There’s one outside my door, a field,
because I don’t mow it.
Not until later, after the daisies. And the fawns.
The daisies come first. Then the fawns around the first of June, speckled white, as if daisy-strewn.
It’s late May now: Oxeyes in their glory. Wild iris just gone. Wild roses, full on: small fragile ones. Invasive stinky geranium on the rampage, and poison oak, profuse, more confident, complacent each dry year we come through.
And the grasses: high and plumy, sending off their pollen. (Today the pollen count was 1005. Low is 0-4; moderate 5-19; high 20-199, and very high 200+.
This world! We need a new word.)
But it won’t be long until strawberries.
And the end of school, and the migration
of students, all ages, into other ways and places of life.
And poetry? Where is poetry in Eugene in June?
Summer’s pause is fast upon us:
Windfall’s monthly reading at the library ends in May
Studio 7 won’t host poets again until September
Wordcrafter’s open mic concludes in June
University sponsored readings, done for now
Poet Laureate Ada Limon’s praise of poetry and paying attention has come and gone. Kindergarten has concluded the monthly chant of Chicken Soup with Rice.
In May
I truly think it best
to be a robin
lightly dressed
concocting soup
inside my nest.
Now: Hiatus.
Now we all run outside and shout poems into the blackberry brambles and wind. Why not?
Because they keep coming, the poems. The Red Sofa Poets go on meeting and critiquing. I imagine their sofa: velveteen, a little worn, with ample, shapely arms. The Breakfast Poets nibble their morning fruit and write. Tough Crowd, Poetry 1, Haiku-a-go-go. The groups continue to gather. Solitary unnumbered others write and dream in their own secret places. R sings extemporaneous poems alone in their basement apartment; H makes poetry into songs and sings them later in back yard concerts with a back-up band.
A local literary magazine, pronounced dead in1992, revived this year: Emergency Horse, revenant, irreverent. Cantering, snorting, munching new grass.
The Northwest Review, too, has reinvented itself, online this time. Set to celebrate its first issue, maybe every issue, somewhere live.
The Hult Center for Performing Arts will have a second spoken word open mic this month. The first, in January, to rave response. Don’t bother signing up--all the folks left out last time have already filled the list.
More unfurling. Poetry happens here in galleries: Karin Clarke, White Lotus, Maude Kerns. The long-established Tsunami Books hosts readings galore, and Hodgepodge, the new bookstore/bar on East 14th, has a regular open mic and a Poetry Book Group meeting on their chalkboard of events. Poetry at The Wine Lab, among the workspaces of Whiteaker Printmakers. Poems performed at the once-church-turned-movie-theater-turned Art House.
People and poems meet in
coffee shops (Theo’s, Vero’s, The Lovely Café, Perugino’s, Hideaway).
At little free libraries perched on street corners, in front of houses.
Poems speak from park benches: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees/and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything/which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes (e.e. cummings)
Poems go for walks. On the name signs of each city park in Eugene:
In the spring at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. (Margaret Atwood, Lafferty Park).
In times
of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
(W. H. Auden, Amazon Dog
Park).
(I have to admit: I don’t usually look at name signs in parks. I just arrive and tumble in—but see what I’ve missed? What I get to seek out? What you could too, if you came here? A treasure hunt of poetry all over town.)
Poetry in a grocery store. On the walls above where anybody really looks. Mostly food and wit, not always poetry, but how about this—
what garlic is to food, insanity is to art
To read it, you have to look up from your grocery list, away from the carrots and beans and eggs and dogfood. Who interrupts an errand and does this? It feels like stepping into poetry just to pause and look around.
Keep going—and pausing, and looking around—
On the 26 stops of the EmX bus line in West Eugene:
26 poems, engraved on steel.
In the Mahlon Sweet Airport, a self-serve kiosk at the top of the escalators: push a button and poem on a tongue of ticker-tape paper unrolls from a slot.
In the parking Garage on 10th and Oak: poems, each level.
At the Eugene Saturday Market, a busker sets up a typewriter. Ask for a poem and he’ll type one for you while you wait.
A man at the corner today, needing money, holds up a piece of cardboard: Same problem. Different Day.
The trains hoot and ratchet their passing poems.
The shouts of kids in the park, the little hiss of bicycles.
And this week from the bark path through yet another field:
the crickets, chirping in verse.
The black-headed grosbeaks. The yellow warblers.
The pacific wrens in the woods.
At Fern Ridge Reservoir, a multi-vocal poem of toadsnore
and bittern gulping, redwing blackbird, marsh wren, goose, yellowthroat, swallow and purple martin
all reciting their lines above the grasses.
(Did you know—researchers have found that some
species of mice sing complex lines in response to each other? This occurs at frequencies beyond human hearing. Such poetry cannot therefore enter these notes with certainty. Let’s just say probably, and not just mice.)
Dead snake made a poem on the gravel road.
Broken glass another one.
And then brief rain descended this afternoon.
My friend laughs. There’s almost too much poetry
in Eugene.
But no, never—the field is raggedy and wild and full
of complicated life. To sing, to praise, to revel, to lust, to feel alive. To grieve, to rage, to suffer, to heal, to put to rest. To muse, unhitch the mind, to plumb down deep, to send us somewhere new. Why trim back, why limit, why mow too soon? Why should anyone miss the bit we’re briefly in? Because even when it’s hard it’s what we’ve got.
I’m still waiting for the fawns. I hope they come again. They might not. There’s always that chance. Things change, falter, die, transform. But if they do arrive, I’d like to show you the poems the fawns make racing across this field. I wish you could feel them, hear them, these giddy just-born poems-with-legs. I wish you could, for a minute, be them. Here in Eugene, or wherever you are.
Kelly Terwilliger lives near a field and a forest in Eugene, Oregon. She is the author of three collections of poetry, A Glimpse of Oranges; Riddle, Fishhook, Thorn, Key; and Night Maps. Her newest book, Endnotes, is a combination of poetry, prose, and paintings. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, and Britain, including december magazine, The Baltimore Review, The Comstock Review and The Amsterdam Review, and she won first place in the Guernsey International Poetry Competition—which means her poetry has also adorned buses and an airport in the Channel Islands. In addition to writing, she teaches and performs as an oral storyteller and likes to swim in wild places whenever she can.
