with Oregon and August come many storms

With Oregon and August
come many storms
and brooding cloud-banks over high hills,
spread out west to our shore,
the last land,
the charnel grounds of the sun.

The thunderheads all hustle as far out
as they can over our poor city,
searching beyond the hills, beyond the ocean,
looking west as every lost soul does
when ambivalence digs in, real
for the first time.

The clouds in Oregon run the course
that set the pace for our ancestors to follow, first
in covered wagons with hollow hearts,
then in combat boots and backpack
bustling with collected notes,
hungry ghost of a script
that's to be written and then learned rote
and delivered, hands clasped
tight behind the lower spine,
pitch-perfect.

It is the song of all our time spent hoarding,
collecting and judging,
the song of every part of our lives
idly passed through too-easy boredom.
This yarn (spun of words pulled
from Mother, books,
graffiti on satchel, conversation,
nights
alone and waterfronts)
is the anthem of longing.
Our pioneer hearts weave it,
the red thread that connects all our artlessness in the morning,
when it first sets in (shocking
like the hothouse and then the frozen lake)
that you are alone and will be;
and at night
when the sorrow of a wasted day
wraps you up in a black
cocoon of dreaming.

Cavalier and lonely,
we are like the tall clouds
(they came first, and twist our ears
with bad weather and melancholy
when when we ignore them)
and we press towards the west
in a bedraggled but maddened
and maddening hoard.

Our hearts spawn in those
woods where the sun dies
and we push out West
to be born.