near Parker Creek,
a doe bounding away through
shoulder-high fog
fairly floating,
soundless
as if she were running in a cloud.
That his death was disfigurement:
at impact when light passed
the cells yawned then froze in postures
unlike their former selves, teeth
stuck by the glue of their blood
to windshields, visors. And in the night,
a quiet snowy landscape, three bodies
slump, horribly rended.
Acacia Accidie Accipiter
flower boredom flight
gummy wet pale stemmed
barely above root level
and darkened by ferns;
but hawk
high now spots the car he shot
and left there,
swings low
in narrowing circles,
feeds.
My mouth stuffed up with snow,
nothing in me moves,
earth nudges all things this month.
I’ve outgrown this shell
I found in a sea of ice –
its drunken convolutions –
something should call me to another life.
Too cold for late May, snow flurries,
warblers tight in their trees, the air
with winter’s clearness, dull
pearlish clear under clouds, clean
clear bite of wind, silver maple flexing
in the wind, wind rippling petals,
ripped from flowering crab,
pale pink against green firs, the body
chilled, blood unstirred, thick with frost:
body be snake,
self equal to ground heat,
be wind cold, earth heated,
bend with tree, whip with grass,
move free clean and bright clear.
Night draws on him until he’s soft
and blackened, he waits for bones
sharp-edged as broken stone, rubble
in a deserted quarry, to defoliate,
come clean and bare
come clean and dry,
for salt,
he waits for salt.
In the dark I think of the fire,
how hot the shed was when it burned,
the layers of tar paper and dry pine,
the fruit-like billows and blue embers,
the exhausted smell as of a creature
beginning to stink when it has no more to eat.
The doe shot in the back
and just below the shoulder
has her heart and lungs blown out.
In the last crazed seconds she leaves
a circle of blood on the snow.
An hour later we eat
her still-warm liver for lunch,
fried in butter with onions.
In the evening we roast
her loins, and drink two gallons of wine,
reeling drunken and yelling on the snow.
Jon Jackson will eat venison for a month,
he has no job, food or money,
and his pump and well are frozen.
June, sun high, nearly straight above,
all green things in short weak shadow;
clipping acres of pine for someone’s
Christmas, forearms sore with trimming,
itching with heat –
drawing boughs away from a trunk
a branch confused with the thick
ugliness of a hognose snake.
Dogged days, dull, unflowering,
the mind petaled in cold wet dark;
outside the orange world is gray,
all things gray turned in upon
themselves in the globed eye of the seer –
gray seen.
But the orange world is orange to itself,
the war continues redly,
the moon is up in Asia,
the dark is only eight thousand miles deep.
At the edge of the swamp a thorn apple tree
beneath which partridge feed on red berries,
and an elm tipped over in a storm
opening a circle of earth formerly closed,
wet, as if there were some lid to let
secrets out or a place where the ground
herself begins, then grows outward
to surround the earth; the hole, a black
pool of quiet water, the white roots
of undergrowth. It appears bottomless,
an oracle I should worship at; I want
some part of me to be lost in it and return
again from its darkness, changing the creature,
or return to draw me back to a home.
LOCATIONS
I want this hardened arm to stop
dragging a cherished image.
– RIMBAUD
In the end you are tired of those places,
you’re thirty, your only perfect three,
you’ll never own another thing.
At night you caress them as if the tongue
turned inward could soothe, head lolling
in its nest of dark, the heart fibrotic,
inedible. Say that on some polar night
an Eskimo thinks of his igloo roof, the blocks
of ice sculptured to keep out air, as the roof
of his skull; all that he is, has seen,
is pictured there – thigh with the texture
of the moon, whale’s tooth burnished from use
as nothing, fixtures of place, some delicate
as a young child’s ear, close as snails to earth,
beneath the earth as earthworms, farther beneath
as molten rock, into the hollow, vaulted place,
pure heat and pure whiteness,
where earth’s center dwells.
You were in Harar but only for a moment,
rifles jostling blue barrels against blue barrels
in the oxcart, a round crater, hot, brown,
a bowl of hell covered with dust.
The angels you sensed in your youth
smelled strongly as a rattlesnake
smells of rotten cucumber, the bear
rising in the glade of ferns of hot fur
and sweat, dry ashes pissed upon.
You squandered your time as a mirror,
you kept airplanes from crashing at your doorstep,
they lifted themselves heavily to avoid your sign,
fizzling like matches in the Atlantic.
You look at Betelgeuse for the splendor
of her name but she inflames another universe.
Our smallest of suns barely touches earth
in the Gobi, Sahara, Mojave, Mato Grosso.
Dumb salvages: there is a box made of wood,
cavernous, all good things are kept there,
and if the branches of ice that claw against the window
become hands, that is their business.
Yuma is an unbearable place.
The food has fire in it as
does the brazero’s daughter
who serves the food in an orange dress
the color of a mussel’s lip.
Outside it is hot as the crevasse
of her buttocks – perfect body temperature.
You have no idea where your body stops
and the heat begins.
On Lake Superior the undertow swallows
a child and no one notices until evening.
They often drown in the green water
of abandoned gravel pits,
or fall into earth where the crust is thin.
I have tried to stop the war.
You wanted to be a sculptor
creating a new shape that would exalt itself
as the shape of a ball or hand
or breast or dog or hoof,
paw print
in snow, each cluster of grapes
vaguely different, bat’s wing shaped
as half a leaf, a lake working
against its rim of ground.
You wear yellow this year for Christmas,
the color of Christ’s wounds after three days,
the color of Nelse’s jacket you wear when writing,
Nelse full of Guckenheimer, sloth, herring, tubercles.
There were sweet places to sleep: beds warmed
by women who get up to work or in the brush
beneath Coit Tower, on picnic tables in Fallon, Nevada,
and Hastings, Nebraska, surrounded by giant curs,
then dew that falls like fine ice upon your face
in a bean field near Stockton, near a waterfall
in the Huron Mountains, memorable sleeps
in the bus stations of San Jose and Toledo, Ohio.
At a roller rink on Chippewa Lake
the skaters move to calliope music.
You watch a motorboat putt by the dock,
they are trolling for bass at night
and for a moment the boat and the two men
are caught in the blue light of the rink,
then pass on slowly upon the black water.
Liquor has reduced you to thumbnails,
keratin, the scales of fish
your ancient relatives,
stranded in a rock pool.
O claritas, sweet suppleness
of breath,
love within a cloud that
blinds us
hear, speak, the world without.
Grove St., Gough St., Heber, Utah,
one in despair, two in disgust,
the third beneath the shadow
of a mountain wall, beyond
the roar of a diesel truck,
faintly the screech of lion.
Self-immolation,
the heaviest of dreams –
you become a charcoal rick
for Christ, for man himself.
They laugh with you as you disappear
lying as a black log upon the cement,
the fire doused by your own blood.
The thunderstorm moved across the lake
in a sheet of rain, the lightning
struck a strawpile, which burned in the night
with hot roars of energy
as in ’48 when a jet plane crashed near town,
the pilot parachuting as a leaf through the red sky,
landing miles away, missing the fire.
There was one sun,
one cloud,
two horses running,
a leopard in chase;
only the one sun and a single cloud
a third across her face.
Above, the twelve moons of Jupiter
hissing in cold and darkness.
You worshiped the hindquarters
of beautiful women,
and the beautiful hindquarters of women
who were not beautiful;
the test was the hindquarters
as your father judged cattle.
He is standing behind a plow
in a yellow photograph,
a gangster hat to the back of his head,
in an undershirt with narrow straps,
reins over a shoulder waiting for the photo,
the horses with a foreleg raised,
waiting for the pull with impatience.
The cannon on the courthouse lawn was plugged,
useless against the japs.
In the dark barn
a stillborn calf on the straw,
rope to hooves, its mother bawling
pulled nearly to death.
You’ve never been across the ocean,
you swept the auditorium with a broom
after the travel lectures and dreamed of going
but the maps have become old, the brain
set on the Mackenzie River, even Greenland
where dentists stalk polar bears from Cessnas.
The wrecked train smelled of camphor,
a bird floating softly above the steam,
the door of the refrigerator car cracked open
and food begins to perish in the summer night.
You’ve become sure that every year
the sky descends a little,
but there is joy in this pressure,
joy bumping against the lid
like a demented fly, a bird breaking
its neck against a picture window
while outside new gods roll over
in the snow in billowy sleep.
The oil workers sit on the curb
in front of the Blue Moon Bar & Cafe,
their necks red from the sun,
pale white beneath the collars
or above the sleeves; in the distance
you hear the clumping of the wells.
And at a friend’s house
there are aunts and uncles, supper plates
of red beans and pork, a guitar is taken
from the wall – in the music
the urge of homesickness, a peach not to be held
or a woman so lovely but not to be touched,
some former shabby home far south of here,
in a warmer place.
Cold cement, a little snow upon it.
Where are the small gods who bless cells?
There are only men. Once you were in a room
with a girl of honey-colored hair,
the yellow sun streamed down air of yellow straw.
You owe it to yourself to despise this place,
the walls sift black powder;
you owe yourself a particular cave.
You wait for her, a stone in loamy stillness,
who will arrive with less pitiful secrets
from sidereal reaches, from other planets of the mind,
who beneath the chamber music of gown and incense
will reflect the damp sweetness of a cave.
At that farm there were so many hogs,
in the center of the pen in the chilled air
he straddles the pig and slits its throat,
blood gushes forth too dark to be blood,
gutted, singed, and scraped into pinkness –
there are too many bowels, the organs
too large, pale sponges that are lungs,
the pink is too pink to understand.
This is earth I’ve fallen against,
there was no life before this;
still icon
as if seen through mist,
cold liquid sun, blue falling
from the air,
foam of ship’s prow
cutting water, a green shore beyond
the rocks;
beyond, a green continent.
OUTLYER & GHAZALS
for Pat Paton
1971
OUTLYER
IN INTERIMS: OUTLYER
Let us open together the last bud of the future.
– APOLLINAIRE
He Halts. He Haw. Plummets.
The snake in the river is belly-up
diamond head caught in crotch of branch,
length wavering yellow with force of water.
Who strangles as this taste of present?
Numen of walking and sleep, knees of snow
as the shark’s backbone is gristle.
And if my sister hadn’t died in an auto wreck
and had been taken by the injuns
I would have had something to do:
go into the mountains and get her back.
Miranda, I have proof that when people die
they become birds. And I’ve lost
my chance to go to sea or become a cowboy.
Age narrows me to this window and its
three-week snow. This is Russia and I a clerk.
Miranda throws herself from the window,
the icon clutched to her breasts,
into the
snow, over and over.
A world of ruminants, cloven-hoofed,
sum it: is it less worthless for being “in front”?
There are the others, ignorant of us
to a man: says Johnson of Lowell who
wouldn’t come to tea who’s he sunbitch
and he know armaments and cattle like
a Renaissance prince knew love & daggers
and faintly knew of Dante, or Cecco.
It is a world that belongs to Kipling.
What will I die with in my hand?
A paintbrush (for houses), an M15
a hammer or ax, a book or gavel
a candlestick
tiptoeing upstairs.
What will I hold or will I
be caught with this usual thing
that I want to be my heart but
it is my brain and I turn it
over and over and over.
Only miracles should apply,
we have stones enough –
they steal all the heat and trip
everyone even the wary.
Throw stones away.
And
a tricky way of saying something unnecessary
will not do.
The girl standing outside the bus station
in Muskegon, Michigan, hasn’t noticed me.
I doubt she reads poetry or if she did
would like it at all or if she liked it
the affection would be casual and temporary.
She would anyway rather ride a horse
than read a poet, read a comic rather than
ride a poet. Sweetie, fifteen minutes
in that black alley bent over the garbage can
with me in the saddle would make
our affections equal. Let’s be fair.
I love my dear daughter
her skin is so warm
and if I don’t hurt her
she’ll come to great harm.
I love my dog Missy
her skin is so warm,