I wrote her two letters a day.

After she graduated

I flew to LA and we drove her Grapes of Wrath pickup back to Portland.

I helped move her into a studio apartment

the shape of an octagon

now razed for an intersection.

Then my confession, not born of accusation,

everything pulverized.

A letter from Seattle arrived several years later.

She was married.

She forgave me.

We began writing letters again.

No, I haven’t written a damn thing. I hate teaching.

I hate my graphic design job. I’ve got to quit.

Cancer struck, a rare type.

She qualified for experimental treatment.

I saw her a final time, bald, emaciated.

Imagine our worst hangovers multiplied ten times and they never go away.

She died.

Her husband returned all my letters.

He knew they should be mine.

I have never read them.

One day.

I want to read the Big Bang of my heart,

cosmic material that coalesced into a writing life.

She didn’t live long enough to read my books,

going on 30 now.

I know she would have loved the one about rain.

We had a rain story together,

it took place in the sun.

Her list was right, except for number six.

Her husband hung himself from a cherry tree in their front yard.

She discovered him after working in their bookstore,

where I had met her a year before at a book signing.

She’d drawn a tantalizing poster with black ink,

tacked it up all over town and beyond.

One person showed.

She apologized repeatedly during three hours with nothing to do.

She sneaked me wine, sipped a bit herself.

Our eyes certainly met.

She recommended a writer named Roberto Bolaño

and I didn’t want to leave.

After the suicide, wildness.

Driving drunk into ditches.

Rarely showering or changing clothes.

Blackout flings with locals and tourists.

She looked me up on the jag.

Said she was out to seduce me.

We went on a jag together,

but never at her house.

She told me about the hanging.

He’d received a handwritten note of rejection from the New Yorker

about one of his poems on the subject of wind.

An editor said he was close, encouraged him to keep writing.

If he’d received a form letter, he’d still be alive.

I wanted to see that tree.

See if she had it cut down, stumped.

She couldn’t look at that tree every day or could she?

Eat the cherries?

I never asked about it.

On one of her last visits to Newport,

madness was ebbing.

She said I’d helped her grieve,

something about safe hedonism.

(There is such a thing.)

She went with me to the printer

to help load cartons containing

the first literary review in Newport High School history.

The cover was a photograph of a man dressed like Ronald McDonald

who walked down Highway 101 in a parade.

I ambushed him with my camera at street level,

capturing his zany face and salute right out of the Third Reich.

When she saw the cover, she laughed,

suggested how to present the book to the review’s staff.

I instantly agreed.

Fifteen minutes later she walked out of McDonald’s

with 25 brown bags bearing the golden arches.

We slipped a copy inside each bag,

along with a silver-wrapped Ding Dong,

the magisterial cake of starving poets,

I told them.

I must have passed out a thousand that semester,

in the cruelest year of the Great Recession.

On Monday morning I made the presentation.

I wonder if any student remembers the happy bedlam of that moment,

the moment you held a book in your hands and your story was in there.

Did it amount to anything shaping contours of their future?

Would it one day prevent hanging yourself in your front yard?

Later she published a letter press edition of her husband’s poems about wind.

She mailed me one of the 50 or so copies. I read it.

It should have won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

No one would have done something like that for me

had I killed myself or died in a traffic accident.

I have lived a life that does not warrant such an action.

There is still time.

A Gulf of Mexico hurricane blew her to the Oregon Coast,

where we met.

After titillation in a sacred grove of cedars,

we ate awful Chinese food washed down with weak gin and tonics.

We laughed when she said her mother told her to fuck me,

and I said that a great line for a country song

Nashville would never write.

Next I was hiking up her ruffled red dress,

tugging her red hair,

smearing her chest

with a scorpion tattoo

and seashell necklace

against the glass in a Depoe Bay motel room

overlooking gray whales spouting for tourists.

Her straw cowboy managed to stay on.

Oceans and orgasms her favorite expression.

I used it in a story later.

We drank a bottle of white wine.

She smoked on the balcony,

told me of her bi-polar disorder,

about manic moods.

The medicine was dissolving her teeth.

Her description.

I used it in a story later.

I was her ticket out of Depoe Bay,

Jack Nicholson’s favorite cocaine village during the filming of

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,

her living in a trailer three times her age,

cleaning motel rooms.

I was close to offering.

She never suspected,

but I suspected she wouldn’t need it in the end.