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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (March 1, 2006)
HARD TO UG H BA BY P A G E 11 DRAWING BY MINUET MCCARTHY (AGE 5) Spirit is a hard tough baby A hard tough baby on a wild Friday night A hard tough baby in a swirling spiraling eddy of salacious storm A meld of pernicious ocean and Godless omnipresence if ever there was Spirit is a hard tough baby in January And a hard tough storm is slowly crucifying The 72-foot crab boat superstitiously named the Mary Kay After the Skipper’s fair-skinned wife with eyes as blue as a Norwegian fjord And a tower of dyed red hair as coifed as Marge Simpson's 72 feet of hard cold steel with slurry-charcoal paint and steel plate with middens of florescent-orange crab pots coiled as a paint-by-numbers portrait of the next sleepy port of call if only it was September with Indian summer skies. Not to be, as this denizen of rust and grunge and grime From a sink-full of greasy frying pans with yesterday’s sticky leftovers — And who the hell could eat this sluck, anyways Eat this sluck in this nasty ass-kicking devil's tantrum — And rust, grunge and grime all the way To a jet-black hold stacked plumb full of 35000 pounds of squirming Dungies A cloud of red squirming reptilian-like space creatures, fishermen called bugs With creaky joints and pin-black eyes Anointed by tons of salt-brined ocean water with deadly implications Rocking back and forth, rock and rolling like Elvis, Chuck or Jerry Lee A god's belly-full of frothy bottle-green water Rumbling back and forth, back and forth Throwing some kind of aqua temper tantrum While the Pacific Ocean thrashes its version Of a grand mal seizure Thrashes on a night in January when a Sou’wester Throttles this creaky hulk of steel and grunge, all 72 feet — Take all of me, why not take all of me Tosses it around that Harvard educated junky Standing dejectedly behind a power block Wishing he was back in the classroom Listening to Professor Whomever drone on about Plato, Keats or Shelly While really, really all he cared to study Was that Neutrogena-faced girl with long elegant gams When the moon was full but she never bothered to call Yes, he remembers chosen lines from Bob Dylan Twists them like mountains of Poly-Dac Wishing Dylan — not he — was sulking Behind the power winch And he — Mr. Harvard — was free-wheeling POETR. Y Spirit is a hard tough baby As he grabs crab pot after pot in 22-second, double-fisted grasps From sandy ocean floor littered with delinquent dreams and bones Not mine, he shouts. Damn it to hell, above the clatter of hard wind A shrill trumpet call as vindictive as his third wife, Celine Well, she had those almond-eyes the color of opals And she just happened to call Not my soul, he murmurs. You piece of aqueous garp...yes, well The ocean is a hard mistress. Hard. And Mr. Harvard yells above the maelstrom of storm Above a maelstrom of ocean storm on a dingy black night Three days and three nights, to be exact, without sleep or a hot meal, a crying game — Jesus Moon Baby with jet-black eyes and raven hair, stringy as boiled linguine He remembers her, number two On a blind January night with the moon down And he can’t get no satisfaction Spirit is a hard tough baby As the Mary Kay runs hard at the Columbia River Bar On a feral night in January when the weather report predicts 60 knot winds With overriding gusts to 80, and Mr. Weatherman — Yes, 20 years of college and they put you on the day shift — Or on the stern-end of this 72-foot slug bait tanker Hand-crafted in Seoul in 1985 for less than a buck an hour And Mr. Weatherman is off a full 15 on this no-mercy night with crab claws and pincers And the Skipper has no heart, has no heart Has no cash to make a six month bank payment on this Korean tub And the bank manager ain’t no friend with his Chamber of Commerce smile And his way too pretty wife who drives a Lexus with an automatic And all the Skipper's got is his beat-up one-ton '86 Ford Sad as a played out gravel pit Where he used to make his girlfriends on Friday night after football games Friday night — how can he forget As a 35-foot mastodon wave rakes the deck With all the hungry spite of a German pincer movement Friday night in January when the boys who made it home Won’t leave the Sea Hag Tavern Won't leave until little George summarily dismisses them all 60 minutes after last call And he ain’t so little, the stingy mean bastard, all 300 pounds of him. Take all of me But hell, rain races sideways down the lonely streets in Ilwaco And the boys haven’t even paid for Christmas yet And all nice girls are married or fast asleep Dreaming of long vacations in Hawaii With George Clooney as fawning scoutmaster Hawaii with blue cerulean skies and baby-blue seas and soft pillow clouds The kind Gainesborough painted on English heath in July And he didn’t carry no frigin’ umbrella Spirit is a hard tough baby As the Mary Kay tramps into a tobacco-brown sluice of trouble and storm On the Columbia River Bar in January Now rumbling into 40-foot snarl-faced combers Like the clarion call of a trumpet in the hands of the devil himself The devil high on pain killers and Bennies Oh, Mr. Harvard where did you go wrong Now a member of the fishermen’s pain fraternity A hard tough breed that feeds on punishment as noxious as lutefisk On a mean six-pack night in January when the moon is down and Spirit is a hard tough baby A hard tough baby A hard tough baby Driving the Columbia River Bar in January Hard tough baby DAVID CAMPICHE POEM FOR THE GOVERNMENT ‘JUST’ CHILDREN It was just children playing in the sand (accompanied by the narcotic scent of blooming lindens, don’t forget), just children, but after all the devil, and the minor gods, and even forgotten politicians, who'd broken all their promises, were also there and watched them with unending rapture. Who wouldn’t want to be a child — for the last time! I’m writing some poems for the government but I can’t talk about them now. I can’t talk at all. The writing has been going well, on schedule, and all expenses have been taken care of. I’m not at liberty to discuss the secretive nature of my work which demands that I write in silence and disgust and under an assumed name. My work for the government is not only confidential, it is gross, exquisite many lives hang in the balance. I'm also writing some poems that aren’t for the government, but now those seem about nothing at all. I don’t know where or how my poems will be used, but I want them to be fool ish and deadly. That I write in silence and seclusion and under this parasol, for the government my tiny son at my feet, makes me extremely poetic. I think of splashes and hear the poems I am writing in this paradise, one of which is really for you I include it in the government batch perhaps to better include you in our lives. -LOREN GOODMAN A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude We must admit there will be music despite everything We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come -ADAM ZAGAJEWSK! AFTER SCHOOL Here is a boy just out of school. Here is the same boy now at large. Here is the officer in charge Here is the bunker where they lie Here in the desert sere and dry Under the hot sun in the sky. There is the liar with his prattle Moving the boys around like cattle Listen, you’ll hear his saber rattle. There is the man who began this battle There is the coward who, when young, Raised his finger, stuck out his tongue At the flag, emptied his lung Of a hawker when the bell was rung, Calling the boys whom he stood among There’s the commander now in chief. There is the robber baron, the thief Wrapped in religion and his belief That this is his land, his personal feoff. The ship of State is upon the reef Here are the mothers lost in grief Here is the blood. Here is the oil. Here are bitterness and turmoil, Here the men and boys who were loyal; Here is death upon foreign soil — There is the man who believes he’s royal Handing out a cross, a star; "Here is a medal. There you are, Mrs. Jones Have a cigar. Be proud of your son. Tell him au revoir" "We thank you for the life you gave Which, it's too bad, we couldn’t save How sad that it wound up in this grave ” Here is a body in the sun. Here is a life that is undone Here is a boy just out of school. -JACK GILBERT -LEWIS TURCO