beloved by dealers down in Santa Fe.
He lived to corner strangers, read them tracts
of his invention on the careful work
he would preserve and pridefully display.
Foley roamed the Great Plains in his van,
his thin hair tied back in a ponytail,
and people learned that he was smart enough
to deal. He made a living off this stuff,
became a more authenticated man.
But when he drank he would begin to rail
against the white world’s trivializing fluff.
Last night when he came in, reeking of smoke
and liquor, gesticulating madly
as if we’d both returned from the same bar,
I heard him out a while, the drunken bore,
endured his leaning up against my oak
credenza there, until at last I gladly
offered him a drink and a kitchen chair.
I still see him, round as a medicine ball
with a three-day beard, wearing his ripped jeans
and ratty, unlaced Nikes without socks.
I see him searching through two empty packs
and casting them aside despite my scowl,
opening a third, lighting up—he careens
into my kitchen, leaving boozy tracks.
I offered brandy. He didn’t mind the brand
or that I served it in a water glass.
He drank with simple greed, making no show
of thanks, and I could see he wouldn’t go.
He told me nothing happened as he planned,
how he left Rasher’s tiny shop a mess.
I killed him, Foley said. You got to know.
You know the place. Grand Avenue. The Great
White Way they built over my people’s bones
after the western forts made stealing safe.
Safe for that fucking moneyed generation
F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to write about—
and here was Rasher, selling off such crap
no self-respecting dealer’d waste his time.
I heard he had good beadwork, Chippewa,
but when I went in all I saw was junk.
I’m thinking, Christ, the neighbors here must love him,
the one dusty-shuttered place on the block
and inside, counters filled with silver plate
so tarnished nobody would touch it, irons
with fraying cords and heaps of magazines.
He had the jawbone of a buffalo
from South Dakota, an old Enfield rifle,
a horn chair (or a cut-rate replica),
German Bible, a blue-eyed Jesus framed
in bottle caps—I mean he had everything
but paint-by-number sunsets, so much junk
I bet he hadn’t made a sale in years.
You got to know this guy—skinny bald head
and both his hands twisted from arthritis.
I wouldn’t give his place a second look
except I heard so much about this beadwork.
He leads me to a case in the back room.
I take a look. The stuff is fucking new,
pure Disneyland, not even off the Rez.
Foley’s glass was empty; I poured him more
to buy time while I thought of some excuse
to get him out of here. If homicide
indeed were his odd tale’s conclusion, I’d
rather let him pass out on my floor,
then dash upstairs and telephone the police.
I wouldn’t mind if “fucking” Foley fried.
It’s crap, he said. I tell this slimy coot
he doesn’t know an Indian from a dog.
I can’t believe I drove five hundred miles
to handle sentimental tourist crap.
He rolled himself upright in my kitchen chair
and looked at me with such complete disdain
that I imagined Mr. Rasher’s stare.
I knew the man. We dealers somehow sense
who we trust and who the characters are.
I looked at my inebriated guest
and saw the fool-as-warrior on a quest
for the authentic, final recompense
that would rub out, in endless, private war,
all but his own image of the best.
Pretty quick I see I hurt his feelings.
He gets all proud on me and walks around
pointing at this and that,
a World’s Fair pin, a Maris autograph,
and then he takes me to a dark wood cupboard
and shows me what’s inside. The old man
shows me his motherfucking pride and joy.
I look inside his cupboard and it’s there
all right—a black man’s head with eyes sewn shut—
I mean this fucker’s real, all dried and stuffed,
a metal ashtray planted in the skull.
I look and it’s like the old man’s nodding,
Yeah, yeah, you prick, now tell me this is nothing.
He’s looking at me looking at this head,
telling me he found it in a house
just up the street. Some dead white guy’s estate
here in the liberal north allowed this coot
whatever his twisted little hands could take,
and then he hoards it away for special guests.
I didn’t say a thing. I just walked out.
Now Foley filled his glass, drinking it down.
His irises caught fire as he lit up.
I sat across from him and wiped my palms
but inside I was setting off alarms
as if I should alert this sleeping town
that murder lived inside it. I could stop
the story now, I thought, but nothing calms
a killer when he knows he must confess,
and Foley’d chosen me to hear the worst.
Weird, he said, looking straight at me beyond
his burning cigarette. I got so mad.
Like all I thought of was a hundred shelves
collecting dust in Rasher’s shop, and how
a dead man’s head lay at the center of it.
I had to get a drink. Some yuppie bar
that charged a fortune for its cheapest bourbon.
I’m in there while the sun sets on the street
and people drop in after leaving work.
I look at all these happy people there—
laughing, anyway; maybe they aren’t happy—
the well-dressed women tossing back their hair,
the men who loosen their designer ties
and sip their single malts—living on bones
of other people, right?
And two blocks down the street, in Rasher’s shop,
a head where someone flicked his ashes once,
because of course a darky can’t be human,
and someone’s family kept that darky’s head.
These genteel people with their decent souls
must have been embarrassed finding it,
and Rasher got it for a fucking song
and even he could never sell the thing.
No, he showed it to me just to get me,
just to prove I hadn’t seen it all.
Well, he was right, I hadn’t seen it all.
I didn’t know the worst that people do
could be collected like a beaded bag,
bad medicine or good, we keep the stuff
and let it molder in our precious cases.
Some fucker cared just how he dried that head
and stitched the skin and cut the hole in the top—
big medicine for a man who liked cigars.
It’s just another piece of history,
human, like a slave yoke or a scalping knife,
and maybe I was drunk on yuppie booze,
but I knew some things had to be destroyed.
Hell, I could hardly walk, but I walked back,
knocked on Rasher’s door until he opened,
pushed him aside like a bag of raked-up leaves.
Maybe I was shouting, I don’t know.
I heard him shouting at my back, and then
he came around between me and the case,
a little twisted guy with yellow teeth
telling me he’d call the fucking cops.
I found the jawbone of that buffalo.
I mean I must have picked it up somewhere,
maybe to break the lock, but I swung hard
and hit that old fucker upside the head
and he went down so easy I was shocked.
He lay there moaning in a spreading pool
I stepped around. I broke that old jawbone
prizing the lock, but it snapped free, and I
snatched out the gruesome head.
I got it to my van all right, and then
went back to check on Rasher. He was dead.
For a while I tried to set his shop on fire
to see the heaps of garbage in it burn,
but you’d need gasoline to get it going
and besides, I couldn’t burn away the thought
of that weird thing I took from there tonight.
It’s out there, Foley said. I’m parked outside
a few blocks down—I couldn’t find your house.
I knew you’d listen to me if I came.
I knew you’d never try to turn me in.
You want to see it? No? I didn’t either,
and now I’ll never lose that goddamned head,
even if I bury it and drive away.
By now the bluster’d left his shrinking frame
and I thought he would vomit in my glass,
but Foley had saved strength enough to stand,
while I let go of everything I’d planned—
the telephone, police, and bitter fame
that might wash over my quiet life and pass
away at some inaudible command.
I thought of all the dead things in my shop.
No object I put up was poorly made.
Nothing of mine was inhumane, although
I felt death in a kind of undertow
pulling my life away. Make it stop,
I thought, as if poor Foley had betrayed
our best ideals. Of course I let him go.
The truth is, now he’s left I feel relieved.
I locked the door behind him, but his smell
has lingered in my hallway all these hours.
I’ve mopped the floor, washed up, moved pots of flowers
to places that he touched. If I believed,
I would say Foley had emerged from hell.
I ask for help, but the silent house demurs.
IN THE BORROWED HOUSE
While flowerbeds have gone to seed,
a book you didn’t plan to read
offers the unexpected phrase
that occupies your minds for days.
You write with someone else’s pen
of someone else’s life. And when
light’s absence leans across the town,
you lay another body down.
ADAM SPEAKS
When I was clay there was so much to feel: symmetries of sunlight
traced within the feather and the leaf, pale secretions
trailing from shells, the clammy hands of fog touching my body.
My first uncurling into day was built from muted fires
below, and I began to grow distinct, bone, nail and hair,
muscled, akimbo, awkward as the fawn I later named.
There was a sea inside my flesh—I tensed to hold it in,
but found it was the whisper of the moon calling to me.
You who are thinking of me then, remember I tore my self
out of myself, bellowing like thunder. When I saw birds
I thought they were the love of God, and wailed at how they flew above me.
BALLADE AT 3 A.M.
A Dunkin’ Donuts denizen,
Phil diagrammed conspiracies
in which the country had a plan,
contrived by top authorities,
to generate our mass malaise.
When I would ask him why or how,
suspicion flickered in his eyes.
I don’t know where he’s living now.
Jake had the presidential grin,
describing all the Saigon whores
who sold their wares to a bored Marine.
Due to his unexplained disease
he lived on federal subsidies,
though late at night he would avow
his fate was fixed by a hiring freeze.
I don’t know where he’s living now.
The bullet piercing Marvin’s spleen
was not a North Vietnamese
but friendly fire from an M16.
He wasn’t even overseas
and bore no combat memories
that might explain the way his brow
twitched as if he had DTs.
I don’t know where he’s living now.
Lost in the disco Seventies,
I met them briefly, anyhow,
and went on to my girlfriend’s place.
I don’t know where they’re living now.
THE LOST HOUSE
A neighbor girl went with me near the creek,
entered the new house they were building there
with studs half-covered. Alone in summer dark,
we sat together on the plywood floor.
The sky way I contrived it, my right hand
slipped insinuatingly beneath her blouse
in new maneuvers, further than I planned.
I thought we floated in that almost-house.
Afraid of what might happen, or just afraid,
I stopped. She stood and brushed the sawdust off.
Fifteen that summer, we knew we could have strayed.
Now, if I saw it in a photograph,
I couldn’t tell you where that new house stood.
One night the timbered hillside thundered down
like a dozen freight trains, crashing in a flood
that splintered walls and made the owners run.
By then I had been married and divorced.
The girl I reached for in unfinished walls
had moved away as if by nature’s course.
The house was gone. Under quiet hills
The creek had cut new banks, left silt in bars
now sprouting alder scrub. No one would know,
cruising the dead-end road beneath the stars,
how we had trespassed there so long ago.
MR. LOUDEN AND THE ANTELOPE
Mr. Louden was my father’s ranching friend
whose pickup sprouted rust from summer hail.
It didn’t bother him. He had one arm,
and a tucked-in sleeve, and drove us toward the end
of his fence line, passing piñon and chaparral.
Forty years. By now he’s bought the farm.
I can still hear him chuckling: No, there ain’t
nothing funnier than a one-armed man
driving while he tries to swat horseflies.
I never heard him utter a complaint.
He could have been weathered sandstone, deadpan
when his empty sleeve flapped out in the breeze.
He released the wheel to point as antelope,
like dolphins of the desert that were playing
in our dusty wake, surfaced alongside us
and in one fleet formation climbed the slope
ahead, and over it. They left us saying
little and were far too fast to guide us.
Where were we headed in that battered truck,
my father, old Mr. Louden, and I?
And was it the hail-pocked wr
eck that I recall?
Now forty-eight, I can’t believe my luck,
to have seen those agile creatures chasing by—
unless, of course, I only dreamed it all.
Though I can’t prove it’s true, I saw them go
out of sight like figures out of a myth.
They left us gasping in their kicked-up dust,
our own dust settling like summer snow,
while Mr. Louden laughed, conjuring with
his only arm, mage of the blooming rust.
A MEANING MADE OF TREES
From a phrase by Seamus Heaney
This bedroom high in the old house,
its roof pitched steeply overhead,
traps the lake water sounds, afloat
on what it holds: liquid lapping.
I could lie here half the day long,
hearing rain wrung out of the sky,
windows open, so the outer
breath and green of the world get in.
The alder’s scabbed, serrated leaves
that will fail later in the fall
fulfill themselves, a waterfall
steeped in the greening chlorophyll.
That stir of limbs against the roof
must be the native Douglas fir—
a winter friend because it keeps
the housebound memory evergreen.
Most of all the cedar rises,
huge and straight, the hulking host
and omphalos of my dream world,
its rootedness a kind of triumph.
WINTER 1963
As my father turned the car into the drive
and we were home from our rare trip to church,
a man’s voice speaking from the radio
caused us to linger there, engine running.
Just so, the voice with its calm cadences
lingered by woods where snow fell downily.
Though only eight, I thought I understood
the words to fit our snowless January,
and that the man, whose name was Robert Frost
(like rime I saw that morning on the lawn),
had died in Boston, which was far away.
Who knows where I went next, with all the woods