the man’s photograph, knowing he has only two years
to live. He doesn’t know this, of course,
that’s why he can mug for the camera.
How could he know what’s taking root in his head
at that moment? If one looks to the right
through boughs and tree trunks, there can be seen
crimson patches of the afterglow. No shadows, no
half-shadows. It is still and damp.…
The man goes on mugging. I put the picture back
in its place along with the others and give
my attention instead to the afterglow along the far ridge,
light golden on the roses in the garden.
Then, I can’t help myself, I glance once more
at the picture. The wink, the broad smile,
the jaunty slant of the cigarette.
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Appendixes
Appendix 1
Uncollected Poems: No Heroics, Please
The Brass Ring
Whatever became of that brass ring
supposed to go with the merry-go-round?
The brass one that all the poor-but-happy
young girls and boys were always snagging just
at the Magic Moment? I’ve asked around: Do you know
anything about the brass ring …? I said to my neighbor.
I asked my wife, and I even asked the butcher (who I think
is from a foreign country and should know).
No one knows, it seems.
Then I asked a man who used to work for a carnival. Years ago,
he said, it was different then. Even the grown-ups rode.
He remembered a young woman in Topeka, Kansas. It was
in August. She held hands with the man who rode
the horse next to her, who had a moustache and
who was her husband. The young woman laughed
all the time, he said. The husband laughed
too, even though he had a moustache. But
all that is another story. He didn’t
say anything about a brass ring.
Beginnings
Once
there was a plumb-line
sunk deep into the floor
of a spruce valley
nr Snohomish
in the Cascades
that passed under
Mt Rainier, Mt Hood,
and the Columbia River
and came up
somewhere
in the Oregon rainforest
wearing
a fern leaf.
On the Pampas Tonight
On the pampas tonight a gaucho
on a tall horse slings
a bolas towards the sunset, west
into the Pacific.
Juan Perón sleeps in Spain
with General Franco,
the President barbecues
in Asia…
I wish to settle deeper
into the seasons,
to become like a pine tree
or a reindeer,
observe the slow grind and creep of glaciers
into northern fjords,
stand against this nemesis,
this dry weather.
Those Days
FOR C. M.
Yes I remember those days,
Always young, always June or July;
Molly, her skirt rucked up over
Her knees, I in my logger-boots
My arm round her little waist,
We laughing, doing
onetwothree—glide!
onetwothree—glide!
in the warm kitchen,
Fish chowder or venison steaks
On the stove, roses stroking
The bedroom window.
Across the pasture, the Nisqually River
We listened to at night.
Oh how I wish
I could be like those Chinook salmon,
Thrusting, leaping the falls,
Returning!
Not chunks and flakes and drift
drift
The Sunbather, to Herself
A kind of
airy dullness;
head is a puddle,
heart & fingers —
all extremities —
glow
under your indifferent
touch.
Now old sun,
husband,
pour into me,
be rough
with me,
strengthen me
against that other,
that bastard.
No Heroics, Please
Zhivago with a fine moustache,
A wife and son. His poet’s eyes
Witness every kind of suffering,
His doctor’s hands are kept busy.
“The walls of his heart were paper-thin,”
Comrade-General half-brother Alec Guinness
Says to Lara, whom Zhivago has loved
And made pregnant.
But at that moment,
The group from the topless bar
Next the theater begins to play.
The saxophone climbs higher and higher,
Demanding our attention. The drums
And the bass are also present,
But it is the rising and falling saxophone
That drains away the strength
To resist.
Adultery
Poem on My Birthday, July 2
“and we kept going
up and up and up
and your brother
had a headache
from the al-titude
and we kept going
up and up and he said,
‘where we going, dad?’
and I said, up.”
just pleasant to sit here
this morning drinking fresh coffee
wearing a clean shirt. taking stock?
what does that mean? mum dead,
dad has sclerosis. sclerosis,
a hell of a word. what is tomorrow?
tuesday? ha. my wife wants
to bake me a cake. she says. most
of my birthdays I’ve had to work.
that means. birthdays? I remember
the road into jameson lake:
hardpan, switchback, dogwood
scraping the fenders and trailing
along the canvas top of the jeep
until, past timberline, we left
the woods and road behind
and nothing ahead but steep ridges
sided with wildflowers and bunchgrass,
then over the highest ridge
into jameson valley,
and the lake still frozen.
that was a giggle. ice fishing
in july. high country, indeed.
Return
George Mensch’s cattle
have dunged-up the living room,
windows have fallen out
and the back porch
has caved in around the kitchen:
I move through each filthy room
like a finance company.
For the Egyptian Coin Today,
Arden, Thank You
As I stare at the smoothly worn portrait of
The Sphinx, surrounded by a strange fading landscape,
I recall the remoteness of my own hands pulling
Themselves awake this morning, shaky, ready to begin
Their terrible round of questioning.
In the Trenches
with Robert Graves
The latin winds of Majorca
are far away still. Here,
machineguns traverse each night. By day,
high-explosives, barbed wire, snipers…
Rats wo
rk their way in and out
of the fallen. The corpses are like lorries,
the rats drive them deeper
into the mud. Behind the lines,
on both sides, officers and men queue
for a last fuck. All but Graves, anyhow.
First the hawk must grow in a man, a spur
to sex. We live
in difficult times.
The Man Outside
There was always the inside and
the outside. Inside, my wife,
my son and daughters, rivers
of conversation, books, gentleness
and affection.
But then one night outside
my bedroom window someone —
something, breathes, shuffles.
I rouse my wife and terrified
I shudder in her arms till morning.
That space outside my bedroom
window! The few flowers that grow
there trampled down, the Camel
cigarette butts underfoot —
I am not imagining things.
The next night and the next
it happens, and I rouse my wife
and again she comforts me and
again she rubs my legs tense
with fright and takes me in her embrace.
But then I begin to demand more
and more of my wife. In shame she
parades up and down the bedroom floor,
I driving her like a loaded wheel-
barrow, the carter and the cart.
Finally, tonight, I touch my wife lightly
and she springs awake anxious
and ready. Lights on, nude, we sit
at the vanity table and stare frantically
into the glass. Behind us, two lips,
the reflection of a glowing cigarette.
Seeds
FOR CHRISTI
I exchange nervous glances
with the man who sells
my daughter watermelon seeds.
The shadow of a bird passes
over all our hands.
The vendor raises his whip &
hurries away behind his old horse
towards Beersheba.
You offer me my choice of seeds.
Already you have forgotten the man
the horse
the watermelons themselves &
the shadow was something unseen
between the vendor & myself.
I accept your gift here
on the dry roadside.
I reach out my hand to receive
your blessing.
Betrayal
like bad credit
begins with the fingers
their lies
The Contact
Mark the man I am with.
He is soon to lose
His left hand, his balls, his
Nose and handsome moustache.
Tragedy is everywhere
Oh Jerusalem.
He raises his tea cup.
Wait.
We enter the cafe.
He raises his tea cup.
We sit down together.
He raises his tea cup.
Now.
I nod.
Faces!
His eyes, crossed,
Fall slowly out of his head.
Something Is Happening
Something is happening to me
if I can believe my
senses this is not just
another distraction dear
I am tied up still
in the same old skin
the pure ideas and ambitious yearnings
the clean and healthy cock
at all costs
but my feet are beginning
to tell me things about
themselves
about their new relationship to
my hands heart hair and eyes
Something is happening to me
if I could I would ask you
have you ever felt anything similar
but you are already so far
away tonight I do not think
you would hear besides
my voice has also been affected
Something is happening to me
do not be surprised if
waking someday soon in this bright
Mediterranean sun you look
across at me and discover
a woman in my place
or worse
a strange whitehaired man
writing a poem
one who can no longer form words
who is simply moving his lips
trying
to tell you something
A Summer in Sacramento
we have been looking at cars lately
my wife has in mind
bucket seats power everything
but I’ve had my eye on a little
red & white 71 Olds Cutlass
A/C R&H wsw tires
low mileage & 500 cheaper
but I like convertibles too
we’ve never owned a really good car
most of our bills are paid
& we can afford another car
still
a couple of grand is a lot of money
& a yr ago we wd have taken it
& fled to Mexico
the rent’s due Thursday
but we can pay it
by God there’s nothing like
being able to meet your responsibilities
on my birthday May 25
we spent 60 dollars or more
on dinner wine cocktails
& a movie
at dinner we cd hardly find anything to talk about
though we smiled at each other
frequently
we’ve gone to a lot of movies the last few months
this Friday night
I am to meet a girl I have been seeing
now & then since Christmas
nothing serious
on my part
but we make it well together
& I’m flattered
with the little attentions she shows me
& flattered too
she wants to marry me
if I will get a Reno divorce soon
I will have to think about it
a few days ago
an attractive woman I’d never seen before
who called herself Sue Thompson
a neighbor
came to the door & told me
her 15 yr old foster son had been observed
raising my 7 yr old daughter’s dress
the boy’s juvenile parole officer wd like
to ask my daughter some questions
last night at still another movie
an older man took me by the shoulder
in the lobby asked me —
where’re you going Fred? —
shitman I said
you have the wrong fella
when I woke up this morning
I cd still feel his hand there
almost
Reaching
He knew he was
in trouble when,
in the middle
of the poem,
he found himself
reaching
for his thesaurus
and then
Webster’s
in that order.
Soda Crackers
You soda crackers! I remember
when I arrived here in the rain,
whipped out and alone.
How we shared the aloneness
and quiet of this house.
And the doubt that held me
from fingers to toes
as I took you out
of your cellophane wrapping
and ate you, meditatively,
at the kitchen table
that first night with cheese,
and mushroom soup. Now,
a month later to the day,
an important part of us
is still here. I’m fine.
And you—I’m proud of you, too.
You’re even getting remarked
on in print! Every soda cracker
should be so lucky.
We’ve done all right for
ourselves. Listen to me.
I never thought
I could go on like this
about soda crackers.
But I tell you
the clear sunshiny
days are here, at last.
Appendix 2
Introduction by Tess Gallagher to A New Path to the Waterfall (1989)
This is a last book and last things, as we learn, have rights of their own. They don’t need us, but in our need of them we commemorate and make more real that finality which encircles us, and draws us again into that central question of any death: What is life for? Raymond Carver lived and wrote his answer: “I’ve always squandered,” he told an interviewer, no doubt steering a hard course away from the lofty and noble. It was almost a law, Carver’s law, not to save up things for some longed-for future, but to use up the best that was in him each day and to trust that more would come. Even the packaging of the cigarettes he smoked bore the imprint of his oath in the imperative: NOW.
This was an injunction that would bear down on us with increasing intensity as we attempted to finish this book. In an episode eerily like that which preceded the death of Chekhov, to whom he had recently paid tribute in his story “Errand”, Ray had been diagnosed with lung cancer after spitting up blood in September 1987. There would follow ten months of struggle during which the cancer would reoccur as a brain tumor in early March. After twice swerving away from recommendations for brain surgery by several doctors, he would undergo seven weeks of intense, full-brain radiation. After a short respite, however, tumors would again be found in his lungs in early June.
These are the facts of that time, enough to have made realists out of us if we hadn’t been realists already. Nonetheless, much as Chekhov had kept reading the train schedules away from the town in which he would die, Ray kept working, planning, believing in the importance of the time he had left, and also believing that he might, through some loop in fate, even get out of this. An errand list I found in his shirt pocket later read “eggs, peanut butter, hot choc” and then, after a space, “Australia? Antarctica??” The insistent nature of Ray’s belief in his own capacity to recover from reversals during the course of his illness gave us both strength. In his journal he wrote: “When hope is gone, the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.” In this way he lived hope as a function of gesture, a reaching for or toward, while the object of promise stayed rightly illusory. The alternative was acceptance of death, which at age fifty was impossible for him. Another journal entry revealed his anguish as the pace of the disease quickened: “I wish I had a while. Not five years—or even three years—I couldn’t ask for that long, but if I had even a year. If I knew I had a year.”