Astoria, a drinking town with a fishing problem,
is a phrase proudly printed on mugs and magnets.
And when you spend a night there,
you realize no one is joking.
The whole town is a dive bar
with glowing beer signs sweating against windows,
bars leaning into bars,
every doorway promising
whiskey, something fried and
stories that change with each telling.
Even the stores feel drunk.
Antiques beside VHS tapes,
old fishing knives,
ceramic clowns,
some dead grandmother’s Pyrex,
records warped by forty winters,
and a taxidermied whatever-the-hell-that-is
watching from above the register
as the wet breath of the Columbia
seeps from the walls.
I don’t know who followed me
through those wet streets persistently
with a pressure behind my shoulder.
The unmistakable feeling of:
“I am still here.”
Maybe that’s what happens when
generations of people pass through
and leave pieces of themselves behind.
Fishermen.
Loggers.
Sailors.
All stacked beneath the floorboards,
drinking beside us,
waiting patiently to be noticed
by anyone other than the screaming sea lions
throwing themselves across the docks,
barking into the morning to declare
their ownership of the Pacific.
The Columbia collides with the ocean.
Fresh water forcing itself west,
the ocean pushing back,
current against tide.
The water buckles
rolls over itself,
breaks sideways,
and pulls in more than one direction.
It looks less like a boundary
and more like an argument
that has been going on
longer than anyone can remember.
Fog catches on the green hills,
as the whole town watches
two infinities trying to swallow each other,
while enormous ships move through the argument
their black silhouettes like migrating gods.
The locals, living and dead,
have seen all this before.
They look for one more drink
in a filthy bar where nothing quite dries,
another strange little treasure
buried beneath somebody else’s life,
another drunk walk home through the fog
with the sea lions screaming at the dark.
The river keeps arguing with the ocean.
The ships and ghosts keep passing through.
And Astoria,
wet, half-lit, smelling faintly of mildew and fish,
keeps pouring another.
Chestnut Cowboy 