never ran this hard through the valley

never ate so many stars

I was carrying a dead deer
tied on to my neck and shoulders

deer legs hanging in front of me
heavy on my chest

people are not wanting
to let me in

door in the mountain
let me in

- jean valentine

hello.

in the men's room(s)

When I was young, I believed in intellectual conversation:
I thought the patterns we wove in stale smoke
floated off to the heaven of ideas.
To be certified worthy of high masculine discourse
like a potato on a grater I would rub on contempt,
suck snubs, wade proudly through the brown stuff on the floor.
They were talking of integrity and existential ennui
while the women ran out for six-packs and had abortions
in the kitchen and fed the children and were auctioned off.

Eventually of course I learned how their eyes perceived me:
when I bore to them cupped in my hands a new poem to nibble,
when I brought my aerial maps of Sartre or Marx,
they said, she is trying to attract our attention,
she is offering up her breasts and thighs.
I walked on eggs, their tremulous equal:
They saw a fish peddler, hawking in the street.

Now I get coarse when the abstract nouns start flashing.
I go out to the kitchen to talk cabbages and habits.
I try hard to remember to watch what people do.
Yes, keep your eyes on the hands, let the voice go buzzing.
Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat,
watch who they relieve themselves on, watch who they own.
The rest is decoration.

- marge piercy

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
So single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

-- mary oliver, the fourth sign of the zodiac

fence repair

What’s the matter with you today
sed John you and Jan fighting?
On no I said it’s not that
it’s a letter I got that’s bothering me.
Must be from the govament
or the insurance, I can understand that.
No, John, it’s not them this time
it’s from a friend.
Did he die or summin?
You aint sed a decent word all morning
I might as well be working by myself
and let you set on the nailkeg
unrolling barbwore

Oh dammit, John,
it’s just a letter that pissed me off,
I said. It’s from a writer who saw something I wrote
about coyotes killing sheep
and he wrote saying that never happens.
He sez what? sez John.
He said there’s no documented evidence
that a coyote ever killed a sheep
unless it was rabid, I said.
And he said my story was a lie
and should never have been written.
He’s a writer? sez John.
What does he write about?
Oh, he writes novels, I said.
Books about cowboys and Indians
and the California mountains.

He sez that sed John
did he? You know
most chickens I known of
is layers and most folks
I known is liars
and most of them don’t know the different
but that don’t get in the way
of their opinions.
It was a preacher
got his first call
to come to our town back home
his first sermon that everbody
showed up to hear
was how all people is good
it aint no such of a thing
as a bad person

he wasn’t in town half a year
before Travis Newberry
knocked up his daughter in the eighth grade
and he was twenty-four by then.
He’d started preaching late
after giving up on farming
and owning a grocery store
must of been too late
he run out of words after bout a year
we had to elect him to office
to give him something to do.
First thing he voted no taxes
and no pay raises to schoolteachers
so they all known he’d be a good one
mebbe governor some day
had to move him out
of the parsonage and into a house
where he had to pay rent
like real people
so they found him a place
out on the end of town
where they could be alone
with that pregnant girl
they took out of school.
It was skunks out there
a mama and four babies
and his wife and that girl
sez oh they’re purdy
let them alone we like them
so he did
by the time she had her baby
they’d killed all their chickens
the Easter ducks and the cats
it was mice and skunks
running all over that place
they couldn’t live there no more
so he run for state office

they sent that girl
off to Christian school
we never heard of her again
and tried to raise the baby boy
but couldn’t do that neither.
He got elected
to the campaign of no taxes
and close down the schools
cause he blamed it all
on Travis Newberry hanging around
the jr-high parking lot
and moved to the state capital
to live and before
they could rent that house again
they had to set out traps
for two months and rat poison
sed they got twenty-four skunks
but nobody counted the mice
it was awful
took a year for the smells
to go off and it wasn’t no hippies
back then to rent it to
they had to wait it out

so he run for Warshington office
six years later
and put the boy in the orphanage
up for adoption
he might of been a scandal
but he didn’t get elected
they made him a judge instead
after that and he’s rich
still there and being so famous
he don’t pay no rent
the state gave him a house
and a car and a maid

but that still don’t mean he known one damn thing
about people or skunks or mice
or preaching or farming or
running a grocery store.
I seen it with my own eyes
a coyote running through
a herd of sheep and killed nine lambs
just to do it
and we set up five nights
in our pickups waiting for him
until he come back
and he killed four more
before we shot him
and that’s nothing to what
Allen Dalley out to Summit lost
that one year when they say
coyotes got half his lamb crop
that’s just a bunch of bullshit
because he done one thing
don’t mean he knows nothing
about anothern
and if he doesn’t know
what he’s talking about
you tell him to just keep his mouth closed
or run for office
that’s what it’s there for
so why don’t you forget about it
and you can forget him too for now
let’s get to work
cause all this is real
not something in a book
and has to be got done for sure
not just by thinking about it
and if you don’t get that frown put in a drawer
this is gone be a long day of work

- david lee

I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling -- whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were —
it's green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,

whatever he says I'll do. 

                -- marie howe, my dead friends


I'm leaving my job at the opera. my last day is may 18, the day after closing night.

'you're not home, it's probably better'

I am calling to wish you well. I am calling because I want to
change something I said. A year ago you asked me three questions.
I thought you were asking my birthday wishes and answered all
wrong. If you remember (if I know you you’ll pretend you don’t)
I answered:

1) No, I have always been homely.
2) Yes. I believe you have always been too lovely for anyone to bear.
3) Silk. It is not always expensive, and it is impossible to tear.

It’s my birthday again and because I am cleverer now I can answer
you with more nerve. But because I am still me I am pitiless
enough to have your number and call you with this excuse to let
you know I am still alive (I won’t push it by telling you that I am
wonderful).

1) Yes. Thank you.
2) No. I found it a most repulsive photo.
3) Same. Though I don’t think of you, still it’s a near-perfect heat.
And so dear when ruined.

-- brenda shaughnessy

---

though it doesn't begin for another fifteen days, I have it on good authority that this next year of my life is going to be significantly better than the last.

high hopes

It wasn’t that they were so
high, exactly,
they were more
low-down,
close-to-the-ground,
I could rub them
the way you touch a cat
that rubs against your ankles
even if he isn’t yours.

So yes I feel lonely without them.
Now that I know the truth,
that I only dreamed someone liked me,
the cat has curled up in a bed of leaves
against the house and I still have to do
everything I had to do before
without a secret hum
inside.

-- naomi shihab nye

bravely forward, I said. I meant it, though the sentiment comes in flashes of motivation. in between, there are long slow blank spaces. I crawl between moments of conviction. the rain pours.

I really, really miss my friend.

'the summer day,' mary oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

"thanks," w.s. merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

even if I now saw you
only once,
I would long for you
through worlds,
worlds.

-- haiku, izumi shikibu

things right now feel almost impossible.

"watching television," marie howe

I didn't want to look at the huge white egg the mother spider dragged
along behind her, attached to her abdomen, held off the ground,

bigger than her own head--
and inside it: hundreds of baby spiders feeding off the nest,

and in what seemed like the next minute,
spinning their own webs quickly and crazily,

bumping into each other's and breaking them, then mending
and moving over, and soon they got it right:

each in his or her own circle and running around it.
And then they slept,

each in the center of a glistening thing: a red dot in ether.

Last night the moon was as big as a house at the end of the street,
a white frame house, and rising,

and I thought of a room it was shining in, right then,
a room I might live in and can't imagine yet.

And this morning, I thought of a place on the ocean where no one is,
no boat, no fish jumping,

just sunlight gleaming on the water, humps of water that hardly break.

I have argued bitterly with the man I love, and for two days
we haven't spoken.

We argued about one thing, but really it was another.
I keep finding myself standing by the front windows looking out at the
street

and the walk that leads to the front door of this building,
white, unbroken by footprints.

Anything I've ever tried to keep by force I've lost.

september

Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.

The night is so still that I forget to breathe.
The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.

Tonight there are people getting just what they need.

The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.
I remember you in a black and white photograph
taken this time of some years. You were leaning against
a half-shed tree, standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

Tonight, there are people who are so happy,
that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.

Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.
My hand trails in the water.
I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind.


-- jennifer michael hecht

the mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

-- philip larkin

"superbly situated," robert hershon

you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning-- a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things

i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed

and to be on the safe side i wouldn't mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed

how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it-- therefore i love you

part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses

just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i'll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them

but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight-- something that can't help being
in the right place at the right time-- come take your seat

we'll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve

100.

These journeys are quiet. They mark my days with adventure
too precious for anyone else to share, little gems
of darkness, the world going by, and my breath, and the road.

-- from run before dawn, william stafford

day 99

Our ancestors were farmers
they did their talking with their shoulder muscles
they got up at dawn and baked their brains
all day in forty-acre cornfields
they liked to listen to the singing of their bodies
blood set in motion, the hum of air
the virtues they most prized were
tenacity, endurance, raw physical energy
an unlimited capacity to absorb punishment
they could smell rain twenty miles away
they had the habit of gazing heavenward
as if what they most wanted to understand
would be coming from that direction and
what came never ceased to amaze them

-- not unlike the runner, joe david bellamy







day 99: a rough headwind, a distilled sunny sky, two dead deer on the side of the road. a stomachache. this penultimate day is bittersweet.

"Song," Frank O'Hara

Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?
I was thinking of you
having a Coke in the heat it was your face
I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian's
I was thinking of you
and down at the railroad tracks where the station
has mysteriously disappeared
I was thinking of you
as the bus pulled away in twilight
I was thinking of you
and right now

july 29

By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.

For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.

-- Jack Gilbert

today, my stepfather would have been 45. though we have learned how to get on without him, we miss him in ways large or small every day, each of us in our own separate fashion. me? I think of him every time I play softball, and feel especially proud when I win the weekly game ball (our MVP prize) -- which I did last week. I don't really believe in heaven, but on days when I have a good game, I hope that he can see me somehow, and know that I am thinking of all the summer afternoons spent playing catch in the front yard.

happy birthday, steve. we miss you.

a little bit of earth

I woke up dreaming my mother's garden—
fields in autumn, green turning gold,
grasses scythed down in the late, dark sun;
and here will be corn, she was saying, tomatoes,
flowers I never knew she loved.

I woke to a child climbing into my bed
—four-year-old girl of my sister's son—
hair like silk and the color of wheat
falling into her eyes, begging me to get up.

And in my mother's kitchen the strong light smelled of coffee
and autumn, in fact. In fact, my mother,
who hasn't gardened in twenty years, was taking a bath.
I heard her splashing through the walls. It was October;
the child came forward, one fresh egg cupped in her palm.

I woke up dreaming the harrowed fields,
sharp with stubble, my mother's lands.
She was already preparing for spring; she was already
stepping naked from the bath, away from grief—

a widow with work to do, weeds in the yard,
and the child calling softly to me, come on, come on, come on.

--waking elsewhere, cecelia woloch

Today I visited my new community garden plot. I've been on the waiting list for a year, which I don't feel so bad about because it turns out there are 1400 people on the waiting list.

1400.

The plot is a couple miles from here, nestled in an area of southeast Portland that's impossible a challenge to navigate because the streets start and stop randomly. You'll be driving down 57th and suddenly it dead-ends at a house and picks up again six blocks later. I lived in this neighborhood when I first moved to Portland and there were truly nights in the first few weeks where I would drive for two hours just trying to get back to the house.

I got lucky, because not only did I get a garden plot, I got a SHINY NEW garden plot. The garden is expanding this year and there's a new section with 23 new raised beds.



The plot is 20' x 20', which I just want to point out is bigger than the studio apartment I lived in during graduate school. (For real: the studio was 15' x 15'). I am SO EXCITED! I had a balcony garden for two years in my last apartment, and I got such joy from it. I already have a list of things to cultivate: tomatoes, peas, salad greens, cucumbers, kale, basil, chives, tomatillos, garlic, green onions. Sunflowers. Sweet peas.

It rained this morning, so I mistakenly thought it was a lousy day outside and therefore didn't step foot out the front door until 4 PM. In fact, it was the perfect temperature; a sweet, late-spring warmth. The opera season is over, and summer is coming. The sky glows faintly with the last of the day's light until well after 9 PM. My favorite time of year, while the days are still extending and extending; the flowers are still blooming, and summer is still a hopeful promise, a sweet singular taste.

sitting practice

On Saturday, I attended my first zen meditation practice. I first became interested in zen back in college, when I was voraciously reading the memoirs of Natalie Goldberg, whose life (both the writing and non-writing aspects of it) was and is profoundly affected by her zen practice. She talks often in her writing of the discomfort of zazen (sitting meditation), of struggling to quiet her mind while in meditation, and of the things she learned from her zen teacher, Katagiri Roshi.

At some point not long after I moved here, I searched for nearby zen centers. I was struggling with my writing (and still do) and I was curious to try it out. But I never pursued it; I was daunted by the unfamiliarity of it, and I was often too busy. Or made that excuse, at least.

I have thought of it on and off in the past few months -- enough to add it to my very small but growing list of things I'll do after my next birthday -- and last week I discovered that Dharma Rain was holding a free "Intro to Zen Meditation" workshop on Saturday afternoon. I often put free events on my calendar with good intentions, and then inevitably I talk myself out of them because I'm busy or the weather's too good/bad, or something else comes up. Or I chicken out. I very nearly stayed at the barn on Saturday (Cookie was being such a sweetheart), but I didn't. I showed up to the zendo 20 minutes early, and though I knew the workshop was being held in the nearby Dharma House, I hadn't written down the address. The DH is really a house, so although I walked up and down the street looking for it, I didn't have any luck. I figured I'd try the zendo, hoping to find a person or at least a sign to help me out. I strolled in only to realize I'd walked in on a silent group of Zen monks seated at a table. I froze and slowly retreated toward the door, feeling awkward and a little terrified, frantically reading the flyers on the bulletin board with hopes that something would direct me. A minute or so passed and one of the monks came quietly over and whispered, "Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for the intro to meditation workshop?" I whispered back. He nodded and directed me to step outside; he was barefoot and in robes, bald-headed. He had the kindest face. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Once outside, he pointed down the street to a nondescript house on the corner. "It's there, in the brown house," he said. "You can go right on in." He smiled.
I thanked him and apologized for interrupting. "It's really okay," he said, and clearly meant it; I believed him. Later I discovered that the monks were in the middle of a silent retreat. I felt simultaneously mortified and grateful for his kindness.

I walked down the street to the house, which was on the opposite side of the road. I was still 15 minutes early so I strolled to the corner before crossing the street; as I stood looking for traffic a woman with flaming red hair called from the house steps to me.
"Hello!" she said. "Yoo hoo!" She was smiling, so I waved. When I crossed the street she asked me if I was looking for the workshop.
"We got here at about the same time," she said, "so I figured you must be coming here too. Go on upstairs! I'll be in in a bit."

I won't bore you with the details, except to say that I was pleasantly surprised to discover a natural physical affinity for meditation: My de facto seated position, in yoga and elsewhere, is typically half lotus (which I find easier on my knees than normal indian-style). Apparently it's uncommon to find many people who are comfortable seated that way. By the end of our 20-minute meditation session -- with eyes open, did you know that? -- the backs of my legs were asleep but I was otherwise OK. I was fascinated to hear feedback from the other attendees, many of whom were fidgety and uncomfortable; some of them fretted to the teachers afterward. Was I breathing correctly? I was focused too much on my stomach muscles. These are people whose main stated goal was to stop being so anxious, to stop overthinking. I had not considered zen practice for that reason, because I viewed it as a religion rather than as an activity.

I did discover that many of the things I do unthinkingly in my daily life have predisposed me towards meditation; early in the session one of the two zen prefects teaching the class said that even after eight or nine years, she still has to remind herself, convince herself, that going to zazen practice will make her feel better. I understood entirely; I do the same thing with running. Running is so much like meditation for me in many ways, as is riding. Learning to push through discomfort; learning to turn off the nagging voice in your mind. I still need help with writing, though.

I may or may not attend zazen on Wednesday. I might ride my horse instead. Who can say. Have I mentioned I'm also reading the Tao Te Ching?

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

-- mary oliver