Delo Sky

Clouds like alabaster

behind them blue, blue, and more blue,

the color of a plastic Delo oil jug.

Knapweed in bloom.

Little purple Russian flowers occupying

town lots and road cuts.

Try not to get the seeds on your shoes!

makes great honey

An old beer can

from before pop tops,

Red Label rusted out,

home to some ants,

covered in yellow pine bark.

A Prince Albert tobacco can

wedged in the fork of a juniper tree,

sixty years years grown around it.

Inside, a mining claim dry as a bone.

The ink faded out but still readable:

John McCloskey 1932

She said I love this town

for the smell of pine in the cold morning air.

The smell is Korpine wood chips

being squeezed of moisture then

pressed into oriented strand board.

Tarantula

In Cachagua before a rain, tarantulas cross the dusty roads

toward the creek bed

and disappear under trailers and sycamore trees.

When the rain comes, the arroyo fills like a garden hose

and flushes summer down the mountains and out to sea,

and what every school boy wonders is this:

do the big spiders ever drown?

In Bend, the first rain washes pine pollen down the streets

in yellow streaks the color of wet sulfur.

It dries in paisley patterns

curlicued around coffee cups

and knapweed flower heads.

In the river that is never dry, silt is unstuck

and shrouds the logs

stranded

beneath the water at the foot of the ghosts of saw mills.

Once, I was caught out in a windstorm east of Dayville.

Miles from the road, I hid under a living fir tree and watched three dead ones

teetering

near the spot where I had stood minutes before

to plant a small orange flag.

I had the urge to run to the flag and listen to the snags creaking in the blast

like a spider running toward the river

like a mother grouse flying at danger

like a curious bear cub running from its mother

then one fell and buried the flag.

I think, yes, I did once see a drowned tarantula,

its wet black body like a hairy starfish in the high flood mark of Cachagua creek.

I wonder how it got past the snapping dogs and BB guns of the trailer park

and whether it was moving toward something

Or away.

Steens

When we left Medford it was nearly a hundred degrees

and we were hungover, packed tight into your little

Toyota, the one that grew sprouts in the

trunk when it rained.

Kip had drawn us a map of hot springs...

here a cottonwood, there a hole in the fence,

look for the steam.

In the driveway, Matt pointed a finger

in the air to where two redtails circled.

The next day we got to Pike Canyon, a hail

was falling

so cold my bones felt like rocks.

We napped in the cave there, shivering in

sleeping bags.

How can it be this cold?

How can my hands not

curl up?

When the weather cleared a little,

we watched from the lip of the cave

as a mountain lion crept

paw to paw to paw to paw

up the other side of the canyon.

The road was like mud soup

skidding along, trying not sink.

The windshield wipers didn’t work

so I leaned out the passenger

side with an

old black

tee shirt for a mop.

The next day the sun came out,

and we hid in our tent on the playa,

listening to wind

rustling the sage.

How can my skin be this dry?

How can my fingers feel like garnet sand

paper ripping itself to shreds?

When the sun hid behind the mountain,

we sat around the hot spring saying nothing

just watching the little bubbles

floating up out of

a boiling red pool

so deep

like the end of a long liquid

hair, rooted way

down

there.

Walking in the mud with backpacks on,

we came to a wide shallow pool

a few skeptical cows

When the footing worsened

and the cold water sent our testicles scrambling

back into themselves,

I don’t remember who yelped first.

Sunset in the Sheepshead,

the long frozen roll of the

Steens,

the world nightly

remade

frozen in fault block

wave.

Steam from a cup of tea,

the moon rising full in the gloaming,

I said, you see those little tiny clouds, they mean more

rain tomorrow and you laughed.

Good for you!

Never one to swallow authority.

The next day, it rained.

Joe's Place

It’s best to get there early

otherwise

he gets ambitious,

he makes big plans;

taking out this aspen and that becomes

cutting a swath out, filling it with rock art, building a barn.

It’s no good telling him about keeping a few

dead trees around for the flickers and bluebirds

and whatnot.

He sees trees differently than I do;

dead limbs bother him, dying tops,

groves that don’t thin out and let a few

of the biggest ones thrive.

It’s no good, that discussion,

so I pull out the saw and cut down what he points to,

laddering up to swing at the dead

lower parts of big ponderosa

bucking up aspen into

little cubes for smoking meat on the grill.

Days like that, in late September

start out in wool hats and shirts;

by the afternoon it’s a tee shirt covered

in pine pitch, sweat, bar oil.

We throw the small limbs into a bonfire pile,

open beers and sit in the sun

on the deck.

And its nice there

talking about abstractions

looking out over the trees

squeezing lime in beer

eating beef jerky.

This poem has no

point to make about such days,

or any opinion on what they might mean.

I’m just saying that its good to work the muscles

as the day turns

from cold to hot

and back again

then drive home taking in the new snow on the

mountains.

Whales

It was a good movie, a

documentary about 
whale hunters

in Barrow, Alaska.

Afterward I went home and started the grill.

I’m getting better at it—I didn’t used to eat meat.

I start it early enough now, throw on some

scrap maple, some mesquite chunks.

Then I sit watching because the patio is very small;

there are lots of things nearby that could burn;

paint thinner

old sheething

the puddle of oil under the chain saw

the jute mat. 
Lots of things that could burn.

It takes awhile

for the coals to turn red then white.

It’s nearly autumn, cold enough

that the heat feels good.

The dog watches from the grass.

My wife comes to the door holding my son,

I can’t hear them through the glass.

He looks out at me,

looks at the fire.

It was a good movie.

In one scene,

a hunter

sat on the ice waiting for the bowhead,

waiting in the bow of his skin

boat, dressed in white,

waiting.

The look on the man’s face was

like he’d been waiting for a long time

and he didn’t mind waiting a little more.

Out of site, a big skiff with twin Hondas

churned the water,

exploding harpoons

at the ready.

Christmas Valley

Every plywood sided box

flung out beside the road

tracks the satellites

with a Prime Star dish,

the future’s megaphone

declaring victory

over the sagebrush tundra.

Center-pivot sprinklers

carve circles of alfalfa among

rusted pickups, busted tractor attachments,

piles of orange hay string.

From the air they look

like one-handed clocks;

time is a curtain of water

but the future is always drier than the past.

Between the green spheres,

blooms of alkaline dust

where once there

was a wide shallow lake,

the volcanic fist of Fort Rock rising

big over the water like the sails of a galleon,

white light off a thousand little waves.

invisible boats, the bellies of chub

float just out of reach

in the sky

Someone made a pair of sandals

from the stringy wood of the sagebrush,

left them in Cow Cave

left them on the shore

8,000 years ago.

the ghosts of their feet, the pressure of heel and toe

lingering on like a motorcycle’s track across the white playa

Do you remember the advertisements

In out of state newspapers, back-to-the-land magazines?

Five acre lots, Christmas Valley Oregon, cheap as…

dirt

Come here, come quick, start over

in Oregon,

land of the fir tree

the salmon

big rivers

water water everywhere

water water everywhere

You could buy them sight unseen

from one end of a telephone

because, as every real estate agent knows,

there’s no time like the present.

Crane Shed

The day Tanya’s dad was found dead and our dog ran away while we tried to pack, and we thought maybe she was dead too I wondered if there would be a third death. I was watering a shrub outside, a little mountain mahogany that doesn’t really need it when I heard a huge explosion somewhere from the south. It was a big noise but I was watering the cercocarpus. Had it been another day I might have thought more about it.

It turned out to be the old red timber crane shed in what we call the Old Mill District. We say it like that—like it’s capitalized—because there’s no mill there now, it’s just ice cream and pottery and expensive underwear stores and so forth.

It was a huge old red building built on the scale of the big yellow pine that once covered this area. Entirely made of wood. The lumber crane inside was so big it needed buttresses on the outside to hold up its supporting trusses.

The developer who had bought it was tired of arguing with the city over whether it was historic. They had a plan to tear it down and build an imitation of it filled with shoe stores, condos, that kind of thing and give it a name in memory of what they had dismantled. So they just took it down with dynamite one day when no one was looking. Let the bureaucrats sort it out. That’s how we do it here.

They paid a hundred thousand or so in fines and resold it for several million more than they paid. Probably had a good laugh over a hand-crafted beer, a round of golf, something like that.

People were outraged about it, then less outraged. People remembered it then forgot about it. The state told the county to use some of the fine money to build a memorial to the shed.

Really, they said that.   

Jude

There are no wrinkles on his face

and he speaks calmly, without hurry.

He explains how the percentages

will be calculated and why taking on

contracts for artificial stucco

might not be a good idea,

in terms of my yearly premium.

And I think, fuck it,

what’s the use of anything

anymore when you find yourself

buying insurance to swing a hammer?

Somehow I kept thinking,

as he followed the columns of numbers,

about Jude, who played standup bass

and was the smartest person I knew.

We went up to Mt. Hood one thanksgiving;

he wanted to know what it was like

to sleep out, to hitchhike through

the Oregon countryside.

We got as far as Cherryville

before it turned cold.

His shoes were these old thrift store brogans,

thin leather.

So we stopped in Government Camp

at a cabin there owned by the college,

Reed College.

It snowed day and night,

day and night,

it fell off the roof in

little avalanches.

He told me years later how,

when he flew in and out of Portland,

he would look down on

all that snow

and think of me.

how the snow would

resonate

like the strings of a bass, a big stand up played full

tilt and shaking the walls with that deep rumble.

Beans (for Jerry Ramsey)

Dove Creek calls itself

the pinto bean capitol of the world

but there are also the speckled Anasazi

beans, colored like

paint horses

and the mortgage lifters, big potatoey

things with the heft of a rock,

and Mexican beans called bonitas.

These seeds are antiques; you can walk out into

the granaries of the Anasazi, not far from town,

and find the same speckled beans lying

amidst the turkey pens and pottery shards.

They are grown, still, without irrigation

the spindly tough little stalks

tucked into swales of undulating mesa,

tended by farmers,

many of whom came out

here fleeing the dust bowl.

Somehow they never took

up the gods of their brethren.

Like Rain Bird for instance,

the bringer of summer downpours.

Actually, the new gods

would not have them until

1978.

That was the year someone finally

found enough excuses to dam the Dolores river

and what once a warm fetid summer stream

is now a tailwater trout fishery,

but it takes awhile for

The Word to reach out this

Far, for the pipe to lay itself

out.

It will, oh Hallelujah, it will.

Color Black

What do people mean when they

say they have a black black mood?

Why that color, lack of color?

I lay down on the desert with a gun

a big black 9 mm,

stuck it at my head, looked up into the sky.

It felt good there, substantial, like it could

really end

something.

About two inches from the end of the barrel,

it used to be about what I

didn’t have

and then it's about what I

have too much of.

I didn’t really mean it

yet

not yet

after awhile I could feel the ants on my

sleeve and thought

how it’s good looking into the sky

hearing almost nothing

looking right into the color blue.

It’s saved me before, many times

in fact.

The colors,

the smell of trees, grass, dirt,

it’s so hard to keep a straight face

putting yourself up against the earth

when you realize every misery wants some kind

of audience.

Some Deaths

My Grandmother died and Jesus and Maria came for the body 

in a black Chevy Astro Van. 

They did a kind of comedy routine

delivered in black polyester

and Maria showed us the lump on her forehead

where an unhappy customer had connected

with a beer bottle the week before.

If the Holy Spirit rode with them, He waited in the Chevy.

Proving, I suppose,

that if Him exists he laughs at

I Love Lucy reruns

more than my Grandmother ever did.

Winter night in the desert.

I coil the intestines of my favorite dog 

back into him like a rope.

We carry him in a pack up the Dolores River,

shooing invisible cows before us

in the moonless cold.

He was a herding dog, though not very good at it,

but the rock pile over his carcass

kept the spooky desert cows

off that hill for months.

Proving, I suppose,

there are some things one can improve at 

after being squashed by a truck.

Once, I had big plans for my own carcass.

There was a certain slab of granite

and circling vultures over Cone Peak,

abalone shells and acorn mortars in the meadow.

Lovely but,

now I fret over who’s

gonna drive me there.

Proving, I suppose,

that we choose our own sentence

but not the punctuation.

Moonshine

I am cooking moonshine

but I don't drink now.

The smell of ethanol,

you know how damnably weird it

is when you don't do something

everyone else does?

That's how this feels,

like they have never thought about it.

Smug, but left out.

Like only you have been told a nickle is now worth more than a dime,

but wait everyone else keeps spending them up the same way.

Copper pipe stainless keg drip squeal of the wine running through the morning

then it is the evening when you wish something would flow through you.

I have always felt like the day has a fence to it and to jump the fence takes a drink. Otherwise there you are standing on the fence between morning and night. Like a rusted bolt needing a loosening or whatever.

Like the rest of the world does not see the turnstile and only you have the coins.

Like the rest of the universe has more blood than you do.

Like the entire whole big enormous viny branchy forest of it all can be cleared out.

When I started this, I did not think I was an alcoholic. But I did not think much about it or whether it mattered to me. Now it kind of does.

I feel dry and sandy covered, buried half in the rubble nothing to offer nothing to loosen the tongue.

Loosen

loosen

loosen

turn

I grew up with talking about drunk

more than watching drunk

living with having been drunk.

Maybe I have been drunk a lot.

My girlfriend comes home, opens a glass of wine.

She has a good reason, like I never do. 

Santa Cruz Poems

1.

the day is a long long one and the flat light of one o'clock

still as the weeds on the windless levy

college kids walk scruffy dogs on scruffier ropes

the willows and cottonwoods and the grey cinder blocks of the prison over the river

dyed red hair and blonde dreadlocks, skateboards

the dehydrator hums in the trailer

I'll take this town the way you'd buy a bicycle,

not the one you hope to ride, the one

you know you will ride

every day

soon the heat will break in the breeze

and I will wander downtown with the tourists

and the homeless

hoping to unfold or to fall to life like autumn leaves

while the woman i came here for is is

teaching children how to

palm strike, shout no!, fight back

like a stray branch I have fallen here

where others come to take root

the dehydrator hums in the kitchen

the air smells like strawberries and

dry grass

ared-haired boy pedals by, pedals by on the levy path.

2.

He wears a red Hawaiian shirt

and flip-flops and is always ready with a

screw gun, a loaner pane of glass,

a good catholic joke.

He is on his way to the movies

riding his big cruiser bike and

whistling.

He is rounding the edges of

each of his fence posts

one by one with a jigsaw.

His eyes have the quality

of a summer day and his

laugh is like a cloudburst

3.

Oh take me out to Body where the doors are always locked!

Take me out to Body where the doors are always locked!

It sure is fun to get there, no matter what the hour!

Just don't stay for long now, cause the ranger he is sour!

Well we skied out to Body, upon a winter's day!

And it was cold as hell friend that's what I'm trying to say!

But the mercury weren't nothing

the ranger's frown was something

It froze our bones right to the core and we had to ski away!

I hear that there are ghosts and ghouls and even a curse or two!

And don't you take a thing from there or they will come for you!

Don't forget your entrance fee

and get there before three

Cause the undead man in green won't spare a minute or two!

Thrift

Here are rusty bicycles

odd cans of paint in shades

of turquoise

old wicker

and what about brass

figurines

last year's shin guards

light globes with crackled surfaces

busted weed whackers

heavy glazed dishes

VCRs of dubious vintage

and who owned those pedal pushers

these ranchero shirts

that badminton set

first?

Among the aisles of

twice and thrice used jeans,

never used hockey sticks

cookie tins

are invisible boxes of muted

wants

diverted impulses

staggered desires

I am trying to remember

the exact definition of thrift

was it about things bought cheaply

or things not bought at all?

Carousel

Florida nineteen eighty

A man in a wrinkled white shirt

sleeves turned up three times each

Vuarnet sunglasses

watches a suitcase rounding the luggage carousel

like a hot-walking horse—American Tourister

pacing the gaudy vacation bags.

He sees through the Vuarnets

past the carousel

a California garage

where the suitcase’s false bottoms were built.

He hears the chugging laughter of a fat cop in Lima

snorting white powder

from the tip of a knife blade.

An ulcerous leper in front of the Arequipa hotel

holds a hat out toward him

as he walks by

with a suitcase full of American hundreds.

Time is a triple beam scale—his ass in the balance

green nerves for weights—that comes to rest

as he reaches for the suitcase’s handle

gliding toward him like the reigns of a horse.

Bad Lyrics

(The following is the result of a little exercise. Without pausing or looking anything up I attempted to remember as many bad music lyrics from the 1980s that I could. Stopped long before memory exhausted itself.)

Oh what a feeling, cause I’m dancing on the ceiling.

Pass the dotche on the left hand side!, I said pass the dotche on the left hand side!

If you’re lost and you look you will find me, time after time

Relax don’t’ do it, when you want to sock it to it!

Get into the groove boy, you’ve got to prove your love to me.

My girl just wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the time!

Rock me amadeus, amadeus, amadeus, amadeus

When you want to go to where you go to when fashion sits…puttin on the ritz

I got my first real six string, bought it at the five and dime

If you see my dad, tell him my brothers are all grown up they’re beaten on each other

I seen a real square cat, Looked a nineteen seventy five

Celebration time come on!

I had the time of my life, and I never felt this way before!

On the wings of love! only the two of us together flying high!

I smell like I sound, I’m lost and I’m found, I’m on the hunt I’m after you

Big time! I’m on my way I’m makin’ it!

To all the girls I’ve loved before who’ve walked in and out my door…

Bruce! Don’t bring me down down down down down

When you’re playin with the queen of hearts, holdin anything ain’t smart

You wanna be in the show! Come on baby let’s go!

Where the streets have no name

She seems to have an invisible touch.

ROXANNE!

Shout, shout, let it all out. These are the things I can do without, come on.

When I’m a walkin down the street and I strut my stuff!

Now I know I’ve got to get away from the things you do to me

Every move you make, every breathe you take

She’s got legs and she know how to use them

Rock the Casbah! Rock the Casbah!

I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints and then I smoke two more

She blinded me with science, science!

Owner of a lonely heart! Owner of a lonely heart!

She can’t read at seventeen, the words she knows are all obscene but it’s alright

Hush, just you shut your mouth my little china girl

It’s the one thing, you are my thing

Holy diver

To live and die in L.A., to live and die in L.A.

Red red wine

That Billy Jean is not my love, she’s just a girl who says I am the one but the kid is not my son!

I don’t want to play, I just want to bang on me drum all day

I said do you speak a my language, he just smiled and give me a vegemite sandwich

I wear my sunglasses at night so I can so I can watch the way you move

Ice ice baby

In a big country, dreams stay with you like a lover’s voice across a mountain side

Move out, you bring me down, move out, don’t come around

Girl, you know it’s true

She told me to walk this way! Walk this way!

Just eat it eat dontcha make me repeat it

You spend me right-round baby right-round like a record baby

I’ll stop the world and melt with you

Everyone loves the lowrider

Wake me up before you go go caus I’m not plannin on goin solo

Wire

I got a letter from someone I didn’t want to hear from,

she accused me of things I didn’t want to be accused of.

It seems she’d found religion and her faith was

like daylight savings; it required her to set her clock back far into

the past to where it intersected with my own memory and caught the two of us there, suspended like ants in amber.

My own path back to that moment was like a twisted copper wire,

It turned back on itself, was thin in places, became knots and webs

circling over itself.

I had no fear of tracing its tangle back to the thing she accused me of, but something in me arose automatically to her accusation

and I arrived in time at the office of an abortionist.

Nothing of that waiting room hid from me.

I looked on that eighteen year old boy, sitting under fluorescent lights,

waiting and pretending to focus on a stray Time magazine.

Nothing was happy in me there, no feeling of power or coercion,

no sense of getting anything I wanted and she did not.

Just a penetrating sense of failure and worry

as I waited on the side of the door that led out into the summer sunshine

and she on the other side which led only to its locked rooms.

If her faith, in that moment when she appeared at the door groggy, defeated, and sad, was with us it was a ghost.

It may have spoken to her, it may have roared in her ear,

I did not hear it and she did not speak of it.

Later, she told me the shaking hand of the old

doctor, his rheumy eyes and cold breath,

had taken not one but all future children from her womb.

Yet now she lives in the suburbs

of Atlanta with

three babies and a bible.

And I remember the little black flowers on her dress,

the tattooed skull on her ankle,

the sunshine on the parking lot that day,

more than I care for her peace of mind. 

Pennies

I remember the pennies on the table,

me on one side counting, my father on the other.

There was not enough for two cokes

so he said we would just buy one.

But when he came out of the seven eleven,

he unzipped his jacket and pulled out another

and a bag of peanuts.

He told me a story about how he had gone in

once before and was accused of stealing a Pepsi

so now he stole something every time he went in.

For the principle he said.

His shirts were still immaculately white,

rolled three times each to the crook of his arm,

right below the needle marks.

We ate the peanuts and drank our cokes.

I was starting to know that not

eEverything he said was true.

Even now I still wonder whether he was

really wrongly accused of stealing a Pepsi,

or whether he was caught in the act.

Or whether any such thing happened at all.

Transmission

The transmission has been reluctant about

second gear for many years,

the high squeal of the alternator

digs into my brain like a letter opener,

the wipers don’t work where the

windshield is spider-webbed,

the oil pressure reads zero, always.

This vehicle, it is not a symbol of gradual increase,

the slow move into middle age,

middle tax brackets,

middle anything.

It’s just a piece of shit without even

that flogistin of character that would

offset the stress of driving around in it.

A reminder that I have become mostly a

swinger of hammers,

curser of building inspectors,

half-assed libertarian carpenter,

what I said I would never be but can’t get it together to not be.

Elegy for Elaine’s Café

To come out of the rain and smell

fresh bread on the counter

red vinegar on a plate of greens

the fumes of strong coffee

And listen to the lady behind the counter

talk about working at the potato chip plant

in Hermiston, how the grease smell would get in her hair

and the little slabs of tater before cooked would

take on the shapes of faces, animals, clouds…

And sit at a table with a red checkered cloth

dumping brown sugar in my coffee

smearing butter on bread

pouring olive oil on my salad

And wait for the little book store

to open with its racks of romances

and thrillers but also

North American Range Plants

The American Indian Tipi book

or the owner’s handmade

histories of Harney buckaroos, early

forest rangers,

pine trees that fit one to the rail car

And know that once the gas tank was filled

the groceries bought, that was all of town

for another week at least

Sometimes that was just enough

the feeling of doing something if not

good then at least well

no more, no less

Then one season

there was only butcher paper

over the windows

of an empty storefront

Coming in from the woods,

I could find no reason to linger in

that town anymore

It was just an Erickson’s Sentry market

and a Texaco staffed by

nubile young women

who each lasted about a summer

before a full belly

rose over the top

of her Wranglers

It was as if the town had dismantled its

front porch and visiting was

either a matter of peeking

in the window or opening the

door wide on all its faults

So I took a cue from

Ing Hay’s apotechary—

Left shut for years and years

In the middle of that town

while inside

bottles of ginseng, records of who owed what to whom,

the makings for a pipe of opium

recalled in darkness a

time when chinese was spoken there

­­–and I mostly forget about Elaine’s café

except sometimes when its

muddy and cold in the sagebrush

and the imagined smell of warm bread

fills the lungs

like a cloud of incense