My first time hiking was in Oregon, in the shadow of Mt. Hood in Oregon, where the landscape is so lush you expect a Hobbit to run by. Sadly, I was 23 years old and drumming for a touring rock band based in San Francisco; our debilitating penchant for partying made a few-mile hike feel like a marathon.
Only in recent years, living in Colorado and New Mexico, have I been able to spend quality time with loved ones, and sometimes alone, in swaths of nature that say more than any writer can. Well, most. Poet Derek Pyle, a teenage Naropa University student, bucks the prose-only trend of Stays Magazine today with his embryonic sunset journey, “Emigrant Creek, Oregon.”
Emigrant Creek, Oregon
by Derek Pyle
a neighbor’s shotgun
cracks
sunset sky
Half a ten-strip deep, the Doug Fir woods cleared
to reveal grasses, downhill toward the creek. From
the top, we – Thaddeus and I – ran as fast as we
could, feeling the wind strong. Over the barbed
wire and across the creek, there a few feet from the
water, a pregnant cow
purple
calf legs and head
sticking out
The rest still inside the womb. Thaddeus laughed
the kind of laugh appropriate when nothing else is,
but I was clear:
“I’m going to deliver this calf”
prompting and
pulling
mom pushes
Thaddeus left, he saw “too much,” but my duty
was with this cow. Physically opening the vulva to
get the calf:
gasping leap in
frame-vision,
maggots spill from the womb
We struggled until mom couldn’t anymore, calf
still stuck. Exhausted, we lay there together – mom,
baby, and me – covered in shit like cows sometimes
are. Relaxing into the final breaths, I thought she’d
die lying like that but
she walked feebly,
a final
creekside thud
—
Derek Pyle and artist Cathy DeForest run Jubilation Press in Ashland, Oregon, selecting poetry and prose that creates meaning in people’s lives by providing inspiration and encouraging reflection. Derek and Cathy print on Jubilation Press’ two antique Vandercook cylinder printing presses.
