THE
LOW
PASSIONS
POEMS ANDERS CARLSON-WEE
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
NEW YORK | LONDON
for Mom, Dad, Kai, and Olaf
for all those who took me in when I was far from home
and in loving memory of Scott Christopher Maxwell
CONTENTS
Riding the Owl’s Eye
County 19
Dynamite
Finding Josh
Great Plains Food Bank
Leaving Fargo
Birdcalls
Living
Icefisher
McDonald’s
Primer
The Muscles in Their Throats
Lodestar
Gathering Firewood on Tinpan
Cousin Josh on Doomsday
Asking for Work at Flathead Bible
Jim Tucker Lets Me Sleep in His Treehouse
To the Rail Cop at Rathdrum
Earshot
Flood of ’97
The Raft
Cousin Josh on Family
Old Church
Moorcroft
Living with the Accident
Fire
Polaroid
Lillian
Short Bed
Between Boulders
Cousin Josh Goes Off on Food Stamps
Clausen’s Dog
Checking for Ticks
Lyle Clears My Throat
Pride
News
St. Mary’s Memorial
Cousin Josh on Lighthouse Mission
Soft Hunting
The Mark
Northern Corn
Cutting for Sign
Butte
Cousin Josh on His Liver
Affording the Funeral
Shoalwater
Ms. Range Wants to See Me in It
Taken In
The Low Passions
Years Later, I Go Back to Thank You
After Fighting
To My Cousin Josh with Nothing
Listening to a Rail in Mandan
Notes
Acknowledgments
THE
LOW
PASSIONS
RIDING THE OWL’S EYE
Out of all the dumpsters that could have been
empty, all the weather that could have bloomed
over the prairie and ruined me, all the cars
that could have sped by without hesitating and left me
on the fog line nameless forever. The trains
that could have taken my legs. The men
that could have pulled a switchblade and opened me
like a flood enfolding the red North Dakota clay.
Out of all the hazards we pass through
in amazement, all the stories we tell of luck
and good fortune and prayer and survival, it is always
our own lungs that dry up and darken,
our own miles that straighten, our own hunger
that wanes. The Lord gives us mountains
and we fail to mine out that grandness.
The Lord gives us trains and we waste those distances
transporting coal. Some say the world is broken,
some say the Good Lord has forsaken our dreams,
but I say it is our own throat that grows
the cancer, our own asthma that blackens our breath
to a wheeze. And the truth is, the mile-long train
will always crawl past. The socket-fixed gaze
of the owl’s skull will always turn perfectly
And what is important to them is not how we ride
on the westbound freighter, not how we shiver,
not how we crawl crooked and thin
and climb yet again into the trembling eyehole.
It is not about suffering. It is not about fear.
We must peer out from inside the owl’s eye.
Watch the coal dust cook in the wind eddies.
Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises
the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky.
We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness.
The cargo worth carrying across the distances.
COUNTY 19
I twist in my seat beside the woman who picked me up
on County 19, reaching back to help her son
eat his Happy Meal. I fly a french fry through the air,
thinking how weird it is to hitch a ride on the road
I’ve driven so many times with my dad—
the route between our house and the old folks home
where Grandma lasted alone for fourteen years.
Each time we visited: the veins wider, bluer,
the ankles thinner, the distances between bedsores
diminished, the cheer my dad convinced himself to feel
as he repeated the litany: I am your son.
This is your grandson. We’re so happy to see you.
The woman asks me where I’m going
and I say as far as you can take me,
but as we pass the old folks home I tell her to pull over.
The boy is finished with his Happy Meal and now
he points at the bruise on his elbow and says Ouch.
His mom nods at him in the rearview as I get out.
That’s right, she says. Ouch. There is the low roofline,
the sign with a bible quote in changeable letters,
my grandma’s old window as blank as it was
when she lived here, some earth dug up
in the bordering cornfield for construction
of a new wing. I think about barging through the doors
and demanding to see Elizabeth Wee, making
some kind of scene. I think about setting up camp
in the hole in the cornfield and refusing to leave.
But instead I wander the grounds for a while.
I lie in the parking lot’s grass island and watch
cornstalks feathering the road with lank shadows,
the sunlight dipping down into the tassels.
I want speed. I want new people. To ditch
this slow sanitary drain of golden light,
my pastor parents and their immovable faith,
this town’s brown river exhausting its banks.
Elizabeth is underground. So is my cousin.
Stones like polished teeth in the family plot.
In the twilight I walk back to the shoulder
and catch a ride from a farmer hauling a trailer
stacked with hay bales three-high. When he asks me
where I’m going I say as far as you can take me.
DYNAMITE
My brother hits me hard with a stick
so I whip a choke chain
across his face. We’re playing
a game called Dynamite
where everything you throw
is a stick of dynamite,
unless it’s pine. Pine sticks
are rifles and pinecones are grenades,
but everything else is dynamite.
I run down the driveway
and back behind the garage
where we keep the leopard frogs
in buckets of water
with logs and rock islands.
When he comes around the corner
the blood is pouring
out of his nose and down his neck
and he has a hammer in his hand.
I pick up his favorite frog
and say If you come any closer
I’ll squeeze. He tells me I won’t.
&nb
sp; He starts coming closer.
I say a hammer isn’t dynamite.
He reminds me that everything is dynamite.
FINDING JOSH
Seven Camels touching on the bedstand
in a measured row, like a pan flute
with flush pipes that, when blown,
all hit one note. An eighth, unlit,
fits loosely in his curled fingers.
A few empty Coors rim the bathroom sink,
pull tabs removed. There’s no need
to check for a pulse, hold a credit card
for breath. I’ve worked with carcasses
the size of men. Gagged at the odor of a doe
letting go, smoked flies off piles of organs,
heard the wet rip of skin teased free
in oval sheets. I know the creature
But the hair still spins the cowlick.
The neck still cranes as if to listen.
GREAT PLAINS FOOD BANK
The wind is in the trees again, and I’m thinking it’s a wonder
the body can move. The way the mother at the Fargo food bank
fingers a can of concentrated juice. The way the line keeps
heaving forward. The way the child tugs the heavy skirt.
My job is to look for the elderly, help them load. Like the guy
who grew up in Oslo and is still trying to make it to Bergen.
It’s a straight shot on the train, he says, but you have to be
in Norway to catch it. I lift his meat and yogurt onto a cart.
I wait as he chooses nine of the least bruised carrots.
The trunk of his car has the smell of dried flowers, and his
baguettes fit lengthwise easily. But before I help him lower
himself into the driver’s seat, and before his hands pass over
one another, turning into the northbound traffic, he tells me
I’m young. Tells me it’s spring. Says I should be out of here,
heading for Bergen. I know he’s right. I know he’s
so goddamn right. I stand as still as I can as he leaves.
LEAVING FARGO
We crammed in McAlpine’s Pulse and drove
west out of Fargo to see the train wreck.
Late summer and the heat moaning
from the radiator, smoke gushing from the seams
in the hood, all of us snake-biting
McAlpine’s neck when he admitted
he’d thinned the coolant to try to make it
stretch. We passed Whale-O-Wash
where the volleyball girls held up cardboard
signs, did barefoot high kicks in bikinis,
offering five-dollar specials to raise funds
for their team. We passed M&H Gas.
Ironclad. Rickert’s Bar. The Hardee’s parking lot
where the Moorhead kids lounged on the hoods
of their cars, but we didn’t flick them off
because we knew about Garcia,
who’d just hung himself in his father’s closet
with a belt. Skateland. Hebron Brick.
My mother’s church on Division boarded up
and watermarked at the windows, signed
by the height of the flood in the spring.
Indian Triumph. Curt’s Lock and Key.
Ameristeel where McApline worked
with his uncle on weekends. The bums asleep
on layers of newspaper in the bushes
beside Bell State Bank. Tintmasters. Dakota
Electric. The rubble and brick where last winter
a lady carved a swastika into her wrist
before burning down her own fortuneteller business.
The old folks home where wheelchaired vets
waved out the windows at whoever
came by. Bozak flicked them off
and we all laughed. We passed the last trees
on the edge of town and gunned down
a county road through the ripening beets,
cranking up the windows and blasting the heat
as McAlpine pushed the Pulse above 90.
We called this Operation Desert Storm—
the North Dakota roads so flat and straight
you could hit 95 before the car started to quiver,
McAlpine screaming into the windshield:
Oppy Desy! Oppy Desy! All of us peeling
off our shirts and wearing them like turbans.
As we hit 99 I dug a onesy from the glovebox
and packed it and held it to McAlpine’s
trembling lips. This one’s for Garcia, he said.
We passed 100. Out in the fields the heat-
lifted kinks of cargo came into view.
It was the wreck we were looking for—
a junker from Wolf Point, Williston, Minot,
Grand Forks. A local. Low priority. Loaded
with hoppers, tankers, Canadian grainers,
gondolas hauling scrap metal to Duluth.
Somehow the clay and rain had fucked up
the rails and caused the freight to buckle
at the couplers, but nobody had died.
The conductor and his crew rolled on down the line,
drifting in the engine unit, watching
in the rearview as the mile-long train turtled
into the sugar beets and began to pile.
BIRDCALLS
I crept around the dark train yard
while my brother watched for bulls.
Two days deep into the Badlands
and all our water gone. We had a birdcall
for if you saw something and another
for if you heard. A silent yard eight strings wide
with a few junkers parked. The horizon
a dull burn. The rails lit dimly by dew.
I was looking for the water bottles
the conductors used and threw out the windows
with maybe a sip left inside them.
I found one by stepping on it.
I sucked it like a leech. I stumbled
up and down the ballast and found five more,
unbuttoning my shirt and nesting them
against my chest upright and capless.
We had the sandpiper for if you should run
and the flycatcher for if you should hide.
I can’t remember why we had the loon.
I crouched in the space between coal trains,
cradling the bottles and feeling the weight
of how little I had to spill.
I rubbed coal on my face. I felt crazy.
I thought about being found like this.
I tried to imagine what my story would be.
A version with my brother in it.
A version with no brother. I swear
I could smell rain a thousand miles away.
I could smell rain in the soot. I folded my hands
around my lips and made the gray ghost,
which told him where I was.
And also meant stay alert.
And also meant some other things
only owls understood.
LIVING
I get everything I need for free.
These boots came from the factory
dumpster on the far side of town. This hat
was moldering on the kitchen floor
in the foreclosed home I picked through.
This coat, this backpack, this brand-
name headlamp. I got this cornmeal
behind the grocery store, this flatbread
behind the bakery, this french press
in the alleyway next to the coffee shop in uptown.
This bible in a bum camp, this banjo
in a trashcan, this headless mannequin
in a free pile outside Honest Ed’s Antiques.
The British call it skipping.
The Brazilians call it living, call it vida.
&n
bsp; Vida que surgi de nada. Life out of nothing.
I bike past the butcher’s on Pike
and find a bag full of pigs.
None of them whole. A few sets of hooves,
a half torso, two heads, another head
with no nose, a leg, a pile of coiled tails
slowly uncoiling like white worms
taken out of a hole. Most of it going
musty, the muscle falling away
from the fascia, the skin drained of color
and feeling like withered pumpkin.
But some of it might be good.
A pair of milky gloves is clumped up
and tangled among the little hairless tails.
I dig them out. I blow to check
for holes. I begin sorting the pigs.
ICEFISHER
The man sets the fish house far out
on the lake. Drills the hole.
Scoops the slush out with a ladle.
Silence and the lake and the man.
The pine hills folded in fog,
faded to ash and gunpowder.
The maple leaves fallen and lost
in the snow. The gray ghost
thin and sinewy, moving off through
the coal-black remnants of branches.
If you cannot see it in winter
you will never see it.
The man goes into the dark house
and lowers his lure. The deep hole
glows. The water is clear.
The low hoot of the owl simmers
the shore meridian as evening
comes on and the hole
darkens. He breathes into his hands.
He lets out a little more line.
MCDONALD’S
You walk all night and into the next day
to survive the sudden October snow.
You have no money or hope of money.
Your backpack is a cloth sack with duct-
tape straps and safety pins in place
of zippers. Your gloves have no thumbs,
just holes, just unraveling half fingers.
You’ve come inside for the heat,
for plastic spoons, mayo, salt and sugar
packets, hand napkins you’ll ball later
for insulation beneath your clothes.
You’ve come for the bathroom—soap
to scrub your face, your neck, your pits,
toilet rolls for kindling flames as you camp