nor was it afraid to lose itself in this brown soup.
Or maybe this was just a very large rat — still,
why should its example be of any less worth?
Ah, my friends, I could tell you my troubles
but is that why you came? Sure, it stinks here —
the best birding is done in foul-smelling places.
So far I’ve seen the hawk circling, the kingfisher chuckling
before smashing itself breast-first into the muck.
I’ve watched the blue heron standing on just one leg
until it found something half-rotten to spear. Then swallowing
with a toss of its head, as if this were a meal for kings.
Urban Legend
Like many stories, this one begins with Jesus —
well, he sure looks like Jesus, this guy pulled over by the ditch.
Let’s say the tarp has blown off the back of his Isuzu pickup.
Let’s say that the apostles are slowly rising heavenward.
See them twisting in the thermals, in this sky that’s not a joke
even if these fugitives could figure in a gag’s protracted setup.
Calling for the hauling of twelve helium-filled desire dolls —
to a toga party. See how the apostles all have boners underneath their robes.
And isn’t that like me, to put the boners into play,
however inappropriate, when this is not a joke.
This is not a joke because the story wants to go into the record.
Yes, it does want. The story has a little mind that thinks.
And the mind sends its ambassadors: these poodles nuked in microwaves,
bonsai kittens, sewer crocodiles, rats suckled in maternity wards.
I believe in the fatal hairdo just for the love of saying fatal hairdo.
And I believe in the stolen kidney because I too have woken up with something missing.
But I haven’t spoken yet of the rapture, another word whose saying
is like dancing at a toga party after downing many shots.
Because who hasn’t tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity’s lead coat?
Who doesn’t have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?
So back to Jesus, back to daylight, and you can make the dimwit me
who launches herself into the updraft of the rapture
and goes sailing straight through the story’s sunroof. Above, the bonsai kittens
pad the sky as cherubim. Below me, hairdos right and left are going up in smoke.
Now the apostles are storming heaven, the Isuzu’s motor’s ticking,
while the left hand of Jesus forms a ledge above his brow.
And you, Earth angel, fear not my crash landing in the diamond lane —
the vinyl men are full of noble gas, and I’m rising on my balsa wings.
A Simple Camp Song
In the days of yore, three handsome drunks
took me to sea until my jigging hook was swallowed.
I reeled its line around a plywood chock
until the big fish hovered at the ceiling of the water.
I know this sounds like a fable, so let it be a fable
in the rain where we hunched underneath our stupid hats.
We didn’t have a gun, so one of the drunks leaned out
and drove a gaffing hook under its jawbone.
A loud whump from the transom when the rope played out;
then the little boat stood on its hind end. We rose up
with the bench seats pinned behind our knees
and hung in the air until the boat sat down again.
And nobody’s lungs were inundated by the sea
in this soft-core, cloud-upholstered version of the past.
Someone merely pulled the starter and we towed the fish to shore,
where it sprawled on the wet sand, bigger than a woman.
I know a fable would have coughed up a pearl or a word
but the fish was a fish, lying there, not speaking.
Its lips did move in a mockery of speech,
its gills a set of louvers, opening and closing.
Then the drunks found sticks and I did, too,
and we brought them down on the shovel of its skull.
But the fish wouldn’t die until I put some weight behind the stick,
until I jumped with my upswing, like a primitive.
Buh went the stick. It felt all right to be barbaric,
to be cut from the same cloth as the wilderness itself.
But soon a birding group appeared on the bluff
and stripped all the teeth off the gears inside their lungs.
The drunks were coming sober and the screaming made them look
down at their hands, streaked with red fish blood.
The birders wanted us to find a quicker way to kill the fish —
Okay, you try, we said.
Then it drops like a curtain, the heavy velvet of dysmemory.
I guess the sandpipers wobbled in the tide pools in the rocks.
The birders withered back into the spaces in the brush.
And someone cut off the halibut’s cheeks.
The reason why it’s vague is: all I wanted was the drunks,
bunch of snaggletoothed losers who lived in trailers in the woods.
In those days I was drawn to the wind-chapped hand.
Good Lord, how they stank.
Question: how big does a stick have to be to be a club?
Answer: at least as big around as a small man’s wrist.
Too big, and the club starts to turn into a log.
And the drunks start to stagger when they raise it for their blows.
So how far back for yore? First the story needs to skip
the part where the club has bits of brain stuck to the wood.
Instead, cut to the evening when we chopped the fish in pieces
and ate them fried in butter that left a halo around our mouths.
from Book of Bob
INVOCATION WITH LANGUAGE IMPRECISE
Now he’s dead, and so I guess
I could have him say anything I want.
My father’s mouth I could fill with flowers
but beauty meant less to him than plain old bread.
Let it be bread then. Let him be Bob.
Let everything go by its plainest name —
including the dirt and the bones inside it,
the secret bones inside the dirt.
Many jockeys have come to unseemly ends,
many horses were sent down to their graves
when their intricate, delicate knuckles unknitted
down a muddy track’s back stretch.
But some of them rose and hobbled on,
their manes awash with blood and sweat,
the lather running from their mouths,
the ridden, the risen, the riven, the roans —
which he called ponies
though they weren’t all that small.
CANTICLE FROM THE BOOK OF BOB
We hired the men to carry the coffin,
we hired a woman to sing in our stead.
We hired a limo, we hired a driver,
we hired each lily to stand with its head
held up and held open while scripture was read.
We hired a dustpan, we hired a broom
to sweep up the pollen that fell in the room
where we’d hired some air
to draw out the stale chord
from the organ we hired.
And we hired some tears because our own eyes were tired.
The pulpit we hired, we hired the priest
to say a few words about the deceased,
and money changed hands
and the process was brief.
We said, “Body of Christ.”
Then we hired our grief.
We hired some young men to carry the coffin,
we
hired a woman to sing for his soul —
we hired the limo, we hired the driver,
then we hired the ground and we hired the hole.
My Eulogy Was Deemed Too Strange
My father battled two fire-breathing white owls
that night with his sword, though he was small
and they taller than the turrets — his blade
swung only as far as their thighs.
He was dressed like an Apollo astronaut
and we were driving toward the pancake house
when we saw the castle, beset by flames.
That’s when my father pulled off the road
and got embroiled in what this is: first dream
I ever dreamed. Come morning, I wanted to ask
if the fire had happened, if the others had seen
his silver boots, as delicate as carpet slippers.
But I kept my mouth shut, because — though I couldn’t
distinguish the owls from the rest of the weirdness
that passes for life at the age of five — I knew
how it sounded to sound like a fool. And now
I know this: that the castle stood in the same spot
by the rise in the road to the pancake house
as where we laid him out when his time came.
Not a castle at all but a funeral home
in whose next room resided a dead fireman
whose brethren arrived in dress uniform
and paid their respects to my dad’s coffin
until they realized their mistake. Outside,
the fire truck’s lights swept across the wet window,
making our faces glow and dim and glow again.
But my mother looked nervous when I tried to explain
how it started in flames in the place where it ended.
As if she could see me chest-deep in the pulpit
with the book of Nostradamus and a tarot deck.
So at Mass the next day I held my tongue
and used it only as a platform for the wafer, the body of Christ,
about whom my father had his doubts. I just wish
I’d told him this while he was living: how he climbed
that bird’s leg like a vine. How bravely he carried
his sword in his teeth, and how his fists were full of feathers.
Conscription Papers
Here is the trouble with visiting the past:
it means dallying so long in the company of the dead.
And they brew their tea from such strange bark —
going down, it stings.
Hence my mother sends these tea-tan sheets
gone to powder in their creases.
Official business from the War Department:
You are now a soldier in the Army of the United States! Congratulations!
The irregular print of the 1940s
clots the windows of the e’s and g’s
where the metal arms swung from the typewriter well —
Cooperate by taking only small items which can be carried in your pockets.
Like a Saint Christopher medal to deflect the bullet.
Though the dead make good duffel bags for hunkering behind,
lugging them is a son of a bitch. So my mother
is a patriot, especially when she says, Don’t put me in your poem.
His Soldier’s Pay Record tells you what kind of people we are
because nothing is declared inside its little oaktag book
but his name, rank, and serial number, forget about
posterity — even my father’s signature’s in pencil.
At least war gives a man an afterlife as paperwork.
Somebody named S.J. Duboff witnessed its delivery.
Odds are he’s dead, so to mourn him I’ll say: Mr. Duboff,
may your soul be of the ilk that can embrace the accident of being here.
And I know this is only a less-ochre echo of those other pages,
which I would tape here if they were not such frail
darkening scraps, about which my mother writes:
I don’t want these so do with them what you will.
Night Festival, Olympia
Something about the parade I hated —
so much gaiety on a knife edge,
the captain of the samba band dressed up like a beast.
But hey, that’s just me, the truculent me.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea
of humans being happy. As the thief says,
This will go easier if everyone cooperates.
So when a drunk stepped forward and asked for a quarter
I said, “How about a buck instead?”
with an exuberance rigged up to balance my mood:
I dug for the dollar, he stuck out his hand.
Then said, “I am a veteran,” after I’d launched
my half of the shake, realizing then
the hand wasn’t being offered: it was a proof.
As in: a mathematical summation.
He was showing me he had no fingers,
only two stubs whose taut raw skin
reflected pink tones with which the night glowed
as if we did not live in houses,
as if we huddled around the flames.
But this was in the parking lot at Safeway,
palace of the all-night goddess of cigs —
whose dull voltage lit my piety
when he held up his hand and I went ahead
with touching it, as if I were not afraid.
Eulogy from the Boardwalk behind the KFC
Deschutes Parkway, 10/11/01
What is not part of the calamity goes on —
are borrowed from the heart of the water,
a camouflage blotchwork
of old bruises. They zigzag forth
in single file — tack left, tack right,
then pause and shiver, tack and shiver,
tack and shiver, tack and shatter —
when their shivering scatters
and leaves nothing at the core.
They get their discipline from the current
and go crazy in the calm — please notify
the human spectators: what is not part
goes crazy in the calm. The fish
are slightly darker than the water
whose feet we lay our shadows at —
all right, I know the water doesn’t have feet
but how much precision do you expect
from us who stand here all strung out
on far-flung grief? At least I have tried
to describe the salmon honestly,
their knitted frenzy below the floodgate.
How we see them only if we look straight down
from this low bridge, where the cars scream past.
Straight down, and the water surface unsilvers:
what we see best are their white scars.
Shrike Tree
Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree,
a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill.
The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree’s black thorns
and the sun had stripped them of their feathers.
Some of the dead ones hung at eye level
while some burned holes in the sky overhead.
At least it is honest,
the body apparent
and not rotting in the dirt.
And I, having never seen the shrike at work,
can only imagine how the breasts were driven into the branches.
When I saw him he’d be watching from a different tree
with his mask like Zorro
and the gray cape of his wings.
At first glance he could have been a mockingbird or a jay
if you didn’t take note of how his beak was hooked.
If you didn’t know the ruthlessness of what he did —
ah, but that is a human judgment.
They are mute, of course, a silence at the center of a bigger silence,
these rawhide ornaments, their bald skulls showing.
And notice how I’ve slipped into the present tense
as if they were still with me.
Of course they are still with me.
They hang there, desiccating
by the trail where I walked, back when I could walk,
before life pinned me on its thorn.
It is ferocious, life, but it must eat,
then leaves us with the artifact.
Which is: these black silhouettes in the midday sun,
strict and jagged, like an Asian script.
A tragedy that is not without its glamour.
Not without the runes of the wizened meat.
Because imagine the luck! — to be plucked from the air,
to be drenched and dried in the sun’s bright voltage —
well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless.
With a chunk of sky in each eye socket.
And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl.
Chum
How come we all don’t have the luxury of our ghosts?
The way some paintings of salmon
show their spectral versions flying.
License, you might say,
for the artist to put dead fish in the sky.
Instead of leaving them as they are
when you see them wilting in the eddy:
two tons of major spent-sex stink.
Yet see how everyone skips so giddily around the trail —