Oregon poet, Mark Thalman, helps us springboard into new guest writer features with four poems from Catching the Limit (© 2009, Bedbug Press – Fairweather Books), part of the Northwest Poetry Series. Thalman received his MFA from the University of Oregon, and has been teaching English in the public schools for 28 years. He’s also been a board member of the Portland Poetry Festival, a Poet-in-the-Schools for the Oregon Arts Foundation, and an Assistant Editor for the Northwest Review. His work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, CutBank, Many Mountains Moving, Pedestal Magazine, and Verse Daily, among others. The following poems appear with his permission.

EASTERN OREGON

Out here is miles from anywhere.
Coyotes, cattle, and sun become your companions.

Hills roll and fold, a sea of giant swells,
then flatten out, lay calm, in bleaching summer heat.

When evening unveils its stars,
life shrinks under the universe.

For centuries, Nez Perce came to trade for Columbia salmon,
then Pioneers snaked wagons down the Blue Mountains.

Even today, dust devils coil up,
and rivers cut deep gorges.

Sage grows low so wind can go where it wants–
whistling through wire fences.

[Previously published in Writers' Dojo]

AT THE CABIN: ODELL LAKE

Not having talked to anyone in a week,
I keep my voice in shape
by standing on the swing,
knees pumping, arms flexing ropes–
making the board go
back and forth,
higher and higher,
until I´ve got enough momentum
and become the metronome.

If I am off key or forget a lyric,
there is no one to hear it.
On a slight breeze, I sing to my favorite trees,
chipmunks scampering the wood pile,
the shy rabbit by the lake. I sing
through soft filtered light–
a couple of Elvis, a bunch of Beatles,
followed by some soul,
and a medley of rock n´ roll.

Firs, having stood for hundreds of years,
absorb my voice. When I stop
not much has changed.
The world is a little older, the planet
a little further through space.

[Previously published in Pedestal Magazine]

HIGHWAY TO THE COAST

Thick and green, the hills rise
on each other’s shoulders.
High ridges disappear in fog
make me wish I was born of water.

At the divide, I taste the cool ocean air,
the way a deer finds a salt lick,

and roller coaster down a narrow road
that does not believe in a straight line.

Blackberry vines
crawl through barbed wire fences.

Small towns occur like a whim.
As if in a coma, they merely survive.

I tune in the only station
and listen to country western.

Static gradually drowns the singer out.
Rounding a corner, he pops to the surface

for another breath,
simply to sink back still singing.

Fir shadows lace the road.
Bracken cascades embankments.

At the next curve, a farmhouse is half finished–
boards weathered raw. Chickens roost in a gutted Chevy.

Scattered among these hills, families
rely on small private lumber mills,

the disability or unemployment check,
the killing of an out of season elk.

[First appeared in Caffeine Destiny]

NORTH UMPQUA, SUMMER RUN

Wading thigh-deep,
I cast a fly
which I tied last winter,
and let it drift
below the riffle.

There, a steelhead lies,
weighing the current,
balancing in one place,
the mouth slowly working
open and closed.

While eyes that have never known sleep
signal the body to rise,
slide steadily forward,
shadow flickering
over mossy stones.

In a smooth flash of motion,
deft as a blade, the fish strikes
and the surface explodes.

Trembling violently in air,
amid spray and foam,
the steelhead blazes like a mirror catching sun,
falls back, extinguishing the fire,
only to lift again,
a flame out of water.

In a long meteoric arc,
cutting a vee across the surface,
the fish unable to dislodge the hook,
dashes instinctively down stream.

Zigzagging back and forth,
fight the current and line,
it is only a matter of time,
until this miracle of energy
rests on its side,
gills flaring.

She’s fat with roe,
so I work the barb out
and let her go
on her journey
from which
there is no escape.

[Previously published by Gin Bender Poetry Review; later appeared in Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon, Ooligan Press, Portland State University)

–

Thalman will be part of a panel discussion on Oregon poetry during the upcoming Summer Solstice Poetry Weekend, coordinated by Eleanor Berry. The discussion takes place on Saturday, June 26th, from 1:30 – 3:30 in the Stayton Public Library meeting room in Stayton, Oregon. On Sunday the 27th, from 3-5 p.m., Thalman will be among the events featured readers at the Stayton Friends of the Library Used Bookstore.

Read another of Thalman’s poems here.

–

Hanna Neuschwander is a Portland writer and editor with roots that extend to the Northwest, Southwest, Northeast, and Canada. Her non-fiction articles about Portland’s artisan coffee and food world have been published in Willamette Week, Barista Magazine, and Portland Monthly. She works at Lewis & Clark, where she is the editorial director of Democracy & Education, a journal for people who can’t think of two more important things.

HOW UNWORRIED I AM ABOUT NEXT WEEK

Skip a rock across the meridian
Fold the state of California in half, and this day
By nightfall I’ll have crossed over
Drinking whiskey at the Coronado
Watching pelicans teach their young
to slide into the envelope of a wave
There will be sun in San Diego
And my brother’s newest pair of $400 shoes

Nora Robertson writes fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays, which have appeared in such publications as Redactions, Alimentum, Monkeybicycle, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, Plazm and Portland Monthly. She is a contributing editor to the New Oregon Arts & Letters webjournal and is the producer and writer of the New Oregon Interview Series. Her recipe poem, “How to Boil an Egg” (below), was nominated by Redactions for the 2007 Pushcart Prize. Her performance work has been showcased in Portland in the Enteractive Language Festival, the Public Works series curated by 2 Gyrlz Performative Art, Phase One: Words + Music; Performance Works Northwest’s Alembic Series in the five-woman show Housebound, and in Tiffany Lee Brown’s site-based installation Play Me at JAW 2008 at Portland Center Stage. She lives in Portland, Oregon and works for the Portland Public Schools.

© by Nora Robertson. All rights reserved.

HOW TO BOIL AN EGG
Targhaz Interiors

1. First, you have to not think about a lot of things. The passage through the vaginal canal of the hen, the feminine parts clinging to and pushing forward the papery shell enclosing a thin membrane around the possibility of a future chicken. Maybe you had one of those experiences, like at a natural history museum or working at a diner, where you may have had the privilege to see the blood spot. Some people never recover. The taste always reminds them.

2. The kind of pan with the special core that conducts heat all over is best. Allow the tap to rush frigid and breathless. The water will need salt. Have you heard about the slaves of Targhaz who dug out chunks of grey-white salt in sub-Saharan holes, dry as their salt-block homes sucking water from their bones as they slept? Foremen only lasted two weeks. Faces rotated through like the burning yolk-yellow round of sun overhead. And what about that snake god of Ghana asking for lovely virgin bottoms, rigid and headless? I imagine I am that girl, pinioned, winner of a local beauty contest. While I’m waiting, it happens that blood drips down my inner thigh, red as hibiscus, spoiling the meat. There’s no warrior to rescue me. I have to rescue myself through biology.

3. Boil all this with the egg, seven minutes at least. If you’re hard-boiled, you’ll like it plain with a little salt and pepper. Sometimes, it’s easier that way. There are many ways to devil your egg, with blood-flecks of pimiento or the rendered fat of a hen. My grandmother used to make hundreds of these in the late 60’s for what they called entertaining. In a bone-white house with tilework shimmering milky light off the walls, she laid them out in rows on gleaming platters. My mother came into the kitchen once in the middle of the night and found her peeling eggs. Her body was bent over as she was sobbing. My mother remembers the feel of her shuddering when she rushed to hug her, the streams of salt water running down between their faces.

(previously published in Redactions)
–

MY HUSBAND AS SENSITIVE INSTRUMENT

1. Delicate, quivering, he watches TV with the sound turned down low. If he had antennae, they would be curved and lightly furred. The best insects for Yucatan tacos are jumiles with their strong mint flavor. The first step is to locate the jumiles, to slide your hands between the flat of rocks and pull out the thing you want, its tiny legs scrambling against your palm. The Maya would eat an honored sacrificed one afterwards, wasting nothing of the god-flesh. It’s not that they thought they could predict time, just inhabit it more fully.

2. When two of our good friends decided to sleep with another two of our good friends and the one who was my old girlhood pal like hips rotating out of the same socket bucked up the nerve to tell me about it, he already knew. You can keep the jumile alive almost indefinitely in the crevices of a leather bag as long as you feed it the right mixture of leaves and grass. The Maya would strip the god costume off the carcass and prepare the honored sacrificed one for the coals. They thought each moment had a personality and that by careful observation, you could know which way the wind was blowing, what was dangerous and safe.

3. When it is the right time, crush the jumiles in a stone mortar, volcanic. Grind in a little chile, salt, tomatoe. The mixture will become soupy, corpuscular, time to fleck it with green of chopped cilantro and punch it with lime. The summer I drove in circles across the hot body of the country like an arrow returning to its bow, my husband already knew why. But it’s easy to tell when you’re lying, he said. Maybe no one was ever paying attention before.

4. Ladle the jumile mixture across just-made tortillas sent from a cupped kneading hand onto the griddle to the plate. It goes well with strips of meat leftover from barbeque, with fermented maize. I had allowed someone else to run the flat of his hand across my back the same way I later ran it across my husband’s, like brushing fingertips across a harp, across the steely inner strings of a piano. Rib stacked above rib, shuddering with wet.

(previously published in Alimentum Journal)

–

Stanley Fisher has been a writer working in advertising for 30-years. His plans to become a teacher after college took a detour just before graduating when his team won a statewide advertising contest and Fisher won a job writing for a top radio station in Portland, Oregon. His work in “persuasion, coercion, and propaganda” has earned a national Telly award for creative excellence in cable TV advertising. Fisher’s Simple Pleasures essay project continues and those who’d like to respond to the same request that started the project: “Tell me your simple pleasure, and why it’s meaningful to you,” are invited to do so by emailing Fisher at Stanley.fisher@aSimplePleasureAday.com.

NOTE: Stanley Fisher went off and joined those cotton clouds at the end of January, 2009. We miss him down here on earth and think of him whenever the sun breaks through.

Blue skies.

With those two words the heart lightens, troubles ease and imagination expands to hold half of heaven. If only we could have blue skies all the time. For much of the year you can, if you enjoy living in deserts of sand, or ice.

It’s not the blue sky itself that lightens some things and expands others; too much blue sky causes oxidation, wilt, sunburn. It’s the way the sky changes out of winter’s grey flannel into a new spring suit, or when it removes its rain clouds like taking off a broad-brimmed hat to show me its sunniest smile. And when that beautiful face is accessorized with a necklace and earrings made from huge clouds white as cotton puffs, I fall in love with the sky all over again.

My home state, Oregon, is a place immensely proud of its mythology and despite the pressures of truth and the inquiries of outsiders, meteorologists, and other doubters, we strive to preserve it. One of our greatest myths is that it rains here all the time. Another is that if you live here, you will grow webbed feet.

Truth is: the rain myth does not apply to the eastern two-thirds of the state. That Oregon is semi-arid high desert, a family secret of sorts hidden behind the slogan, “Cool Green Vacationland,” pressed into license plate frames and printed on travel brochures from the state’s department of propaganda and myth preservation.

But here in western Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the most populous part of the state, just ask anyone: it is oddly wet and blue skies are oddly rare. Cars don’t wear out here, they rust. And people don’t really get fat here they just absorb the atmospheric moisture and swell.

I have cousins in southern California; they wash their cars a lot. They like not having to think much about blue skies, they take them for granted. In Oregon we take grey skies for granted. We like not having to think much about washing cars; we know it’s going to rain.

When you’re a child you spend a lot of time looking down at the ground, at bugs and worms and things; and a lot of time looking up at clouds shaped like ships that turn into sharks that turn into ice cream sundaes. And in the middle of your life you spend a lot of time looking straight ahead.

Grey days and mid-life are much the same, a lot of looking straight ahead, cloudy with a chance of drizzle, not much momo to look up. Then it happens: one of those rare days to see ice cream sundaes in the clouds, one of those days to get wrapped in the embrace of bliss. The temperature draws me outside and my blue sky, home from some sunnier escape, presents herself bejeweled with cotton-puff clouds.

Rare days like that cover me like the lopsided boyhood tents built with sheets borrowed long ago from mom’s linen closet. Over cords strung from the top of dad’s favorite chair to a handle on the opposite cabinet hung a miniature sky of cotton percale and beneath it new worlds came and went.

Rare days like that nudge me off the course of myself and my own little world and my own brief life and make me look up and recall ships and sharks and connect with things greater. Whether it’s those fantastic scenes imagined beneath living room tents or today’s expansive reality, the effect is still the same. Calm hues, brilliant highlights, and soft shadows wash over me in currents that gather up troubles, fears, worries—and for a moment—sweep them away.

When one of those cotton puffs floats between the sun and I and day’s brightness suddenly darkens, it is the drawing shut of an eyelid in the sky. Heaven is winking. Someone, something, out there, seems to think I’m still worth flirting with.

Some tell stories about their “out-of-body” experiences. I’ve never had one of those but every time blue skies brush aside the usual grey backdrop and cotton-puff clouds distract me from the usual forward gaze, there’s an “out-of-me” experience that never lasts quite as long as I’d like. But as it departs it always does so cordially with a quiet promise of coming again another day.

And as real life reasserts itself I return to wherever I was before getting nudged off course; a little happier, a little saner and a little more certain it’s possible to face whatever troubles there may be by looking up at blue skies and cotton-puff clouds.

John C. Morrison’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including the Seattle Review, the Cimarron Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Most recently, he directed the Writers in the Schools program for Literary Arts or Oregon, and currently teaches poetry at Washington State University, Vancouver. His first full-length collection of poems, Heaven of the Moment, is a finalist in the 2008 Oregon Book Awards for poetry, and three of the poems below (“Evening Dress,” “My Neighbor’s Dog,” and “Spinoza and the Morning”) are included in the collection.

Evening Dress

for my son

One day the sky will open,
promise, like there’s a zipper
invisible from our side. One

long zip from zenith,
where cirrus clouds curve
mare tail strands, down

to the horizon, green peaks
of distant spruce trees. What’s next?
What’s behind? No, it’s not

a giant pant fly, God’s prick
ready to douse our world, his infinite
love and patience at end. No.

Promise. The sleek zipper
belongs to the back of a long
dress. From sweet wisps at cool nape

down to dimple a tip of the tongue
above the buttocks. While everyone
goes about their day in cars,

on sidewalks, in dusty offices,
all beholden to a dull script,
you will see what to reach for

as the dress slips off into evening,
into darkness. Promise. Close your eyes,
draw her close, breathe stars.

My Neighbor’s Dog

Better for me had my neighbor died
before we began to drink out our nights
at a table stained with red wine:
his eyes, two tight circular syllogisms,
two eight balls rolled back black and white
into his head. The old philosopher
who named his dog Being. Capital B,
Being. His colleagues at every
university struggle with phantom
answers. Professor Tiederman dismisses
them as alchemists and names Being,
discovers Being becoming, Being,
which wasn’t and now is, Being
born in a litter of nine retrievers.

And the world, roundly, makes too much sense,
like looking in your rearview
after a long day at the end
of a long, straight street to see
slow traffic laid out behind you:
braided silver glinting wet
in the sunlight through clouds. You say
how wonderful to sit still beside
a black van pumping country rock
at an interminable stoplight
and then be here: woven in the bright braid,
and then be here. Being is like that,
halfway in my tipped garbage can
one minute; the next, shredding
in his bird-soft mouth my copy
of the daily Oregonian.

I’m home Sunday, ignoring my headache
from La Salles, ignoring the sticky smell
of Chianti in my sinuses, the smell
of Tiederman’s tedious chatter,
his illicit flurries while his wife,
sweet Janice, sits home warming her feet
under the belly of Being,

Being. Ignore it all because my son
shouldn’t see his old man drunk
or marred by wine. Better for him to play
street football unencumbered while I rake leaves
and the leavings of Being, lean
against the sweetgum and watch his team
huddle for a second down call.
Read the lips on my son, the light receiver,
he’s telling Tiederman’s boy Lewis,
that foul-mouthed shit, Throw it to me
on a fly pattern. Bent over at their hips,
the five study the line my son
draws on his dirty palm, a crisp line
up the gutter to the Hubner’s driveway.
The quarterback Lewis, always the arbiter
of cruel mediocrity, says
loudly enough for Being to hear
and howl out back, Fuck you. Everyone
goes short. Listen to him, son. Listen
hard. Listen to Being scratch at the fence gate.

Spinoza and the Morning

The surgeon knotted sutures one step
too slow to seal the net of vessels
oozing around his heart. Mother

rocked, framed by a window
shining on the penultimate hour.
Stunned, stuck like the late night

was clear pitch, I watched the dark
for sign of morning. Young, at school
I’d write for philosophy and push up

from the kitchen chair to step outside,
breathe, and see the strange stars
spun to us from the other hemisphere

and return with less time to Spinoza,
the lens grinder who taught relentless trust.
By morning when I packed my papers

in my bag and started toward campus,
I was drunk on exhaustion and his axiom
that we are God thinking. So let God learn regret.

A few years later at work, the other janitor
and I scrubbed floors, toilets, grime inside
light fixtures so close to sunrise, he insisted

we have the light find us facing west
and the great Sacramento Valley.
The streets were empty as we drove, reckless,

balancing large paper cups of dark beer
through the dim. We outlived our folly.
Spinoza wouldn’t survive the glass dust

that lacerated his lungs. Dad,
bloated by another four liters of saline,
another twenty pounds of pressure to give his heart

traction, ceased, and three of us, quiet
as dust in the room, struggled to remember
how day begins. Those years before

out of the car and up the rocky hill’s dirt path,
my friend and I turned to see
already it was bright morning across the river

in the towns of Fruto and Chrome. We stood
in the shadow of the Sierra
watching the wall of light careen our way,

emblazing pools of distant rice fields
and the deep green of almond orchards.
Faster than thought, light swept toward us,

claiming creek and stones, onto us
and over us, a wind from heaven to warm
our backs, lay our shadows in the grass.

Our Brother the Rain

More than ascribes to
more than holds to
more than maintains
the rain
the rain insists.
We go quiet
mortified
even ashamed for the rain
who pushes
pushes the point
that was never really in question
that was only ever a friendly call
for clarification
and we were all
more than completely clear
a cloudburst back
a silvery syllogism long ago
and at that moment
the rain had a point
well-made
well-put
a bon-mot
well-taken
and now a point long since
conceded
one the rain made first softly
deliberately but gently
then with increasing vigor
until we have no choice
but admit the mania
of our brother the rain
who will finish by weeping
our brother the rain
who blusters toward torrential
deaf to our deep hush.

Last Work

For my strain of cancer, after
surgery, radiation was perfunctory,
a mopping up of the most likely dead
and gone. Unless a car or some other great
stroke of dark luck took me,
I’d live through my youth to have
a few amber years to shuffle

on the sidewalk, an old man
in the luscious summer shade. But what
about the already elderly men around
the waiting room like around

a campfire, ringed by forest-green drapes,
the quiet eerie as the secret heart
of a temple? We would arrive
at the clinic in street clothes and emerge
from behind the cloth wall to join
the circle in a faded but sterile gown.

In conversation, they were
always onto a project, new circuitry
for the basement, laying a slab
of smooth concrete. Each man

had a bit better than 50/50
and in one sentence I’ll teach you
about both odds and faith:
Within a year half would rise
glorified, the rest would remain

on our planet with me but have
a clean garage, the mower slick-
oiled and blade-sharp, and be ready
for a lonely, languorous recovery.

Jack Lorts is a retired educator, living in small town eastern Oregon, and a poet publishing in little mags as well as a recent chapbook, The Daughter Poems & Others, by Pudding House Press.

The party at Ralph’s
was the party at Ralph’s
(he was in Europe, Bora Bora
or some such on a Fullbright).
Everyone from the Project was there.
Bobbi, who was house-sitting for Ralph,
said     What the hell

Come on over     If Ralph were here
he’d ask you
(he’s in Tibet or Tahiti
on a Guggenheim or some such).

A barrel of cheap wine was passed
cold pizza
and the usual solutions
to the world’s problems.
Vince, Herb and I
    watched the game on TV.

The party at Ralph’s
was the party at Ralph’s.
Thanks, Ralph,
wherever you are!

Rhiannon Lewis-Stephenson, traveler, poet, writer, cynic, romantic, and a bit of a freak, a student (as of now) of institutionalized learnings in Humboldt, trying to move to Portland or Seattle.

Beatrice’s mind was art gone wrong, a weathered collage that had been peeling loose ever since he left her. She had led a separate life from me since the beginning, but I couldn’t mind, her innocence prevailed her. I would watch her strange rituals sometimes, her compact self completely still in the warm dirt of our garden with the bees kissing her crimson flowered t-shirt as though she sweated honey. The buzzing did not affect her in the least bit; she would close her eyes like she was listening to symphonies played by Beethoven; the music of the bees surrounding her. They were the heroes of the flowers, their rites so engraved in their communities of marigolds, daffodils, and penny royal, absorbed past distraction. Their work was thorough, gentle, and without selfishness, and I could only believe that I would have not known these simple details of the bees if it was not for Beatrice’s unprejudiced sight. So I loved her, because she took me past the judgment I had held against their stingers, and let me lose myself in their strength.

Some days I found Beatrice in her hole of sadness, having fallen too far in for even the bees. On these days, I would tell her stories of my days in college, still only a sophomore, my two years of college hardly making it a well-known experience; but I knew enough of the bustle and hum of paperwork to feel pain from it. I would explain my hatred of all the endless reference papers I constantly had to cite, the glances and the gossip. I knew that she didn’t care but I felt that one does as one can. Whether she listened to me or not, it doesn’t matter now, but I realize that I could have, and should have, tried harder. She received no one but me when she fell in such a state, and then, in these moments, we were friends.

Beatrice spoke to me less than any person I knew, but in those few words she taught me more than anyone had. “In which that you despise, you love.” Her advice would echo constantly in my head, the little sentences, the strings of poetry she spoke like the trickle of a mother’s breast. The effect of her dark redwood eyes would leave me lost, feeling as though I had been passed through a different place, one unknown to my chosen state.

When she would speak, her lashes would flicker, a half lit lamp. It’s my soul, she would tell me, it has been halfway blown out. Only then would I choose to leave because it was then that the good time would end, the quiet would enter the room, her head would bow down, and the smiles would grow fewer. Her guilt, she engulfed herself inside of it, its hungry belly eating her up until I would feel as though I did not know her.

At times when she was well, I would imagine that maybe she would take me away, her gypsy talk would light me up inside and make the wildflowers look a lot brighter; for she threw reality away like it was naught but a piece of scratch paper:

“We’re the whole thing, Damien, we walk with those who did not burn the witch, we advise those who lose themselves inside these cities. You’re only a part of me, as I can only be that part of your imagination, so I sing to you and you play me guitar. Those who tell of riches and your box houses, they’re the stingers on the bees, the venom in the snake. For whose life are they to judge? Our roads we take are dust-scattered and there the fires burn. You cannot be accepted because you look through glass windows and you do not see where the villain went, but you question why the hero’s heart was broken.”

It would be nonsense speech, and the people who would visit her would leave telling me, “She is definitely not quite right, Damien. Except for her beauty, there is nothing here for you anymore. You are passing your point of common sense, boy, it’s time to quit.”

They would offer me full paid jobs in which I could write my stories whenever I wanted to, in beautiful sites of green grass and oaks, but I could only refuse and think of who’s really all right in the real world.

Beatrice never spoke to me of him, but I knew he was there always, behind her lilted speech, I could feel the hurt inside of her. His bus had come and gone, and he had gotten off a long time ago, but she still held the ticket in her right pocket. Some nights I would find her sitting near the telephone, her wild eyes blank and sad. These moments I would feel the bees inside me bursting to come free and the jab of their precious stingers against my heart, for her love was never mine, and my love was always hers.