OREGON TAYLOR FIELDS

A walk home on Ray Street can change you. Darkness falls leaving you with an unfinished day, it always seems. Images you see only by yourself. Life is never perfect or pure, always the rough edges. You try and make sense of the shapes and sounds of the day, wondering why. Still you go home each day on Ray Street, your brief in hand hoping for another better day...

  "At the end of the day, I just have to do what I do and let it be what's it gonna be...." - Chris Stapleton

  The wind from the South swept into Aqua Caliente valley searching for water. It wanted to make a storm and be called a Monsoon, but found no water. Becoming angry, it leapt across the desert, finding two small sharecropper houses, green fields behind.  The houses sat like two desert sisters. Thinking the sharecroppers stole the water, the South wind blew and blew. The crops crumbled, windows and roofs scattered all about.  The two sharecroppers looked at the devastation. With little hope and sad hearts, they decide to move on. Later that winter the wind from the North caught up with the wind of the South. The North wind told it of the young children the sharecroppers had and how they suffered since the South wind was there. The South wind felt bad and against odds, fought its way back to the sharecroppers farm giving it a gentle rain. It hoped the crops would grow again and that the families would return, but they never did…

  I grabbed the dog and walked down to the corner market. The shagginess and unruly nature of my dog remind me of my youth. No one would want him or me then. The morning air freshened as I sat in front of the market with coffee and paper. A small article on the entertainment page caught my eye, “Jack Ely Dies.” The article went on, “Ely famous for singing Louie Louie…” Our old high school song, I thought. It was sung at every football game and dance. The memory threw me back to those times. Awkward and an outcast, they were long years for me.  I thought of Anne Farmer. Her beauty gave her a pass to the in-crowd. Dating upper class-men who had fast cars and faster ways, the girls in that group had nothing to do with outcasts like me. Anne was different. She had a type of beauty that earthiness cast and a warm smile. She always took time to say hello to me. I knew not why, but it helped me find my way through those times. Shortly after graduation, things all changed. Anne got pr...

  They were brand new apartments, huge buildings one the same as another. They almost from the start had a loneliness about them. An impermanence look pervaded the faces of those wandering around the lobby.  He chose a small unit at the end of building B, its only attribute, a view of an untouched field. This would change, he knew, but not for a while. Time to look at the emptiness, think about what could have been.  He had a smaller car now, everything was smaller including this 1,000 foot rental wonder. The changes caused by too many lines to write here. He had no other choice but to lean into it. At least there was a view, with nothing but a cold winter coming, he needed that… Time maybe to dream again and wait for Spring…

  "They were left behind by some wandering mind. They could not see themselves, but were the marks of our lives" - Oregon Taylor Fields

 

  An ordinary coffee place on a dark day. The patrons blending into a blankness. Their faces backlit. Still there was poetry here. Each person a blank sheet of paper to write on. Places for lines of rhymes. The one at the door waiting, how no one talked, just the sound of the coffee machine. The patron at the end of the coffee bar looking at the waiting one.  The jars of coffee beans on the wall. The barista you didn’t get a look at, the other making coffee for a person serious in standing. The quiet movement against the buzz of the city.  All poetry in the moment, if you looked….