Double Decker Ode to Nature’s Vast Dopeness
and to Tubing Our Way Through It
Ephraim Scott Sommers
Hello, hot assed pomegranate seats
on this grey bus
someone, who must’ve been feeling
slutty with a blowtorch,
cut the rusty top off of.
Hello, hip teenager,
the time traveler
from the eighties
in Oakley blades,
storming us upriver with a squeaking trailer
full of blow-up O’s for the coming float! O Magnum PI mustache!
O scent of sunscreen
and the legal marijuana in someone’s pocket.
Let’s get whatever wind
happiness is more quickly
into our skins again! O the grunting engine of getting away
from the tragedies of this last month
which have been
so multi-layered
and many lately,
how the soul sometimes must claw the body and the brain out
of the casket
they’ve been an angry vampire in.
So who will raise their hands with me to prove
they’re dry and still alive
in their life vests?
Who sees the river to the left we are driving uphill and beside in this bus
and, like the rainbow trout getting down in there,
doesn’t want to ride it?
With many thanks,
of course, I hand a twenty spot
to the young wheelman for the premier ride, to the top,
for the gravel roads we’ve survived
in getting here! Thank you for allowing me to play a fool infatuated
with everything again,
for who doesn’t love
the absurdity of carrying
these bouncing oversized O O orange innertubes like pumpkin donuts
across a state highway
and down a skinny trail
toward the spine of the mighty O O Oconaluftee River,
which is Cherokee
for by the river,
for where the grumpy bears like me go to wash, for believed
by many to be O holy,
to be O healing,
and who doesn’t want to be healed by holding ourselves
even more wide open?
For this moment,
I thank the mud.
I thank the tangled and hairy-ass toes of these tall trees.
I thank the strangers
we are funny-walking with for not making fun of these
absurd water socks
my doctor has ordered me
to wear. In truth, I have to say that
I have wanted
to isolate myself from being weak in front of my closest friends.
But what California kid
turned too thin Carolina man
could stay home
when the laughter of moving water
is saxophoning
a good homie solo
over everything. O lovely and funky horn line. O nouns
I cannot slip
my lips around,
we have reached
our stream. We have reached the put in point. Is everyone ready,
we ask, my three good
friends and my wife
and I, we who have waited for the crowd to have abated by boating
their so many O O O’s
out of view (the crowd
of whom I also love,
of whom has just as much right as us to enjoy anything so miraculous
as being alive
on a Wednesday
in the Blue Ridge mountains
with people who matter). We cheer as they disappear around a waving tree.
We humbly ask the shoreline for a little more solitude
today for the five of us
as we seek to discover
the secret that the earth is always whispering behind the noise
of ourselves. Some of us
have anxiety, of course,
which may as well mean all of us do as we support
our anxious brothers and sisters by speaking up for them
in solidarity always to eliminate
any awkwardness, any whirlpooling maybes. Is everyone ready?
We are a team of orange
O’s that is well prepped
to be knocked and slobbered around by the wet dog tongue
of new experience.
We put in with a toast,
O the cold water on my shin bones,
O a photo, O a joke
about peeing ourselves while laying on our backs
just out of the water,
and with what luck I am strapped by a bungee cord and the kindness
of my friends’ hands
to the heavy pink O with the ice chest
full of beer and snacks
and my cellphone
and my soda waters
and sugar sensor
in a dry bag,
and though I no longer drink alcohol now, what a privilege
on such an excursion
that I will be able
again and again to say O hello and feel useful
every time my friends must struggle and wiggle-arm
their giggling O’s across river
and sideways over to me
for a fresh cold one. This day, itself, is like gliding
the foam into the mouth
of a tall cold beer, and I am the beer and the glass,
and we haven’t even started,
and for all of it,
for everything,
I can finally give back a can of gratitude, for with what
uneasiness my friends
must’ve been worrying about me in silence all this last month,
about my illness,
and have never told me.
What group texts I must’ve been
left out of, what love. And if they’re worrying now, they’re only
showing smiles and teeth
as they climb upon
each of their orange O’s
and let go of me to drift a little ahead of them, everyone still within a country song’s
earshot of each other.
And so we shove off
and into the river together, on this day
when my sugar
while floating the rapids on my O will go low
but a day
when I’ll have already been prepared with a homemade garbanzo bean salad
and baked chicken breast,
a day when while floating
my O above a lazy section
of the Oconaluftee River,
I’ll be eating an exquisite lunch, and enjoying nature’s stoney dopeness
between bites from a plastic fork
dipping into and out of a Zip-Loc bag,
so hallelujah, so yewwwwww,
so whatever the coming rapids,
whatever the world,
my sickness sometimes feels
like each experience is just too sweet, that I don’t deserve it,
a day like this, a day
where I can subtract
the past and the future into one big orange zero,
hover within this present,
this day where my friends and I can ride the roughest worry gone.
MARCH 2026
and to Tubing Our Way Through It
Ephraim Scott Sommers
Hello, hot assed pomegranate seats
on this grey bus
someone, who must’ve been feeling
slutty with a blowtorch,
cut the rusty top off of.
Hello, hip teenager,
the time traveler
from the eighties
in Oakley blades,
storming us upriver with a squeaking trailer
full of blow-up O’s for the coming float! O Magnum PI mustache!
O scent of sunscreen
and the legal marijuana in someone’s pocket.
Let’s get whatever wind
happiness is more quickly
into our skins again! O the grunting engine of getting away
from the tragedies of this last month
which have been
so multi-layered
and many lately,
how the soul sometimes must claw the body and the brain out
of the casket
they’ve been an angry vampire in.
So who will raise their hands with me to prove
they’re dry and still alive
in their life vests?
Who sees the river to the left we are driving uphill and beside in this bus
and, like the rainbow trout getting down in there,
doesn’t want to ride it?
With many thanks,
of course, I hand a twenty spot
to the young wheelman for the premier ride, to the top,
for the gravel roads we’ve survived
in getting here! Thank you for allowing me to play a fool infatuated
with everything again,
for who doesn’t love
the absurdity of carrying
these bouncing oversized O O orange innertubes like pumpkin donuts
across a state highway
and down a skinny trail
toward the spine of the mighty O O Oconaluftee River,
which is Cherokee
for by the river,
for where the grumpy bears like me go to wash, for believed
by many to be O holy,
to be O healing,
and who doesn’t want to be healed by holding ourselves
even more wide open?
For this moment,
I thank the mud.
I thank the tangled and hairy-ass toes of these tall trees.
I thank the strangers
we are funny-walking with for not making fun of these
absurd water socks
my doctor has ordered me
to wear. In truth, I have to say that
I have wanted
to isolate myself from being weak in front of my closest friends.
But what California kid
turned too thin Carolina man
could stay home
when the laughter of moving water
is saxophoning
a good homie solo
over everything. O lovely and funky horn line. O nouns
I cannot slip
my lips around,
we have reached
our stream. We have reached the put in point. Is everyone ready,
we ask, my three good
friends and my wife
and I, we who have waited for the crowd to have abated by boating
their so many O O O’s
out of view (the crowd
of whom I also love,
of whom has just as much right as us to enjoy anything so miraculous
as being alive
on a Wednesday
in the Blue Ridge mountains
with people who matter). We cheer as they disappear around a waving tree.
We humbly ask the shoreline for a little more solitude
today for the five of us
as we seek to discover
the secret that the earth is always whispering behind the noise
of ourselves. Some of us
have anxiety, of course,
which may as well mean all of us do as we support
our anxious brothers and sisters by speaking up for them
in solidarity always to eliminate
any awkwardness, any whirlpooling maybes. Is everyone ready?
We are a team of orange
O’s that is well prepped
to be knocked and slobbered around by the wet dog tongue
of new experience.
We put in with a toast,
O the cold water on my shin bones,
O a photo, O a joke
about peeing ourselves while laying on our backs
just out of the water,
and with what luck I am strapped by a bungee cord and the kindness
of my friends’ hands
to the heavy pink O with the ice chest
full of beer and snacks
and my cellphone
and my soda waters
and sugar sensor
in a dry bag,
and though I no longer drink alcohol now, what a privilege
on such an excursion
that I will be able
again and again to say O hello and feel useful
every time my friends must struggle and wiggle-arm
their giggling O’s across river
and sideways over to me
for a fresh cold one. This day, itself, is like gliding
the foam into the mouth
of a tall cold beer, and I am the beer and the glass,
and we haven’t even started,
and for all of it,
for everything,
I can finally give back a can of gratitude, for with what
uneasiness my friends
must’ve been worrying about me in silence all this last month,
about my illness,
and have never told me.
What group texts I must’ve been
left out of, what love. And if they’re worrying now, they’re only
showing smiles and teeth
as they climb upon
each of their orange O’s
and let go of me to drift a little ahead of them, everyone still within a country song’s
earshot of each other.
And so we shove off
and into the river together, on this day
when my sugar
while floating the rapids on my O will go low
but a day
when I’ll have already been prepared with a homemade garbanzo bean salad
and baked chicken breast,
a day when while floating
my O above a lazy section
of the Oconaluftee River,
I’ll be eating an exquisite lunch, and enjoying nature’s stoney dopeness
between bites from a plastic fork
dipping into and out of a Zip-Loc bag,
so hallelujah, so yewwwwww,
so whatever the coming rapids,
whatever the world,
my sickness sometimes feels
like each experience is just too sweet, that I don’t deserve it,
a day like this, a day
where I can subtract
the past and the future into one big orange zero,
hover within this present,
this day where my friends and I can ride the roughest worry gone.
MARCH 2026
