River West
The Columbia River Gorge
Writing River West
The poems in River West were written over a ten-year period of time as I have reflected on life in Oregon. The state strikes me as a borderland between two different ethnographies: the first, settled by overland trips from wilderness areas to the east; the second, settled by sea voyage from the Northeastern United States. Oregon politics are vulnerable to resolving into contrasts between the eastern lands of the state and the communities along the interstate corridor. However, I grew with a foot in each perspective, and I wanted to write about my experiences around Oregon.
These experiences include my years in mountains and farmlands south and east of Portland, Oregon, and my years of professional work as a Clinical Psychologist for children and families. Across my life, as across the state of Oregon, there are differences and distinctions that I believe fade into shared needs for family and belonging that come together despite the rhetoric of our time. I determined to publish this book last year, alongside a collection of songs I wrote over 30 years, but the project kept developing until this spring.
Abandoned home in Oregon wilderness
“Letting the Forest Back In”
Old road, where branches swing in on the view,
Grey house, within a clearing decades old,
Where squirrels and snakes, bats and birds, now room
With what signs of humanity still hold
In a domain where spiders, and fliers,
Hundred-legged crawlers, all who share the dirt,
Capture and devour, come to conspire,
With hares, and moles, and mice; the deer assert,
Rights to the orchard, and the yawning gate,
Cannot restrain them; outer walls split wide,
The slope pulls back, and the foundation breaks:
The forest leans in to heal the mountainside.
Above, the owls look down from nests again,
On ruins where my family once had been.