Sylvia Beach Hotel, Newport, Oregon, May 20th, 2011
http://www.sylviabeachhotel.com/

One of my regrets would be that I will never again have the pleasure of sneaking into a cafe, any cafe I like, sitting down and diving into my world and no one knowing what I am doing and no one bothering about me and being totally anonymous, that was fantastic.
J. K. ROWLING, BBC News, Jul. 17, 2005

Looking for meaning we are interrupted
by a small girl asking four basic questions
dancing on and off the chair opposite.

Two tables over her father feeds baby brother.
What are you eating? she asks first.
Quiche, I say. Made of eggs. Like a pie.

Clock? she says, tapping my watch.
Yes indeed it has a small clock face.
What's that? moving closer, touching

Stopping by to see the Smith River
it's been awhile we both lay down
put our heads together and talked
the current state of affairs running
right through our toes fingers hair
till I grew silent but she babbled on
incessant with no punctuation no
pause to her stream of consciousness
unless you call that beautiful laughing
water dancing marks of exclamation

The paws twitch
the fleas itch
can you imagine the vast reaches
the ridges the gulches the long lashes
not to mention the wilderness of the tail
where follicle to follicle and strand to strand
through the dense fur of the seeing eye dog on
her side how the opportunistic flea
makes its way in that clawtooth ingrown
toenail sort of way that ectoskeletal inside
out dastardly impish trollish out

The road to Foster's place is 2.4 miles 8 minutes with traffic. But he's not there anymore. He's here. One of the things I wanted to do while passing through Eugene was look up David Foster, emeritus professor of art at U of O, because of his influence in my life. I remember visiting David on my way back from taking the professional knowledge test in Portland, just after moving here from England. I was the first person at Southern Oregon offered this quick method of proving you were qualified to teach. They weren't set up for the test in Ashland yet, so I had to drive the six hours north. Now I'm hesitating because I can't remember how it turned out we went to breakfast together...

My God! My God! Has it always been so?
Walking to the kitchen for a drink of water
and coming back with fish tagine leftovers.
Take the other day. I went down to the fenceline
swearing under my breath I'd get that rooster.
Every morning the call to prayers at four dark
by that feathered tin trumpeter in the guava.
How many times I stood clear of his backside
hands on my hips like my old grandmother
muttering promises to cut his scratchy warbling
and dismantle the acoustic tunnel that amplifies
his broken serenade right up to our own bedroom window

That fierce wild cry in the night
arriving only now in earshot from another time
a time to abandon everything we have gathered around us

and embrace the shadows like lovers seeking forgiveness
a time to walk away from the fire with the promise entrusted
and speak it to another wall a ship-lap tongue and groove array

of knots and grains that make us weep for the forest of childhood
no time to think here no time to hold on or let go this time
there is no pillow to turn into no soft escape that will muffle

How Many Miles to the Border

How close to the other and his chaos
dusty roads and slogans marked
in stones against the barren hills

The line is there I know the wet line
of the river the deep line that pulls
you in as you swim from what you

are to what you think you really want
the weather too stops on that spot
the clouds too big to get through checkpoints

Dirt Dirt

Dirt dirt give me the dirt
the scoops the shovels.
How about in spades or
trowels? Plowed under
or dug up. Come on

I know you're a mine
of information a veritable
quarry no a canyon
or is it a gulch? A hunch
of gulches. An arroyo
of Hey! Yo! Wassup?

She Definitely Gets Me Going

Otherwise I'd be staying
probably minding my own behavior
since there's enough of that to go
around and come back again
without going anywhere really

not so much a spinning of wheels
as a weaving and re-weaving
an undoing to delay completion
I suppose a waiting because they're
in the vestibule the concerned

Trash Mermaid

On the beach this
morning's murder
of crows. Rocking
their black numbers

where froth and turbulence
reveals food
wearing shells
crustacean clues

perhaps their group
deception is no crime
merely passion for
misleading information

LA VELITA NARANJITO

Her name was La Velita Rosalita Carmelita Celestina Naranjito and she was hand-picked to go far in this world. It could have been different. Nestled there in her dark leafy green bower, a beautiful cluster of white blossoms highlighting La Velita's graceful proportions, she watched with trembling apprehension the day the great shaking took her sisters and brothers from her life. That was the day people still call The Great Fall.

Does it ring? Maybe later in life
right inside deep in the inner
ear where you know this
is a very personal journey
all a-buzz at the late stages
and before? before that?
I don't know. Voices mumbling
in coffee shops between
the clinking of forks and
hissing of Gaggia machines

This is a reminder that on this day in that year
we all remember we did the unforgettable
a thing seared into our collective memories
like a blacksmith's mistake like rare
blue fin tuna over Mediterranean salad
without the olives a dark day a question
mark at the end of the jet stream that
embroiders our planet a day when all
wasn't enough to stop a catastrophe
when we stopped asking each other
are you okay?

Why is it we forgive the land
and not each other? Entire
countries shoved over several
feet and we call such disaster
natural and blame people

elected or hired to build say
nuclear reactors call them
irresponsible shame them
make them bow before the flag
as if that slack rectangle

Now in plexiglass like the Aztec skull
those crystalline nebulae spinning
in frozen suspended cranial reaches
atop a plinth in the Museum of Man
just off Piccadilly Street in the
Burlington Arcade now the journey
of pulp pressed against the screen
and pushed through the bleach to the
day's beginnings in the wide margins
of the writer's mind before breakfast

"As one should sue a star" — first line from Emily Dickinson

As one should sue a star
the air is liable when gray
and oceans absolutely wrong
when waves turn rogue and break the day

Night, too, can be so fickle, therefore
punishable by battery-operated light
But worse, delinquent rain that sulks
in passing clouds and will not fall

Even my big black truck's windshield wipers made music
while I peered through the smears at the lines on the mountain road

First they played Haydn's "Rider" and we tried to sit still
but applause broke out between movements and the cellist smiled

Next was tricky, Bartok's number five, arching dissonance
and spooky sounds of night mixed in with a melancholy or longing

At intermission, the retired bookseller said he liked the first one

First, Second and Third sit inside each other's skins
Like Russian dolls all varnished up with nowhere to go because they're already here

Whenever I see a butterfly taking a breather on the road
I know it's either warming up its wings or clutching onto that broken stone for a last look

Don't you love the lovemaking that goes on
Between mountains and clouds?

I don’t know what it is
about the vertical line
of the cat’s eye
how the world shrinks

into the frozen still-life
between running and readiness
breath fierce and calm
like sister and brother