The Overuse

If Then

SETTING: OPTICALLY PURE GLASS ABOUT 3.5 X 10-4 INCHES OR 9 MICRONS IN DIAMETER, CAPABLE OF TRANSMISSION OF INFRARED LIGHT (WAVELENGTH = 850 TO 1,300 NM)

SCENE 

(Voice): Do you?

(Other Voice): Maybe we should...

(Voice): Okay that was better next time...

(Other Voice): Yet it is now more perfect than perfection.

(Voice): Still one and one makes; if you ever feel then that it is you know I don't feel...

(Other Voice): Me too!

(Voice): If then...

(Other Voice): If then, if then if then! If then! If then! (ululates)

(Voice): If then trains are running, if then outhouses can be made from flower petals?

(Other Voice): Somewhere a little closer in? Bubble wrap and, and who wants to die alone?

(Voice): A dog in Spain, I was only in that serpentine canyon once. In Utah. Serpentine. And a reciprocating saw.

(Other Voice): See how the arrows fall over there? And the slings right here.

(Voice): Another one like you, another one who was prehensile.

(Other Voice): Squatting or making mortgage out of potatoes?

(Voice): Lace, cherry cake, dishes if necessary.

(Other Voice): Yet neither with intention nor having the proper pulleys, the trains in Amsterdam.

(Voice): I see. So tired. Would you be offended if..

(Other Voice): I said what is these fruits anyway? (sighs)

(Voice): So, where then?

(Other Voice): Right, where then?

(Voice): Too bad.

(Other Voice): Pleased ta meet-cha!

(Voice): Good luck!

(Other Voice): With all of that. 

Untitled

Oncorhynchus Mykiss

crack swell rot 

cave chip split 

decay recede 

bleed grind

my opinion is that,

and I don’t know

if anyone else 

has figured 

this out,

there are reasons why

and more than that

they don’t listen

to reason they 

listen to 

outside forces

open your mouth 

please good

a bloody business

this scraping

see here: 

rot decay

periodontal 

recession

cavity

apocalypse

the unhearing

with yellow teeth

trout swallowed

by trout

geese clubbed

with putters

take a 

bag of flosses

and a crawdad 

pinching a trout fry 

in a cold pool

with you

the gravel behind

the dam

the molars rolling 

toward 

your lips

your mouth 

is full of 

bloody 

trout

Those Days in the Middle of the Week

Click on the first picture, then scroll to read:

Those days in the middle of the week, when everyone else is working.

I sit out at the plaza, in the café, by the ridgetop table, and do what I do.

The lifelong adolescence in its way. The barking at the commerce of time.

A staff put out against the current of everything.

Constructing semaphore messages always anxious

they’re invisible.

It is not the baby being pushed across the plaza, the immigrant washing the

café dishes, the growing of squash with water from a drying well.

It’s not anything other than the echo of metaphors

bouncing down the well

reaching cool silence

inaudible.

Yet the repetition of anything builds a mooring eventually,

whether it bothers the tide or not to

abide by the new sinuity

glide the new riffle

make way for

its mass.

Ambition is a sham against the tide.

One that makes its space

by taking it from 

the plaza quiet

with the force

of will. 

Were my arm a scythe, I would reap my own head

that the fountains keep flowing

in the plaza bath or the

drip irrigation lines unbothered

by distortion

distortion distortion.

The baby rolls past the dry fountain

the brown skin shuffles coffee cups

the squash dies when the water 

is diverted

to our cash crops.

We'll Always Have Picture Hanging Wire

Hedge Nettle Tea

I went down to Green Ridge to watch a friend’s house

while he went east to bury his father’s ashes.

Four walls, a roof, no fuss.

A riot of garden all around,

succulents and olive trees,

basil and pine.

I was reading a lot of geology, a lot of weather,

trying to get the story of it just right. 

How the Pacific High was throwing wind

our way and the wind made fog

and the tectonic plates 

made mountains that 

blocked the fog and grew redwood trees.

I love even the sounds 

of these big movements.

Subduction and Coreolis, lithic and morphic and upwelling and deposition.

And then I go out to pick nettles and realize that

all of my life I have been wrong 

about which is the stinging and which is the hedge nettle. 

Names for everyday plants,

long committed to memory, wrongly so. 

I don’t know anything. 

I make a tea of the hedge nettle anyway. Lemony smelling 

and all kinds of green. To have mistaken which of 

the nettles give a sting, 

to have not noticed even that. 

Such a thing. 

Vultures circle below the garden,

riding the rising heat.

I watch them through the steam of the tea.

I think they are vultures. 

In fact, I insist. 

Running Teeth

I am walking toward the frozen river

down at the end of the block

at three am over squeaking snow

ready to arrive and revel in its metaphors,

its shards and pools

and the last patch of open water.

When an eruption of dogs

from the leafless birches

disperses my easy thoughts,

a chattering of bark! bark! bark!

And just as I think how stupid

they come low at my ankles

bark! bark! bark!

the way some other dogs did this summer

and imprinted a lingering fear

of running teeth.

A blurring rustle of black fur

and I wonder is this what it would be like

to face oncoming wolves
at the edge of town?

And then they pass

still bark! bark! barking!

and disappear up the road to the gun club.

I turn back toward the house,

no aurora tonight only the pink lit clouds

of downtown Fairbanks,

and leave the river to move

underneath itself.

Dog Eulogy

The dog just died.

Ten miles in, among the saxifrage

and the boulders,

a lump of red hair, froth at

the mouth.

The flies already around,

the smell like nothing else.

The morning getting hot

as the sun crept down

the rim of Eagle Creek.

There was no reason for it,

not that we could see.

The dog went to sleep, and woke up

dead.

Mysterious as a fish that walks

from one puddle to another.

It wasn’t a problem so much

as a carcass to be buried now,

wrapped in a nylon tent for a shroud

carried up the slope

into the scree.

Piling granite upon the

dead, first a ring of stones

and then working in

then that point where

one has to be placed directly upon

the body.

Then it is not just an exercise,

it is the taste of bile

on the tongue

the thought of the lungs piled under so many

rocks not able to breath,

it is the first cobble upon

all graves to come.

my own for instance

One last check for breath

before the stone is laid down squarely on

the stomach

then the rest

the plonking sound

of granite on granite.

It made a tidy mound,

a cairn for mouse and

moisture to rearrange

with some orange paintbrush

and dog kibbles for an

offering

to life and death itself.

Oh, maybe there was some other place

than this

for the dog’s soul

to roam to.

But It was a day of blooming paintbrush

in shadeless meadows,

the scent of crushed horsemint.

The sky was blue,

the snowmelt draining

through the spongy alpine meadow

roaring over the rocks.

And I doubt the aspen

leaves anywhere else

twinkle like a

thousand silver mirrors,

the way they do there.

The Letter

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

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

It seems she’d fround religion and her faith was

like daylight savings; it required her to set the 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 the 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 tatooed skull on her ankle,

the sunshine on the parking lot that day,

more than I care for her peace of mind. 

Truck

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 with

cold weather cracks.

The oil pressure reads zero, always.

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

no slow move into middle age,

middle tax brackets,

middle everything.

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.

All I need now is the pony tail

and the A.A. schedule.

Keep comin' back, it works.

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.