Sweet Home, Oregon

Sweet Home
the name brings images
of cross-stitched samplers
exclaiming "Home Sweet Home"

though it was home,

it was seldom sweet.

Except maybe that year
at fifteen
I lost my virginity again and again
in the arms of a lost lovers
and in the silence of the tall timber.

Timber that masked my sins
and held up the town
for high school graduates and drop-out boys disguised as men
who drive ten-year-old trucks
with big drooling dogs in the back.

Driving them to jobs
not careers
meaningless manual labor
in the woods falling giant trees
to become homes for these same men
or working in noise filled lumber mills
that would eventually steal
their backs, hearing and lives.

A city that drained each man
completely each day
then on Saturday night liquor
filling them with fortitude
or guts as it was called to those who had it.

Her lake offered, at its glory,

professional speed boat races
where high-speed crashes gave excitement to a dying town
and attracted tourist dollars
and fishing for the townies
who fought fish into nets each week
so they could say they'd battled and won.

She signaled the fatal wound of the town
home to less and less of the young
who headed out to college

or the Navy. Foreign pastures that promised a sweeter home.

Desperate souls formed the Country Jamboree
a music festival and fund-raiser
for our of work loggers who cursed
tree huggers, Canada, Mexico and the President,
no matter who was in office at the time
and who could not afford the price of admission
to the fair designed to save them.

Most of it is gone now,
the tall timber with three logs filling
a dangerous truck
giving way to lumber barely bigger than a stick
and corporate suits boarding up old mills
and replanting logging sites.

Families move on, transient,
to the cities,

leaving homes that only show life at night
by the newcomers who worked in Albany and Eugene
and only bedded down in the quiet town
named Sweet Home.