oregon poetry

Probation Poem 9-25-17

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , ,

Men in the waiting room

speak of addiction.

One wears the uniform

of a road flagger.

 

He shoots a text

to a treatment center

on the last Blackberry

in America.

Rain falls outside.

Give me 40 days

and 40 nights of

Bladerunner rain.

Give me Noah meets Deckard

and let us all drown

and start over

with replicants in Congress.

 

I hear an insane man

beyond the door.

I’ve sat in a room

with his insanity.

It caromed like an object in a cartoon.

Euthanasia crossed my mind.

But not for myself.

 

Why do I write

poems in here?

They clash with the

coke machine and gray carpet.

I should stop reading Whitman in here.

He’s clouding my vision

with his hallucinations of democracy.

 

I am no poet

with these probation poems.

Read this non-poem

for corroboration.

Corroboration is a terrible

word for poetry.

(Carom isn’t bad.)

At least I know that.

 

A sign on the wall

says the seafood plant is hiring.

ASAP!/ $11 an hour.

 

The local seafood industry

dies without this office.

They cast their nets

in the parking lots.

I’ve seen it.

Casting from a truck,

not a boat.

Fishers for marginalized men.

Fishers not taught by Jesus.

 

I’ve seen so much here,

none of it poetry.

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Husky on the Detroit Dam

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , ,

I had a dream about Sonny,

my long gone husky.

We were fishing together

on the Detroit Dam.

We had never fished in real life.

Detroit, Oregon.

Dumb.

Molalla, Oregon.

Smart.

Portland, Oregon.

Dumb.

Klamath Falls.

Smart.

I cast my line into the fake lake,

for phony rainbow trout.

I smoked a cigarette

I never smoked.

Sonny was giddy at the wall,

primed, spring-loaded.

She shook that husky look:

mischief.

A blue-eyed mischief in one eye.

“Matt,” she said.

“Blow up the dam!

Let the Santiam run wild!

Like I once did!

Put me in your new novel,

the watershed novel,

let me ride shotgun,

I’ll be the sidekick,

a funny sleuth,

howling clues,

bolting the detective

into adventure

and revelation,

like we used to.

I pulled the car over

and wrote this all down.

The novel was right there,

in my husky’s one blue eye.

Live Tide, Dead Tide

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , ,

A thousand mussels at the wrack line,

cracked open at dawn.

A repast for the gulls.

Murres eviscerated,

a murre alone,

moored in the sand,

blinking fast,

not long now.

Surfers calling it quits

because the surf is dead.

A lone crab, barely moving.

The merciful crow approaches,

a method in black madness.

New swallows dip and dive.

They fly our dream of being alive.

That smell, that ocean smell.

It smells like—

I don’t know.

We can assume it depends

on how death recycles life

this particular morning.

If I wait here long enough,

on this salty log,

the answer may come,

when the gulls looks at me.

Reading “Song of Myself” in the Probation Office

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , ,

“All truths wait in all things,” wrote Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself.”

I wait for that truth; I take notes.

In the probation office this morning, Walt’s singing.

I record his music in a blue book.

Where, a man says, “Alcohol is my gig.”

Where, a rebuffed kiss got him three busted ribs.

Where, she cracked a beer bottle on his head.

Where, smoking pot burns a slit windpipe.

Where, poinsettias pen forced reports.

Where, Captain Crunch proves dangerous in the checkout line.

Where, a man in a three-piece suit reads Macbeth.

Where, the state stages another ventriloquism show.

Where, a grandmother falls asleep on her phone.

Where, she can’t fill a beaker with piss.

Where, a man can’t write an action plan because he can’t spell.

Where, I didn’t offer him help.

Where, I failed him right there.

Some writer.

Beaverwood Birthday–A Birthday Poem

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , ,

(One of my great friends in Astoria recently celebrated a birthday. I wrote this poem for her to mark the occasion.)

I gathered beaverwood for a birthday,

for a friend who keeps me in sauerkraut and Maigret,

a bundle of gnawed sticks

strewn across the beach,

washed down from the watersheds,

to stake up her tomato plants

that probably won’t make it in Astoria,

but we’ll stake them up nonetheless,

in our sluiced gray gardens,

because that’s us,

our lives right now,

staking up tomato plants in territories

where they aren’t supposed to grow.

 

We rejoice in all things beavers!

We gladly accept what they offer!

We won’t stake up our tomatoes

with cheap bamboo from China!

All hail Oregon beavers!

When they roll lily pads

and smoke them like fine cigars,

we get it. We want to join them.

 

And when we taste those tomatoes,

later in the hot Oregon summer,

probably in the rain,

we will toast our furry bucktoothed friends,

and nod our heads in wonder

at their persistence to start over,

after high water destroys their dams,

but never their instincts or spirits.

Breaking Bread with Birds

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

(A poem dusted off from the archives. Polished with The Snow Leopard in mind.)

A lone surfer paddles for a Sunday wave.

A sea lion parallels through the morning teal.

Seafaring mammals nod to one another.

They speak the language older than words.

Land sucks.

Never get in the boat.

Find a lake that has never seen a boat.

They do exist in Oregon.

A gull eats two hunks of my Tillamook cheese.

Another gull tears a clam apart at the wrack line.

I hurl a slice of fruitcake to the gull.

He nods, too.

A driftwood fort decays behind me.

The other fort I built is gone.

Driftwood is waiting.

I build alone, waiting.

Sandpipers and sanderlings dart in the wet sand.

They make sustainable laws by silent acclimation.

Wind blows.

The south jetty disintegrates.

A freighter brings and old ocean over the bar.

A sand dollar cashes out.

I sit on a white driftlog.

I eat my breakfast and break bread with birds.

I write on a 20-year old plastic toy.

The log will outlast us both.

A crow emerges.

She’s scouting fruitcake.

The gull blocks him out like a quality power forward.

Tangerine peels will suffice.

Cirrus clouds begin to give way.

The sun bides its burnout time.

Somewhere a Prometheus is still chained to a rock.

But not here.

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