Infrastructure

These poetry and poetic prose pieces, true to their title, follow the infrastructure of a life. A kid in love, reading to his first-grade teacher. An old man walking with friends in an Oregon forest, learning how life continues. A carpenter on the courthouse steps, showing Occupy Eureka how to build a place of refuge. With his wife Jenny, hearing war planes above a desert hot spring. Cheering the destruction on Demolition Derby Night at the Modoc County Fair. It was better than the...
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These poetry and poetic prose pieces, true to their title, follow the infrastructure of a life. A kid in love, reading to his first-grade teacher. An old man walking with friends in an Oregon forest, learning how life continues. A carpenter on the courthouse steps, showing Occupy Eureka how to build a place of refuge. With his wife Jenny, hearing war planes above a desert hot spring. Cheering the destruction on Demolition Derby Night at the Modoc County Fair. It was better than the Iraq War. No one was killed. Admission was only 8 dollars.A poem to uncover the underworld plot to overthrow Christmas and capitalism. Another to record a watershed meeting, an inter-species discussion of whether to let the humans vote. Following a remote and neglected state park trail, crossing rotten bridges, the title poem tries to answer Jenny's question: "How did it get like this?"A requested poem, for a friend whose young son has died in a senseless accident. The infrastructure we turn to: fledgling swallows on a power line, big mouths, pale fluff, scared and hungry. The nest of broken shells.On the Big Island, a quarter-mile-long ten-foot wall of carved blocks of lava, yet with a wide gate open to anyone seeking refuge. In the eastern Sierra, in a circular pool of concrete and stone, soaking up history with three Vietnam vets. In a repair shop on Broadway waiting for LouAnn who has small hands to replace a burned-out headlight that I can't get to. In the waiting room talking about old cars with a guy who's just come from taking his wife to the cancer clinic. Finding the infrastructure beneath a world designed to break and not be fixed.