Category: Poetry

First Contact

complex
the scion of ourselves
together,
Jesus coming in a leather jacket,
love being binding truth
whatall & why not w/ everything
connected to everything else
the small joke being incessantly
onus, the sleepers, compartmentalists,
bureaucrats, casual buddhists, fundamentalists,
clients, zombiebodies in the unemployment line,
the men’s business breakfast, all up
& down cannery row
save the faithful @ mass
but all equally guiltily asleep
in the church, the chapel, the synagogue, the mosque,
the buddha boy’s temple
& everywhere else & the numbers
click & tabulate & go ’round,
as the gas pump goes ’round
there’s been a lot of hands reaching up
there’s been only one reaching down
& the all in all being
accounted for in an extraterrestrial plexus
of where we’ve been
where we’re going
& what we shall be …or
or cease to be
unless there is acknowledged—First Contact

this abundant life

I can no longer call them homeless, not because they aren’t,
I’m not relegating them to the planet, nation, community,
or under an overpass, card board box, tent in blackberry bushes, & not because
I’ve seen families living in Africa with as much—or much less..

I can no longer call them homeless
I chose to call them Rotarian
that we may work for relief of especial needs
of others out of good will
see plight, acknowledge pain, knowing
we all need four walls for this abundant life

One of them told me, “I stopped being able to live indoors about 20 years ago.
Don’t know what it is, I do alright..,” he said, as I dropped him off
to go under his favorite Oregon freeway bridge,
“except sometimes in winter I worry about losing my toes.”

I know a preacher who regularly sits among them
rarely preaching Jesus, because he often finds Him there,
but instead buys them cigarettes, gives clothes & pocket-money for cheap wine,
brings them food, or a tent when he knows they would use it
all to relieve pain, prays with them when they ask,
directs them to missions & shelters if they don’t know,
takes them to the emergency room if they need to go.

Rotarian’s in our midst, a few of them better than we,
when living a fast paced life in conceit..
some of them are insane, some of them thieves,
all have had something stolen,
many without learned skill of hygiene this
left behind with four walls of normal life,
they wheel on, on bikes, grocery carts in whining dull roar of traffic,
all of our pain and bliss is somehow connected,
moments of delirious uplifting sunshine
& anguished biting cold, moving south, a hitch-hike,
a protected end of a grain car
makes trek a possibility, peer passed on whispered knowledge
of the “best missions” with good food &
where they will not shame you

This past Christmas morning I saw two
in back of my motels’ outside wall, under eve, arms
& legs entwined for warmth,
but yet sparkling with frost,
asleep, on crisp north California December asphalt

I know another preacher who gives them clean socks
washes their feet.. if they will let him.. washes
them lovingly in warm water, & spreads
antibiotics over sores & soles
while he shares the Gospel…

I can no longer call them homeless,
these Rotarian who sometimes righteously rage at being killed
& destroyed beneath this crushing wheel.

Descent

she handed it to me
then I dunno,
how I did it—knew I shouldn’t
but I just sliced me a slice
of fruit w/ the ol’ barlow knife
while I was looking at a coiled up snake,
who’d been talking to my woman,

& then first thing I know,
I was making moonshine
Skip & go naked foolin’ round til waay
after midnight every-night
everything seemed clear for a while,
but trouble was I ended up havin’-to-get-a-job, plus
plow the farm & then the woman left
& I had to take care of the kids too,
& keepin’ the house from fallen apart..

no more huntn’ & fishin’
just makin’ mortgage payments
for a farm I was given free and clear
long ago before the bank was even a notion

seems like there was a time
when there was just the plants & animals
& clear blue sky, white clouds
& the low and high blue flint hills
& the woman had really just been apart of me
that couldn’t no more leave
than I could say anything bad about anything
& hav’n kids didn’t involve them growing up
& killing each other
& back then I don’t ever remember
screaming in the middle of the night either….

Caught up in the Air

A dozen or more three hundred year old black oaks spread
over the top of the south side hill of our farm
a two acre pasture on top &
our house sat on the edge and overlooked a small
twenty acre valley bottom with a creek & across it
was a similar hill of Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir
to complete the farms north edge as a cross section
of a small valley running from our house south/north

One afternoon after school when I was 14
I walked out through the oaks to find my Grandfather
a man in his early eighties, he had turned the
place into a farm in only about four years

It was his son’s farm who owned a business
in town and twenty miles away, my grandfather had
used his own money, to build a lambing shed, then
chicken coops, then a substantial barn, and a half acre
garden down by the creek that was irrigated
by a pump and sprinkler and we all ate
very well and the tractor was an important tool

Every day in his sweat stained straw
cowboy hat he was on his son’s Ford 8N tractor
to the garden, the sheep shed, the creek,
& when I went looking for him my radar
was set for the Ford tractor

The tractor was the 20 team of mules
he used to own when he was
a successful farmer on the Great Plains
& he had started as a cowboy breaking horses for a living
& was at the door of change from horse drawn everything
to tractors, & power from oil
that began to feed the world
shortly before, banks and the great depression
ended all that for him

For our little farm, the tractor plowed, the tractor fertilized, the tractor planted,
the tractor cut hay, the tractor raked hay, and the tractor bailed hay
the tractor hauled hay, the tractor mixed cement,
the tractor toted injured animals,

I found him sitting on a 5 gallon bucket
his hat on his knee & embarrassment on his face
a look I’d never seen before from
the most affable man I’d ever known
“Oh Jimmy,” he sighed, “You have to do something for me,”

He had left the Ford tractor out of gear and did
not set the brake while he got off to do some chore &
the 8N had rolled down the hill…

The hill had about a 70 percent slope
& almost a straight drop got it going at such a high rate of
speed that when it hit the bottom it actually bounced
over a fence at the bottom of the hill and while airborne
hit the pasture & bounded over another small
hill by the apple trees and rolled out but not over
into the fresh green pasture;
beside the still slough where bull frogs were
letting go in their slow & late afternoon jug-a-rums
& I by his narrative, I was now looking down wide eyed overthe hill
& out to where, yes in the green pasture—thered tractor was sitting motionless

“I’d like you to go down there,” he said pointing but looking away, “and if there is nothing
wrong with it, drive the tractor back up here and never-tell-my-son-that-this-ever-happened.”

I went over the top of this steep hill side amazed & imagining again
the trajectory and the perfect angle of descent that kept
the 8N from turning over and fully expected something broken
as his narrative told of a loud noise when it hit
the bottom of the hill, before it leapt the fence

& yes, I was wishing I’d seen it happen, but
when I got to it I could not see anything broken & I touched
the button starter next to the gear shift,
it fired up and I drove it back up the 100 year old
road bed that was at one time the road from Medford
to Prospect, that now let us take a long gentle slope up
and down to our house and farm, &
he was relieved & I never told his son of the driverless 8N’s wild ride

Another afternoon when I was 17, I found him on the
concrete floor of the barn having fallen and broken
his hip while tending an animal, I gently got him
In the carry-all I attached to the back of the tractor
& very slowly got him to the house, before dark where
I called and we waited for an ambulance, to come twenty miles from town
& they operated & pinned his hip
& told him he’d never walk again.

Before he left the hospital he told me that was bullshit
and he’d be walking on a plane to fly to Kansas, as he was determined not
to die in Oregon as he thought they might bury him there,
& he mended, in a hospital bed in our living room, started out on crutches
& progressed to a walker, & then two canes & then to one

That next fall I and a neighbor killed three nice bucks
across the creek where I knew they could be waylaid
& I drove them back draped over the tractor
up the old Prospect road past our house where
my grandfather was standing on the back patio watching
us return & he raised one of his canes
and brandished it in the air, as we drove past.

That next spring I accompanied him to the
airport and saw him walk with one cane up onto a 727
& as he got to the door he turned around
& waved his Stetson hat down at me on the tarmac,
& then slowly turned around in his cowboy boots
& entered the jet to be caught up in the air & I never saw him again.

Oregon Dirt Farm

Our creek was about a half- mile
from its entrance to the River
an adjacent ranch pumped water
from a dam it made thirty feet
from our fence & the creek backed
up each summer to flood a feeder
ditch to a pump that rerouted the tributary
over 500 acres, lifted the water from a
Massive electric pump & poured water
on dry desert ground to irrigate alfalfa,
Deep growing legumes, & we
Leased this ranch one year while the land
Changed owners, I cut hay, raked hay, bucked
Bales of hay & we sold nearly all of it in massive tight
Stacks, where other small farms would come &
Buy this one year boon that we’d come by, in this process
I had a free run of 500 acres that was liberating at 15,
having been confined to 20 before that time, the
River became my own, with four good riffles & a salmon hole
There were pear trees & a pond that had two foot trout
That produced one every other cast, I worked all summer
& helped build a shop and earned at the end of the summer
Twenty dollars, & was pleased to get it & buy a cheap military surplus
Deer rifle, & it dawned on me decades later, that I was really some sort
Of bond slave, but I never had a thought of that as
Every hot afternoon on a tractor, & working with my
Grandfather, real farming seemed to me to be the greatest adventure
Of my life, it was the last serious farming my grandfather did
& before the depression he had owned a similar spread,
& the money financed good things of which I have no recollection
I do remember sense of the wealth of the earth,
& the smell of new mown hay and the dust of the harrow before we planted oats
I remember taking a friend of mine, a punk just moved up from L.A.
To the river & pointing out quick sand & watching him swagger
Out onto it & tell me I was full of it & when he began to
Jump up & down I saw him sink to his armpits,
& I pulled him out laughing hard, & that
Summer was probably the best summer of my life up to then
Big farm meals, morning, noon & evening hard work but plenty
Of time to do wild things between the haying and the harvest
When the owner came the next year their gentrified ways took over
But they let me and no others, still have the run of the place except
I couldn’t shoot their deer, & I made good use of the riffles & could
Hunt ducks off the far pond, where the trout, took dry flies
& spinners every evening, I saw a world expand & purpose &
Our 20 acres had been sufficient for subsistence but that summer
My Grandfather & my uncle and I sweated for money, I had no notion of
Other than the twenty dollar rifle,
that killed big black tail bucks,& my friend who ignored the quicksand warning,
became a heroin addict in 1972, & current ranch owners who are not gentry
shot a neighbor kid with rock salt–for fishing in their pond.

Not so, Sad Song

Long skinny
poems with
two word
Lines, long
skinny women
w/legs entwined

Young hippie
mamma’s w/
braided armpit
hair, became old
hippie mama’s
that just
don’t care

There was
a season
for both
& more,

Pill popper &
alcoholic’s duress,
living in bars but
under stress,

Long skinny
poems with
two word
lines, give it
up now

To narrative
tales, dressed w/
long skinny
women, gone
down wrong
roads white lines &
junkies sing
sad &
baleful songs

The River done
booked this
all away,
as flotsam &
downriver, & long gone
to stay

 

Song

Lupine purple lupine & deep
Mountain blue on right
Lupine blue, blue lupine
& Blue then turns white
Chaparral down in Mule Creek on
Left & the sliding rocks betray
A coyote after, fawns
& their spring time slow
Lupine purple lupine
White ones now grow
Uphill trail gives it up to a saddle back
& Lupine blue & white all the way

300 years

Acorn woodpeckers zoomed between the oaks
Ka k aka akaing to their machine gun ridden hidey holes
On trees, snags in a dead limb & a power pole, & sometimes
Under the eaves of our house,
Colonial birds these in
Oak trees, birds — a 100 or more in all
& three breeding pairs four at most,
On the Oregon side-hill near a 20 acre farm black&white
Black & white red heads Ka k aka ak kaing zooming  up & down between
The farm house, the guest house & the barn,
& a crack of a  twenty-two &  a
Miss & the second shot tumbles the little flying cop car
out of the tree & out of the sky, with iron peep sights, &
The boy’s been given charge— “kill ‘em all,” he said,
“They’re drilling holes in our house!” it was not too
Serious, but a bird or two a week fell, examined then tossed aside
Years later in text book he read of their nature with all
Breeding pairs when killed or predated, became new breeding pairs & all would
Become breeding pairs if need be, for a steady population
& this was the answer to the fact that the birds never went a way,
While the oaks were there spreading out
Over the house the hillside & making those summers cool when it was
Hot, and the wood peckers flew, and bred and laid eggs
In their hidey holes, high in oaks where a little rot could
Be hollowed out in a spring time banging sound &
With the heads sticking out, Ka k aka ak kaing
& this small misunderstanding seemed to make
No less harmony on the hill, with our sheep, & steers
& a ground squirrel killing border collie, but
Now I look on Google Earth & see the oaks are gone —all of them
The cedars were taken out 25 years ago, &
I know now the woodpeckers have finally departed, &
I haven’t been back
Since these new people fell the cedars—I’m no druid
But the oaks were there three hundred years,
& the woodpeckers had a colony for at least that long
& though it’s perhaps the worst thing I could think of to say, but
To have them back, I would stay—300 years

In a Grove by the River

In a grove by the river
Landlord walks, counting
First fruits six months out &

Summons pruners to these rows, &
Directs water from this
River to supplement the rain
Oversees the cutting, helps
Stack limbs & fires off
Bonfires while
Mist moistens up the air &
Smoke drifts past willow’s
At the water’s edge
Blue heron flies
Out from an eddy as the tractor
Loudly makes its turn

Now fruit will grow
In larger when harvest
Finally comes

Landlord walks on
River bank & surveys what
He’s done

St. Somebody’s

Not..
That hospitals
Are bad if you
Need one

I must admit
Other plans have
Not prevailed
But writing
This poem

Being better
Than the altrnative,
& if this is the last
One I’d recommend the
One before

Though this
Is no dark
Thing I’ve been
Pulled back before

A woman moans
From across the hall
From pain while their protocol
Can’t help she moans on & on
Nurses don’t want to bother Doctors
some do & care Clara Barton
Ministering Angels not stopping
To inquire who’s on the list
The rest is triage & a corporate dice roll
Save prayers of sisters, prayers of brothers,
Prayers of Fathers, prayers of Mothers.

Ring of Fire

“I dreamed we were doing
Ring of Fire
with Mexican Trumpets!” Johnny Cash

Down
& coming up
For air
Then down
& I went down once more
To swim along the red coral reef
Then emerged to snorkel on top
& see what I could see,
I was in the Red Sea,
Five miles north of Masawa, Eritrea
January 1970, yellow & striped
Blue butterfly fish,
Clownfish,
Dotty backs, mine own this day
Aquarium, bathtub warm aqua-blue water
Morning, we had a beach
w/ iced down beer
In twenty gallon shining galvanized trash cans
In a U.S. Army deuce & a half & our shift at operations had four days off
& I got to the strange place somehow strangely by volunteering
For Vietnam, in 1968 and found myself instead in Africa
& this reef was the most amazing
Thing an Oregon farm boy had ever seen,
Apart from baboons that threw rocks & mostly missed & this
Alive swimming Technicolor, waving
Fans of red coral white & light yellow corral & turquoise blue
The patch reef was on the other side
Of a sand plain & as I swam the reef gave way &
Dropped off to a dark blue to become a fringe reef & fish were
Bigger, & the reef humped over more & I continued going
Down the reef where water was a little deeper
& off it then dropped down into darkness
I’m on the comfort of the reef, on the edge &
When I saw it to my right, & I saw it full on tip-to-tail,
My body had me over the top of the reef, swim fins moving
Like instinct moves things fast, my mind had no time to say “Shark!”
Much less cognate “Tiger shark, approaching 20 feet,” but it was the biggest
Damn thing I’d ever seen come out of darkness &
Over the top of the reef the sand plain turned to
Chest deep water in thirty feet & I had fins off
& was running back to beach, & I remembered my friend
100 feet away from me & could see his snorkel & started yelling
& when his head came up and he heard “Shark!” as I yelled,
& we saw a replay of myself, & after the breathlessness
We got back, & the Sargent First Class had drunkenly
Driven the deuce & a half into a sea grass meadow
& got it stuck on an African low tide
When we got there the SFC was drunkenly
Digging out the deuce & a half
We grabbed beers & went up
The beach to see an Italian film company
Making a movie about a boy in a raft, & they had cameras rolling
& were shouting in Italian from a bullhorn
In a larger boat & fake shark fins on floats were in the water &
We looked closely at Italian actresses in bikinis &
Drank our beer & shook our heads
Ourselves swimming w/ man-eaters
While these cameras rolled that morning &
Others in our outfit were in
Phu Bai, taking North Vietnamese rockets,
Getting addicted to heroin, & we drunkenly kept
East Africa, that year & none of us knew 120 miles
To the south of the beach we were on— Bab-el-Mandeb
Was the land bridge for humanity’s walk out of Africa
When ice age waters receded & oceans & man were purposed
To begin the long walk from an Eden to the ends of the earth
& twelve years later I heard Mexican trumpets
Still belting it out during Semana Santa in
Lo de Marco, after I’d returned from the jungle
Where parakeets & Jaguars were home
& before I took my evening
Ramble down the beach I thought of this African beach,
& the meal I might have been & now since then,
Sometimes softer but no less dangerous things
Have come out of darkness — but that day in Mexico
Pelicans in formations flew above the beach palapa
That sold beer & you could see the three
Islands of Tres Marias in the setting sun,
& this world aflame did deposit
Close peril at my doorstep of
The magnanimity of a shark attack
More than once, & still
Blessings & beauty continue
To arrive & the wind moves these
Oaks outside my door & the Sacramento River
Flows grace constant, & my sons have become men
& my sweet wife brings me cantaloupe
In bite size morsels to eat when I finish this poem,
I’ve even been heralded by Mexican trumpets,
& even before Bab-el-Mandeb this long walk has been good &
I listen for the voice every evening.

Integral

sandpipers take formation
from the beach/tiny
wingflutter up
hundreds
a sight of motion wall
of movement
together separate integral
& connected aeronautical mobius
form&contention
then away
to alight a distance
short of an incoming tide
visual concert
of communal fidelity
now,
individual
beach walking
sandflea eaters

Hard Believing

This old man
he lay down on a couch
overnight invite to
sunrise, & service &
it had been three months
since he’d read it,
& he lay down & he’d not
prayed since a small boy,
& in his mind’s voice he got out,
“Jesus,”
& an unearthly scream came out
his head & he
slept a sound sleep,
& woke refreshed
twenty days later having
listened to Father Louis &
how Dr. Williams actually preached
in Paterson,  he
remembered, this night
& John’s Gospel & then
reading, Psalm 22
he said yes, while the
’62 Chevy II
rolled across the bridge
on Antelope Creek, & he
canceled the Buddhist retreat & its
hard believing
39 years
& 24 rejecting
Church & state this old man
is gone