Murder

  2018

  POEMS

  ALDEN NOWLAN (1933–1983)

  I give you smoke on the autumn air

  Alders, gone fire red—

  Popals long and white and bare

  Near a snowy riverbed

  Gin when the night is cold or dark

  Wings to soar our sky

  Hope and Truth in your fierce heart,

  Knowledge, Love—

  Goodbye

  THE WINTER TESTAMENT

  The snow has silenced the barn

  Left its white hide across the walls

  And blinded the horse

  And tempered the grand illusion

  That spring will ever come at all.

  Outside by dark the sky is smoke

  The dog, half-starved barks,

  For he’s chained to the hard-luck culvert

  By his master gone away.

  THE WINTER TESTAMENT 2

  Beyond the crude window

  Across the road the snow

  Fills the tracks, the spruce stand is cold

  Where the fisher burrows;

  A rabbit followed my brother home

  Sat on his boot in the dooryard;

  And there was quite a hoot,

  So he named it, I think, Thumper.

  Found out later

  The fisher had caught its scent

  And scudded it all that day,

  The rabbit

  Bet against the odds

  Just to get away.

  NEWCASTLE, WINTER OF 1956

  Leonard Drillon lay drunk downtown

  While fire burned his house to ground

  And trapped children screamed his

  Name.

  Next morning, Constable Billy Dunn

  The one who kicked him in the groin

  Called all his fuckin’ family “scum,”

  Shook his hand, looked ashamed

  And offered to drive him home.

  NOVEMBER 1977

  November, the trees are still.

  The black earth reminds us of a regimental

  Song, and, from the hospital stack, smoke

  From bandages

  Touches that raw sky

  Just at one white spot in the heaven

  And I’ve come outside

  For a cigarette.

  (I look seventeen, though am twenty-seven)

  Up in the room beyond the white curtain

  Jammed with frost and the ridges of aluminum

  Where the job is following a blue Monitor,

  The nurse after twelve years, eleven months,

  Has become the disinterested partner in

  The pain of others.

  And, her patient,

  My mother, has just suffered

  Another botched operation,

  By a cursory drunken doctor.

  So many of her gender have died this way—

  As wonderfully brave as they can manage in a

  Room full of strangers, more interested in the

  Machinery than in such struggling,

  Frightened, still-beautiful bodies.

  THE SPRING TESTAMENT

  I go every day past the gravel bar

  And walk to the church

  In the April mud

  Because my friends have tossed me out

  And slammed the doors upon my face,

  There in my worn suit

  My face is lashed by crawling shame

  I reckon with what I have done

  That has so besmirched my family name

  And humbled by my new stage of grace

  Walk home alone in the setting sun.

  PEG AT SEVENTEEN

  My love was like a winter sparrow

  The world she saw a winter land

  The pulse of light on broken boughs

  A flush of sun on popal stands;

  The ice and drifts of a winter gale

  Left sorrow in her eyes—

  I remember my love when she was young,

  Before winter made us wise.

  CIRCUS

  I have come out on a grey afternoon

  To be at the circus with my son.

  The man behind me with his wife and

  Children laughs, as if a joke was so

  Well crafted he’s undone, and grabs not once

  But twice, my shoulder as he grins.

  So then he laughs every time the elephant

  Breaks wind.

  Or when the clown begins his task

  Of wrestling with the ostrich,

  He points his finger and chews

  Popcorn, blows bubbles with his gum.

  He is radiant in what I cannot see, that

  Has become

  Hilarious to him.

  All these poor animals trying

  To act gracious

  Their eyes, again and again

  Showing the universal

  Symptom of mortification, remorse and pain

  Not only for themselves but

  For their harried trainers.

  Finally it is over, all that unseen shame

  And they have shone the spotlight

  On the nineteen-year-old Armenian girl with

  The peculiar Armenian name;

  She’s ninety feet up

  Without a net, swinging free of the

  Pin bar that keeps her from her death

  All of this—all of this

  In order to make a dollar.

  And even though through the torn tent

  Comes dismal blowing snow and rain

  A smile never leaves her—for she takes it

  As her duty.

  And the man with his wife

  And children,

  No longer points or giggles

  But finally understands enough, to shut

  The fuck-up.

  A TRIP TO THE OUTER ISLAND (THE POET AS GUNSLINGER)

  The gunslingers are always the age we were then—twenty-one or thirty-nine

  Younger the killings become

  Studies in dim pathology

  Older and we mistake as comic the

  Poignancy of

  A gun well oiled worn so low.

  The young gunslinger doesn’t know

  How much of a set-up it’s been

  Until he gets there

  And is expected to be entertained

  By laughing at pistol tricks he’s

  Seen before, and finally, though the .44

  Is pointed at his head, won’t draw

  Except as last resort.

  The old gunslinger counts on this, of course

  When he holds open his shirt to show his scars

  Which keeps the kid in his place.

  The old man

  Could spit in the kid’s face before he’d

  Choose to make a move.

  In the end the old gunslinger

  Won’t come out of his room

  And the kid from the first moment

  Wanted to be home.

  Yet coming onto evening both

  Search the trees for wanted

  Posters, both know what it’s like

  To be alone;

  And the kid’s reputation has grown, and grown

  The price on his head is getting

  Larger, and someday someone

  He knows will get him in his back.


  That’s really what the old gunfighter

  Is counting on smiling at.

  THE JOURNEY

  I sometimes wake, know

  That we are not

  Travelling through the night

  Of snow with the train’s endless rocking, the

  Iced-over glitter of some obscure village lights

  And my sons are with me, safe at home.

  I have not, this time waking alone

  Migrated anywhere.

  That has really been my desire

  As long as I have known journey,

  Not to journey anymore.

  For I have used travel like a drug

  To ease pain I cannot treat

  Affliction I cannot cure.

  I have travelled

  To places filled with dull company

  Shamed by the actions of others

  I have come upon

  Or riotous in abandon of myself

  All knowing gone.

  I have stood with men

  Who would murder if they could without a

  Thought, and saw how others fawned about them

  Greedy to be snivelling for no cause;

  Or have agreed myself with those who had

  No truth to please my sense

  Of camaraderie in a bar.

  With this comes wisdom to be alone

  So wisdom is faith if not ignored.

  I have long known,

  That my youthful hope was dashed

  Not only by my own frivolity,

  But by the ill others had for me;

  One who asked me favours as he hid

  Behind the comments of his wife and friend.

  And knowing I was honour bred

  Never to answer what lie was said

  But to do my duty if I could.

  I have attained my life in spite of that,

  Dream only of mercy, not justice at

  The end; for mercy is justice after all.

  But it seems this night I have lost more

  Than I have ever gained

  True loves lost, friends gone,

  Those intolerant of my life

  Contemptuous of my name.

  Today my son asked me if we

  Could go to that city street

  Where he lay his best toy car down

  Under some forgotten flower bed.

  He smiled, unsure, but said he knew

  The place it could be found

  And wonders if it can’t be far;

  Tries to remember the city or the town.

  “I forgot it there,”

  He said. “You remember the garden with those tiny plants—?

  “Ah yes,” I said, “and the smell of the great

  Grey sea, the improbable sea that so far away

  Had no comfort or claim for your mother you or me.”

  So I told him the trip

  Could not be made—that journeys such

  As those are ones we cannot take.

  What is lost remains where it was lost,

  Hope and love, camaraderie in a bar

  Or honour squandered, all buried like his toy,

  And the seas are cold and forbidding now

  Even if our poor heart breaks.

  But tonight my child is unsettled in his sleep,

  Seeking that garden in Tasmania

  To reclaim whatever part of him was left behind;

  Toy car, or truck or Jeep.

  And now and then I hear,

  Against the dark and bitter slashing

  His few clear words

  “I found it, I found it every part.”

  As if the wind itself is asking;

  Or telling that children’s wisdom makes us pause

  Their bravery makes us weep

  And is carried in their laughing—

  Telling that they themselves are our hope,

  On cold nights that are so slowly passing.

  PARTING AT THE STATION IN VÖCKLABROOK

  Inge smiles and offers me money

  I will never take

  For having travelled from Paris

  Through Austria by train to see her;

  Offers it as gentle as a blessing,

  Offers it with her kiss as sweet as kindness,

  She knowing I have paid a week’s wages

  For a trip that ends as soon as it begins,

  A trip hurried into blindness, Munich and night falling.

  With the ticket takers

  And station masters, the jurisprudent ones

  All of us must deal with, all of our lives.

  Their faces so clean shaven—

  Those who would never take advantage of anyone,

  Except some child running away in winter,

  Orphan out of step with all the others,

  A man who can never speak the language

  And has been trying to all his life,

  A woman with a pleading smile,

  Or a stranger,

  Yes, a stranger they can better.

  WE HIT BILFERD

  We hit Willie Bilferd in the mouth

  The air was sharp, when he cried,

  We all felt brave

  When he tried to stand,

  Wipe torment from his eyes.

  He’d written a song about his mom,

  Was on his way to take it home.

  We threw him down and stepped on

  It, the week after his father died.

  He and his mom lived alone

  Wore a bowtie in the November sun,

  Face white as milk that dried

  Leaves curled in a lime-rinsed drum.

  Old memories pierce these forty years

  Touch of cruelty in a child’s glee,

  Sitting solitary on the grey deck chair

  Telling her of new friends he had,

  But the one who liked him most was

  Me.

  THE LILLIPUTIAN LOOKS UP

  I have lost my youth, Peg,

  You know that.

  Nothing more can be said

  About curtains blowing

  Above a register

  In your house when

  I visited that hard, cold night in 1968.

  (Something I’ve written about for forty years)

  Well,

  A party in the dooryard

  Rough and ready boys singing;

  The winter snow, where the light went gold,

  Grader passing on the road,

  Bedroom

  Smelling of love at twilight,

  The kitchen—ah, the kitchen, my dear,

  Of bacon, onions and wine.

  THE HOUSE

  My mother hated our house:

  Big and empty

  When night settled,

  And the hallway ran from one end to the

  Other.

  There were never enough tables or chairs

  Its smell contained the secret of endless hours

  Of washing and scrubbing.

  Ajax detergent after school at four o’clock

  The floors were pulled apart

  By callow children running.

  Nothing nice ever lasted

  And not a friend of hers entered.

  All of this

  And winter, winter, winter,

  Besides.

  She loathed it, as an


  Anathema

  And who could blame her.

  The work was never done.

  That last week

  In the hospital

  She tried to pull herself up.

  Go home.

  AUTUMN TESTAMENT

  So on the hills to the north the sky is clear

  And far away the metallic drone

  Of rattling chainsaws

  Cuts the evening to the bone.

  Fresh ruts are visible in the snow

  While the river, still glides cold and slow

  Here is where the buck has moved

  Sheltered by the frozen moon.

  From the chop down can be seen

  The doe that moves across the stream,

  Muscled in her tough and dainty hide

  While snow blanches her back and side.

  The buck moves toward her in the cold

  Swaggers its tines and lifts its nose,

  Moves its tongue to taste the air,

  Breathes in the doe urine lying there.

  It is November so she is touched

  By the heat of need and northern musk.

  Hunted, hounded, while coyotes bark,

  This union

  Makes them heroic, in the chilling dark.

  TRAVEL

  We are travelling again my son and I

  And he is so far from home,

  Nor do either of us speak the language

  Or understand the money

  Though he holds the coins in his small fist

  And the air has turned colder and the sky

  Gone strange, the breath of phantoms

  Plagues me day and night; and I am leaving behind

  Bad plans, bad relations, I have been travelling half my life.