The ravages of alcoholism and sexual betrayal give way to a new ease and largesse in the poems of Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985) and Ultramarine (1986), the work British readers first met in the collection In a Marine Light (1987), published the year before his death at age fifty from lung cancer. These poems expressed, among other things, a thankfulness even for his trials, and for having been delivered into a life he considered happy. This amplitude carried him into the final poems of A New Path to the Waterfall (1989), written in the last six months of his life. Art and life were his focus. Death, mosquito-like, hovered and supped at the periphery.
I recall in those last days being aware that I was, for Ray, the only reader of those poems he would have. I laughed and cried with them, reading them as they came. His humor, lashed as it was to pain, positively unraveled me. In “What the Doctor Said” we don’t expect eagerness and the turnabout of thankfulness from a man receiving news of his oncoming death. But that is what we get:
he said I’m real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may even have thanked him habit being so strong
*
It’s steelhead season, early January 1996. I’ve been rereading Ray’s poems here at Sky House where he wrote so many of them. Below in the valley, men are walking the banks of Morse Creek, the river which became the central metaphor of Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.
Just yesterday our neighbor, Art LaMore, recalled Ray’s amazing luck. One morning Ray had dropped a hook baited with salmon roe off the footbridge and caught a ten-pound steelhead. He’d carried it to Art’s door, hooked over his fingers by its gills, to show him. He had felt blessed beyond reason. By the time I came home, he’d cleaned the fish on the kitchen floor. There are still knife marks in the linoleum. Men fish for years on Morse Creek and never catch a steelhead. I don’t think Ray knew this or cared. He simply accepted the gift.
We often walked along this river, sorting out the end of a story, as with “Errand”, or discussing our plans for trips. Always we found release and comfort in noticing—that pair of herons, ducks breaking into flight upriver, the picked-over carcass of a bird near the footpath, snow on the mountains—the very kinds of attentiveness which bind his poems so effortlessly to our days.
When I think of the will that carried him through a lifetime in poetry, I recall particularly one afternoon in the summer of 1988. We had finished assembling and revising his last book of poems, A New Path to the Waterfall. We were preparing for a fishing trip to Alaska which we knew would, in all likelihood, be our last. Ray wanted to go to Morse Creek once more, so I drove as close as I could get and we climbed out of the jeep onto the bank. We just stood together a while, looking into the water. Then, without saying anything, we began to walk toward the mouth where this freshwater river joins the Strait of Juan de Fuca, some seventy miles east of the Pacific. It was hard going for him and we had to stop often, to sit down and pull up, twenty feet at a time.
It was important, that walk, hyphenated by rests—his breath gathered inside him, again and again. We would talk quietly in those moments sitting on the ground, and I recall saying like a mantra, “It isn’t far now.” He was traveling on his remaining right lung, but carrying himself well in the effort, as if this were the way to do it, the way he had always done it. When we made it to the river mouth, there was an intake of joy for us both, to have crossed that ground. It was one of those actions that is so right it makes you able in another dimension, all the way back to the start of your life. We savored it, the river’s freshwater outrush into salt water, that quiet standing up to life together, for as long as it was going to last.
“When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers,” Czeslaw Milosz writes.* For Ray, I think poems, like rivers, were places of recognition and healing:
Once I lay on the bank with my eyes closed,
listening to the sound the water made,
and to the wind in the tops of the trees. The same wind
that blows out on the Strait, but a different wind, too.
For a while I even let myself imagine I had died —
and that was all right, at least for a couple
of minutes, until it really sank in: Dead.
As I was lying there with my eyes closed,
just after I’d imagined what it might be like
if in fact I never got up again, I thought of you.
I opened my eyes then and got right up
and went back to being happy again.
I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you.
(“For Tess”)
Ray made the ecstatic seem ordinary, within reach of anyone. He also knew something essential which is too often sacrificed for lesser concerns—that poetry isn’t simply reticence served up for what we meant to say. It’s a place to be ample and grateful, to make room for those events and people closest to our hearts. “I wanted to tell you.” And then he did.
TESS GALLAGHER
Sky House
Port Angeles, Washington
14 January 1996
* * *
* “A Magic Mountain” in Czeslaw Milosz: Selected Poems, rev. ed. (New York: Ecco Press, 1980) 93.
Fires
And isn’t the past inevitable,
now that we call the little
we remember of it “the past”?
— WILLIAM MATTHEWS, from Flood
I
Drinking While Driving
It’s August and I have not
read a book in six months
except something called The Retreat From Moscow
by Caulaincourt.
Nevertheless, I am happy
riding in a car with my brother
and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.
We do not have any place in mind to go,
we are just driving.
If I closed my eyes for a minute
I would be lost, yet
I could gladly lie down and sleep forever
beside this road.
My brother nudges me.
Any minute now, something will happen.
Luck
I was nine years old.
I had been around liquor
all my life. My friends
drank too, but they could handle it.
We’d take cigarettes, beer,
a couple of girls
and go out to the fort.
We’d act silly.
Sometimes you’d pretend
to pass out so the girls
could examine you.
They’d put their hands
down your pants while
you lay there trying
not to laugh, or else
they would lean back,
close their eyes, and
let you feel them all over.
Once at a party my dad
came to the back porch
to take a leak.
We could hear voices
over the record player,
see people standing around
laughing and drinking.
When my dad finished
he zipped up, stared a while
at the starry sky—it was
always starry then
on summer nights —
and went back inside.
The girls had to go home.
I slept all night in the fort
with my best friend.
We kissed on the lips
and touched each other.
I saw the stars fade
toward morning.
I saw a woman sleeping
on our lawn.
I looked up her dress,
then I had a beer
and a cigarette.
Friends, I thought this
was living.
Indoors, someone
had put out a cigarette
in a jar of mustard.
I had a straight shot
from the bottle, then
a drink of warm collins mix,
then another whisky.
And though I went from room
to room, no one was home.
What luck, I thought.
Years later,
I still wanted to give up
friends, love, starry skies,
for a house where no one
was home, no one coming back,
and all I could drink.
Distress Sale
Early one Sunday morning everything outside —
the child’s canopy bed and vanity table,
the sofa, end tables and lamps, boxes
of assorted books and records. We carried out
kitchen items, a clock radio, hanging
clothes, a big easy chair
with them from the beginning
and which they called Uncle.
Lastly, we brought out the kitchen table itself
and they set up around that to do business.
The sky promises to hold fair.
I’m staying here with them, trying to dry out.
I slept on that canopy bed last night.
This business is hard on us all.
It’s Sunday and they hope to catch the trade
from the Episcopal church next door.
What a situation here! What disgrace!
Everyone who sees this collection of junk
on the sidewalk is bound to be mortified.
The woman, a family member, a loved one,
a woman who once wanted to be an actress,
she chats with fellow parishioners who
smile awkwardly and finger items
of clothing before moving on.
The man, my friend, sits at the table
and tries to look interested in what
he’s reading—Froissart’s Chronicles it is,
I can see it from the window.
My friend is finished, done for, and he knows it.
What’s going on here? Can no one help them?
Must everyone witness their downfall?
This reduces us all.
Someone must show up at once to save them,
to take everything off their hands right now,
every trace of this life before
this humiliation goes on any longer.
Someone must do something.
I reach for my wallet and that is how I understand it:
I can’t help anyone.
Your Dog Dies
it gets run over by a van.
you find it at the side of the road
and bury it.
you feel bad about it.
you feel bad personally,
but you feel bad for your daughter
because it was her pet,
and she loved it so.
she used to croon to it
and let it sleep in her bed.
you write a poem about it.
you call it a poem for your daughter,
about the dog getting run over by a van
and how you looked after it,
took it out into the woods
and buried it deep, deep,
and that poem turns out so good
you’re almost glad the little dog
was run over, or else you’d never
have written that good poem.
then you sit down to write
a poem about writing a poem
about the death of that dog,
but while you’re writing you
hear a woman scream
your name, your first name,
both syllables,
and your heart stops.
after a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on.
Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad beer.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either,
and don’t even know the places to fish?
Hamid Ramouz (1818—1906)
This morning I began a poem on Hamid Ramouz —
soldier, scholar, desert explorer —
who died by his own hand, gunshot, at eighty-eight.
I had tried to read the dictionary entry on that curious man
to my son—we were after something on Raleigh —
but he was impatient, and rightly so.
It happened months ago, the boy is with his mother now,
but I remembered the name: Ramouz —
and a poem began to take shape.
All morning I sat at the table,
hands moving back and forth over limitless waste,
as I tried to recall that strange life.
Bankruptcy
Twenty-eight, hairy belly hanging out
of my undershirt (exempt)
I lie here on my side
on the couch (exempt)
and listen to the strange sound
of my wife’s pleasant voice (also exempt).
We are new arrivals
to these small pleasures.
that we have been improvident.
Today, my heart, like the front door,
stands open for the first time in months.
The Baker
Then Pancho Villa came to town,
hanged the mayor
and summoned the old and infirm
Count Vronsky to supper.
Pancho introduced his new girl friend,
along with her husband in his white apron,
showed Vronsky his pistol,
then asked the Count to tell him
about his unhappy exile in Mexico.
Later, the talk was of women and horses.
Both were experts.
The girl friend giggled
and fussed with the pearl buttons
on Pancho’s shirt until,
promptly at midnight, Pancho went to sleep
with his head on the table.
The husband crossed himself
and left the house holding his boots
without so much as a sign
to his wife or Vronsky.
That anonymous husband, barefooted,
humiliated, trying to save his life, he
is the hero of this poem.
Iowa Summer
The paperboy shakes me awake. “I have been dreaming you’d come,”
I tell him, rising from the bed. He is accompanied
by a giant Negro from the university who seems
itching to get his hands on me. I stall for time.
Sweat runs off our faces; we stand waiting.
I do not offer them chairs and no one speaks.
It is only later, after they’ve gone,
I realize they have delivered a letter.
It’s a letter from my wife. “What are you doing
there?” my wife asks. “Are you drinking?”
I study the postmark for hours. Then it, too, begins to fade.
I hope someday to forget all this.
Alcohol
That painting next to the brocaded drapery
is a Delacroix. This is called a divan
not a davenport; this item is a settee.
Notice the ornate legs.
Put on your tarboosh. Smell the burnt cork
under your eyes. Adjust your tunic, so.
Now the red cummerbund and Paris; April 1934.
A black Citröen waits at the curb.
The street lamps are lit.
Give the driver the address, but tell him
not to hurry, that you have all night.
When you get there, drink, make love,
do the shimmy and the beguine.
And when the sun comes up over the Quarter
next morning and that pretty woman
you’ve had and had all night
now wants to go home with you,
be tender with her, don’t do anything
you’ll be sorry for later. Bring her home
with you in the Citroën, let her sleep
in a proper bed. Let her
fall in love with you and you
with her and then … something: alcohol,
a problem with alcohol, always alcohol —
what you’ve really done
and to someone else, the one
you meant to love from the start.
*
It’s afternoon, August, sun striking
the hood of a dusty Ford
parked on your driveway in San Jose.
In the front seat a woman
who is covering her eyes and listening
to an old song on the radio.
You stand in the doorway and watch.