Ok, here’s one more landfill poem in search of the holy,

in this unlikeliest of places.

Maybe it’s really the perfect place where all the broken things live?

But why do I always have to seek beauty when ugliness is so plentiful?

Maybe I have had it backwards? Lately I’ve been thinking I never want to leave, after so many years of longing—yearning to—

I’ll just stay.

Like Terry, Keith, Tim, or Chris—so many others, working till they simply can’t anymore.

Now it’s spring again in my (maybe?) final year?

Now I’m thinking I want to be that kestrel, that hunts here.

She has spent all day in that little tree covered in white blossoms.

I think it’s the wife of the one who perches on the north corner of the MRF,

facing the apron and all the incoming trucks. Maybe I’ll stay here

by the road and just sit in that tree now that another winter is over.

It might be ok. But I can’t fly—I’m heavy, 

and have no beautiful feathers.

No plumage of blue and burnished orange, no dark line through my eye.

Breathing in dust of all the passing trucks.

I have to be the driver in the truck. I can’t be the bird.

But that bird is holy. She’s perfect. 

Perfect at what she was made to be. Completely ordered.

A little nervous, but still, on that highest, holiest, blooming branch.

The tree is clothed in white petals, beautiful, it calls to bees,

and a rest of perfect safety for this little falcon with no name

covered in feathers, able to fly and hunt and hover,

faithful simply to have and feed young, somewhere

here in this broken, breaking but green green place.

Maybe I never need to leave this place—or fly away.

Or maybe that was what I needed to find out

before I could ever be free and allowed to leave?

I could just sit here in the cab of my truck, and read War and Peace

over and over, forever, like David Bottoms ended up doing.

He said he couldn’t decide which was better, books by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy.

At the end of his life he wrote me a couple of short notes apologizing for brevity

because he could only type with one hand. This was right before he died.

Or I could be like Johnny Cash, and sing a song by Depeche Mode,

but subvert their sarcasm, simply by singing it—and meaning every single word.

The wind heaps the white up mounding over the tops of snow fences 

For Zeke Sanchez

until the black of the road is not visible;

particles of ice and snow obscure into one flow

a white stream blowing so fast 

they merge as water runs under wheels and below frame

reaching a foot high or so it flies across the road at a right angle, 

north to the south of the I-80, empty of traffic, 

my light trailer a billboard catching gale pulls leaning away

from wind—it’s the gusts that get you—

don’t see it coming, only what it does, after,

while I crawl at 25 mph, or slower, to keep from laying over,

I can’t see the edges of the interstate—

essentially snow blind 

my hands sweat, shaky, grip the wheel to drive straight, 

eyes strained ahead bleared with effort

to trace the vanishings in the white.

Up ahead a cattle hauler lost it, drove straight off into median

probably during the night, thinking he kept to the road

then laid it over.

After the back door sprung, cattle panicked in shock, 

frozen but not dead

dead but didn’t know it

wandered in whiteout

then tipped, laid across the road

some on their backs bloated, 

frozen solid now, tiny legs like pointed cloven quills

jutting up. 

Just another driver’s disaster. Sky and windy plain a wasteland of white

while I drive over this powder compacted to ice

and have absolutely no idea why I don’t just blow

sliding sideways to join him.

Every once in a while, the quality of a day’s morning light stuns,

just one more Wednesday morning

mid-November at the landfill, 

driving up the bumpy haul road which wraps back

around to the muddy new cell, where outside,

beyond the dozered-up ridge, beyond Minter Bridge Road,

lies that farm I’ve watched and photographed sunrises

nearly twenty years now, but never ever noticed that oak tree,

the one next to the barn with such bright yellow leaves

I’ve been counting as they fall, lessening every day

branches aimed up drooped down, umbrellaed, black stilled lightning,

surrounded by the preternatural wet green of winter, warm new grass.

It refuses to tell me anything about myself.

I think though we are both passing away, moving through

this life, even while its leaves drop for another year,

bare branches weary, left looking like a dying dead old oak—

Just to the right and behind is a dome-topped silo, cylindrical,

while the charred dripping oak bears up, majestic, next to the small red barn

and smudged white, craquelure farmhouse as it has

already over a century, and only now astounds me

because before it merely blended with the landscape

somehow escaping notice—but now has become individual—

it will outlast me another hundred or more years, ignored;

a watcher, watching. No one sees it; marks it. Then the landfill

will be just some other green hill deer graze over unmolested,

hiding underneath it the buried work of decades

of earthmoving and refuse. I and my circling truck

will be unremembered here, but it will remain

encircled by Minter Bridge and the Tualatin

winding around it, the harassment of gulls, 

back-up alarms silenced, all the dust clouds finally settled.

But in the meantime it grants me some solace

and beauty in change of seasons and weather—

Could this be called companionship? 

It’s then I realize how near heaven really is.

And that I have skills that are completely unwanted here.

A stack of books (Du Fu, Heaney, Robin Robertson, and Jack Ridl)

rests on the jumpseat. 

Who needs this news

that we are immortals.