sea junk as ritual

In the middle of April in 2021 my then wife asked me for a divorce. It was eleven o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday. It was sunny in Portland that day.

Sometime not much later I was out wandering neighborhood streets, including the grass-and-trees median in the middle of Reed College Way. There was a lot of weeping. I had called my best friend Gavin at his work in Oakland, and he was spending a long time on the phone with me. Listening, consoling, encouraging.

At some point he quoted from one of the characters in the movie “Almost Famous” the line in the photo above. When I got back to my not-much-longer home I went down into the basement – where I did nearly all my writing, including this Blog, and some of my painting – and tore off a piece of paper and wrote those words. A pretty famous quote from Goethe. To remember that encouragement.

I’ve been carrying that slice of paper around since. It traveled with me to my friend Kate’s house, where she put me up for a while – more couch surfing of sorts – then down to a rented room in Encinitas, CA, on to a rented room in the Golden Hill neighborhood of San Diego, and right here now, in Banker’s Hill. That’s 1,221 days with this piece of scrap paper sitting under the computer monitor – the monitor my former wife gifted me one Christmas – looking at it nearly everyone of those days.

I flipped the piece of paper over this morning, and I don’t remember ever doing that, and on the other side is a typed section of my poem “Head of the Meadow,” my poetic attempt to honor a particular beach in Truro on Cape Cod. There’s the title and these opening lines, typed on the paper in verse form — “What do I call the air here? Head of the Meadow, Crumbling lot, Shifting Dunes, Jagged poles and driftwood spires, Plunged, Nelly skelly, In soft sand, remnants of other worldly ceremony, Sea junk as ritual.”

I saw it again this Friday.