at ruby's diner

 

He builds her a universe to remember

before taking off, moving her

water glass so many degrees from

the coffee cup they've agreed

to call the sun, letting the pepper be

the star that's left in the bottom
of the Dipper's bucket. The saltshaker
marks where he'll soon be standing

on his back porch measuring the distance

between how he lives and how he knows

he can’t—light years from where
he's traced her hand in his flight
journal. Let the rim of my plate be

the curve of your earth, he says. When

salt spills, new stars burn the sky.

 

 

 

 

*Ten Minute Watercolor Postcard by Nadine Hergenrider

 

*Poem previously published in Fifth Wednesday Journal

dotted lines

The road drops out from beneath us.

The wiper blades squeak and the radio lost all signal twenty miles ago. There are no vehicles on the road but ours and the occasional pickup hauling bales of hay. Up ahead-- thunderstorms and the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. The best way to get there is to follow the dotted lines on a map painted on the side of a brick building in the small mountain town you passed through sixty miles ago.

We stop a few miles shy of the wilderness. White-tailed fawns are playing in the meadows. We've been welcomed to tag along.

From this point on, we leave the map. No more dotted lines.

Inside the barn are shelves of birds nests, jaw bones, fossils, feathers and whatnot.

We don't want to leave.

when i say rock i mean story

On a tray on my desk, in a blue bowl on a shelf, on the steps of my front porch I have a collection of rocks. Some have come to me from friends: a bit of laced shale found on a hike in Japan, a black bit of lava from a point between Bolivia and Chile, an agate from my daughter's pocket, a triangle of sandstone carved on a sidewalk while waiting for a bus from my son.  Flint from Arkansas, a loon-shaped rock from the Poconos.

A stack of unskipped skipper rocks -- now, those are the rocks of poetry. The rocks are meant to be skipped across the water, but if I do that, I lose the rocks. Keeping them stacked on a shelf in my bedroom keeps the skippers from their one chance to skip. Oy.

I wanted to say rocks come to us when we aren't looking but sheesh! How corny is that? But still and all . . . every rock has its story and most rocks arrive without my asking them to show up. The rock in this photo came from a friend who has only met me a couple times and yet, she showed up at my house bearing the gift of two rocks. Both came to her when she wasn't looking. There she was, cooling her feet in a Colorado stream when all of a sudden she heard pick me, take me home, give me to Sherry.

The rocks in my house are abuzz with speculation about this new rock. (Notice how I am not mentioning the red and green glass? They are of an entirely different nature. Their story has yet to be told). New Rock is meant to be cracked open. What is its story, anyway?  Everyone who has come to my house has picked the rock up and rolled it in their hands. Enticing to consider what might be inside. Should we crack it open? And if we did, where exactly would the best point of entry be? If we pick the wrong spot, the rock will shatter and whatever is inside the rock will be ruined.  Pick the right point of entry and tadah, the insides will be revealed intact. Writers understand this.

green corn moon

Thumbing through Facebook today, I came across a post by a fellow poet linking a photo taken from the internet of the moon not too far west of where I live. The small news article mentioned the August full moon is the smallest, farthest full moon. I did not know that, but might have figured it out. As much as we poets do and do not write about the moon, it plays into our lives on a daily basis.

Two nights ago my sister called to visit. We had some unsolved world problems to sort through, analyse and solve. Not a problem -- we had some quiet evening hours available. I sat out on my deck and watched my pups keep watch over the bunnies hiding underneath my shed and  she sat at her kitchen table twenty miles away from me, looking out her window at her sheep pastures.

We could talk and solve problems until her flock of sheep became agitated. Sometimes they do that --just as my pups do. Unexplained agitation happens, we agreed. I asked her why she thought her sheep would get riled while we were talking. Check the moon she said. How can the moon tug on all the water in all our oceans and not tug on sheep and bears, coyotes and bobcats, husbands and tired children?

As we were talking, my Blackberry phone beeped. I had an incoming email from our brother (Hewhowaits) who live across the divide from us. He was on a moonlight ride and wanted to let us  know the animals were out in force. Bear, mule deer bucks, moose, elk and . . . as he snapped the photo -- a wolf pack howling at said moon.

None of us knew, though, that this August moon is known as the green corn moon until I read the Facebook comment today.

Photos by Hewhowaits O'Keefe

notes for a future poem

Between the Missouri River valley and Roger's Pass, the landscape is wide open. Framing the horizon are an assortment of buttes: Crested, Bird's Tail, Crown and Sullivan's. To the southwest you can make out the faint wagon trail of Mullan's Road, one of the first "roads" built between Montana and Washington.


How far can you see?

You can see the curve of our Earth. A friend once told me out here you realize we truly live on a planet.


We passed one other car in a forty-mile stretch and in that stretch of time, we passed one tree.




.....had I seen what I thought I saw?

Time passed. We reached the mountains and the lake that needed a canoe. We found shade and cool water. Relatives from three corners of the globe gathered along the shore. Someone brought the hamburgers, someone else forgot the buns.

I fell in love with my brother's grandson. (I might have to sneak a photo in here so you can fall in love, too.)

But all the while time passed, that tree stayed on my mind.

 I remembered the mile marker.

Returning home, everyone was filled with yawns. I volunteered to drive and because I drove, I gave myself permission to pull off a road with no shoulders.

Mother, Father, Daughter and Dog - they all tilted in their seats when  I parked the vehicle on a slope of crunchy prairie grass.




 No one wanted to hike back up the road with me. You know how it is, some things we experience alone.

the leavings

On the way to a small family reunion in the mountains between the east and west divide, my father shared his stories. I rode shotgun. Stage coaches once clipped along this very valley, did I know, my father asked. Any steep inclines or sharp turns were suspect for hidden stage coach robbers. The man who sat next to the driver carried a gun, making him the first target should the stage coach be robbed.

I tell you this and hope you feel the bumps in the road, feel the sway and the heat of the stage coach.

Actually we were traveling in my father's van to a reunion in which he would represent the last of his generation.

We drove through Sun River's valley. Nowadays we speak of landing sites when we think of river boats and water. I wanted to think, instead, of canoes and rowboats, ripples and sloshing water. He spoke instead of having recently learned that whereever boat met shore in the river's valley, people from the late 1800's referred to those spots as the leavings.

getting out

To someone I was saying for more than a little bit of time, I had been needing to get out of dodge. There I am, in the chrome's reflection, taking a photo of the Challenger that helped me.

I'm back now. I no longer feel I am in Dodge. More on that in a bit.

announcing

Between my day job and evening work, I have been writing for a marvelous company which specializes in serious non-fiction for Young Adults. I'm really pleased to have received my author copies in the mail last week of my second book for Morgan Reynolds Publishing, From China to America: The Story of Amy Tan. Click here to explore more of what this publishing company does for the minds of our teenaged students.

And what else?

I'm pleased to announce a new poetry journal, Untitled Country Review, edited by Scot Siegel. The second issue features a poem which resulted from my experience in helping a friend in the last hospice days of his father's life. Scot was wonderful to work with on some final editorial changes in the poem. I ended up with a stronger poem and I hope you'll click here to read it. I hope you can spend some time clicking on the Front Door tab to read the work of others as well.

And what else?

A flash piece in Sliver of Stone can be found here. I won't name any names, but the piece is biographical. Definitely click around in this issue as you'll find some strong poetry in there as well.

And coming up, I have recently finished recording two of my poems which will appear in the upcoming issue at Terrain.org.  This journal focuses on environmental subjects near and dear to me. I think it took me longer to record the two poems than it took me to write them. I'll post an announcement when the issue is released.

Ok, it's awkward to sound my own horn, but it's easy to sound the horn for these publications and publishers. How to type the sound? Woot woot!

still life portrait

He frowns at them as if
they were whiny patients
in an orthopedics’ waiting room,
masking their hopeful glances
each time a door opens:

the stoved-up pen, two weeks
of mail and the duct-taped T V
remote sitting on the kitchen table,
where he no longer spends any time
eating steak and baked potatoes.

Now it’s Hot Pockets with this week’s beer
special from the Kum n Go gas station
down the hill and around
the corner from where she’d ride
the bike they stored in the kitchen,
next to the table where she left
the note underneath the pen
now broken.



Previously published in Avatar Review.   Photo by William O'Keefe (my father).

in due time

We called our oldest brother Mr. Science when he wasn't around. We being my second brother and me. My second brother being Hewhodangledoverdams or Hewhotrades. Whatever we didn't know, our oldest brother taught us. Also (and this is an important distinction) whatever we knew, he had already taught us. 

Anytime the world baffled me, I could go to this oldest brother for clarification knowing I would later walk away feeling reassured. If he didn't know the answer, sometimes he made the answer up and sometimes he would remind me some things come to us after a little bit.

Now, he lives on the other side of the divide from me. We can reach each other anytime, but rarely  need to. We don't need to be in each other's space to feel connected, but yesterday I thought of him. I've been waiting for a decision from an important decision-making-place. This place tells me that a decision will be reached in due time.

What this meant and where did the term come from was just the sort of thing to discuss with the oldest brother.

In due time? My first attempt at googling the phrase got me this. It's a link to a hard rock album by the same name. Except the album used to be called something different. And except we should "note that some of these songs (from the original album) were not included in the official release of In Due Time, as they were replaced by other songs."

I love when redundacy comes to me without any effort on my part. And I enjoyed, too, considering the artwork on this album. It features a clock with Roman numerals. The 9 appears as an 11.

Just as I started my second google search for in due time, I received an email from this oldest brother with  photos from his last fishing trip. The title to the photo of him sleeping fishing: He Who Waits. 

missing: one rowboat, one dawn

1) Every canoe I've ever been in, I've tipped out of. This you should know before agreeing to canoe with me.

2) I have a Tug Boat Pilot's License, here.

3) The license is in my childhood nickname.

4) On the subject of nicknames, and in a decade a couple galaxies far away now, I talked some friends into assuming bitchin babe names when we were in certain eastern Montana bars. We picked names that would seem likely to be tooled on the back of a leather belt. I was Judy with a Y. And my neighbor lady first picked to be Margaret, not understanding how that was not a name one would see tooled onto the back of a leather belt. Eventually she picked Wanda with an A.  We learned enough about shooting pool to know any shot was legal as long as one foot was touching the floor.

5) There is an ongoing list in one of my journals that details activities that are also legal as long as one foot is touching the floor. Rowboating is not one of them.

6) It took some years but came the day when I met a man who spoke of hope being a rowboat in the dawn. He meant (I think) that one shouldn't wait for the dawn.

7) He might have meant that one should not wait for a rowboat.

8) I didn't wait.

9) Eventually, because I was not looking for one, I came across a rowboat. We climbed aboard, my daughter and I. There were no oars. The water sloshed. She sprawled out on the floor of the boat and listened to the slosh and ripple. I didn't. Not at the time. I had done so a few decades earlier, on a different lake, with a different man. In a different type of boat.

                   9a) She referred to the bottom of the boat as "the ground of the canoe"
                               9a sub1) My daughter is a writer but doesn't know it yet.
                   9b) I also have a son who, had he been there, would paddle the boat by hand.
                               9bsub1) He would coax all of us to taste the water.

10) It was a canoe (getting back to the end of item 9 before the subparts got carried away), and instead of a lake, we were on a pond at just about midnight, with paddles. We had snuck onto a farmer's stock pond. Eastern Montana, the middle of August, the height of heat.

11) Not every watercraft that comes with paddles is successful. I wanted to get wet, He wanted to stay dry.

12) See item # 1.

sorts

When out of sorts there are times I find myself in an obscure bookstore or along a river bank. Sometimes I rearrange the magnets on my fridge door.

Sometimes I find myself in line at the post office. Today I mailed a package at my favorite downtown (read that: old) post office. When I left, I realized I had a sheet of stamps in my hands. I have a book of Forever stamps at home and didn't need these. But now I have this sheet of stamps and now I'm back in sorts. 

list of other perspectives from this week:

* the bear scat found on my sister's sheep bridge.

* overhearing the lady in front of me at the post office talking about wearing her jury duty socks.

* a friend telling me he'd rather have real bees when he reads.

* the bag boy at the grocery store last night asking me if i still had any growing kids at home.

* reading a letter from an ex co-worker telling me his granddaughter is spoy old.

* knowing there is a row boat waiting in the dawn without oars.

* trying to remember who told me they were startled by blue.

* today is my parents' 57th wedding anniversary. both of them can still outwalk their grandkids.

notice

When I started taking photos, I was surprised at what I hadn't noticed before.

Between where I live and where I grew up, we have this attitude about there being nothing to see.We've made this trip so many times, we've seen whatever there is to see. 

I showed these photos to everyone who has made this road trip over and over and over. (Two hundred and twenty-one miles with two gas stations and four junctions.)

No one knew where any of these shots came from.

(Disclaimer: All these shots were on the go, through the window of a speeding vehicle.)

When we become involved in our surroundings, we realize there is more to be seen. More to consider. This happened to me when I started to write poetry a few years ago.  Now, when my ability to write poetry starts to falter I realize the reverse is true -- I've stopped participating with my surroundings.

A few years ago I accepted a (third, weekend) job to help my kids with college tuition. The job placed me in ranch supply stores where I taught potential customers about the science behind pet food nutrition. At first I was so caught up in enzymes, ash content and labelling laws that I didn't realize why so many customers were in the store and what their true needs were. They didn't need to hear me talk about the benefits of animal proteins and calcium ratios. Although I no longer have this job anymore, I cannot walk into any of these stores without seeing the customers differently.

Behind the Scenes of a Holistic Nutrition Demo

The man in last week’s flannel shirt sits his Aussie

near the hamster cage, steps outside for a smoke. Too poor,

I wonder, to buy the holistic nutrition I’m selling. Still,
we visit when he returns- his dog never breaking
point. Turns out he wrote the book I wish I could write,
lives with fame many others pray for.

I’ve seen blue eyes like his before- diluted
from living above the timber line, not enough light
in winter. It’s been seven years since his wife died,
her dog has not recovered. He drives down from his mountain
ranch each Sunday so Dixie can guard the Petko hamster cage.
There’s no more sheep left in their fields. Why bother,
is the message he writes in the book he leaves for me

at the counter. The trench coat lady in the rows
of cat food needs me to reach a bag of Meow Mix.
She can’t even lift five pounds, though she’s lost
one hundred and fifty in twelve months. Now
her stomach skin reaches to her knees, weighs
her down. She opens her coat to reveal the reason
she says she’d sooner die than live anymore like this.
But what would happen to Felix, she asks? We lock eyes
in aisle five. She says mine are warm and hazel. I tell her
hers are calico. She says it hurts to laugh anymore.
Please don’t make her try.

finding a way home for my mower

Next time I see this, this beauty will be mine. My brother traded five comic books for three of these sweet lawnmowers. A step back to a quieter time. I wish we had had a recording device with us when he first showed me all three on his front lawn because each of the roller mowers had their own throaty sound. I think my red number carried the  alto-tenor range.

I could have it with me right now, but at the time could not figure out a way to haul it 221 miles back to my own house. Getting it back home will be an adventure someday.

I like adventure.

                                                                                                           (literary proof I like adventure)

( more proof )

 

Hewhotrades and I like adventure and old stuff. If I trade my 1943 Red Deer wall calendar for a tank of gas in someone's pickup truck (by the way, did you know back in 1920 in Britain petrol was sold by chemists in tins?) perhaps I can find a way to get my push mower back home.

Here is some grass that is going to need mowing. It isn't mine. The photo isn't mine either, except it was taken by my camera, which means I retain 2/5ths ownership. 

And then this is the inside of the first chapter book I ever read silently to myself when I was seven. I own 5/5ths of  the book.   A neighbor down river from my childhood home gave my siblings and me hardcover books from her older childrens' library. Over the years in all the trading that's gone on within my family circle, this is one Old Stuff I won't part with. It's how my love for adventure began.  It's what convinced my oldest brother and me, back in the day,  to hang our second brother (Hewhotrades) (fka: Hewhodanglesoverthedam) over the edge of a dam to retreive ducks sucked up against the headgates.

her hope is still available

He told me hope is a rowboat waiting in the dawn

Su Blackwell

and thanks to michael for sharing this link:

coasting

Her ’47 Willy Jeep crests

every hill, every hill waving

alfalfa flags. Stout cottonwoods

from nineteen-oh-five still shelter

Nez Perce campsites in the bottom

land. Meadowlarks are whistling

at the prairie dogs. She finds

neutral, turns the motor off

long enough to listen -- 

her favorite of all chores.

bury

His mother was raised to follow the meander of a prairie creek and find the meadows where sheep once grazed last century. Some things could be taken from the earth. Agates from a river bank or six scoops from a shovel filled her bucket with worms traded at a crossroads gas station for a cheeseburger and a malt or sometimes a darning needle and new cotton batting for another quilt. 

In this way he came to follow the creases in the earth – the gullies and ravines leading to the river. Down river from the county dump he found abandoned appliances, gutted the copper lines and added them to the coils in the back of his father’s truck. After a month of riding the coulees, he could buy more books on his list: maybe an English/German dictionary or a used copy of Les Miserables.

He learned tracks were easier to find if he waited for the fields to burn. He found circles of rock, once --the remains of a teepee village.  Arrowheads, elk teeth and beaded buttons.  Stretched out on the prairie grass -- earth between his fingers, he imagined hearing buffalo parties heading out, the snap from a campfire, and hides stretched against the poles. How many books would these artifacts buy? He pressed his ear to the ground, then held still and listened.