March 5th, 2009
David Oliveira
David Oliveira is a native of California’s San Joaquin Valley, born in Hanford and raised in Armona—Kings County towns thirty-five miles south of Fresno. He is a graduate of California State University, Fresno, where he studied poetry writing with Philip Levine. After a career as a grade school teacher in Armona, Oliveira moved to Santa Barbara where he worked in data processing. He was publisher and editor of Mille Grazie Press in Santa Barbara which published poetry by writers primarily from California’s central coast. He was a founding editor of Solo, an award winning national journal of poetry, and he founded, with poet Phil Taggart, the long-running Santa Barbara Poetry Series at the Contemporary Arts Forum. In addition, Oliveira is a recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Santa Barbara Arts Commission, and in 2000, he was named Santa Barbara’s poet laureate.
A Little Travel Story, Oliveira’s first full-length collection of poems, was published in 2008 by Harbor Mountain Press. His other published work includes a chapbook, In the Presence of Snakes from Brandenburg Press, and a collaboration from Solo Press, A Near Country: Poems of Loss (with Glenna Luschei and Jackson Wheeler). In addition, his poems are featured in several important anthologies, including: How Much Earth: the Fresno Poets, which he edited with Christopher Buckley and M. L. Williams; California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present; In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare; and The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place. He is also the inventor of Poet Cards, trading cards that feature poets instead of sports figures.
Oliveira has also been widely published in journals, among which include: 5 AM, Art/Life, Askew, Café Solo, Chiron Review, Gávea-Brown, Mississippi Review, New Virginia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Third Coast.
Oliveira has been a featured reader at many venues, including: Beyond Baroque Foundation; the Central Lending Library, Singapore; City Lights Bookstore; Cody’s Bookstore; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Universities of California at Santa Barbara and Riverside; and Yale University. He has also been a headlining poet at the Los Angeles, Ojai, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura poetry festivals.
In 2002, David Oliveira moved to Phnom Penh where he makes his home on the bank of the Mekong River with his partner, Vic Thong, and is professor of English at Paññāsāstra University of Cambodia.
A Little Travel Story
Though it is not cold,
the man puts on his business coat
so that motorists, using this remote highway
to return from their weekend at the beach
might recognize his walking
as the temporary inconvenience
of one who had not planned to walk.
But because it is also dark now,
his smile appears in the headlights too late
to change anyone’s hurry.
It would be simple, at this point,
to turn your attention
to the hard facts in the lives
of the Mexican farm worker and his pregnant wife,
who are the ones who stop for the stranded driver,
who, in a language he does not understand,
invite him to ride to a telephone
in the back of an old gray truck
with the company of two children.
But this is, finally, not the story of a poor family
who could not think of other than helping,
nor is it a story to show the generosity
of the hapless walker
whose gratitude buys a month’s groceries,
nor is it the story of his car
that, for reasons it keeps to itself,
quits fourteen miles from the nearest phone.
This, you will be surprised to learn,
is the old story of the moon
which no one sees rise behind them
in the June night, one day away
from being full above all their fortunes.
When the moon is a ripe apricot,
its glistening sugar easy
to pick off the kiss of a lover,
who thinks the sweetness will last
for just the moment they are tasting?
Even if you stand beside the road
and watch the moon grow small,
aging to white in the span of one night,
you will not understand anymore than you do now
about the roundness that rolls each moment away
from this life you love so much.
It is only this little thing the story wants to tell.
The travelers find their way home.
The moon goes to sleep on the other side of the world.
