The Mailman as Cancer Patient
Hanging around the house each day
the mailman never smiles; he tires
easily, is losing weight,
that’s all; they’ll hold the job —
besides, he needed a rest.
He will not hear it discussed.
As he walks the empty rooms, he
thinks of crazy things
like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey,
shaking hands with Franklin D. Roosevelt
at Grand Coulee Dam,
New Year’s Eve parties he liked best;
enough things to fill a book
he tells his wife, who
also thinks crazy things
yet keeps on working.
But sometimes at night
the mailman dreams he rises from his bed
puts on his clothes and goes
out, trembling with joy…
He hates those dreams
for when he wakes
there’s nothing left; it is
as if he’d never been
anywhere, never done anything;
there is just the room,
the early morning without sun,
the sound of a doorknob
turning slowly.
Poem for Hemingway
& W. C. Williams
3 fat trout hang
in the still pool
below the new
steel bridge.
two friends
come slowly up
the track.
one of them,
ex-heavyweight,
wears an old
hunting cap.
he wants to kill,
that is catch & eat,
the fish.
the other,
medical man,
he knows the chances
of that.
he thinks it fine
that they should
simply hang there
always
in the clear water.
the two keep going
but they
discuss it as
they disappear
into the fading trees
& fields & light,
upstream.
Torture
FOR STEPHEN DOBYNS
You are falling in love again. This time
it is a South American general’s daughter.
You want to be stretched on the rack again.
You want to hear awful things said to you
and to admit these things are true.
You want to have unspeakable acts
committed against your person, things
nice people don’t talk about in classrooms.
You want to tell everything you know
on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges,
on yourself most of all.
You want to implicate everyone in this!
Even when it’s four o’clock in the morning
and the lights are burning still —
those lights that have been burning night and day
in your eyes and brain for two weeks —
and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade,
but she won’t turn off the lights that woman
with the green eyes and little ways about her,
even then you want to be her gaucho.
Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say
as you reach for the empty beaker of water.
Dance with me, she says again and no mistake.
She picks this minute to ask you, hombre,
to get up and dance with her in the nude.
No, you don’t have the strength of a fallen leaf,
not the strength of a little reed basket
battered by waves on Lake Titicaca.
But you bound out of bed
just the same, amigo, you dance
across wide open spaces.
Bobber
On the Columbia River near Vantage,
Washington, we fished for whitefish
in the winter months; my dad, Swede —
Mr Lindgren—and me. They used belly-reels,
pencil-length sinkers, red, yellow, or brown
flies baited with maggots.
They wanted distance and went clear out there
to the edge of the riffle.
I fished near shore with a quill bobber and a cane pole.
My dad kept his maggots alive and warm
under his lower lip. Mr Lindgren didn’t drink.
I liked him better than my dad for a time.
He let me steer his car, teased me
about my name “Junior,” and said
one day I’d grow into a fine man, remember
all this, and fish with my own son.
But my dad was right. I mean
he kept silent and looked into the river,
worked his tongue, like a thought, behind the bait.
Highway 99E from Chico
The mallard ducks are down
for the night. They chuckle
in their sleep and dream of Mexico
and Honduras. Watercress
nods in the irrigation ditch
and the tules slump forward, heavy
with blackbirds.
Rice fields float under the moon.
Even the wet maple leaves cling
to my windshield. I tell you Maryann,
I am happy.
The Cougar
FOR JOHN HAINES AND KEITH WILSON
I stalked a cougar once in a lost box-canyon
off the Columbia River gorge near the town and river
of Klickitat. We were loaded for grouse. October,
gray sky reaching over into Oregon, and beyond,
all the way to California. None of us had been there,
to California, but we knew about that place—they had
restaurants
that let you fill your plate as many times as you wanted.
I stalked a cougar that day,
if stalk is the right word, clumping and scraping along
upwind of the cougar, smoking cigarettes too,
one after the other, a nervous, fat, sweating kid
under the best of circumstances, but that day
I stalked a cougar…
And then I was weaving drunk there in the living room,
fumbling to put it into words, smacked and scattered
with the memory of it after you two had put your stories,
black bear stories, out on the table.
Suddenly I was back in that canyon, in that gone state.
Something I hadn’t thought about for years:
how I stalked a cougar that day.
So I told it. Tried to anyway,
Haines and I pretty drunk now. Wilson listening, listening,
then saying, You sure it wasn’t a bobcat?
Which I secretly took as a put-down, he from the Southwest,
poet who had read that night,
and any fool able to tell a bobcat from a cougar,
even a drunk writer like me,
years later, at the smorgasbord, in California.
Hell. And then the cougar smooth-loped out of the brush
right in front of me—God, how big and beautiful he was —
jumped onto a rock and turned his head
to look at me. To look at me! I looked back, forgetting to shoot.
Then he jumped again, ran clear out of my life.
The Current
These fish have no eyes
these silver fish that come to me in dreams,
scattering their roe and milt
in the pockets of my brain.
But there’s one that comes —
heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,
that simply holds against the current,
closing its dark mouth against
the current, closing and opening
as it holds to the current.
/> Hunter
Half asleep on top of this bleak landscape,
surrounded by chukkers,
I crouch behind a pile of rocks and dream
I embrace my babysitter.
A few inches from my face
her cool and youthful eyes stare at me from two remaining
wildflowers. There’s a question in those eyes
I can’t answer. Who is to judge these things?
But deep under my winter underwear,
my blood stirs.
Suddenly, her hand rises in alarm —
the geese are streaming off their river island,
rising, rising up this gorge.
I move the safety. The body gathers, leans to its work.
Believe in the fingers.
Believe in the nerves.
Believe in THIS.
Trying to Sleep Late on a
Saturday Morning in November
In the living room Walter Cronkite
prepares us for the moon shot.
We are approaching
the third and final phase, this
is the last exercise.
I settle down,
far down into the covers.
My son is wearing his space helmet.
I see him move down the long airless corridor,
his iron boots dragging.
My own feet grow cold.
I dream of yellow jackets and near
frostbite, two hazards
facing the whitefish fishermen
on Satus Creek.
But there is something moving
there in the frozen reeds,
something on its side that is
slowly filling with water.
I turn onto my back.
All of me is lifting at once,
as if it were impossible to drown.
Louise
In the trailer next to this one
a woman picks at a child named Louise.
Didn’t I tell you, Dummy, to keep this door closed?
Jesus, it’s winter!
You want to pay the electric bill?
Wipe your feet, for Christ’s sake!
Louise, what am I going to do with you?
Oh, what am I going to do with you, Louise?
the woman sings from morning to night.
Today the woman and child are out
hanging up wash.
Say hello to this man, the woman says
to Louise. Louise!
This is Louise, the woman says
and gives Louise a jerk.
Cat’s got her tongue, the woman says.
But Louise has pins in her mouth,
wet clothes in her arms. She pulls
the line down, holds the line
with her neck
as she slings the shirt
over the line and lets go —
the shirt filling out, flapping
over her head. She ducks
and jumps back—jumps back
from this near human shape.
Poem for Karl Wallenda,
Aerialist Supreme
When you were little, wind tailed you
all over Magdeburg. In Vienna wind looked for you
in first one courtyard then another.
It overturned fountains, it made your hair stand on end.
In Prague wind accompanied serious young couples
just starting families. But you made their breaths catch,
those ladies in long white dresses,
the men with their moustaches and high collars.
It waited in the cuffs of your sleeves
when you bowed to the Emperor Haile Selassie.
It was there when you shook hands
with the democratic King of the Belgians.
Wind rolled mangoes and garbage sacks down the streets of Nairobi.
You saw wind pursuing zebras across the Serengeti Plain.
Wind joined you as you stepped off the eaves of suburban houses
in Sarasota, Florida. It made little noises
in trees at every crossroads town, every circus stop.
You remarked on it all your life,
how it could come from nowhere,
how it stirred the puffy faces of the hydrangeas
below hotel room balconies while you
drew on your big Havana and watched
the smoke stream south, always south,
toward Puerto Rico and the Torrid Zone.
That morning, 74 years old and 10 stories up,
midway between hotel and hotel, a promotional stunt
on the first day of spring, that wind
which has been everywhere with you
comes in from the Caribbean to throw itself
once and for all into your arms, like a young lover!
Your hair stands on end.
You try to crouch, to reach for wire.
Later, men come along to clean up
and to take down the wire. They take down the wire
where you spent your life. Imagine that: wire.
Deschutes River
This sky, for instance:
closed, gray,
but it has stopped snowing
so that is something. I am
so cold I cannot bend
my fingers.
Walking down to the river this morning
we surprised a badger
tearing a rabbit.
Badger had a bloody nose,
blood on its snout up to its sharp eyes:
prowess is not to be confused
with grace.
Later, eight mallard ducks fly over
without looking down. On the river
Frank Sandmeyer trolls, trolls
for steelhead. He has fished
this river for years
but February is the best month
he says.
Snarled, mittenless,
I handle a maze of nylon.
Far away —
another man is raising my children,
bedding my wife bedding my wife.
Forever
Drifting outside in a pall of smoke,
I follow a snail’s streaked path down
the garden to the garden’s stone wall.
Alone at last I squat on my heels, see
what needs to be done, and suddenly
affix myself to the damp stone.
I begin to look around me slowly
and listen, employing
my entire body as the snail
employs its body, relaxed, but alert.
Amazing! Tonight is a milestone
in my life. After tonight
how can I ever go back to that
other life? I keep my eyes
on the stars, wave to them
with my feelers. I hold on
for hours, just resting.
Still later, grief begins to settle
around my heart in tiny drops.
I remember my father is dead,
and I am going away from this
town soon. Forever.
Goodbye, son, my father says.
Toward morning, I climb down
and wander back into the house.
They are still waiting,
fright splashed on their faces,
as they meet my new eyes for the first time.
Where Water Comes Together
with Other Water
I
Woolworth’s, 1954
Where this floated up from, or why,
I don’t know. But thinking about this
since just after Robert called
telling me he’d be here in a few
minutes to go clamming.
How on my first job I worked
under a man named Sol.
Fifty-some years old, but
a stockboy like I was.
Had worked his way
up to nothing. But grateful
for his job, same as m
e.
He knew everything there was
to know about that dime-store
merchandise and was willing
to show me. I was sixteen, working
for six bits an hour. Loving it
that I was. Sol taught me
what he knew. He was patient,
though it helped I learned fast.
Most important memory
of that whole time: opening
the cartons of women’s lingerie.
Underpants, and soft, clingy things
like that. Taking it out
of cartons by the handful. Something
sweet and mysterious about those
things even then. Sol called it
“linger-ey.” “Linger-ey?”
What did I know? I called it
that for a while, too. “Linger-ey.”
Then I got older. Quit being
a stockboy. Started pronouncing
that frog word right.
I knew what I was talking about!
Went to taking girls out
in hopes of touching that softness,
slipping down those underpants.
And sometimes it happened. God,
they let me. And they were
linger-ey, those underpants.
They tended to linger a little
sometimes, as they slipped down
off the belly, clinging lightly
to the hot white skin.
Passing over the hips and buttocks
and beautiful thighs, traveling
faster now as they crossed the knees,
the calves! Reaching the ankles,
brought together for this
occasion. And kicked free
onto the floor of the car and
forgotten about. Until you had
to look for them.
“Linger-ey.”
Those sweet girls!
“Linger a little, for thou art fair.”
I know who said that. It fits,
and I’ll use it. Robert and his
kids and I out there on the flats
with our buckets and shovels.
His kids, who won’t eat clams, cutting
up the whole time, saying “Yuck”
or “Ugh” as clams turned
up in the shovels full of sand
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