Pat is a professional writer, editor, and poet, who studied at the University of Iowa and moved to Portland, Oregon, with her best friend from college, a gay man eager to escape the Midwest and live fully out of the closet. Pat eventually cared for him and two other close friends who died of AIDS in the 80s and early 90s. This was her “found family”. Pat has written extensively about this experience, including a book-length series of poems, Love’s Gravity, which was a finalist in two small press competitions. Her chapbook, A Luminous Trail Through the Wilderness, was published by 26 Books/Unnum Press of Portland. Her writing has appeared in Calyx; the Oregonian; the Sun magazine; Fireweed: Poetry of Oregon; Talus and Scree; Broken Word: The Alberta Street Anthology and other publications.
Pat and her husband Alden Pritchett are currently involved in NE Village PDX, a grassroots nonprofit that helps residents of Northeast Portland age in their homes while remaining active in the community. One of her passions in life is social and economic justice. She also loves to sing.
Email Pat: pvivian3@comcast.net
Holding
Each time I visit Tom,
weeks have elapsed
since I last came,
and his body, his limits
are new again.
It takes a day
or so to figure out
how I fit in.
Just now,
I grasped his clammy hands
to help him up off the couch
so he could bask in the sun
by a window.
He used to not want me to pull,
just grab, stand firm
and let him hoist himself.
Now he cries out, “Pull!
Pull harder! It feels
like you’re going to let go.”
“I’m holding on to you
and I won’t let go,”
I promise him, “until you do.”
And I pull.
And I won’t.
Cruising the Loop
When we were living poor together
in that tall-windowed Lovejoy room,
we used to cruise the Loop, a cheap date
on a Friday night. We’d hop in the Toy and fly
above the wrinkled Willamette,
feel the wind tease the small red car.
We sped ahead through core Portland,
a flat stretch until the Marquam Bridge
swept us over the river like a mezzanine
high above the jazzy cityshine.
Of course
it was fleeting –
A few hurtling seconds and we’d drop
into a freeway trench, headed north again
past eyeless husks of warehouses
until the soaring Fremont ramp
sucked us up
into the cycle one more time:
Sometimes we slugged it out in campy lines
we knew by heart, love’s sleaze; or waltzed
in circles of felicitous wordplay; or froze
in queasy silence, both staring out the window.
And sometimes we veered perilously close
to whatever was actually happening
between us.
Tunnel Vision
(for Ronald Reagan)
Mr. President, this is war.
Twenty-five thousand were dead,
mostly young men
before you deigned to utter the A-word.
You need to know I’m losing a friend.
By sluggish degrees, the virus
is invading his brain.
The stellar glow that shined out of him,
that no scientist could possibly explain,
is contracting, growing more dense by the hour —
he’s becoming a white dwarf of a man.
We talk on the phone. He’s always home.
How are you doing? I ask gently, and he says
I love you
in answer to my question.
There are black holes in our conversation.
We say the same things again and again.
Old jokes like rituals, private one-liners:
I often, often, often repeat myself.
I almost always never contradict myself.
Do you have trouble making decisions?
Well, yes and no.
We talk about the weather –
a chilling fog grips the bay.
We talk about his mother –
there are things they can’t talk about
anymore. Like what? I ask
and he says, Viet Nam.
Mr. President, this is war.
But there’s a lighthouse beam
that pierces the fog in his brain,
and we invoke it each time
we talk on the phone. I say it to him.
He says it again. It’s the only defense we have:
I love you.
Universe
We spend days like this,
you stretched out on the couch,
me propped at the other end,
your feet in my lap, my hand
massaging in slow circles
or folded around your bony ankle.
Daffodils sprouting from a vase
are the loudest thing in the room,
yellow trumpets.
The TV coddles us in sterile, gauzy imagery.
It’s an anesthetic funnel, a leak
in the room where the color drains out,
your blue eyes going snowy at the edges
as you tell me,
“We’re as complex inside as the solar system.”
What will you stare into all day
if you can’t see?
When you hiccup and wince,
hiccup and cry out, I press my fingers
into your foot or cup your shin
to anchor you.
In the morning, you hover
on the edge of the bed, thin as a child’s
stick figure. I rub your shoulders, your hair;
when nothing human can touch
the chaos of a universe,
I bring morphine.
By midafternoon, you dress,
go downstairs to the garden,
squint up at the sun
and lie on the chaise lounge,
let me cover you.
Let us lie down together in the sun,
blinding and cruel
but warm.
Ask Nothing
Because each day brings us closer
to our undoing.
Because the knot of our lives will be torn
and soon.
It’s hard to be so far away
that when I reach out,
that clump of feathers
I know as my heart
flies out of its cage.
But it’s so easy
to leave the body
for only a moment,
asking nothing
but to be in the white room with you,
the bone-white room with the TV going.
Ask nothing.
Ask nothing of the body
that rises in its lightness
toward the stars.
Ask nothing of the stars,
who they are
how they got there.
Nothing of the breeze
that stops at your door.
Nothing of the trees
and their mirror images.
Nothing of roots
but to be roots,
and give thanks for the body,
this hollow landing in a wooden room.
Ask not why the limbs are so heavy.
These things are the body.
Descent (listen to a recording)
Suddenly it matters:
swifts headed to winter
brutality in Central America
twilight-dance in fall in Portland.
Pepper specks, a darkening vortex,
dusk cloud in spiral descent—
they pack into the gradeschool smokestack
like black smoke drawn back, more coming
with their impeccable timing—
miles of numinous blueblack cries chiming
overhead, thick as a galaxy.
They gather
without shoes or money,
like souls returning.
What passerine
passsion governs them:
who goes in first, who last; by what sign
are they called to their need
to commune; how they dive
through the vent without smashing
into ungiving stone. Do they see us,
a struggle of humans? Suddenly it matters:
they have sharp, strong claws
and are friendly to others
of their species—do they
believe in torture, God
or democracy? Or just
the good grit
of soot and seed.
Opera Singer at Golden Fields Manor
Her day-and-night attendant whisked her out
through an exotic, perfumed crack
of the authentic two-room suite.
Down the hall to dinner she rolled, eyes slack,
jaws dull—a plate placed
at the table, pale mannequin
fiddling with her napkin, hair swept up
smooth as a standing ovation,
nary a stray all the way to the crown.
Just then, she was queen of nothing.
Just as Joe Aikin’s spoonful of quaking Jell-O
found his left eyebrow, Elsie McCracken
raked wizened fingers down the window,
and Marge in her spidery hairnet
fended off a rattling dish tray spill,
Madame tall French knot made a pooched taut
O with ragged lips, as if surprised at herself,
and let loose a note that bloomed
whoopie into a gusty melody
whipping around the room. I swear
it carried the top of my head away, lifted the roof up
off all of us. Like raising the lid
and spotting a diamond
sparkling in a dumpster.
She might not know
who she’s been—duchess, diva, or vixen
trilling at Bayreuth, Covent Garden,
that starch-white wedding cake in Milan,
or why she’s here
at Golden Fields Manor—
but by Goddess, she can still sing.
Leading the Blind
The slender woman on the #12 bus
missed her cross-town connection and is lost.
Whitened knuckles of a solitary hand
clutching a white cane,
the other resting on the fur
of the panting canine, who is also lost,
she leans forward into an unmapped future
while the driver explores route options and calls Dispatch
to help reconnect her.
This lopsided 3-way intersection
is a six-pointed star, with such odd angles
it would be easy to get lost
at the corner of NE 57th, Alameda and Sandy.
Our bus slides to a halt,
doors open while the driver exits, offers his arm
and escorts the woman and her guide across the street,
waiting politely as they board the #71.
All of this, of course, takes a few minutes
and throws the bus off schedule,
leaving everyone else
behind, bound to their own connections.
But suddenly Now is something we have plenty of.
Here is what you need.
Time louvers its doors open wide and settles
with it’s old friend Being over the whole bus.
We are so ready for this, we are waiting
for the light to turn green,
we are waiting
for more drivers like this, we are ready
as he steps back up to his seat, to greet him
with a groundswell of clapping
that rises out of us like a hungry wave —
spontaneous combustion
as the bus lurches into motion
Revenge
Decades after her shaggy fling
hiked up the Big Apple skyline,
Fay Wray is back in town
stomping around in a pair of red stilettos,
come-hump-me pumps heroic as fire engines
each half a block long. Sporting a natty ensemble
cinched at the waist, straight out of “I Love Lucy”
she strides into six lanes, tall as an empire.
There will be no more art made of her
terrorized screams, no crowds stampeding
onscreen, no ripped diaphanous gown.
See how she unspools the film.
See her sweep airplanes out of the sky,
mop up trillions in third world debt
like soap scum, bleach mean CEOs
with Asset Clean, balance the federal budget
on one hand—while calmly with the other
she scoops up survivors from the collapsing tower,
cupping them safe in her palm.
See her shortstop the bombs.