POETRY FORUM

To Gerry Mulligan

by Christopher Raley on December 15, 2013 :: 0 comments

Happiness cannot be expressed
because we all think it’s phony.
Thank you, Gerry Mulligan, the Irishman

playing blues in New York, putting
bebop into dixie—or was it the other way round?
In that case you really were kind.

Let your humming baritone be
the voice of a sudden friend
in the middle of Los Angeles

or clouds breaking over the coastline
where Highway 1 shines like a string
gone slack out of the basin.

Whatever it was you found there
I hope to God it still exists. We could all
use a little happiness without the ubiquitous

irony of eyes not seeing eyes,
sincere expressions of insincerity,
and a new track mark to conceal.

editors note:

Music to give feelings a face we can look in the eye and speak the truth. – mh

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I was born in Chico, CA in 1974 and lived there until 1994. I was 19 and had two years at a community college behind me when I decided I didn’t want to go to school anymore. I moved to Salem, Oregon and lived with my brother and his wife while working as a carpet cleaner for ServiceMaster. After about a year I decided to return to school and attended Western Oregon University in Monmouth where I received a BA in English with an emphasis on writing.

By this time I was married, and in June of 1999, with a pregnant wife, I moved back to Chico. It was supposed to be temporary. I worked for my father’s disaster restoration business which was also supposed to temporary. I picked up what local freelance work I could get, but being a career writer was not in the cards so to speak. Ten years later my father sold the business and I was still working for it. I continued for the new owner for another two years before quitting because of overwhelming stress from all angles related to the industry. In November of 2011 I began working as Director of Operations for Grace Brethren Church and remain there in that capacity.

My first significant exposure to poetry was Bob Dylan. I remember listening to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol” as a young boy with my father late at night, trying to keep the volume in that tenuous place between just loud enough to hear well and not loud enough to wake mom. It was like nothing anyone else sang and it tuned my ear to hear language rather than affectation. But it wasn’t until that year long break between colleges that I actually started reading poetry. I began with T.S. Eliot (I have no idea why). This may have been good, or it may have been bad. His poetry gave me a lot of things I had to get over and I hardly ever return to his poems, but ultimately it started me down the path of writing poetry.

I started my blog, tappingthewall.com, in July of 2010. Prior to that I had a couple poems published on Cyber Oasis and in Western Oregon University’s literary journal Northwest Passage. I currently live in Chico with my wife and two sons.