Whale Watching

NSP Meditations, Poetry

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.

Ruminations on Golf

NSP Meditations, Poetry, Sports

I find golf ball after golf ball,

only the best brands,

on the beach called Whiskey Run,

named after a botched bootlegging operation.

Balls shanked or duck hooked

from the luxury links course on the cliffs above,

$350 a round,

Republicans with JD Vance beards

flying in from all over the country.

I stash their mishits in my pockets

for later use at my podunk proletarian course,

a 12-hole (!) layout,

$22 a round,

coyotes and the caretaker’s chickens

roaming fairways of weeds and molehills,

sand traps unraked for decades,

greens less forgiving than most inferior human beings,

playing with expensive clubs from my dead uncle,

the theologian who beat the shit out of his oldest son growing up

and gave up on God at the end.

Sometimes I pull out the Billy Casper Shotmaker driver,

crafted from persimmon,

rip a tee shot with glee knowing

I am the only golfer in the world hitting a Billy Casper driver.

Cost me a buck at a Reedsport thrift store that benefits the developmentally disabled.

No irony with the Billy Casper driver.

I just like the feel and sound of wood crushing rich men’s balls.

No one ever around when I tee off at dawn.

I play my left-to-right fade game,

decent off the tee,

mediocre irons,

a great short game

like my last round

where I rammed in three 15-footers for par

and chipped in for birdie from 90 feet,

heard nothing but wind whipping through

the gallery of Sitka spruces,

a quiet roar I counted as applause.

I wish I hadn’t thrown out my dad’s Doug Ford blade irons after he died.

I’d carry that 2-iron he could never hit.

I never understood why he cheated at golf,

foot wedge his favorite club.

Maybe it had something to do with that cold night on train guard duty

as a 21-year-old Marine in the Korean War.

A communist infiltrator behind the lines

appeared in front of his sand-bagged emplacement

and he fired a .30 caliber machine gun

at point black range,

spraying him with blood, bone and body.

That might explain the cheating in most aspects of his life.

Or explain nothing.

He never talked about combat until the months before died,

and I reminded him of the time in junior high

when he told me clouds overhead,

pointing to them,

as we played the first hole at Oregon City Golf Club,

looked exactly like the clouds during a mortar barrage

that he survived because he dug a foxhole better than most.

I remember those clouds and sometimes search for that formation

while playing golf alone.

Empire Chaos

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations, Poetry

5:53 Sunday Morning in Empire.

Gray skies, drizzle as lint.

Elmer and I on the move.

Discarded shoes everywhere,

pairs from the homeless.

Sneakers, loafers, slippers.

Why?

Why sometimes only one shoe?

A Zen koan never answered by10,000 monks.

As the old axiom goes:

I’ve walked in these discovered shoes,

many years now.

They’re almost shot,

sole shredding,

holes in the mesh,

stitches unraveling.

We pass two men smoking something in a red sedan.

We pass a homestead carved into a hedge.

A young black man with a sizable afro

rides a bicycle towing a trailer contraption

with a fishing rod sticking out the back.

He’s coasting fast to the boat ramp.

He stops beside the 40-year-old Bounder RV

with three orange tow tags peeling off a panel.

He leans the bicycle and trailer against the RV.

He carries a tackle box.

He places it on the parking lot,

approaches the open driver-side window

of the Bounder, climbs through,

opens the front door, emerges,

lights a cigarette,

starts doing something inexplicable

with shit around the rig.

Parking lot packed.

Forty boat trailers, more trucks and boats arriving.

Families prep to clam.

Seven dollar coffee drinks

kept warm inside space age containers.

A kid cries.

Dad threatens violence.

I hear terrible music.

Big black dog runs wild in a field.

A woman sitting in a chair wails

alongside the Park Host’s RV.

Black man yells “Shut the fuck up!”

Fisherman goes up to her.

I can’t hear his words.

More wailing.

She’s drowning the sound of ospreys chirping overhead.

Elmer and I hit the beach.

Smoke swirling from the encampment.

New tent,

new pile of firewood.

new shopping cart

toppled, charred

from barbecuing

roadkill raccoon.

Disembodied voices screaming profanities in the willows.

We’ll have to pass close by,

but we don’t.

I whip us around,

head home,

angry,

robbed this early morning on Coos Bay

of what I need to

contest the utter crush of American civilization

as Jim Harrison so accurately described it.

A Dandelion

NSP Meditations, Poetry

Dad and I sat in chairs on the deck enjoying a spring day.

I poured us a glass of a coconut roasted chocolate porter brewed in Ashland.

We sipped the beer, agreed it was terrible.

Dad looked down to the yard.

A single dandelion had somehow survived my mowing earlier that morning.

He asked me if he could quote a poem.

I said of course.

My 91-year-old father, closed his eyes, composed his mind, and then recited:

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden,
calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

Who wrote that? I asked.

“Walt Whitman,” he said.

We discussed the poem

and then I dumped the porter onto the lawn,

careful to avoid the dandelion because I know it trusted my face

to let it blow to seed.

The Tourniquet

NSP Meditations, Poetry

The first look in your green Honda Accord.

The 45 record “Just Breathe,” repeating on the turntable in your bedroom.

The bedroom with no walls, only studs, you gripping 2 X 4’s for leverage.

The time you said to objectify you on your kitchen floor on Christmas Eve.

The confessional in my clawfoot tub as I traced words on your stomach.

The slap across the face on the porch of my Portland apartment.

The showing of the tangerine-lace bra in church to piss off your deacon father.

The nonchalance of your excellent vocabulary.

The trucker hat in the Depoe Bay motel room.

The tent pitched in the shadow of Mt. Rainier.

The blue swimsuit on the Clackamas River while rednecks ogled.

The risque motion when you stepped out of the shower.

The curling smoke of your clove cigarettes in a cemetery.

The William Faulkner discussion with bourbon on the rocks in a Seattle bar.

The illicit meeting near the merry-go-round as your son played while husband played video games at home.

The drive back from Seaside with empty wine coolers rattling in the trunk.

The sprint to the ocean wearing nothing but my corduroy jacket.

The sneaking upstairs as my father died downstairs.

The instruction to walk behind so you could swivel your ass in faded Levi’s and someone would see (me).

The breaking of the engagement (for me) with the pastor-in-training who said your pirouetting constituted a sin.

The love letters in longhand returned to sender.

The last text message from you less than the literature we always lived.

The embrace of storyless mediocrity.

The lustrous dull of it all to quote Bukowski.

The tourniquet you tied to the truth of who you really are still holds, tied 40 years ago, way too tight.

Astoria Column’s True Centennial Celebration

Astoria, NSP Meditations, Poetry

Many years ago,

in my different lifetime as a teacher,

I stood in front of Astoria High School creative writing students,

ready to begin a one-period workshop

on the subject of Astoria’s famed column.

The class was populated by the most motley, marginalized, indigent, rebellious, cynical, underdog, stoned, musically-gifted students of my career. There wasn’t an honor’s student among them because honor’s students regurgitate, not create.

First, I asked students to raise hands if they had a Column story.

Every hand shot up.

I gave the prompt: what’s happened at the Column?

Eyes ignited. Whispers.

Nodding heads turned toward friends.

Mischievous smiles.

Suppressed laughter and not so suppressed laughter.

Something had struck deep,

Astoria’s Id,

its true identity,

awakened.

Ten minutes to write.

Ten minutes to edit with partner, rewrite.

Share aloud.

Some important logistics:

The metal door that led into the 125-foot-tall Column hadn’t been locked at night since it opened in 1926. The Column’s caretaker cottage had been deserted for years, perhaps decades. The road up to the Column wound a half mile; headlights of patrolling cop cars could be seen flickering to trespassers. A dozen trails provided easy escapes into surrounding woods Teenagers visiting the Column after hours arrived on foot or the cops would spot their vehicles in the parking lot. There were no cameras, no neighbors.

The sharing began:

My uncle was conceived in the Column

My grandparents walked naked up the stairs and he proposed on the platform

Makeouts, cunnilingus, fellatio, fornication, hand jobs

Firecrackers, sparklers, flashlights

Raves with lightsticks

Hide and seek

Moons at full moons

Sneaking out in pajamas

Hurling Jack O Lanterns to the pavement

Acting out the “I’m Flying” scene from the Titanic movie

Camp outs

Losing virginity

Satanic rituals

Mock weddings

Sword fighting with plastic swords

Playing army

Acid, weed, wine, meth, liquor, cigarettes

Acoustic punk rock shows

Circle jerks

Crossing streams

“I was up there at dawn this morning Mr. Love, writing in my journal for your class.”

Screaming Shakespearean soliloquies echoing up the tower

A cousin threw himself over

A distant relative hung himself off the spiral staircase

Ring around the rosies of Oregon’s great phallic symbol

of Pacific Northwest imperialism and genocide

Stories kept unfolding,

each one topping the next one for absurd transgression,

unknowing acts of Dadaism,

or the creative and silent FUCK YOU!

to the hometown they all hated.

They tore down the Column every night they prowled.

They didn’t know a lick about its history,

neither did their dipshit social studies teachers.

They used the Column for foreplay,

a stripper pole.

I was hearing something unprecedented.

There was no way I was stopping the storytelling.

They relished in their trespassing.

Too bad the Mormon principal wasn’t there to observe.

Chamber of Commerce President as well.

They rendezvoused from miles away.

They met up by plan or accident.

Rain, snow, sleet, under the stars, 90 MPH winds.

Nothing could deter them.

Nothing like being laid in the Column when it sways.

I thought I’d heard it all.

The room verged on explosion.

Then, he read last,

the sullen punk rock kid who didn’t want me to call him by his real name

because he hated his alcoholic, deadbeat father.

So he invented a new first, last name

and it ran a close second to the perfection of Bob Dylan.

“Mr Love,” he said, “I took a dump off the Column.”

“You what?”

The room fell silent.

“The railing was tricky.”

“What?”

“I ate a can of creamed corn for the occasion.”

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