Güd wrtr

Let me say goodbye today.
Let me wish you well on your journey

before I get all teary and full of
would coulda shouldas

as we do when people we love
suddenly shove off for any

number of reasons. Or people
we don’t love in particular,

some we perhaps don’t know
well but we see often enough

that they feel like semi-
permanent fixtures in our

current existence. The older
Asian man at the gas station

who routinely bows when he
accepts my cash from behind

the counter. Susan, who cuts my
hair, or Eric, the pedicure guy,

who gives the best foot and
calf massage. The young woman

whose name I don’t know who
bags my groceries with engineer-

like precision. Former students,
thousands of them, whose names

have fled, but whose faces, some
of them, I recall—you in that seat

over there—who listened and wrote
things that I read and graded.

I hope I was kind. This human or
that one I pass on a walk,

especially the ones pushing
strollers with tiny mammals

inside, or those walking dogs,
sometimes equally tiny mammals,

often larger ones. I appreciate
the smiles, the wags. We are all

heading down the same path.
No one gets out alive. We’re

not meant to. But should you
head off into mystery before

I do, whether or not I remember
your name, let me say that

sharing this space with you—
one of the fixed stars in my

daily orbit—has been a gift,
whether I was bright enough

to recognize it or not.
So let me say goodbye.

Let me say thank you.

•••

For All Souls day, thinking of all the souls of our
companion spirits, the dear departed.

I don’t like to, but…
Oh, why not?

But first I gotta math,
and I don’t math,
so what’s 356 times 2?

I calculator, though,
so… 712?

That’s, well, not
nearly as many as
some poets who’ve
put up their verses
daily for many years.

But as of today, this is
my 713th daily poem.
Two years!

And as another
everyday poet I greatly
admire says,

They don’t have to be good.
They just have to be done.

And if you think they’re
not good enough,
lower your standards.

It’s the practice that counts,
the not holding back,
just lettin’ ’em emerge,
not thinking about anything

but getting the words
on the page before they fly off,
as they can so easily do,
into some other

lucky poet’s head.

•••

Thanks to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer for her terrific example of her
many years of daily poems and the encouragement to others like me.

For Sweet Adelines, it’s all about
the show, and there they are,
the whole chorus, every woman
costumed for Halloween,

singing their hearts out, Mom
in her witch’s hat pointing
skyward, her plastic crooked nose
hanging from black glassless frames.

Kiss today goodbye,
the sweetness and the sorrow.
Wish me luck, the same to you,
but I can’t regret what I did for love…

She cannot stand unaided, her
hands on the walker’s rubber grips,
eyes forward, seeing so little,
but singing her heart out:

Look, my eyes are dry—
the gift was ours to borrow.
It’s as if we always knew, and
I won’t forget what I did for love…

She sang at three performances
last week, blending her baritone
with other women who feel like
like family—barbershoppers all,

harmonizing the world with a song,
ringing chords with such heart
it makes me weep halfway across
the large room. She lives for this.

Gone—
love is never gone,
As we travel on,
love’s what we’ll remember…

As long as she’s singing, she’s here,
enveloped by those who’ve slipped
into that great chorus in the heavens,
dear faces she envisions, voices she

still hears from the days when she
stood shoulder to shoulder with
her dearest friends who together
harmonized the world with a song.

Kiss today goodbye,
and point me toward tomorrow…

No matter how many tomorrows,
each day quickly turning into
another yesterday, may she join
them in song here or there.

Love’s what we’ll remember, indeed.

You, more recently in my life,
never knew him, but let me
show him to you:

Here he is, dark hair shot with
early white, hunching slightly
over the kitchen counter,
chopping onions, carrots,
something, making things,
making food. For me.

There he is—well, his long legs—
sticking out from under
the old Porsche he’s restoring,
and when I ask if he’d like
a sandwich, he says no,
“But a beer would be great.”

He makes his own, though he’s
an equal-opportunity kinda
guy. Any beer will do.

“Hang onto it,” he says.
“I’ll be done here in a bit.”

And I wait to see him slide out
feet first on the roll-y thingie
he uses under cars, the former
Coast Guard mechanic, forever
tinkering,

if not with an engine,
then at the table saw
figuring out how to make
the Arts and Crafts-style
recliner he saw in a catalog,

or lugging home grapes
in autumn, ready for mashing,
for fermenting, for wine to come,
or boiling hops on the kitchen
stove, the aroma filling the
whole house.

My heart still sees him there.

We know that the timeline of grief,
of each mourning for specific beloveds,
does not fit on a graph or chart, certainly
is not linear. And, after all this time,
it is far from fresh, his absence.

But you didn’t get a chance to know him.
You would’ve liked him, I think.

There he is now—kneeling by
the mower in the back yard,
tinkering, checking, raising his
head to find me across the grass,
flashing his wide grin,

as happy to see me
as I am him.

•••

Today is the 40^th anniversary of Cliff Polland’s “valve job,” as he called it, the replacement of his aortic valve, which gave him another 17 years of life.

She who made us two,
we are now three
of the four who used to be.

He, gone these two decades,
who taught her to skim over water
on first two, then one, ski,

and, after we came along,
they put us in the boat
he made with his father

and, after nudging us through
every Red Cross swimming level,
put us on skis behind the boat, too.

His boat still sits in the garage,
which we all still think of as
his, waiting.

One day, we two will put
that boat in that lake
across the road from

the house where they
raised us, and one last time
we will put the two of them

together in the water
that baptized us all.
Amen.

on to the next
in to the breach
unto the horizon
just out of reach

over to the side
in view of the sea
nearby lies you
next to lies me

between or betwixt
because of, you say
under or over
apart from the fray

during & after
alongside we go
amid all the laughter
around, to & fro

before you, just me
after you, we two
until the end, even beyond
together we do

•••

Remembering that a preposition, as some folks like to say, is anything a cat can do,
they’re also little connecting words that show direction, usually used before a noun or
pronoun. You’ll find a lot of them in this poem because I love me some prepositions!
Once a grammar teacher…

We fear what we can’t see,
but none of us can see
what’s on the other side.

We’re not even convinced
that there is another side,
which frightens us all the more.

This can’t be it, can it?
We want so much more—
more time, more space,

more freedom, more money,
more love—always more love.
Even though we’ve had lots,

more than our fair share,
some might say. Doesn’t matter.
Everything we want is right here,

and that other side… if it exists…
well, that’s where faith come in.
But I don’t believe, you say.

And we say,
You don’t have to.
All you have to do is love

the best you can.
The best kind of faith,
the truest prayer.

Hold tight to love in your
sweaty little hand, in your
trusting, steady heart.

And, we promise,
all will be well.

Though these fish have never traveled
this far up their home waters,

they are making their way upriver
now after their long journey from

the sea where they will deposit
their precious cargo of the next

generation in a place their ancestors
swam more than a century ago.

The salmon remember.

Chinook again migrate up the mighty
Klamath River where four dams

once blocked their return,
manmade concrete barriers taken

down bit by bit after decades of urging
by the peoples of the land who knew

them best. The fish, guided by instinct,
cannot know the names of

the Yurok, the Karuk, the Shasta,
the Klamath and the Hoopa Valley,

their land-based human champions,
their sisters and brothers.

But the salmon remember the way
embedded deep in their DNA,

and, as if receiving a coded message,
they have arrived; they have

come home to complete the cycle
of spawning and dying, of birthing

so much more than offspring—
a legacy of hope fulfilled,

of future generations that they,
like us, will never see.

•••

On Oct. 16, 2024, biologists with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW)
spotted Chinook salmon above the former site of the J.C. Boyle Dam in the Upper Klamath River. They’re the first salmon in the region since 1912.

The dam was one of four that had blocked the salmon’s migration between the Klamath Basin and the Pacific Ocean. Each of those dams was recently deconstructed in the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, which has restored the river to its natural, free-flowing state.

(With appreciation to, among many others, the late Steve Thompson for his work on this salmon restoration project.)

•••

(Top) Woman with salmon / Artist: Tamara Adams

“Poem”: meaning “a made thing”
—poet Pádraig Ó Tuama

From poesis in Greek—making—
the oldest term for a poet

was maker. So we make things,
though not things that can be

held—as painters or sculptors do—
or put on walls or shelves for

admiring eyes. But we shape
the clay of words to prepare them

for firing. Or we spin wool into
thread that can be knitted

or crocheted into something
soft and warm. Let me wrap

you in cozy words then.
Let me make you a poem, that

may, with care and attention,
become something you carry

with you, this made thing I
spun from the strings of my heart,

reaching out to yours
like this.

As I drive across the causeway
I think of the bats underneath
who surely must be sleeping
at high noon, given that they
emerge at dusk on their
appointed rounds as
insect catchers and
good stewards of
these rice fields.

I wonder if all the traffic noise
bothers them as thousands
of vehicles rumble over
their snug space, as
the jolt and bam of
construction on
this great span
continues
ad nauseum.

Or, like some of us who live
near freeways, perhaps
the noise morphs into
the sounds of waves,
a rolling and receding
lullaby, alive with
the everyday
thrum of
home,

soothing the wee
beasties as they drift
into their daytime slumber.