Baby (Poem)

Baby

Today I start over a wise baby feeling his way through the carpeted life crawling almost drunk tripping holding on the chair while the adults with their cigarettes laugh from on high, larger angels that smile down on my failures and petty triumphs.

Today I remember that I was once their pre-born angel and that I saw them tripping and drunk laughing in their college dorms as babies themselves and that I wanted to be them then, too.

Today I walk, a tottering an old man on wet streets frozen with stale piss and the writings of all the holy prophets with a trail of light and corpses behind me in my six inch wake. I look up in the sky and I see my life emblazoned there, and I see the glory and the waste and the love and the beingness of it all and I miss it and love it and want it forever and ever and ever.

Again, and amen. 

Eric Marley

December 2013

Letter To My Christmas Tree

Christmas tree, we need to talk. I am a single man in my late forties. Life has dealt me some disappointments, sprinkled among times of incredible joys, and what I think were times of real happiness. I am so thankful for those. The world is hard sometimes, it really is. But when I was young, my parents celebrated Christmas. Every year I could count on seasonal treats from my mother’s able kitchen, and I knew that on some family night we would be decorating the tree. I could count on festive lights and gatherings of friends. I looked forward to Christmas hymns. There’s something about Christmas music, but especially the hymns. I guess in retrospect I would call it a sense of wonder. I have no doubt that part of this wonder was because the onslaught of Christmas marketing we saw on television and, when we were really young, the Sears catalog. It’s how we’re supposed to feel, right? But it makes it no less meaningful to me now.

I went away for a while from you, Christmas tree. For a while I plied my will, trying out my own Christmas holidays. Sometimes, I have to admit, I allowed some cynicism to enter in about Christmas. I boycotted the commercialism and the crowds of people in department stores disgusted me. There were some years where I didn’t have a Christmas tree at all. For a year or two I wouldn’t sing Christmas hymns because I wasn’t sure how I felt about Jesus. That makes me pause, right there. As much as the hardcore Christians, the real true believers would have me believe it should be, Christmas isn’t about that for me. It’s about memories. It’s about a time that somehow felt like rest, like another kind of salvation, like a life raft I could climb aboard during the rainy Oregon winters. It was the feeling of salvation that was wrapped up in the virgin birth; it was beautiful and felt right. From my vantage now it’s not important that I know everything about Jesus, what was true or not true. What I choose to believe is that a merciful God that is made of love is somehow related to me, and that that Being somehow knows me. In effect, that’s the Christmas message anyway, even if I don’t proclaim myself a standard Christian by any stretch of the imagination right now. Anyway, I'll still read the Christmas story sometime between now and Christmas Day, even if it’s to myself. I will have soft music in the background and the Christmas lights will be on. No doubt I’ll cry, and feel like I am climbing aboard a raft again, and I will feel tendrils of salvation reaching toward me like Mary’s hair might have done as she bent towards her only son.

Christmas tree, your smell fills my house with Christmas. It fills my heart to full. It fills my mind with memories of friends and families. I am grateful for all of them. You are a gift to me, Christmas Tree. Thank you for being here tonight.

From Des/Pair to Us/Pair - Prose

From Des/Pair to Us/Pair

In our walk

You and I choose to remember
By stark illustration
That paired things work best
When they work together

 For example…

 We sleep in a cold room

With not enough blankets
So that when we think we are alone
In the night
In dripping dreams
And a chill arises
And despair is stalking
Eyeing us hungrily…
Our bodies will
Seek the Other
Instead of another
Blanket
Which would only be a substitute
For true warmth

So when cold finds my body

Mine seeks and finds yours
Asleep next to me
Still
Radiating life
Radiating love
And with the meager blanket
And my own heat
We wrap together again
From despair to us/pair
And sigh back into dreams.

 --Eric Marley, 2012

Bloodmud - Prose

Bloodmud

I want to be just like myself when I grow up

I don’t want to just remember the grass
Tickling my shins
In the summertime,
I want it to remember it all the time
Even when I am walking on frozen razorblades
So that when I lose an inch
(Due to the razorblades)
I can still feel the grass on my knee
Only now
An inch higher than before

Maybe someday
When life has done its work

And I have done mine

The grass will be over my head
(Due to the razorblades)
And I will melt into the bloodmud
And the dirt parts will reclaim me
And welcome me home
And tell me about their lives while I was way up there
And it will be a good reunion.

Until then
I will walk in such a way
That I remember that in my body
Flows the royal lineage
Of the dirt under the razors
I will remember the language of the grass
Tickling my knees
Encouraged by a smiling sky
To see
To be
At peace
At now
Smiling now in summertime with tall grass
Smiling now in wintertime with the frozen razorblades
Smiling as I become the bloodmud.

--Eric Marley

January 2013

Morning Glory - POEM

Morning Glory

Awoke with a start

Missing my heart

Auburn smile

Eyes like fire

Soft curves...

Life swerves

--Eric Marley

Wreckage - Poem

Wreckage

I don’t know him

But one thing I do know
He didn’t clean up his mess
When he left her;
Didn’t finish the job
Allowed her no closure
Leaves piss on the toilet seat at Starbucks
Cheats on his girlfriends
Makes excuses for his temper
Steals pencils from work
Because in the faulty arithmetic of his wandering mind
They all owe him.
He left her bereft
And found a rebound
Changed his phone number
Made the world numb-er
While her heart bleeds into her stockings
And her aching feet leave bloody prints
In thawing April snow...

Eric Marley

Autumn 2013

Staring Contest - Short Story

Staring Contest

She won’t meet my eyes.

I’ve stared at her long enough to make the connection real. I know she feels it because the same communication that tells her that someone is staring at her tells me that she knows it. It’s part of the magic of being Human Beings; we all know things about each other that we won’t say aloud. That’s the magic – the avoidance dance. And part of that lexicon contains this fact: electricity is not just transferred through wires, and words are not always spoken aloud. 

Her eyes are downcast. I find that most women’s eyes are. Hers happen to be focused on a paintbrush and booklet in front of her, a small watercolor set next to her in a boutique coffee shop in NE Portland. Why am I staring? I don’t even want to start to answer that question, but someone inside me does: visceral sexual attraction, the need to be recognized, the need to possess something new, the need to compliment someone to be seen as kind, the need to connect on some level with another human after sitting for two hours in traffic.

Why won’t she look at me? 

The answer to that question is this: in her internal woman’s voice – wait – not the one she mindspeaks with. I mean her Woman’s Voice; the one that warns her of danger, that tells the stories of all the feminine beings who have ever existed, that tells her of childbirth and rape, of solitary silent joys and the joys of feminine companionship (so different from that of a group of men), of the connection between mother and child and of the mysterious bleeding nest within her - and how men don’t see these things the same way, somehow. That voice. Voice. That wisdom, that truth. 

It is this Voice tells her a story about female deer, does, on a cliff. Oddly, it wasn’t far from where she now sits, near the present-day town of Castle Rock, Washington. The story is told in an instant, in a quantum instinct, and it goes like this: thirteen thousand short years ago, there was a small herd of blacktail does. It was very early August and the bucks were separate, as was typical this time of year, nursing their velvety, forming, sometimes bloody antlers and staying in the open areas as much as was safe so as not to painfully entangle them on low branches. The does were enjoying summers’ respite before the antlers matured, male instinct took over all reasonable behavior and they began fighting for the does. At that point there would be changes in their own female bodies which would allow them to be taken, herded into groups, and bred indiscriminately. The trail the does trod took them on a ledge probably more suited for mountain goats but it led to a particularly lush field of late summer grasses fed by a mountain spring. High up on a cliff under a crystal sky the does moved single file, placing their feet carefully, moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Hundreds of feet below, the spring in the meadow to which they were traveling fed a river whose voice was audible even at this height. The Voice tells the painting girl at the boutique coffee shop in NE Portland that a cougar had been waiting this day at the end of the trail, eyes alight with lust for blood to feed life simply more valuable to the cougar than the life enjoyed by the does; namely his own. The Voice tells how the first doe walked past the cougar, who was crouching above. When she was almost past his hiding place, he sprang. The big tom’s jaws clamped on the back of the first doe’s neck while his hind legs began raking, immediately eviscerating her. Her brief screams echoed down the canyon toward the rushing river that was fed by the small spring to which they had moments before been joyfully traveling. The second doe, not quite off the precarious perch, happened to be the most naturally watchful and nervous of the bunch. She seldom missed danger, which is why she was almost always near the front of any herd. But she did miss it this time. Instinctively whirling, her footing failed and gravity did its work, sending her down towards the mighty water in a shower of pebbles and even a few boulders. The other does in the contingent were not as naturally nervous as she had been but the sudden movement, not to mention the sight of her plunging off the cliff gracelessly bouncing off its granite face, was enough to make them all, to the last, fall to their deaths at the bottom of the impossibly deep canyon. On this day, they all became a part of the story of the earth, the story of What Happened Here. 

This information came to the painting girl at the boutique coffee shop in NE Portland in less time than it took an aorta to open and blood to flow through it. It carried a message.  

That man staring at you, the Voice tells her, has eyes that look like the cougars’.