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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets A World Inhabited RON TALNEY ________________ The Gardener Worried by death my neighbor readjusts his yard each spring. Even at night we hear the click and rattle of his hoe working through the crust so darkly roots take hold. Not bright, but strong, he bends into the weight of earth, winter melting from his face until at last the blood turns quick again, feeding his dim mind with dreams and the final crack of tulip bulbs discovering a vacancy to fill. [621]
Social Graces Birds across the lake wheel and dip. Fish dive with endless purposes in mind. The light emerges quiet, as the earth spins weightless in some memory that gathers ordinary shapes of day. A blank wall, silent but for shadows, my future lurks in all the local mirrors. And somewhere a cat with feathers in his mouth lies watching while my neighbor, the lady-killer, tips his hat and smiles, "Good Morning." [622]
Fears My barber hates me. I feel guilty eating meat. (night comes and I consume the soft perfection moving the slow air more slowly, darkness leaps in my eyes strange as a handshake, a secret weeping of stones comes from each small crack my life has made in the earth) Somewhere a voice says: "Next!" My thoughts break toward the funny light. [623]
Tuck Lung's Restaurant Aware that nothing ever grows simply up, and that the old man is delighted to speak Chinese, knowing, as he does, that I don't speak Chinese, I risk it all: Bok Choy w/rice, easy on the pork. [624]
Morning Poem This morning smoke curves up the hillside trees, and last night drifts across our faces like a poem. "Like smoke we take advantage of the wind," you said. [625]
Being Close It is difficult to be so close. We find our lives as carelessly entwined as teabag strings; and words become a scar our mouths work silently against. [626]
Mountain Talk Up here night drops Like an eyelid. And history is a heartbeat Spread out for miles. Even a soft voice Rings these mountains for days. And our words sound strange Just for having been spoken here. [627]
Everson, in Fall and Disrepair - for Doug This town is 30 years of sadness still. Here the names go bad. Light breaks funny, and the Nooksack River runs high water every spring. You find Kale's Cannery shut down, the old Church gray as death. And south of where the school once stood, dark houses harbor wind off China and the sea. Our neighbor, Mrs. Hamm, lived over there. Morning-glories here. Hortense died the year we moved away. You take the only road your family took one day, south, never coming back, that woman smiling while your sister cried. And even now you feel the town sink heavy into dirt, the dust of faces blank beneath its stone, the weight of clouds and children calling: Years, this is your home. [628]
How It Was - for Lyn Sister, I wake to your birthday remembering how it was, that town still living at the edge of every dream, faces we knew leaning from its streets just right, and books long out of print that said our lives were really fun. Today new towns say what we've been, years gather in our minds like photographs. We live our losses knowing at the back of every town that town we truly are still throbs, slow and fading, saying: Lyn, we slow but never die. [629]
St. Mary's Catholic Church Megler, Washington Stern Mary by the sea, the gray you are is your religion now. You bang your bible on the clouds, glare out across the bay at whales misguided in their fun. Years ago your arms were Indian and gold, your language odd off sailing ships defeated by those cliffs. The river's mouth sings danger to the gulls. Hymns you chant mad Indians forgot a century before. Chinook words fought with Latin on their tongues. Today their children drink your sacrificial wine, the old names ancient in their eyes, your spire still wailing Jesus at the rocks. [630]
Moving Quickly I. Mother, we moved quickly into the thick of things: you saying . . . "remember the starving children"; some dog howling his way into the dark; the still of winter on our lives; and you, my mother, saying . . . remember. II. Night, stretching like a vein of blood, lengthens to the single shadow of your face. The hours creep upon the whiteness of these walls, and we resort to magic, dance about the fire of your bed. We follow as you hold pain deep within you like a bud, your sense of privacy still strong as any cracking of the mind. You hate us [631]
even though we cannot help, and stare out from the fragile fortress of your rage. We were the only crisis you had lived for since our birth. [632]
Reunion Speech for The Class of '54 My friends, no school should be this bleak. These rooms are still that lonely gray, walls still shabby in their disrepair, and windows dark from years of hiding our defeat. Tonight, those voices droning dry as chalk, I think of locker rooms and sweat; the cruel coach making men from boys; of that sadistic nurse who gave us physicals each Fall. I see old Mrs. Peck, who liked me, weeping her frustration at the jokes; and Mr. Blake, who didn't, standing dazed, his one suit ruined when the ink bomb struck. I think of fire drills . . . that black hole opening out to daylight, swirling, and the teacher's sudden slap, the long run home, and shame the years can't ever take away. Dear friends, we earned those years like pain. What hurts is what we can't let go. Even now I dream my ancient need for girls in nylons moving in their sweet, slow dance. Our awkward arms embrace, our names are shouting failure at the sky. [633]
Malheur County We break away from land where breaking never ends. All roads leave us hot and dirt. This bad-times County earned its name; Stinkingwater Pass is real, and we deserve a medal for the part we play. Sun burns the Butte to anger. In every town kids harden into death. Whatever happens we become: Tumbleweed, bad wind, that carcass rotting on the road. 300 miles west it stops . . . But, oh Linnette, that silence ringing in our ears like stone. [634]
Tracking These mountains toughen to an ancient wind. We need to follow ice-cold rivers, tracing history like a frozen finger through the snow. Back to soap-rock, gray flakes of shell, and bone of fish gone hard with accuracy. With noses to the ground we learn a river. Recollection guides us to its mouth. [635]
Tillamook Head The ocean draws us desperate to these rocks. That man who speaks our name says love is here. We are the seascape moving in his eyes, the bitter grays receding like abandoned homes. This place is where our voids begin. Where children breathing water die, and learn their way among the bones of ships, the cruelty of distance on their fins. Don't think we ever love enough. That man who speaks our name is really wind. We walk this shore of sad remains alone, our silly bodies alien in these tides, Ecóla booming love me to the sea. Note: Ecóla is the Chinook word for whale. [636]
Elegy for an Oregon Town Somehow small towns go hard. I used to dream you into stone, a hardness flashing like some violent river in my head. And you would rise, like water churning white, to rest your weight where human bodies break into a thousand arrowheads of bone, or fishhooks riding salmon to the shore. But now you crack like any tired face. And I must reconstruct your birth from lakes too deep for drowning, from children dying down your mountainsides. You wrestle in my flesh with real events, and reaching into stone I harden with your weight: a thousand arrowheads of bone, and fishhooks riding salmon in my throat. [637]
View from Barr Road This narrowed road, rising from the river, bends through my body, twist- ing the landscape into a thought: I should be a tree, growing quiet, looking for some sign. But tonight the dark air tightens my face into a fist. [638]
The Animals' Edge Surrounded by my fierce childhood, this town still lies, secure and certain as a dying field. Its wooden walks have found a mountain path; and street lamps burn the night into a gray wolf thinking. Here we lived so near the animals' edge we could feel our lives divide, tracking down some truth gone puzzling through the dark. [639]
Where We Grew Where we grew mountains were part of the eye. Rivers ran, fresh and cold, through darkened houses, and animals would come to stare at our wild ideas. Into the hush of wagon tracks we could lay our ears; and arrowheads found fingers searching for their bloodstains long flaked to dust on lost trails gone West. Oh, Youth, only such endless surfaces could bring us to this. [640]
The First Snow The first snow and words go to whiteness quiet as a hill. Into everything that's us cold settles deep. Thinking beneath the rawness of each gesture we know this time for what it wants. From such experience lives quicken to themselves: questioning our lips with ice we toughen. [641]
Turnings With all this weather's turning I live toward exposure. I know how the year progresses, how it reaches away from time, how it takes us. I have watched the children change, their bodies growing knowledgeable and shy. They hold me in the sun and laugh to see their father, human and afraid, stand stupid where they placed him. Somewhere I hear the martial music start, the caissons rolling. But I no longer move. Guerrilla forces gather in my eyes. [642]
The Planter The sight of a bright, green planter turns slowly in my head. Its hardness impresses me. There are tulips growing there where my daughters planted them. Methodically my thoughts entangled in roots work the dark ground like a slave. [643]
The Dream Your face floats in the dark. The veins are thick and blue. I see the light beneath the surfaces of bone glowing like new milk. And behind you the black ocean of night rising and falling. [644]
The Man Who Wished for Death You are walking down your street. It has always been your street. The houses pass into your mind like the color gray. In every house your wife waits patiently, her soft hands beautiful as dough, the dishes always done. And children, perhaps your children, play their secret games beneath the stairs, their tiny rooms fit tight like skulls. "I have not been happy," you say. "What is it like to die?" And as you speak somewhere else, perhaps New Jersey, lovers break apart, their heavy thighs twisted like the roots of fallen trees. And in that sudden shift and grind of earth, you feel yourself float upwards, circling back, into yourself, again and again, higher and higher, [645]
above those streets, those houses, wives and children, roots and lovers, higher still until at last you break against that air, against that vast, unyielding joy. [646]
Winter Poem - on a line by Carolyn Kizer Already it seems like years have passed. There on the mountainside I see your face turn snow, the eyes whiten, and your mouth fill with the slowness of winter. Here, in the valley, lives go gray with rain and those countless inconsistencies of flesh. We can cling to the dead but the living break away. I push my breath against the air and watch its cold shape disappear. [647]
The Broken World And so it was I enteredI see you there at the edge of land, the deep, sad arc of your face dying against the sea- wall. In the distance the buoy's distant moans roll in, minute by minute, over the rocks. And at your back, weather growing cruel. [648]
Beers in Tangent - for Bill Sweet Somewhere a tune begins: that's all you get for lovin' me. This town went dead a dozen years ago. But names like Wa-Chang hammer out real faces from the air that clang and swing like church bells from the only place in town not falling down. With timber stripped and loggers gone this place is left to rusting rigs, to graves and John's Café, where grade B stickers line the walls, John's medals from some undetermined war. He hates us even though we aren't quite right, and Tangent is the way it has to be when rage congeals and everything we are burns wrong. We drink more beer, the jukebox sings, and caught within its pounding loss we sense a sudden cracking of the mind. Then, fading into song, we follow, like a map, the pure act of its dying. [649]
The Hunter I yearn for the souls of wild deer. In every forest I watch them graze, and as they graze I feel their dark throats slowly tighten, their great, soft, velvet tongues thicken in my mouth. I am the sound that brings them death. In the deepest of seasons I bury myself in their meat. [650]
Graves at Oysterville These graves are old, seem older even than the sea that daily still defeats the town. Across the Bay renegades from South Bend. stole the courthouse. The cemetery's all that left of water dying in against the stone, of empty houses gray as wind, as stone. These graves are old, but no one here died old. Alone and lost, caught deep where green breaks solid into green, they swam the dark waves down. "Lost at sea. Lost at sea." Today, stone after stone, we learn the names for water, salt, bad weather. [651]
The Dead of Night - for the residents of Tanglewood The order has gone out. The houses must be dark, each bed occupied and quiet. It is time to sleep. At night the neighborhood is everywhere, its shadow tracks our every move. One by one the windows blacken, lawns lie still and shrubs, immaculate and sheared, stand mute as body guards outside our dreams. In sleep we roam from room to room, floor to floor, our odd, robotic step the dark illusion of our lives, still defiant, stumbling, searching for the light. [652]
Ron Talney was born in 1936 in Canada, but immigrated to the United States at an early age. He has lived most of his life in Oregon, and now resides in Lake Oswego, Oregon. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Anxious Ground (Press 22, 1974) and The Quietness That Is Our Name (Bohematash Press, 1978). Talney first published his poetry some 40 years ago and has, he says, "been at it ever since." Talney, now retired, does pro bono work for the local ACLU chapter. During his years of active private practice he focused on trial work, and spent the last years of working life doing legal aid in Salem, Oregon. He has also done pro bono political asylum representation in the Rio Grande Valley, South Florida and Portland, election observation in El Salvador and Arizona, as well as human rights assessment in Haiti, and consulting for the National Legal Services Corporation. Talney graduated from Portland State University (1960) and Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College (1966). He was admitted to the Oregon State Bar in 1966. He has two living children, one of whom is a criminal defense lawyer in Washington. The poems here were initially published in literary and poetry journals as follows: "Mountain Talk" originally appeared in a Prescott Street Press publication called 10 Oregon Poets and later was reprinted in the anthology, The Prescott Street Reader (Prescott Street Press, 1995). "The Dream" was originally published in Encore: A Magazine of the Arts and was reprinted in The Prescott Street Reader. "The Man Who Wished for Death" first appeared in Portland Review and then in The Prescott Street Reader. "Winter Poem," "The Dream," and "The Man Who Wished for Death" were first published in Prescott Street Reader; "Everson, in Fall and Disrepair," "How It Was," "St. Mary's Catholic Church," "Moving Quickly," "Reunion Speech," "Malheur County," "Tracking," "Tillamook Head" (originally published under the title, "Ecóla") in Pacific Quarterly; "Elegy" and "The Animals' Edge" in Oregon Times Magazine; "The First Snow" in The Human Voice Quarterly. "Social Graces," "The Gardener," "Fears," "Morning Poem," "Being Close," "Mountain Talk," "Elegy for an Oregon Town," "View from Barr Road," "The Animals' Edge," "Where We Grew," "The First Snow," "Turnings" and "The Planter," appear in Talney's first collection of poems, The Anxious Ground (Press-22, 1974). "Everson, in Fall and Disrepair," "How It Was," "St. Mary's Catholic Church," "Moving Quickly," "Reunion Speech for the Class of '54," "Malheur County," "Tracking" and "Tillamook Head" (which appears under the title, "Ecóla") were selected from Talney's second collection, The Quietness That Is Our Name (Bohematash Press, 1978). |
