MAXed OUT

I began writing these poems in the fall of 2017 after starting a new job in downtown Portland, Oregon. I usually take the MAX train to work. The Metropolitan Area Express (MAX) is a three county, color-coded rail transportation system serving the Portland area and operated by TriMet. Orange is my MAX line and it takes about twenty minutes on a good day to reach my destination. The cars are often packed with Clack County residents, Reedites, the medical herd heading toward OHSU, PSU students, city bureaucrats, and a mix of others like me. I quickly realized that this diverse array of humanity, with its moods and behaviors, was waiting for me to witness and record in my small black unlined notebook with a ballpoint pen. It was my commuting Garden of Earthly Delights.
The banquet kept unfolding, revealing itself, ride after ride, stop after stop, who came in, who went out. I could not help writing down what I saw, heard, smelled, felt, and imagined. It seemed the mornings were more bountiful than the afternoons--but not always. I wonder if you’ll be able to tell what time of day a specific poem was written?
And then there was the outside--morphing tag posts, gazing goddess murals, trickster crows and purposeful gulls, zipping bikes, homeless compounds, and railroad crossing stuck cars. I saw it all.
I sure got my money’s worth! A ticket to ride revealed a kaleidoscopic universe of committed commuters peppered with Portlandia possibilities. Please hold on….
Ross Island Bridge Blue--The Cover
The bluesque color of the cover was selected to match the newly painted “unusually unbureaucratic hue” of the Ross Island Bridge that’s featured in the poem, “Lady Day Bridge.” I was impressed by the color selection as it seemed rich, beyond blue and the typical dullish finish of most civic metal projects.
I wrote the folks at the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) because they own the bridge and managed the re-painting project. They were timely and responsive to my request to learn the exact bluish finish color of the bridge. In one of its public statements about the color, ODOT said, “Five coats of paint will be applied to the Ross Island Bridge with the last coat a deep blue-green, the color it was last painted in 1967. Faded remnants of the 1967 paint job can be seen in places on the bridge.” And, in a reply to my email, “That paint color at the time was called phthalo blue and green. The paint for the recent painting of the bridge was called ‘Ross Island Original’ and number was Wasser W21.4019.”
We tried to match this magnificent hue, “like all the Portland tattoo ink mixed together,” for the cover of MAXed OUT from the available color selections.