The Shadow Waters

Physics 101

2011-05-21T02:30:00.000-07:00

Here is the boy
kicking a worn hackeysack
in a field,

his shirt off
to feel the sun on his skin,
to show the world

his chest and
narrow waist, his legs
and back still feeling

strong,
when physics happened,
as suddenly as a torn

cartilage.
His quest to understand
how two bodies

might come together, how
one life might discover
its inner gravity,

was ignited the way a sun
is born, with radiant heat
and light,

propelling him up
and away from his small world
into a dark and complicated

universe.

Ashes

2011-05-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

The clouds had been there
for months. Even our faces
were gray with the storm of it,
the wind tugging our jackets
as we huddled on the pier,
invisible rain pricking our hands.
I don’t know how it happened
that I ended up with the remains
of my father in my arms,
the weight of a musk melon
in a double-sealed box.
My brother and four sisters
each held a white rose,
while my mother, so small,
leaning unsteadily as if the wind
would tumble her into the river,
held two red roses, unwilling
to cast them onto the waves.
How could I have known that I
would be the one to tear open
the box that day, to let the ashes of
so many years be carried
away from us? If it wasn’t
a sign that in that moment
a rainbow appeared across
the vast river, then it is still
the simple truth of what happened,
its terrible beauty.

The Biker down the Street

2010-09-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

He waits until dark to fire it up -- suddenly,
like a big dog snarling awake at an intruder --
then sits at the end of his cement drive,
idling the engine and smoking a cigarette
down to its filter. He acts like an ex con. Lawn
withered, shades closed. Sometimes a woman
with bleached hair parks a rusted sedan out
front and rushes to his door, knocking urgently.
On the rare days when I spot him, shirtless
by his mailbox in the sun, me passing the row
of houses on our street, he stands tall, giving me
his prison stare, showing the full-breasted tattoo
on his arm -- arrogant, aggressive, but silent.

At night is when he lets us all know
what he thinks of us and our children.
He rolls his black and chrome machine
out to the street's edge, its metal chest
rumbling like the barely controlled dog
he wants it to be, and when his shaking
rage finally roars against every window
of every home in our neighborhood
until even the far hills can hear him,
he unleashes it -- part Rottweiler,
part iron satellite -- gleaming with oil and
crank-case shine, rolling beneath the pulse
of streetlights, flashing and glittering,
blasting a wake of burnt metal air for us
and our sleeping children to breathe,
until his one fire-red eye rises up the hill
and into the mute sky.

Bird Bath

2010-08-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

Once new
with fresh water
and fluttering
gray birds,
it stands
at the garden's
edge, stained
with old bird
droppings, dried
bowl stuck
with brown leaves
brittle as parchment.
What else
would we expect
now that the
gardener has died?

Leo Cabrillo Beach

2010-02-24T17:17:00.000-08:00

The rocks emerge from the fog,
shouldered giants slumped
in the surf. Gray waves
smother them, foam
and seethe at their ears,
as if winter and the pestering sea
was their lost war, roiling
across their eternally buried knees.

Casual Hero

2010-02-20T19:15:00.001-08:00

The light would be so blinding
he wouldn't remember the drive,

the insistent veering of traffic
like spawning salmon,

he wouldn't remember the lunch
he had packed or the warm tea

in his stomach, he wouldn't remember
the dark house he had left,

its ticking living room clock,
its sleeping, beautiful breaths,

he wouldn't remember the years
in his seat like layers of silt

that had crusted to old bone
and tasted now of antacids --

he would remember nothing
but the piercing light, the rising

shadow of a mountain,
the near silent wake of his car

as it swept the dawn's air
into a perfect mirror of night.

Girl Becoming Stone

2009-11-14T16:10:00.000-08:00

so delicate
in her cotton dress
standing in the sun

the light so bright
you see through her
to the thin bones in her arms

hair moving in the wind,
dress pulling away
from her transparent life

this little body turning
slow as ice forming on a lake
so sad how firm she has already become

so cold
her eyes crystal blue
the muted light of a glacier

The Divide

2009-09-28T17:10:00.000-07:00

after Donald Hall

Deep in a ravine in western Oregon
the old Caterpillar lodges between two firs
thick as ancient pillars. In nineteen eighty-eight
the solitary logger – a one-man crew –
steered it here, muscles clenched for the descent.
In the cab, the yellow hardhat tilts forward over the face
as if the young man were sleeping, only the teeth
and brown bone of his jaw exposed, his heavy gray
shirt and black pants deflated. The arms hang,
fingers like dried reeds pointing to the earth.

Or say the ridge hadn’t buckled beneath me.
I rounded the cutback and rumbled down
the long fire road to my truck, drove the eight miles home
and graduated from college that next spring.
Every morning now I curve along the Pacific Coast Highway,
the rocky cliff falling to ocean only a few feet away,
my black polo and gray slacks loose, and I slouch, tired,
for the long drive to my office, one pale hand on the wheel,
the other on my knee, harness holding me for dear life
to this seat in a car on a road over an endless faultline.

Knee-Deep in the Pacific

2009-09-14T21:42:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago
my father described a picture
he’d taken in Korea, the forests burning,
the crackling of gunfire
like branches popping in the wind.
He did not want to forget
the day so many friends had died.
But he had forgotten
the film, left it to burn
in the pocket of his uniform
in a fire meant to kill lice and disease.
Now he sees things he can’t describe,
no picture to show, or explain.

Thirty years after Korea,
he liked to split wood for days alone,
and he would try to answer
questions of a ten year-old son, wanting to give
something I could hold onto when he was gone.

Now I return this Christmas
from years away,
and he is old
and thinks he will take me clamming once.
He describes clams as big as my forearm
as we drive onto the sand
and as we wade out into the ocean.
But my father has forgotten the lantern,
and the sun has just set, the roiling water
calm for a moment, the sand
darkening like a blackened highway.
Our jackets flap in the wind,
our knees bend against the drawing surf.
He purses his lips and shakes his head,
saying without words for the hundredth time:
he has forgotten.
So when we can no longer see our truck
or our feet beneath us,
we still stand in the ocean.
A city of lights scatters along the surf-break,
men, families, all waiting
for the surf to recede
so they can begin searching this darkness
for life.

At the Santa Barbara Zoo

2009-04-19T22:04:00.000-07:00

Today it took an hour
just to get inside the gates.
A sunny day in April, crowded.
We herd along -- my wife and son,
me, passing the pink flamingoes,
the elephant chewing hay,
the lemurs. My son, just two,
is more interested in the wires
of the fences, or the fountain.
We inch along the walkway
to the gorilla exhibit, stopping
to let mothers and children by.
I am holding him, my arm tired.
A spot clears, and we reach
the railing. Twenty feet below
the black gorilla sits in the grass.
My son leans on the railing
and peers down. I look around
for other gorillas -- mates, his young--
but he is alone. My son turns back,
says, "I think he's looking at me."
I glance down. It's true. A look
like a stern father, eyes narrowed,
glaring right up at my son.
For a moment, I wonder
if the fence is tall enough.
I've seen this guy's fangs.
I look back for my wife,
still lost in the crowd, to see
if it's time to go home.
"Daddy," my son says.
"I think he's looking at me.
I think he's really looking at me."

Tolstoy Attends the Autopsy of Anna Stepanova

2009-04-14T02:20:00.000-07:00

"The whistle of the engine could be heard down the line,
and the movement of something heavy." -- Anna Karenina

It was winter.
The tracks at Yasenki station
lay like black veins in the snow.
Lev hurried, following the dark
footprints to the engine shed.
Inside, four men stood waiting,
pale and silent -- the policeman,
the doctor and his assistant,
the journalist. A bright lamp hung
above the table where she lay
covered in a white sheet
stained dark from beneath.

She was a man's lover,
unmarried, no claim to a home.
When the man -- Bibikov --
told her he no longer loved her,
that he would marry the governess,
she grabbed what was hers,
a few dresses, frail underclothes,
and wandered the frozen landscape.
For three days she was missing.
A porter was the next to see her,
standing near the stopped No. 7 train,
still clutching her bundle of clothes,
her face white. A goods train
rumbled on the other track,
its brakes squealing.
Then she was gone.

Lev opened his notebook
as the doctor withdrew the sheet.
Her head had been crushed,
brain matter frozen in her black hair.
Her right eye and cheek
were torn away. The other eye,
half open, gazing flatly at the lamp,
was an emerald green.
Lev's hand shook as he tried
to write the words, tried to describe
this carcass that was a woman.
Her midsection had been cleaved
so that only her bluish-gray
entrails connected her torso
to her full, womanly legs.

It would be more than a year
before Lev would attempt to resurrect
this woman. At first, she was ugly,
apathetic, dead in spirit. He disliked her
so much that he thought she should marry
the uncaring libertine who had ruined her.
But then he began to see her
in the women around him --
in his wife, his younger sister,
the wives of his friends --
their longing for passion
that had been dulled and dulled
to yellow teeth, luke warm tea,
and children sucking.

He noticed Anna's dark hair curled
on the slender, healthy neck
of the woman seated in front of him
at a play. He saw Anna's green eyes
in his old aunt now bound to her bed.
So he gave Anna a gift -- life.
He helped her escape. He helped her rise
from the divan to touch her flesh
against warmth. He offered her love,
cracked open her chest
to let her heart expand just once,
and God --
God took that poor woman's life away.

On Tolstoy (During the Composition of Anna Karenina)

2009-04-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

Mysterious father, who sits in his lair,

you with your books towering like
fortress walls beside you, and like old stone
the must of your books and warm tallow
drifts from beneath your door.

We know your pen is powerful,
we see how it silences
us when you are with it,
we see our silent mother each day

at the dining table, reading sheets
you have written with that pen,
copying your words meticulously
as if they were prayers,

and at dinner when you emerge
(older and wiser from living
in that other world),
we wish we knew what you saw

when you looked at us.
Your beard is gray, as is your smock,
your bones taut beneath lagging flesh,
and that is how much we know of you.

We only ask (you being
our father) that one day
we will read from the pages
of your heart.

The Woman at the Tam O'Shanter

2009-04-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

Once the belle of the bar,
now her hair is frazzled, her top
two front teeth missing
(knocked out by a drunk man),
her skin leathery and of an odd
brown hue. She seems disoriented,
talking loudly and looking around,
but no one answers. They brood
or talk quietly with their friends,
backs turned to her. She is
the same as so many women
I've seen over the years --

I wonder where they all go.

Spring

2009-03-29T19:39:00.001-07:00

My son sits at the pinnacle
of the slide, grinning, his downy
hair standing up like a halo,
the evening sun bright behind him.
He lifts his arms, says, Ready,
Set, Go! and wends down
to where I'm waiting.
He slides too far, falling
onto his behind, laughing,
repeating already, Go again?
as if I am about to say
it is time for us to go,
as if I am about to tell him
that this day is almost finished.

Poem -- March 27, 2009

2009-03-27T21:57:00.000-07:00

so what happens

when
the student
becomes

the master

Spirited Away

2009-03-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

lift me
over the mountain

above the dark forest
where roads thin to veins

so far above
my blood becomes raindrops

my vision
a blinding orb of sunlight

piercing the enormous cloud

Island Shore in Winter

2009-03-17T02:12:00.000-07:00

The moon is low over the water,
a crack into a white world.
Like snow, the light settles
onto the dark waves.
I think of how small
my piece of the world,
and yet here is the moon
sprinkling its offering
almost within reach.
If I threw a rock
I could jostle its pallid face.

Untitled (3/10/09)

2009-03-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

what
is there
to say

when
it all

goes

wrong

Tuesdays

2009-03-05T23:38:00.000-08:00

She dusts the television screen,
swipes along the base, up the sides,
flicks the antenna. Then the end tables,
the brass lamp bases, beneath
the marble statue of Mary.
She pulls a chair to the center
of the room, climbs up, runs the cloth
along a blade of the ceiling fan, turns it.
Does each blade like this. Pauses.
Puts her wrist to her nose. Sneezes.
Then returns the chair. Flicks each
family photo, then sweeps the frame edges,
the coffee table, beneath the magazines,
beneath the graystone coasters,
the bookshelf, up to the top on tip
toes, then each spine, five at a time,
up over down over up.
Pauses. Puts her wrist to her nose.
The sun shines through the window
onto the carpet. Motes tumble
in the light. She dusts the bottom books.
Sneezes. Sneezes again. The sun's rays
vanish, a cloud passing, then return.
She looks around, wrist to nose.
Motes fall like cotton rain.

Five Days Before

2009-03-05T01:09:00.000-08:00

slip the needle
into my vein

talk to me gently

look into my eyes

say
I can tell you don't like this

see
my false smile

snap vials onto the tube

unsnap them
full of my black-red past

remove the final vial

keep your thumb on my pulse

staunch the crimson spread
of the old

you need only so much

thank me
for all I am giving

The Last Day

2009-02-26T23:09:00.000-08:00

I take my wife and son to the tide pools in Yachats.
The briny breeze tugs at our jackets, blusters our hair.
We splash on the landscape of giant rocks,
stoop, peer at the silken tentacles and spiny balls,
the bright craggy starfish, all moving with glacial slowness.
Seagulls fly overhead with their crooked wings.
My son laughs at their sneaky ways.
My wife leans against me for warmth
while waves wash the rocks and ripple the pools.

And then it is late in day.
The sky -- always gray -- brightens, pink and orange.
We call our son, who stands at a pool's edge,
glances back down, then runs to us. Shadows fill
the holes in the rock, stretch inland like streams in the grass.
Our final trek, up the hill, we drive, wending into the firs.
Cape Perpetua. The place of last light. From the rock chamber
on the precipice we see the entire ocean. It is on fire,
cool and silent, the quietest night coming, and I hope
the beauty of this day will be clear to us this once.

Rupture

2009-02-22T21:35:00.000-08:00

sucked in his breath &
stood up straight

a rush

his heart
his adrenal glands

something more

he put his hand to his stomach
sat on the edge of the bed

steady deep breaths

it was bound and swollen
down low in the center of his body

then a cramp across his abdomen

he stood & moved to the sink
looked at himself in the mirror

fear

he'd never seen it in his own eyes
you can't ignore this look in your own eyes

or this cramp

an unrelenting fist
tightening

sat & breathed those same shaking breaths

the sudden warmth
perspiration

chills down his back & legs

the room was dim
like dawn and dusk

then a voice

speaking somehow from his body
the clearest he'd ever heard it

this is going to kill you

Tolstoy Witnesses an Execution in Paris, 1857

2009-02-20T22:44:00.000-08:00

'When I saw...I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being....'

He had arrived early, merely curious.
The plaza was full, women in dresses, men rigid
in fine suits. The taverns down the cobbled street,
open since dawn, had lubricated the faint-hearted.
They talked and laughed as if at the races, polite
and excited, lining the street that led from the jail's
stone wall and wooden gate. A light fog concealed
the most distant faces peering from the back rows.
The ones near were smiling, chatting.

The guillotine towered three heights of a man,
the upright beams painted oxblood red,
its thick blade, weighted even more by lead,
suspended from the top, a small hook
holding it from its descent.

A hinge screeched, hushing the crowd.
The massive doors swung open, exposing
an unmoving procession, all in black
except for the priest swathed in pure
white robes, the prisoner at the center,
priest to his left, executioner to his right,
guards and wardens lined up behind.

He was escorted to the foot of the stairs
where the executioner ascended,
boots knocking on the steps,
to wrap the pulley rope around his palm.
The priest stood in front of the condemned,
who had apparently murdered a woman,
and said a quiet prayer, head bowed.
A guard snatched the man's hood away,
exposing a white neck and shoulders.
The man blinked, squinted against the light.
Then a Bible was lifted before him,
and he looked at it, unconvinced,
before craning his neck to touch lips to it.

Yanked forward by his arms, which were tied
above the elbows behind his back, he was rushed
up the stairs, half lifted, by two guards.
At the top, they shoved his head down
and pushed him forward onto the plank,
as if feeding wood into a furnace,
one hurrying to snap the neck
brace into place before stepping back.

Three puffs of the cheek,
as if the dead man were preparing
to lift a great weight, before he turned
his face away from the executioner.
For a single heart beat
he gazed into Tolstoy's eyes,
the gray of storm clouds,
before the blade rumbled down,
cleaving one neck and one soul.

Winter 1951

2009-02-17T23:54:00.000-08:00

We were overrun by the Chinese,
men screaming through the forest
at night, some with hatchets,
others with bare hands, facing our roar
of gunfire. You could only shoot so many
before you had to reload.
Then they leaped into your foxhole,
silhouettes rank with sweat.
The private next to me was hit in the temple
with a hatchet. I saw the reflection
of the moon off the blade. I shot
the silhouette with a .38 I carried
in my boot. They kept coming,
black ghosts whooping among the trees.
There must have been half a million.
That's when I heard the sergeant: pull back.
We climbed out of our holes,
put our boots to the frozen ground,
and ran. All up and down the line
BARs and M1s crackled, echoed,
moving down the mountain.
We dropped into a ravine
where someone had set up a .50-caliber,
and it boomed like a giant drum.
I saw the balls of fire from the barrel.
When it overheated, the forest was silent.
I don't think any of us believed it was over.
This was the first time I was scared,
when I had time to think about those men
running into our fire. We killed thousands.
At dawn, fog filled the valley. Everyone was awake.
You could smell Sterno smoke from men cooking.
Then word came: a full retreat. Was it that bad?
I had asked. Yes. They had gained ground.
We didn't know how many or where from.
They seemed to just come from the trees,
bark in their hair, resin smeared on their faces.
The sun cut rays through the branches.
We had thirty minutes to collect what we could
before the trucks began to move like a train.
Then we walked along the ditch, feverish
from lack of sleep, crunching the frozen earth.
Around the first corner, bodies lay in the ditches
where they had been dragged. Men like statues,
some with sleepy expressions, eyes closed,
others with fingers curled, mouths wide,
each dusted with ice from the fog,
statues enough for a hundred museums,
men with elbows bent, holding a stick
or bayonet, some clasping rifles to their chests,
pose after pose, museum debris, all in uniform.
We wound for miles down this endless ravine,
viewing every possible way that we might die.
I don't remember seeing the sun for a month
after this, only the rays in the trees before that long
march when I first thought I may never return home.

Summer Work

2009-02-16T20:23:00.000-08:00

I used to carry shingle bundles
onto roofs two stories high,
my shoulders peeling from sun,
my legs shaking the ladder
with each upward step.
My father sat on the slope,
pocket full of galvanized nails,
experience shading so far back
it ended in a world war.
I was learning work.
I was busting my butt.
Every square we laid
was a quart of sweat
stinging my eyes,
wetting my lips
so I tasted my own salt.
The sun was bright
as the beach, burning my eyes,
my vision dimmed and shadowed,
and when I slipped into a kitchen
for a glass of water,
it was like night. I reached out
to keep myself from tripping,
took a quick drink to ice my throat,
just enough time to feel
my bones ache before
returning to the yard,
to climb the ladder to a land-
scape of utter black.
This was my down payment,
my penance, all wrapped
in seventy pound bundles,
enough to fill our pickup
twice, enough to last me
eight summers. I was strong --
"barrel-chested," they called me --
but my muscles frayed.
Just when the hammer
felt like part of my arm.
Just when my father
was preparing to finally say,
"You're doing good work, son,"
I broke down in pain,
so close
to laying it all down.

Untitled (2/12/09)

2009-02-12T22:37:00.000-08:00

The equations have vanished --

now it's a confused reliance
on experience, taking steps,

opening my eyes.

Beaver Falls

2009-02-10T20:53:00.000-08:00

Scent of algae—cool water running
over stone—mist rising like steam—
as you approach the lip
the roar makes your knees weak.
The water pulls, nudges.
It wants you to go over, too,
down the ragged rock
ten heights of a man
to the churning pool below.
It is a brave boy’s duty to dive.
Pray he doesn’t strike the boulder
or junk cars submerged in the shadows.

I knew one boy who died here—
he was frightened by men with shotguns.
He fled into the forest at night,
stumbling on the rocky trails
until his feet splashed in water
and the ground dropped away, his arms
and legs swinging in the misty black,
his life cracking open so we couldn’t look away.

Every day I remembered him.
It was nearly a year before I was taken
into the dark, driven to the edge,
to feel the cold mist, the roar of the falls—
for one long breath—
where I dove like a fool
following him into the darkness.

Of Empires and Writing

2009-02-07T20:32:00.000-08:00

Birth
may be natural,

but creation
is obstinate.

I will daydream
for hours,

constructing fleets of ideas
in my mind,

only to find my words
congealed,

refusing
to leave the pen.

The beautiful, delicate ships
flounder, rot in their harbors.

It is a tragedy
how many empires have been lost

because of me and
this finicky pen.

Offering

2009-02-05T21:51:00.000-08:00

I come here to give.
Through the same door,
down the same sidewalk,
beneath the same tree,
I enter this holy place
to expel what is inside me.
It is what I know has value,
what is always blooming,
what carries seed and light.
I know how to let blood here.
I know why this blood matters.
The bowl is empty.
Then it comes: the white hand,
the black pen, the naked skin
sweating my last word.

Man on Earth

2009-01-27T10:53:00.000-08:00

after Donald Hall

Deep in a ravine in western Oregon
the old Caterpillar lodges
between two firs
thick as ancient pillars.
In nineteen eighty-eight
the solitary logger –
a one-man crew –
steered it here,
muscles clenched for the descent.

In the cab, the yellow hardhat
tilts forward over the face
as if the young man were sleeping,
only the teeth and brown bone
of his jaw exposed, his heavy gray
shirt and black pants deflated.
The arms hang, fingers like dried reeds
pointing to the earth.

Or say the ridge
hadn’t buckled beneath me. I rounded
the cutback and rumbled down
the long fire road to my truck,
drove the eight miles home
and graduated from college that next spring.
Every morning now
I curve along the Pacific Coast Highway,
the rocky cliff falling to ocean
only a few feet away,
my black polo and gray slacks loose,
and I slouch, tired, for the long drive
to my office, one pale hand on the wheel,
the other on my knee, harness holding me
for dear life
to this seat in a car on a road
over an endless faultline.

The Problem of Describing Pain

2009-01-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

after Robert Hass

She cheated on him
and that hurt.

She met a man,
fell in love with his voice, shared
her dreams, laughed with him
secretly after her husband had gone to bed,
spread humiliation over everything they owned.

Their son was never on her mind. No.
Their vows meant nothing. No. She
checked out, months ago, a year ago,
they were never really connected. No.

"...There are limits to saying,
In language, what the [...] did."

It is important to remember that poetry
cannot say everything, that others must draw
from their own suffering, joy, death
for the poetic act to be complete.

"Dance with me, Dancer. Oh, I will."

Quiet house, ticking clock,
a wife doing something in the dark.

To My Son, in the Beginning

2009-01-22T22:03:00.000-08:00

His tiny body lay on my chest,
and on top of us that weight.
In the coming years he would flail
as I did, learn to kneel, learn to lift
his body onto his hands and chafed knees.
The world would come into focus,
and he would want and hunger
as I did. He would climb, tumble,
learn to run away and laugh,
charm with wide blue eyes.
Even when he no longer wants it,
I am expected to hold his hand.
Even now I am expected to know
more than I have learned.
If only I knew how he would
treat girls, what he might deny
his friends in need, how he might
see poor men like his father
once was, then I may think to say
what I was never told, things that
may ease his fear when he sees
a giant descend to such a small,
fragile old man. Lord help us.

The Flood

2009-01-18T21:50:00.000-08:00

For weeks, clouds of rain drift like fog
across the fields, filling ditches,
spilling onto the highways where cars slow.

The river, always high in late winter,
moves in the distance
like an overburdened conveyor

heaving old logs torn from the mud,
spouting white caps.
Streams flow across roads

until side streets are blocked
by orange cones,
utility trucks with flashing lights.

Power flickers. Lights go out,
come back on.
The wind seems it has been blowing

all year, piling up leaves and twigs,
scattering them across lawns
which now hold murky pools.

Eaves clog and overflow,
slapping sidewalks with runoff,
wearing grooves in the dirt

beneath foundations, cracking concrete.
We fill sand bags
at the beach in rain slickers,

stack them on the beds of pickups
like firewood,
haul them to low areas in town,

lines of men tossing limp bags.
Pickups and cars in mud,
water rising on wheel wells

until the streets are shallow rivers,
tires splitting wake as they roll,
boots splashing in the muddy flow.

Then signs of the coming rage, a high stream
blasting white down a hillside,
a sudden waterfall on the highway,

more erupting streams, as if corks
have popped, and now
the entire valley floor

becomes a lake bed, dark water rising
in lawns and pastures,
roads marked only by stop signs

and fence posts in the murk.
The earth slips
in a ravine, gains momentum,

a creek gone mad, collapsing trees,
pushing soil,
a rumbling river of sludge and logs

that sweeps houses off their foundations,
carrying them like boats
into fields where they run aground, askew

among crushed cars and tractors,
a graveyard of mud-caked logs.
Ravine after ravine,

home after home. The last streets
are blocked until
all but a few of us are stranded

on our own small plots of land,
the expanding lake in the valley
lapping higher, at front porches, at decks,

and the river rolls, sweeping it all along,
growing stronger, darker,
soil and dead insects, leaves and forest rot.

What frightens us is the way
the water comes quietly,
collecting our belongings, our pasts,

the way at night the surge
will enter our yards, surround
our homes without us knowing it.

It is always more than what
we expect,
reshapes more earth, takes more homes,

until we are left with rain-soaked hair,
ankle deep in mud,
calling to our neighbors across

yards and yards of wreckage,
asking,
"Are you okay? Is everyone alive?"

Never Thought

2009-01-18T00:25:00.000-08:00

I envisioned many different versions
of this future I'm now living --

I would be a logger in northwest Oregon,
or a mill manager farther down the coast,

a fisherman in the Bering Strait,
or in my wild fantasies

a lead guitar player in a traveling band --
but I never thought of this one,

the one holding me like a character
in a strange story:

I now live in the hills north of Malibu,
buying shiny brown shoes and

brown belts in Florence, Italy,
wearing khaki slacks and tan

blazers, button-up shirts
in ten different flavors,

getting my hair trimmed
every four weeks, sporting

a gold watch and wedding band,
driving my wife and son

down palm shaded streets
in a car that four years later

still seems new to me.
How did this happen?

Of all things, how did I become
a poet? A professor?

This was not one of my dreams,
and yet it is more dream-like

than any other time in my life.
I am thankful but confused,

well-paid but struggling
to pay for a future even more difficult

to envision than this one.
I know so very little, even after

these thirty-seven unexpected years,
and wonder if I would understand

my path, my next step, my next word,
if I had made one single choice

differently -- but which?
Which choice careened me

to this black chair where I sit
not knowing what my next line should be?

On War

2009-01-17T15:14:00.000-08:00

Today I tried to convince my class
that a poet could write about war
objectively, that there was a way
to show the strangeness of death
without cutting out your heart
and holding its beating mass in the air.

Home

2009-01-17T15:01:00.000-08:00

The way she would lean back
on the couch in the dim light,
the way her skin changed, took on
the shadow, smoothed
to a night sky cream --

that's what helped me --

the thought
of tasting that night sky again,
those shoulders, that neck,
because I was done with our city,
tired of falling down, tired of temporary
houses and temporary neighborhoods.

Deep in the forest of my psyche,
it was evening, and she had settled there.
We could take our home anywhere --
away from the frost-hardened plains,
away from the poor housing in rich
neighborhoods to a place with rooms
and light, a place where my boy
could run down a hallway and emerge
to a glass wall of sun and stand in awe.

One Last Story

2009-01-13T21:28:00.000-08:00

How many of us had fallen asleep
in our pickups before? How many,
drunk from an evening of cheap beer,
a favorite beer, after ten hours
at the mill, a quick stop for a drink
that became drinks, just slumped over?
Nearly every millworker who has children
as old as high school or community
college or their own little families
has had a slip like this, so tired,
so tired from weeks of the same,
so tired from the rain that grays
our windows. But Mike, he fell asleep
on the railroad tracks in town,
on a side road to the ferry, stopping
for a train still hours away, a train
run by a tired but sober engineer
who saw the ghost of a truck, pale,
spotlighted, and it wouldn't move
-- the horn! the horn! -- poor fellow.
In the last moment, the engineer saw Mike,
enough to burn the sad image into his memory:
the yellow hat, the faded brown mill jacket,
his head bowed as if in prayer.
And how his prayer awoke us that night.

Awaiting the Moon

2009-01-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

Dusk. My son and I
sit on the patio, looking up.
Rocket, he says, pointing.

A jet, miles away, rises from LAX
expelling a thin white stream.
A single star sits in the sky.

Bright star, he says. I nod.
He stands on his chair and
peers at all areas of the sky.

Where's moon? he asks.
He is not yet two.
This is all very new to him.

The moon is hiding, I say.
He looks at the trees.
Wiry silhouettes, dead leaves.

Behind the trees? he asks.
Yes, I say. It will come out later.
He looks for the rocket,

which has vanished.
He tilts his head and blinks,
then clambers down, goes

inside, and reemerges,

his blanket in his arms.
He spreads it over my legs.

Cold, he says, patting my knees.
He climbs back into his chair
and looks up at the lone star.

I love him dearly.

The Forgotten War

2009-01-04T20:41:00.000-08:00

In the snow a trail of boot prints
emerges from our wooded valley,
darkens the field up to our porch.
My father has returned from the silence
of the war once again. The war rages
deep among the trees and shadows,
and now he shutters himself in the house.
Fifty years since the war was over,
but this is how he brings it home with him:
in the bone settling silence of winter,
the dusting of snow, the frigid wind,
tire ruts half frozen, faint sweetness
of raw engine exhaust and burning wood.
Across the valley an old tree cracks
from the weight of snow. The report echoes.
Birds swoop from stark branches, descend
to where his boots exposed the black earth.

The Record

2009-01-03T21:04:00.000-08:00

We are peeling potatoes,
my mother and I.
She is so much shorter than me.
She grows shorter every year,
her skin more pallid, her knuckles
more swollen and bent.
A quiet sufferer through six children
and my father. She wanted us
to be good people. She wanted to give us
love, and, in return, she wanted us
to grow to deeply respect her.
She would be the storyteller,
her children circled around.
We would pass her stories on to our children.
For fifty years, she kept a diary
to document this amazing life,
and then she discovered it was the wrong
story she had been telling.
The correct one, the one with details
that would lead us to a deeper truth,
was left unrecorded. Instead
she had pages about the weather,
people who called, the names and weights
of infants born, the TV shows she watched.
But when her daughter had a miscarriage,
what had she cried out in the hallway?
And had her son gotten engaged to that girl
in Montana, or was it only a sad hope?
She couldn't recall, and it hurt her
like a death. All those years gone.
Her husband, what had he said to her
the night she thought he would leave them?
The decades have passed.
Outside the sky is gray. A mist falls
like cotton fibers. Her husband is snoring.
Her children and grandchildren await
the potatoes. In a distant room
an infant begins its feeble plaint.
She sniffles from the frying onions, brushes
her nose with the back of her hand.
And me, I am beside her, peeling the white centers
from their skins.

Storm Weather

2008-12-31T17:52:00.000-08:00

We fought the storm
to the mouth of the Columbia,
our boat so loaded with fish
it rolled slow like a beast
barreling into the waves.
We'd sealed the doors,
but water leaked at their bottoms
like brown piss. The first mate
vomited in a bucket, swayed
with the yawning rolls,
then retched again.
Climbing what seemed
a mountain, the engine strained
so hard it rattled the lamps
and they blinked on and off
leaving us in heartbeats of darkness.
We fell into a valley,
freefalling until we hit bottom
and pushed across to another mountain --
this rise and fall for hours.
I had bit my lip, and when I wiped blood
on the back of my hand,
I smelled diesel and moldy rope,
the metallic odor of fish scales.
There was the odor, too, of three weeks
of avoidance of home, of muscle tearing
work that helped push me through heartache.
It was night now. Out the ports you could see
nothing. For six days we had rolled
between darkness and gray, a bitter cold dusk,
and I wanted it all to be worth it.
But we were overloaded. The captain
knew it. Our precious cargo was now
our lives. He gunned us full bore
toward the river's mouth, tempting the black
stomach of the Pacific.

It was four hours
before the storm eased. We had passed
the jetty into the river channel.
In place of the wash of waves,
the wind howled, piercing the thin gaps
around the hatches. Then, vanishing
like a shadow, the wind and rain was gone,
leaving us with the steady hum of engine
at half speed. The mate lay on his bunk
with a towel over his face, moaning.
I stood and went to the port window.
In the distance, scattered along
the river's edge, porchlights were lit.
Behind them black mountains.
I felt something inside me rocking back
and forth, a rhythm that knocked
against the smooth flow of the Columbia.
You would think I would be happy
to be in safe waters, but my hands shook.
The familiar lights of a saw mill
came into view and something else
arose in me. It carried the oily taste
of pain and memory. I opened the hatch,
clambered up the cold ladder to the wheelhouse.
The captain stood in a dull blue light.
The radar was still spinning.
"Better brace yourself," he said.
"There's a storm coming."
He smiled. The river was smooth obsidian.
He and the others -- they all knew
what awaited me.

Relocation

2008-12-30T14:43:00.000-08:00

He awoke coughing moss and river water
in a desert --
parched earth and dust,
crackling grass beneath his head.

The land stretched flat
to hazy mountains
pale as bleached corn.

How did I get here?

He sat up, his lungs
still moist. He could feel the years
of rain drying up, evaporating
in heat waves.

Like a hunger, his tissues ached
for the bone-chill of mountain mist.

NEA Literature Fellowship

2008-12-28T19:11:00.000-08:00

What a wonderful bonus to the year. I've recently been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in poetry for 2009. The award is for $25,000, which is a big boost to both me and my family. It will help put us in a better financial position and also pay for part of my planned trip to Russia.

Cindy's short story is short-listed for the Pushcart Prize!

2008-04-08T22:03:00.000-07:00

A big congratulations (!) to my wife, Cindy, whose story, "One Little Cigarette," (originally published in ZYZZYVA) was short-listed for the 2008 Pushcart Prize. She's published two stories and both of them have been short-listed. What an amazing record she's accruing.

My book is finally released!

2008-04-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

I received copies of my poetry collection, The Man I Was Supposed To Be, last Wednesday. It's surreal to hold it in my hands.

For more details, or to order the book, visit my Web site: http://www.johnstruloeff.com

Five Years in Iraq

2007-03-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/

Current Electronic Voting System in US Entirely Hack-able

2006-11-06T15:18:00.000-08:00

Please watch the documentary, "Hacking Democracy" (complete documentary).

I had read dozens of reports about the poor security of electronic voting machines, seen citizens across the US claiming errors and potential fraud, but after watching HBO’s new documentary, “Hacking Democracy,” I don’t see how it’s possible to trust our national voting system. If a voting machine could list -16,022 votes (that’s negative 16,022 votes) for Al Gore in Bush’s state of Florida during the 2000 election, the state where Gore lost by a very small margin, and we’re still using those same systems, we’ve got a serious problem. I consider this a national emergency. Yet we can all see what’s being done about it: nothing. Our election will come and pass tomorrow without anyone addressing this problem.

We’ve now reached a time in our country’s technologic history when massive voter fraud is highly possible – and as corrupt as politicians are, I would say that it’s highly probable. It’s stunning, really. And to see government officials not responding is very disturbing.

Read the documentary synopsis here, and please try to watch the documentary if you get the chance.

Five Nobel Laureates Back Minimum Wage Hike

2006-10-12T10:04:00.000-07:00

Read article.

My first job paid the then-current minimum wage of $3.35/hr. I was a gas station attendant, and the owner drove a luxury car and owned two nice homes. Even better, he only worked one day a week (and he certainly wasn’t pumping any gas). I worked over-time each week, and still there was no way I could have lived off that wage. Luckily, I was only 16 at the time and lived with my parents within bike-riding distance. I worked bid jobs (construction) after that with my father and made a lot more money, which gave me a taste of how a good wage could change my life options. By the time I got an hourly job again, I was in college, age 20, and the minimum wage was $4.25, which, of course, was what they paid me. School loans mounted. About five years later I had a full-time, permanent job working for the State of Nebraska, and they paid me more than double the minimum wage. Even though I only maintained liability insurance on my truck, rarely took trips, rented a cheap apartment, and rarely bought things for myself, I was still unable to keep my debts from growing each year.

I cannot imagine how the current minimum wage of $5.15 is reasonable to anyone but the greedy.

Turkish Writer Wins Nobel in Literature

2006-10-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

It was announced today that the writer Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Here’s a link to his Nobel page – there’s not much info now, but they should add more later.

Imagine the Power English Teachers Could Wield…

2006-10-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

On Thursday the Malaysian Minister of Culture, Arts, and Heritage said that fines would be levied (up to the equivalent of $271) for those who incorrectly use the national language (read article). I know that in the US we’ve recently had debates (again) about whether or not English should be our national language, but imagine if someone tried to levy fines. Poets would be in a pinch…so to speak. And just think of the power English teachers could wield in the classroom.

This is such an extreme case that a legitimate discussion is almost moot. But in my view, language must be fluid in order to evolve with society. Imagine if the English language had stalled in 1740 and we were not allowed to alter its use or add new vocabulary. What would we call the Internet? ‘The Ethereal Township of Small Knowledge Aqueducts’? Language is powerful, and I understand the fear people have when they see certain social orders changing, but a contemporary language cannot be corralled. We’ll see the proof of this as levies begin to sail in that nation across the sea.

One Way To Kill A Career

2006-10-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

No pun intended.

A city councilman in Charleston, SC recently reacted to a store robbery by stating that bad parents should be sterilized (read article). The robbery was conducted by minors, one only 9 years old. This councilman will have people coming down on him from around the country, and he’ll likely lose his position. How dare anyone suggest such a thing, right? But what’s interesting to me about this is how many people out there actually agree with him. Some of them might come at it via racism or classism – “get the ‘lesser’ people out of our society” – while others would just like to see incompetent or delinquent parents prevented from having more children. But really, is there a way to stop them in a ‘free’ society? I’ve heard of judges ordering men and women to not have any more kids – but I can only imagine this is a rare kind of judgment. And who’s to decide who should be prevented from having children, and based on what criteria? We’re free to have as many children as we’re physically capable. And this councilman suggesting a plan – it’s one way to shoot yourself in the foot professionally and not really get anything else accomplished except a few headlines.

I’m of the belief that people need to start having fewer kids in general – since our planet currently has over 6 billion people, which is more than what I think this planet can really handle in the long-run. But I certainly wouldn’t want to suggest sterilizing people. Not when I’m hoping to have a public career. Not in today’s reactionary world. Perhaps in about 40 years when we reach 12 billion people, then things will be a little different. Perhaps a paradigm shift will be in order then.

In the meantime, I think my wife and I will stick with….let’s see….um, ten kids. Yes, ten at the most. Seems like a nice round number.

Local San Francisco Blogger Jailed

2006-08-02T21:31:00.000-07:00

Bloggers beware. If you got video, you might receive a night-time knock at the door (see article).

Notice how more and more journalists are being jailed recently? Notice how Rove and Cheney aren’t even being charged (let alone jailed) for intentionally leaking classified information for malicious politcal purposes?

POETRY MOUNTAIN in Fully Swing

2006-07-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

POETRY MOUNTAIN is filling out -- the Literary Magazines page is longer than any other I’ve seen on the Web; thirty or so new author pages will be added in the next month; we’re getting regular hits every day, and each day, the numbers go up, so it’s all looking good.

It’s difficult, though, balancing this kind of Web site development with my daily writing and reading. Most days it’s fine….I dread the times, though, when I will have a cold or am out of town for a week. I need to figure out a chain of command for who gets the Football during those days. This is serious business, people. The site…must…not…go…down.

An example to make this clearer: Have any of you seen the TV show Lost? You know the computer they have to keep typing in the five special numbers every 108 minutes? It’s like that. Just a truly amazing weight that rests solely on my shoulders. A spectacularly amazing weight. I hope I can handle it.

Traveling to Work in the Morning Fog

2006-07-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

My father drove the winding, pre-dawn roads
each day, often alone in the fog, his natural hunter’s
eyes spotting wallets and purses along the road,
glistening wrenches, watches, and once a bank bag
full of cash. It took more than an hour to make it
to work and his keened eyes kept him awake,
kept him from ever getting in an accident,
even on the icy mountain curves above Clatskanie,
even on the black-ice river lowlands
near the Trojan nuclear power plant.
More times than he cared to recall,
he was the first upon an accident scene,
cars dead in the road, crosswise, steaming
in the dewy morning air, their metal faces
crumpled, fluids draining from under their chins.

He never talked about the drivers,
except for once when he told me the story
of how he parked and followed skid marks
down an embankment, through high yellowed grass,
slipping on wet earth and weeds
until he found a car, hissing against a tree, taillights on.
He peered in the driver’s window, the glass cool
enough to have fogged. His head…, he said.
Was he alive? I asked, blind to what he was offering me.
He looked into my eyes.

This story passes through me.

What Work Is

2006-07-12T22:54:00.000-07:00

(for Philip Levine)

In the warehouse
the dust was a haze at night,
hot and gritty in his eyes.
Left alone with a sleeping
forklift operator, he stood
beneath a two-and-a-half ton funnel,
the nozzle neck-high, full of seeds.
Their weight creaked the conveyor belt
as they flowed into the machinery—
the jostling of screens, the sifting,
the augers that could catch a sleeve
and draw your hand into corkscrew blades.
He stood in the musty shadows with
sound muffs sealed over his ears,
breathing-mask cinched around his nose and mouth,
a round white clock ticking his sanity
nailed to the wall in front of him.
Every thirty seconds he latched a sack
to the funnel mouth, dropped the lever,
listened to the rush of seeds swelling—
fifty pounds of it—then unhooked the sack,
lifted and dropped it onto a scale to scoop
in or toss out seeds to make weight,
pulled the heavy sewing machine down, ripped
the seam closed—how many seconds now?—
lifted the sack, turned, dropped it
into a square-pattern on a pallet,
punched it flat, wiped his brow, and turned back
for another. If thirty seconds broke,
seeds would spill over the funnel lip
and rain onto his head, making the dust
heavy as smoke--yet he couldn’t stop.
The machine wouldn’t allow it.
This was what work was that summer.
Eight hours, six nights a week, five-fifty an hour.
After shift, when dawn was blue ash
above the horizon, he rode his bike
eight miles home to a cold shower.
During the day he slept in a sweltering house,
waking up in sweat at dusk, dizzy,
bruised meat. He ate breakfast at the window
watching the sun set red and violent,
and at full dark he would ride out again.
On the seventh day, his muscles twitched.
It was the only day for the fibers of his being
to try to bond again, to become what could
be strong. He would lie in bed listening
in a half-dream. He thought of working
in an office, of driving a car to work,
of not standing beneath tons of seed.
But what he remembered most clearly
was a dream of swimming in the ocean
with a friend, the friend attacked by a shark,
thrashed about, screaming and pulled down
into a bloody swirl. All day he swam
toward shore, feeling a dark presence
beneath him, knowing at any moment
it could rise up and kill him.
He awoke knowing his life must change.

Reunion

2006-07-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

He steps from his parents’ home
beneath a blue Oregon sky. It is July.
Mosquitoes and bees swirl in the heavy air.
The maples and alders are in middle age,
halfway between buds and dead leaves.

He starts the rental car and rolls
down the driveway onto the roads
that were once his own—now old,
cracked blacktop, gray as ash. He
rumbles across bridges over streams

to stop at the main highway.
Cars pass through from Portland
to the coast: SUVs, new trucks, hybrids.
He waits to merge, one of these people,
somehow a tourist in his hometown.

The population is under two hundred now:
one store, two trailer parks, an abandoned
school, two churches, moss and weeds.
It sprouted a century ago, inseminated
by loggers, immigrants, and alcohol.

His family is immigrant. They
have remained while he has moved on.
He has emigrated to other landscapes,
among other people. Yet he still knows
the cashiers at WestMart, still knows

the bartender at Tom and Jerry’s tavern.
He can tell you the stories of giant cedars
that have fallen, show you places unmarked
where neighbors have died—his past
half murky, half clear as a reflection

in an old mill pond. Today he drives
to the river and walks on the sand
to the water’s edge, witnesses
what is carried through from Canada
and eastern Washington to the Pacific:

branches, old sturgeon, the green of fir forests.
Somehow a part of him has never left
this river’s shore. When the evening
cools and the sky turns shadowed blue,
he will be gone, cold and strange again.

Ann Coulter, Shame on You

2006-07-07T07:59:00.000-07:00

I thought one of the fundamentals of being a hateful Republican mouth-piece was maintaining the appearance of high values. Or maybe plagiarism (or, more precisely, theft) isn’t against the rules (see article)…Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot. It’s okay to pillage and burn (see earlier post). Nevermind.

The Buffett Plan

2006-07-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a 1999 article about Warren Buffett (Brilliant Careers: Warren Buffett). He was the second richest man on Earth in 1999, as he still is today. This was before he publicly announced he would begin giving away 85% of his fortune (currently valued at $44 billion) to specific charities (see recent article in Fortune: Warren Buffett gives away his fortune). He made another recent public shift as well: he has now formally pledged 4/5 of this money to The Gates Foundation, run by Bill Gates (the richest person in the world) and his wife, Melinda. In curious timing, Bill Gates recently announced he would be stepping down as the head of Microsoft to run their Foundation full-time. I wonder if any of this was brewing in their annual card games. The timing seems too neat to be coincidence. I’m sure later we’ll hear about how and when they came to these decisions together.

Not that I’ll ever be wealthy like these two men (probably not even within several orders of magnitude), but what they’re doing now is how I envisioned my dream-life playing out. I would work hard for a good portion of my adult life – making contributions to humanity along the way, helping people in the ways I could, and investing wisely – and then after my wealth had compounded for twenty-five or thirty years I would begin distributing it like these guys are. I wouldn’t be writing checks for $100, but for $100,000 or in the millions. This seems to be the right way to live (I’ll avoid a diatribe about current proposals to repeal the estate tax) – to take what you have and give back. After all, if I was in that kind of position, the world would have been good to me. Why hoard it all for myself and only pass it on to my children so they can hoard more?

And so we come to the notion of inheritance. One of the most curious aspects of this whole scenario is Buffett’s view about passing on wealth. First, he not only feels that the estate tax shouldn’t be repealed, but that it should be increased. How many billionaires or millionaires feel the same way? (Note: more than $500 million has been spent in the past year lobbying to repeal the estate tax, if that helps us understand what the rich think about this issue). I applaud him for this. You go, Buffett! We need to weaken this system where wealth gets trapped in the hands of the wealthy.

Second, he doesn’t want “trust fund children.” Wealth should go back into the system to fund new life, to give more people a chance and to avoid the elitism and complacency that often comes from inherited wealth. Tied in to this is his idea about passing on the leadership of his holding company to his children: he said this would be the same as choosing your next Olympic entrants by picking the children of gold medalists from ten or fifteen years ago.

The Buffett Plan. Will the Number Three richest man follow suit? (I know, I know, it's unhealthy to hope for too much...)

230 Years

2006-07-04T16:10:00.000-07:00

Seems like a long time. To me, anyway. To probably most of us here in the US. More than once I’ve heard someone from Germany or Russia talk about how young our country is. It’s often tied to the idea that we’ll peeter out soon enough, that some country like China or Japan, or one that we don’t even think about, will rise to economic dominance, and we’ll be a struggling country once again. Probably so, but I’m glad we’re strong now. With all of our urban violence, the massive prison populations here, the daily crimes, our destructive morals and habits – imagine if we were in a hard economic state, something like suburban France is seeing right now, what would it be like then? Just look at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to see a glimpse of what could happen.

But we’re strong now, and there’s still a chance of changing. Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a shift occurring – perhaps driven by the high gas prices, or by Al Gore’s new movie, or by the incredibly dysfunctional response to Hurricane Katrina, or the way we see ourselves portrayed around the world every time a family’s home is bombed in Iraq – but there seems to be a shift occurring in our sense of what we should do now. I hope so. I hope the concussion of 9/11 has finally worn off, and we can now see straight. This would require a change in our leadership, of course, toward a more humane, productive (not corporate production, but philanthropic production), giving spirit. If you want to think about Christ for a moment now, you’re free to. If not, then you can think about George Bush, and then hope for something better.

This country was founded on the idea of a democracy. Which means us. Which means we can get together and change things. By voting. By thinking and remembering.

Happy 4th, friends. Enjoy today, and try to make tomorrow even better.

The Descent of Heirs

2006-07-02T14:49:00.000-07:00

every person on Earth
descends from five popes
descended from one

millions of people
for every king
and thousands of nobodies

unrecorded by history
Edward III
(eighty percent of England)

history remembers him
whom they reproduced
Muhammad the founder of Islam

of every person in the Western world
genealogy runs through Muhammad
mired in the Dark Ages

yet another totally fictional character
(Queen Isabel, Christopher Columbus,
Hapsburg, Medici, Bourbon)

spreading the Mohammedan line
forty-three generations from Muhammad
you reach...

“The information in this AP news report
may not be published, broadcast,
or otherwise distributed.”

-----------------------------------------

[All lines of this poem were taken
chronologically
from the original version of this news article.]

1000 Rejections on the Wall

2006-06-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

….Nine-hundred ninety-eight magazine rejections on the wall, nine-hundred ninety-eight magazine rejections – tack this one up, cuss just a bit – nine-hundred ninety-nine magazine rejections on the wall….Nine-hundred ninety-nine magazine rejections on the wall, nine-hundred ninety-nine magazine rejections….

What a staggeringly pathetic landmark I have now stumbled upon. Of all the vistas where I get to plant my lawn chair for a while, I get this one. First I passed the age of thirty-three without dying as some kind of pariah, and now this.. I suppose it’s not too uncommon (you play the game, you take the hits), but still, still I gotta say, Hrumph….I imagine most people (to avoid the omnipresent Jaded Cloud that lurks near us writers) just don’t keep a close tally like this. At least a few magazines slipped in acceptances now and then (like Saturday, for instance – Thank you, Bret Lott!). At least I have that. (Like Steve Martin in The Jerk: “All I need is this remote control…And this chair. All I need is this remote control and this chair….Oh, and this ashtray. That’s all I need.” – Yeah, it’s like that.)

Seems like there should be a Hallmark card for this kind of occasion, don’t you think? (“Wish I could send you a dollar for every rejection you’ve received, but MY GOD, I got three kids and a wife to feed!) Maybe I should talk to their Ideas Department. Earn back a little bit of that hurt from years and years of rejection…maybe just a little tiny acceptance from our very rich friends at Hallmark.

And joy of joys, there was a tie for 1000th place: The Journal and Hotel Amerika. One can’t even spell the title of their magazine correctly, and the other one, well, just, pshaw, you know?

Breaking News: FOX News Found WMD in Iraq (!)

2006-06-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

Let’s check out the just-breaking news video of Republican Senator Rick Santorum making this important classified information public: Santorum Today on Fox News (click on the word 'Video')….

[What follows is the actual typed transcription of me watching this news clip:

John (in his pajamas on the couch): So there really were WMD in Iraq! Wow…I thought Bush and Cheney and those guys were lying. It seemed they had just killed more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians for nothing. How foolish I was for thinking such a thing. And this poor Senator had to fight so hard against his own Republican administration to be told about, and then sneak, these classified documents into the Fox newsroom….Hark, what did my ears just hear? They were old, degraded weapons from the Iran war? And they weren’t at all the kind of weapons on our massive checklist that we were seeking during our chicken-in-the-henhouse search of the whole country? Huh. That’s strange…Yeah, Hannity, that’s right: Why DID Santorum have to fight so hard to get copies of these classified Defense Department documents onto your news show? That seems unconstitutional or something, to withhold classified documents like that….Hey, wait a minute. Did he say classified? Let’s look again at the law regarding this kind of disclosure: The Law....Why, he oughta be jailed for that! They oughta take one of our Marine infantry squads, kick that newsroom door in, and give him the treatment Iraqi civilians have been getting to keep our oil flowing….Oh darn, I forgot. Bush won immunity for the Republicans in the last (2004) immunity challenge. Crap.]

Well, folks, yet another episode of misinformation to keep the ignorant portion of our pre-election population confused and rooting for a straw hero….

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-06-21T14:11:00.000-07:00

[Late addition: Gore 'UnScripted' about his new movie.]

Al Gore’s new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is a truly powerful, unsettling movie. It’s one of those movies that you watch, and your response is “my god, people need to see this.” The evidentiary support in the movie is broad-ranging, clear, and creates an argument that you would have to either be paid-off or mind-blowingly ignorant (take a deep breath before you contemplate our current government) to try to refute. On a visual level, some of the cinematography is just stunning. And Gore himself is different. If the man in this movie had been the man running for President in 2000, he would be in his second term right now and we would not be decimating (see the Webster's Dictionary for a reminder of what this word actually means) the country of Iraq. No doubt about it. This is not a dry documentary. If you care at all about the planet our children will inhabit, then this movie will be a very moving experience and will leave little doubt about the course we need to follow. If you don’t care….then I would hope this movie would change your mind.

On a related note: With the entire Republican leadership panning the movie and its assertions (that humans are rapidly damaging our world ecology) without even seeing it, doesn’t this give you a glimpse into their world-view? [Republican motto #1: ‘Stay blind, and pillage, boys!’] When they think about their grandchildren’s adult lives, they must choose to see a happy cartoon fantasy version of reality (not a Pixar version, of course). Either that or they just don’t care. I guess their rusty scales of Prudence will always tip towards money and oil profits, regardless of what is sitting on the other side of the scale. [Republican motto #2: ‘Remember: Proclaim the proper, invigorating Christian values – even though behind closed door we rarely actually follow those values – and we can pillage for centuries more, boys!’] At the very least, we should not have backed out of the Kyoto Protocol. As a people, we have the technology and desire to comply with the Protocol – the only reason we have not done so is that our current government leadership has chosen to maintain high energy-related profits and to keep those profits in select corporate hands, regardless of the consequence….Hey, you know? Maybe these fools will be re-elected! Wouldn’t that be great? [Republican motto #3: ‘Stay the course – and for God’s sake, ignore anything that looks like an iceberg! With the grace of God it will melt before it actually sinks us. Either that or it will strike after you and I have died. Then our children (those poor bastards) can figure out how to deal with it….’]

I wonder what other ways we can screw the highest number of people with the fewest number of decisions?

An Inconvenient Truth.

The Man I Was Supposed To Be

2006-06-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

“The Man I Was Supposed to Be” is the title of both my poetry collection and the center-piece poem of that collection. This center-piece poem has (finally!) made it into print. Rosebud Magazine published it a few weeks ago, and it’s now available in more than 1700 bookstores around the US. If you’re a poet seeking a good venue to place your work, you should consider sending to them. Their circulation is high, with broad exposure, and the poem will make it into print in less than a year. Their taste is eclectic, but they usually go for shorter material (this applies less to poems). Go to any Borders or Barnes & Noble, and unless they’re sold out, you can check out what the magazine looks like. The cover of the last issue was designed by Paul McCartney – what more do I have to say?

Evening Poem

2006-06-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

Oh, it’s too late again,
and I’m tired.
It’s Sunday—
the dog is barking
(as usual);
the mourning doves
are broo-whoo-ing
on the eaves;
children are laughing—
their voices echo
between our buildings—
and I ask myself (again):
Why is it so hard
to write every day?
Why does the day vanish
like sand through a funnel
before I set pen to paper?
Yet here I am—
a dedicated, patient
sand-counter under a lamp,
the day waning
to shadowed blue.

The Chinese Have Turned a Corner on Human Rights

2006-06-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

The government in China has finally come to its senses about capital punishment, suddenly becoming a pioneer in human rights. It only took one simple idea: Mobile Death Vans (see news article: China Makes Ultimate Punishment Mobile). No more messy rifle blasts to the head in public – that method causes too much economic damage to the country. Following in their progressive, capitalistic, corporate trend, they’ve found a new method of un-extending the lives of criminals: ‘quickly, clinically, and safely.’ A large van pulls up to your residence, all painted in smooth black and white with red and blue lights pulsing atop the cab. The ‘technicians’ get out, find you, lead you inside, and Bam! (as Emeril would say), you’ve just saved the country millions of dollars. In fact, according to the inventor of the Mobile Death Van, China “promotes human rights now.”

So how much are tickets to Beijing? I gotta get me a couple (not for me, of course – for a couple of my ‘friends’).

666

2006-06-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, so 666 may not be the number of the beast (see an interesting segment of the ‘number’ discussion here: Who Is 666?) It might be 810 or 806 or 616. But it’s probably 666. But maybe not.

Okays, so today is 6/6/06 – which actually translates to 6/6/2006, which isn’t quite 666, but maybe if we think about it long enough it will be. And this is all according to our current Julian calendar.

And there are some gung-ho folks in Michigan that just happen to live in a town called Hell who are preparing a special celebration today (see a mighty suspicious article: Town of Hell, Michigan, Heats Up For 666 Party).

So maybe today is the date that coincides with the number of the beast. Probably not, but maybe.

My question is this: What is George Bush going to do to make it SEEM like today is the day of the number of the beast? Because we all know (and there is no doubt about this) who GW is….

(You know, there is something odd-feeling about today. It almost feels like April Fool’s Day.)

'Roid Redemption

2006-05-29T21:16:00.000-07:00

So Barry Bonds beat the record yesterday (Sunday). How many more people were booing than cheering around the country simply because of the steroids scandal? ‘Roid redemption, I guess. His 715th homerun, slipping past Babe Ruth’s record by one. Will there be an asterisk by his notation in the log books?

My wife and I and two friends (plus their two-year-old daughter) went to the Giants vs. Rockies game the evening before. It was at AT&T Park (formerly known as SBC Park, formerly known as ???, and before that?) in downtown San Francisco. Our seats were high up behind the catcher – normally too high to really enjoy the game, but the view of the bay and the hills across near Oakland was amazing. Ships sat anchored in the cobalt-gray water with their tower lights ablaze. Thin streams of birds swooped the field and the stadium seats. In the seventh inning, the bases were loaded, with two outs, and Bonds came to bat. Everyone stood, cheering – the roar of more than forty thousand, enough that it made the sound almost inhuman. The sun was near setting, so the stadium was in dusk. When he swung his bat, flashes from cameras glittered like tiny stars from the field’s edge up to the roof. It seemed the perfect moment for history (albeit marred?) to take place. He hit a pop fly which was caught. The third out.

It was almost-history. The day before a real moment. I was there, could have been there. All at once.

After his pop fly was caught, many people walked to the aisles and left, leaving patches of empty seats around the stadium. But I wasn’t really tempted to leave. I enjoyed being up there next to my wife, looking out at the bay and the new lights pricking the hillside beyond, listening to the announcer calling the name of the next batter for the Rockies.

I Never Thought I'd Miss Nixon

2006-05-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

Today I was sitting behind a car on El Camino Real waiting for the light to turn green. The car had two bumper stickers:

“I never thought I’d miss Nixon”

“After we rebuild Iraq, can we rebuild our schools?”

I wanted to step out of my car, walk up to the driver’s window, shake his/her hand, and say ‘Thank you.” Because here we are. The glorious Bush nation. Isn’t it a sad state of affairs when we have a republican President who is acting in a far more dangerous and blatantly criminal way than Nixon, and the Republican Party is still strongly behind him?

The March 2006 cover article for Harper’s magazine (“The Case for Impeachment” by Lewis Lapham) laid down a strong case: he is a consistent and bold-faced liar; he regularly misleads the American people by distorting or leaving out key facts; fiscally he is running our country like a debt-oblivious teenager who has been given his first credit card (Wow, no credit limit!); he has recklessly changed our foreign policy to allow for ‘strike-first’ military attacks (which means this is now fair game for other countries to use against us); he is idly watching the price of oil and gas rise, benefiting his friends, family, and political supporters to the tune of billions of dollars; he lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, etc. etc. etc. I wish Bush would be impeached. I wish he would be investigated by as bulldog a Special Investigator as Kenneth Starr. But it won’t happen.

It still boggles my mind that Bush was re-elected in 2004. My faith in the common sense of the American people was seriously shaken by that election. What delusions were driving the people that voted for him? I talked with one person (who will remain anonymous), and she said it hinged solely on the issue of abortion. Bush was loudly and adamantly against it, and Kerry was less so. The economic state of our country, the corruption of this man and his friends, and the dangerous foreign policies he has implemented were a distant second to the issue of abortion. Perhaps this is the kind of thinking that re-elected the fool. What was that saying he stumbled over? “You fool me twice, uh…shame on you…uh, you fool me once….well, you just can’t fool the American people.” Good God, he did fool a good portion of our voting population.

Please, people. In the upcoming elections this year and in the 2008 Presidential and state elections, please think about what these government fools have done to our nation.

Days Gone By

2006-05-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

It’s odd – now that I’m on a fellowship, which is intended to free up my time, I feel busier than I did before the fellowship began. I guess that says something about my nature. I need to be doing and creating, keeping my mind active. A nomadic intellect. It’s inconceivable for me to survive any other way.

So it goes.

I’ve uploaded a test of my new combo online-lit-journal/poetry archive, and it looks good. I’ll post a link soon, when I actually register the web site. A few years back I built three or four web sites, but they’re poor quality – created with free download sitebuilder software – and now I’m using commercial programs. It’s more complicated, but the potential is clearly greater.

I want to do good things with that web site. I want to contribute to the work that Ted Kooser and others have begun and bring poetry even more consistently into our daily lives.

Story Line Press out of business?

2006-05-21T15:08:00.000-07:00

Their Web site stopped working several months ago, and I hope there isn't a problem. I read that they were going through financial difficulties a few years back, but they've kept publishing. One particular concern I have relates to their poetry book competition, which I entered. They're a solid press, and so I hope they haven't went the way of Zoo Press (which turned out to be a total scam in which I lost more than $100, thanks to Neil Avezedo). Anyone know what's going on?