rolling and churning in the last accident,
bubbles in lava.
Behold
the poet must remember the words that will carve themselves
on his gravestone.
If you walk in the right cemetery,
that card catalogue of dirt, that grassy anthology,
you may read them:
It is only art.
A lifetime, muttering.
The Lamb's Head Inn at Lebanon,
the Little Miami River limbering
its length through Troy toward Cincinnati,
the Symphony Orchestra, the Wiedemann's Brewery,
the blue, indoors & smoky air
through which I watched
The Big O, Oscar Robertson,
turning his wheel of grace,
lofting a lifetime of basketballs.
First we lived on Glade Street, then
on Richwood Ave. I swear it.
And now all Cincinnati—
the hills above the river,
the lawn that sloped toward Richwood Ave.
like a valley of pleasant uncles,
the sultry river musk that slid
its compromising note
through my bedroom window—
all Cincinnati seethes. The vats
at Procter & Gamble cease their slick
congealing. The soap reverts to animal fat.
Up north, near Lebanon and Troy an Rosewood,
the corn I skulked in as a boy
lays back its ears like a shamed dog.
Hair along the hog's spine rises,
the Holstein pivots his massive head
at dusk toward where the barn was.
The spreading stain he sees is his new owner.
It is like being in a Catholic church
the night before Easter.
The statues stir under the heavy purple drapes.
The stiff gods we have made
so lovingly
ripple their stony muscles.
The slime crests toward the Mississippi.
Cairo, Natchez, New Orleans,
the litany of the new flood.
What we imagined was
the fire-storm.
Or, failing that, the glacier, or
we hoped we'd get off easy,
losing only California.
With the seismologists & mystics
we saw the last California ridge
crumble into the ocean
like Parmesan.
We would learn to love Nevada
and develop a taste for salt
in our water, our thirst
become a wound.
We were ready with elegies:
O California, sportswear
& defense contracts, gases that induce deference,
high school girls with their own cars,
we wanted to love you
without pain.
O California
when you were moored to us
like a splinter of melon bobbing among tankers
we knew the European tongue was cobblestone.
But now you are lost at sea,
your cargo of mudslides & vineyards
lost, the prints of the old movies
lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods
snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor
they lie like hands of a broken clock.
We're all coming west
inexorably, bringing our ruinous
self-knowledge,
quoting Ecclesiastes.
We'll be there Friday, early,
your time.
Meanwhile
because this poem does not stop for lamentation
Kansas is stuck in unspeakable gluck,
in geological purge.
The jayhawk plummets in mid-flight,
drawn down by anklets of DDT.
Now we are about to lose our voices
we remember:
tomorrow is our echo.
O the old songs, the good days:
strip mining & civil disobedience,
sloppy scholarship, heart attacks.
Now the age of footnotes is ours.
So much for the Rockies,
so much for the rest.
Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid.
While the rivers thickened
and fish rose like oil slicks
the students of water
stamped each fish with its death date.
Now we hear the sea rising
like a new vowel
in our throats.
Sticks & Stones
lines nag me lovingly.
Like these from Roethke's notebooks:
"I'm sick of women. I want God"
and
"Does God want all this attention?"
Or Margaret Atwood's lines:
"you become slowly more public,
in a year there will be nothing left
of you but a megaphone."
Soon, will I be reciting these lines?
Will there be a party
after the reading?
Who will be there?
Moonrock, the anthologist.
A woman poet
afraid of living on her looks—
may she grow older.
There will be groupies—
may their pubic hair
clog the teeth of bad poets.
There will be the poet
whose marriage poems
are really about his writing students—
may his divorce poems
be better.
There will be the poet
overlooked by Moonrock—
may he turn in his sleep
like a lottery drum.
The Dark Prince will be there
in a dust-jacket,
sexual strip-miner and Dust
Midas, a love only
a mother could face.
Someone will know a cruel joke
so funny he'll tell it anyhow.
Will Twitch the Ironist be there?
Will the best young poet
in America be there?
Dervish will be there—
may his disciples
return to him
the gift of himself.
We don't need each other.
We need ceremonies of self-love
performed without witnesses.
We need to leave the party,
like a car starting across the fields.
It is time to be lost
again, weeping into the trenches
of our palms
until the hands are flooded
and the need begins to grow
like rice in a paddy
to hold something.
Then if I pick up a pen
and write a poem
I will want to read it to someone
and the poem will be the party
to honor whomever I read it to,
a fallen apple branch
cut into firewood,
cold milk in the morning,
a long walk at night.
Rising and Falling (1979)
Spring Snow
Here comes the powdered milk I drank
as a child, and the money it saved.
Here come the papers I delivered,
the spotted dog in heat that followed me home
and the dogs that followed her.
Here comes a load of white laundry
from basketball practice, and sheets
with their watermarks of semen.
And here comes snow, a language
in which no word is ever repeated,
love is impossible, and remorse....
Yet childhood doesn't end,
but accumulates, each memory
knit to the next, and the fields
become one field. If to die is to lose
all detail, th
en death is not
so distinguished, but a profusion
of detail, a last gossip, character
passed wholly into fate and fate
in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.
Moving Again
At night the mountains look like huge
dim hens. In a few geological eras
new mountains may
shatter the earth's shell
and poke up like stone wings.
Each part must serve for a whole.
I bring my sons to the base
of the foothills and we go up.
From a scruff of ponderosa
pines we startle gaudy swerves
of magpies that settle in our rising
wake. Then there's a blooming
prickly pear. "Jesus, Dad, what's that?"
Willy asks. It's like a yellow tulip
grafted to a cactus: it's a beautiful
wound the cactus puts out
to bear fruit and be healed.
If I lived with my sons
all year I'd be less sentimental
about them. We go up
to the mesa top and look down
at our new hometown. The thin air
warps in the melting light
like the aura before a migraine.
The boys are tired. A tiny magpie
fluffs into a pine far below
and farther down in the valley
of child support and lights
people are opening drawers.
One of them finds a yellowing
patch of newsprint with a phone
number penciled on it
from Illinois, from before they moved, before
Nicky was born. Memory
is our root system.
"Verna," he says to himself
because his wife's in another room,
"whose number do you suppose this is?"
Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo
There are only a hundred or so
snow leopards alive, and three
of them here. Hours I watch them jump
down and jump up, water being
poured. Though if you fill a glass
fast with water, it rings high to the top,
noise of a nail driven true. Snow
leopards land without sound,
as if they were already extinct.
If I could, I'd sift them
from hand to hand, like a fire,
like a debt I can count but can't pay.
I'm glad I can't. If I tried to
take loss for a wife, and I do,
and keep her all the days of my life,
I'd have nothing to leave my children.
I save them whatever I can keep
and I pour it from hand to hand.
The News
From each house on the street,
the blue light of the news.
Someone's dog whirps three times
and scuffs the leaves.
It's quiet, a school night.
The President and his helpers
live at one end of the news,
parents at the other.
The news for today
is tape recordings
of dry ice, sports
for today is weather.
Lights go back into the walls.
These might as well be
my neighbors. The news
uses us all to travel by.
I might as well be one
of their children, bees
sleeping the treaty of honey.
The news will find me soon
enough. I veer between
two of their houses
home through the woods.
Strange Knees
It's one of the ways you see
yourself. Over the snow's blue skin
you go strictly, to honor the slag
of calcium in your knees,
to honor the way you say
Bad Knees, Bad Dog, Bad Luck.
Your sons love to hear how you
collapsed in the lobby
of Cinema II, a latch in your knee
not catching.
It's true your knees
hurt all the time but your sons dote
wrongly on that fact. They make you Pain's
Firework. They want to know why
they love you and they eat your stories
up. You saved the cat. You're squeaking
home two miles over the moonwashed
snow because your car broke down.
The stories grow crooked inside
you and your knees grow bad.
Living Among the Dead
There is another world,
but it is in this one.
—Paul Eluard
First there were those who died
before I was born.
It was as if they had just left
and their shadows would
slip out after them
under the door so recently closed
the air in its path was still
swirling to rest.
Some of the furniture came from them,
I was told, and one day
I opened two chests
of drawers to learn what the dead kept.
But it was when I learned to read
that I began always
to live among the dead.
I remember Rapunzel,
the improved animals
in the Just-So Stories, and a flock
of birds that saved themselves
from a hunter by flying in place
in the shape of a tree,
their wings imitating the whisk
of wind in the leaves.
My sons and I are like some wine
the dead have already bottled.
They wish us well, but there is nothing
they can do for us.
Sebastian cries in his sleep,
I bring him into my bed,
talk to him, rub his back.
To help his sons live easily
among the dead is a father's great work.
Now Sebastian drifts, soon he'll sleep.
We can almost hear the dead
breathing. They sound like water
under a ship at sea.
To love the dead is easy.
They are final, perfect.
But to love a child
is sometimes to fail at love
while the dead look on
with their abstract sorrow.
To love a child is to turn
away from the patient dead.
It is to sleep carefully
in case he cries.
Later, when my sons are grown
among their own dead, I can
dive easily into sleep and loll
among the coral of my dreams
growing on themselves
until at the end
I almost never dream of anyone,
except my sons,
who is still alive.
Left Hand Canyon
for Richard Hugo
The Rev. Royal Filkin preaches
tomorrow on why we are sad.
Brethren, Montana's a landscape
requiring faith: the visible
government arrives in trucks,
if you live out far enough.
If you live in town, the government's
gone, on errands, in trucks.
Let citizens go to meetings,
I'll stay home. I hate a parade.
By the time you get the trout
up through the tiny triangular
holes in the Coors cans, they're so
small you have to throw them back.
Glum miles we go
to Grandmother's house.
The earth out here doesn't bear us
up so much as it keeps us out,
an old trick of the beautiful.
Remember what Chief Lef
t Hand said?
Never mind. Everything else
was taken from him,
let's leave his grief alone.
My Eastern friends ask me
how I like it in the West,
or God's country, as it's sometimes
called, though God, like a slumlord,
lives in the suburbs: Heaven.
And I don't live "in the West";
I live in this canyon among a few
other houses and abandoned
mines, vaccinations that didn't take.
In Memory of the Utah Stars
Each of them must have terrified
his parents by being so big, obsessive
and exact so young, already gone
and leaving, like a big tipper,
that huge changeling's body in his place.
The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.
The year I first saw them play
Malone was a high school freshman,
already too big for any bed,
14, a natural resource.
You have to learn not to
apologize, a form of vanity.
You flare up in the lane, exotic
anywhere else. You roll the ball
off fingers twice as long as your
girlfriend's. Great touch for a big man,
says some jerk. Now they're defunct
and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19,
rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench,
his pet of a body grown sullen
as fast as it grew up.
Something in you remembers every
time the ball left your fingertips
wrong and nothing the ball
can do in the air will change that.
You watch it set, stupid moon,
the way you watch yourself
in a recurring dream.
You never lose your touch
or forget how taxed bodies
go at the same pace they owe,
how brutally well the universe