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I Once Met a Girl from Oregon
Mark Nemeth

”Timber,”
she said, and I turned northwest.
”Eugene,”
and I wanted mist and drizzle,
wetsuit surfing and walks among the pines.
”Your land is a barren waste,”
and I drove circles around the mesas,
stopped and searched the night sky
for trembling stars.

Should I seek earthquakes on the Pacific Rim,
wear the famous wool and spend Halloween
in a berry patch, looking for nickel-deposit cans?
I know the grass grows greener along
the banks of the Willamette, and she says
the rain falls like moonlight or August meteors.

But aren’t there deserts in Oregon, too,
where the Snake and Columbia never flow,
and even the beer bottles get dusty?

A single tree in a desert is still green, and
empty arroyos flood every July with fat,
cold drops that paint the ristras and geraniums
brighter red. The Rio Grande flows to the sea
as surely as the Columbia, past mesas
and alfalfa fields, pueblos and radio telescopes,
drawing suddenly every spring the pale green
from the brown bosque, which even in winter
is full of sandhill cranes and white snow geese.

—
Mark Nemeth holds a PhD in civil engineering and works as an engineer for a federal water management agency. His research has been published in the Journal of Hydrology and the International Journal of River Basin Management. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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