Born in NYC in 1957, Laura Tattoo has been writing poetry since the age of 15 and has written seven volumes of poetry. She has lived in Oregon since 1977 and recently moved to the Oregon coast where she is writing her first novel. Many of her poems can be found on her website.
The Crow in the Bay
Waif comedienne
Bankrupt siren
off the seawall she crows
Chanties of chronic distaste
Butchery and
banal belief
Slip beneath her wing
And worship in common with
aquatic beasts of burden
Bella linda loma foma
Roll like seatrash
your languid diatribes
I will love you forever
And your dirty songs will be
my wit's end
The Ghost
I do not remember which way I have gone
I have not developed a sense of time
My house is embellished with ivy and thorn
My roses lay dead of the autumn night
Quick, you see my shadow on the stair
It mounts in graceful agèdness
But do you remember the dust and the web
Of houses long before vacated?
The Making of Rain
(for Akira Kurosawa)
I was an inmate of sadness
but I dried all my tears
and put away the madness
of those melancholic years
The locked doors and the voices
the old crown of perdition
the cold reason of choices
the treason of tradition
And I blew it to an atom
with one puff of my mouth
and left behind my Sodom
for the garden of the south
Now I rest in this bright room
perfumed with gardenia
birds on my windowlace
sontinas de España
And I realize that the sadness
is a part of my framework
and the isolating madness
is a bulwark of my birthmark
And I justify the dullness
with the sadness that I've lost
like an amnesiacal witness
to the holocaust of frost
I know that I could leave there
with one wave of my hand
and blow the frost to seafare
at the edge of this bright land
But I covet it like butter
on a renunciant's bread
and close up every shutter
and put myself to bed
To dream of the northland
and the cold bitter snows
that conceal every man's plan
and cover mouth and nose
To rest on her bosum
to hear her heart ticking
puts an end to the flotsam
puts an end to the thinking
I lay in this garden
and give myself to pain
and watch the south sky darken
and lend itself to rain
Walking with Crows
Words, words
what good are they
when every day
just hurts too much
and there's nothing
left but the
rush of the drugs
and crows that
descend outside
my windows
Pecking at the
leftover crumbs
on the side of the road
leftover songs
that flood
my soul
in spite of
the hopelessness
the black hopelessness
of crows?
Outside my door
they gather, those
tremendous black-
winged wonders
witless survivors
of a winter sky
and the driving rains
until there is nothing
left to peck at when
the roads wash away
But still we go
walking, the
crows weaving
in and out of the
trees above me
making circles
in this lonely
endless, hungry
place of pain and
it doesn't matter that
we're going nowhere
What matters is
the moment of
power and glory
in the morning
when a certain drug
combination saves
my painful body
ever leaden
and brings it
back to being
And to crows
and yet more crows
and a crow song
in my head like
a death threat
but blessed
because we're
still alive and
we're going, we're
going somewhere