Journal

Waiting for Hot Water

It’s a lap swimming ritual
at the end of the swim
to stand in the showers naked
with the guys, waiting for hot water
to find its way to the end of the pipe.
Hands held in the cold stream–
sometimes we turn on two shower heads
thinking that will hurry the process.
We stand like ancient aborigines around a fire,
and soap up when heat arrives.

 

Frank Babcock, poet, is a retired middle school teacher and owner of Marys Peak Bamboo. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He has maintained an interest in poetry all of his adult life and writes poetry because it feels wonderful to do so; he likes sharing what goes on in his silly mind. He is married, the father of many, and currently enjoys twelve grandchildren.

The Poet Shops For A Used Sportscar

“Not red,” I tell the salesman. “Not black.” He
hesitates, mumbles. My best defense, certainty.
“White.” No overtones of middle-age regrets or false
illusions. They almost always come
sheathed in a dark gloss of power
or glowing crimson, candy apple,
fire. The one before us molten lava,
scarcely still, though standing here
inside the lines on asphalt.

For experience, I circle the radiant hulk,
eyes critical and hard, bend to examine
a scratch low on the front. This is not the place
for dreamers, no space here
for metaphor. Following advice
of men who know a thing or two about combustion,
crank shafts, timing belts, I stoop to look for leaks
and rust. I run my fingers over tires
to probe for misalignment, until I stop at something
soft and feathered, a great moth clinging
to black tread, grey ghost waiting for the night.

I scoop him up. Wings spread, a flash
of rosey stripes. The waiting salesman
taps his polished shoe and waves me
to the driver’s seat. I turn my back and kneel
to brush my hand under the bumper
of a nearby truck where my rescue climbs
to fold its crimson once again
into a silvered sliver and rests there
in the shadows
plain and tight as prayer.

 

Quetico in the Moonlight

The roof of the tent is almost stained-glass,
a diffusion of shadows, ghosts
of pines beyond the netted window

standing their black watch
against the western crescent’s
silvery spread and stars’

bright net above. Silence,
punctuated by a soft lap of lake
on rocks and a flat plunk–

something slapping water. Close.
Then, far off, wails, calls
like the voices of lost lovers, roll

across the surface of everything. You
could believe it a dream conjured
in the half-light of your city apartment

to be tossed away into the dawn
were it not for the hum of tiny wings
beating against the screen beside your face,

or the small sting on your neck.
A buzz, while off in the dark another slap
resounds as beaver go about pushing

logs to the stream. A breeze
brushes soft branches
into a rush of whispers,

and the loons’ distant moans and yodels
echo on, as you know they will,
long after you return home.

 

Louise Barden is a prize-winning poet, recognized this summer by Calyx Press for the Lois Cranston Memorial Prize for Poetry.  She previously won the North Carolina Writers’ Network chapbook contest (for Tea Leaves), and the Southwest Review’s 2017 Marr Prize (finalist). Her poems have been published in Chattahoochee Review, Timberline, and elsewhere. She has recently been lured from North Carolina to Oregon by grandchildren.

Alice Martin-Kunkle was one of several potters who gathered to load, cut wood, and then stoke the anagama kiln in Willamina. (See Back Page for more details.) She is a prize-winning northwest clay artist and photographer whose work is currently represented in the ISEA (experimental art) now showing at the Newport Visual Arts Center. Alice Martin Clay Studio (FB), ETSY, and For ArtSake Gallery in Newport are a few of the places where you might find more of her work.

The Worst It Got

A couple of summers I did temp work,
Manpower, Barret Services, between teaching jobs.
It was the eighties and I was in my thirties.

The warehouse was huge and the sump
at the center of a large concrete floor
half a gridiron wide.
There were big turbine engines in one part
and great rolls of metal rope along the walls.
Long canals ran from four directions
into the corners of the sump,
ten feet deep.
On the bottom was a pool of muck and sludge—
oils and fluids and old cruddy cardboard.

We stood there and looked down,
the two of us, the other temp guy and I,
and then climbed down the metal ladder
into it
with plastic buckets and shovels,
rubber boots on our feet.
It took most of the day to scrape and scoop
and slop up
the grime.
At three in the afternoon we were on our knees
with rags cleaning out corners.
Then, though, both of us stood up
and took the afternoon break.
He lit a cigarette and said he didn’t care
if the whole place
blew up.

The walls of the sump were dark and grey
with long drippings of crude the color of crap
and we could see above us metal struts
and the corrugated fiberglass of the roof
where the day was sealed in sickly green.
We could hear the trembles and huffs
of engines and big doors clanging closed.

I didn’t care either and thought if
I keep getting jobs
like this
I’ll probably start smoking too.

It wouldn’t matter what brand,
just light a match
and burn.

 

Writing a Knife

–after Robert Bringhurst   

I want this poem to be sharp
as a knife, a hunting knife,
the kind I used to hone
with a whetstone and spit.
It will be so sharp I can shave
with it, using cold water
from a mountain stream
to wet my face. The scrape
of the knife will sound
like two stones struck together
to start a fire, the kind
that cleanses.

I want this poem to cut
the sadness from your heart,
to hunt all day in the forests
of grief, sniffing the air, staying
downwind, stepping carefully
among the dead leaves.
I want it to cut along
the tissue between the
good flesh and the bruise.
It knows what to pack out
and what to leave for death
to use—coyotes and wolves,
the vultures’ helical hunger.

A good poem knows
its way around the flesh
where the heart has hidden
its pain. Let it track down
that pain and slice it out.

Here it is, the pain
in the poem’s hands.

Go now and wash
the blood from the blade.

 

Toward an Ordinary Mythology of the Sparrow

Creating gods is something that human beings have always done.
— Karen Armstrong, A History of God

When speaking of the ordinary, sparrows come
to mind and so the ordinary can seem like a gift
when it sifts into the honeysuckle and chirps
like joy. It seems so wildly ordinary this thing
this ordinary bird flocks and flutters in
little swiftnesses. It seems, as well, so simple.

But the markings of sparrows are vivid
and complicated and there are dozens of kinds:
swamp sparrow, sage sparrow, lark sparrow,
white-throated, black-throated, and golden-
crowned sparrow, fox, vesper and song sparrow.

This suggests something extraordinary–
diversity, variety, complexity, by god.
One sees, since every sparrow is different,
that nothing is, really, ever ordinary,
which is an arrangement, a setting
of threads, a ranking, a framing, a choice.

I am reminded of an old saying, Where there is
veneration even a dog’s tooth emits light.
The same may be said of the simple sparrow.
There is a god of smallnesses, a god of sparrows,
a god so ordinary he happens in the honeysuckle.

 

Tim Barnes, a poet and scholar who lives in Portland, is author of Definitions for a Lost Language, editor of Friends of William Stafford: A Journal and Newsletter for Poets and Poetry, and co-editor of Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood.

See Beyond the Missing Leaves

There is a dead dear rotting hollow out back
beyond the bleached white bones of a birch.

He was a friend of ours.
Chameleons on this same path, this Highway 61.

At the loss of the petals we may wonder
of the magnolia and of ourselves,

and of the chrome horses
of which we’ve heard Dylan speak,

and of the new neighbors, the strangers,
who just moved in years ago,

and if by grace we shall ever see
beyond the missing leaves our souls underneath.

And this morning the birds speak without words
about the arrival of spring.

But,
are we listening?

 

Joe Bisicchia writes of our shared dynamic. An Honorable Mention recipient for the Fernando Rielo XXXII World Prize for Mystical Poetry, his works have appeared in Punch Drunk Press, The Wax Paper, the Inflectionist  Review  and numerous other publications. His website is www.JoeBisicchia.com

A Vision of Colleen

No longer a fish in an inland lake,
impatient to be born in the vigilant room,
Colleen blurts into the doctor’s waiting hands
bird-bright and wary.

Her skin’s fine translucence
exposes the ruddy blood beneath
pulsing with secret calmness
as if saying, “See how relevant I am.”

In this exact moment Colleen, miniature bride,
marries the harsh air. Arms flung wide, she startles—
then impossibly—reconciled to the expansion,
anchors to the full weight of gravity.

I will never forget bending down to see
the vision of her pansy face,

I imagine panné velvet, perfume,
white chocolate and tulle ballet costumes.

Her miraculous compendium of cell after cell,
an embryonic construction
transformed into limbs, fingers and toes,
the arch of her fine foot, a graceful arabesque.

She is herself as independent
of her mother as her mother is of me—
complete and individual.

And I am reminded of an old photograph—
my eight year old grandmother, in a time,
two centuries removed from the one we are in now,
draped across her gray-haired father’s knee,

both she and Colleen, breathing angels,
and beauty, beauty, beauty.

Dale Champlin is an Oregon poet with an MFA in painting and photography. She has authored a book, Doggerel; twelve dogs and one cat (2017), and a chapbook, Twisted Furniture (2017). She is the 2017 editor of Verseweavers (the OPA anthology) and co-director of Conversations with Writers. Her work has been published in Social Justice Poetry, VoiceCatcher, and North Coast Squid, and is soon to be published in Moments Before Midnight.