it were my buddy’s arm.
And I wished for us both
I could put my arms
around you, old friend.
I love you too, Bro.
I said that, and then we hung up.
Our First House in Sacramento
This much is clear to me now—even then
our days were numbered. After our first week
in the house that came furnished
with somebody else’s things, a man appeared
one night with a baseball bat. And raised it.
I was not the man he thought I was.
Finally, I got him to believe it.
He wept from frustration after his anger
left him. None of this had anything to do
with Beatlemania. The next week these friends
of ours from the bar where we all drank
brought friends of theirs to our house —
and we played poker. I lost the grocery money
to a stranger. Who went on to quarrel
with his wife. In his frustration
he drove his fist through the kitchen wall.
Then he, too, disappeared from my life forever.
When we left that house where nothing worked
any longer, we left at midnight
with a U-Haul trailer and a lantern.
Who knows what passed through the neighbors’ minds
when they saw a family leaving their house
in the middle of the night?
The lantern moving behind the curtainless
windows. The shadows going from room to room,
gathering their things into boxes.
I saw firsthand
what frustration can do to a man.
Make him weep, make him throw his fist
through a wall. Set him to dreaming
of the house that’s his
at the end of the long road. A house
filled with music, ease, and generosity.
A house that hasn’t been lived in yet.
Next Year
That first week in Santa Barbara wasn’t the worst thing
to happen. The second week he fell on his head
while drinking, just before he had to lecture.
In the lounge, that second week, she took the microphone
from the singer’s hands and crooned her own
torch song. Then danced. And then passed out
on the table. That’s not the worst, either. They
went to jail that second week. He wasn’t driving
so they booked him, dressed him in pajamas
and stuck him in Detox. Told him to get some sleep.
Told him he could see about his wife in the morning.
But how could he sleep when they wouldn’t let him
close the door to his room?
The corridor’s green light entered,
and the sound of a man weeping.
His wife had been called upon to give the alphabet
beside the road, in the middle of the night.
This is strange enough. But the cops had her
stand on one leg, close her eyes,
and try to touch her nose with her index finger.
All of which she failed to do.
She went to jail for resisting arrest.
He bailed her out when he got out of Detox.
They drove home in ruins.
This is not the worst. Their daughter had picked that night
to run away from home. She left a note:
“You’re both crazy. Give me a break, PLEASE.
Don’t come after me.”
That’s still not the worst. They went on
thinking they were the people they said they were.
Answering to those names.
Making love to the people with those names.
Nights without beginning that had no end.
Talking about a past as if it’d really happened.
Telling themselves that this time next year,
this time next year
things were going to be different.
To My Daughter
Everything I see will outlive me.
— ANNA AKHMATOVA
It’s too late now to put a curse on you—wish you
plain, say, as Yeats did his daughter. And when
we met her in Sligo, selling her paintings, it’d worked —
she was the plainest, oldest woman in Ireland.
But she was safe.
For the longest time, his reasoning
escaped me. Anyway, it’s too late for you,
as I said. You’re grownup now, and lovely.
You’re a beautiful drunk, daughter.
But you’re a drunk. I can’t say you’re breaking
my heart. I don’t have a heart when it comes
to this booze thing. Sad, yes, Christ alone knows.
Your old man, the one they call Shiloh, is back
in town, and the drink has started to flow again.
You’ve been drunk for three days, you tell me,
when you know goddamn well drinking is like poison
to our family. Didn’t your mother and I set you
example enough? Two people
who loved each other knocking each other around,
knocking back the love we felt, glass by empty glass,
curses and blows and betrayals?
You must be crazy! Wasn’t all that enough for you?
You want to die? Maybe that’s it. Maybe
I think I know you, and I don’t.
I’m not kidding, kiddo. Who are you kidding?
Daughter, you can’t drink.
The last few times I saw you, you were out of it.
A cast on your collarbone, or else
a splint on your finger, dark glasses to hide
your beautiful bruised eyes. A lip
that a man should kiss instead of split.
Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ!
You’ve got to take hold now.
Do you hear me? Wake up! You’ve got to knock it off
and get straight. Clean up your act. I’m asking you.
Okay, telling you. Sure, our family was made
to squander, not collect. But turn this around now.
You simply must—that’s all!
Daughter, you can’t drink.
It will kill you. Like it did your mother, and me.
Like it did.
Anathema
The entire household suffered.
My wife, myself, the two children, and the dog
whose puppies were born dead.
Our affairs, such as they were, withered.
My wife was dropped by her lover,
the one-armed teacher of music who was
her only contact with the outside world
and the things of the mind.
My own girlfriend said she couldn’t stand it
anymore, and went back to her husband.
The water was shut off.
All that summer the house baked.
The peach trees were blasted.
Our little flower bed lay trampled.
The brakes went out on the car, and the battery
failed. The neighbors quit speaking
to us and closed their doors in our faces.
Checks flew back at us from merchants —
and then mail stopped being delivered
altogether. Only the sheriff got through
from time to time—with one or the other
of our children in the back seat,
pleading to be taken anywhere but here.
And then mice entered the house in droves.
Followed by a bull snake. My wife
found it sunning itself in the living room
next to the dead TV. How she dealt with it
is another matter. Chopped its head off
right there on the floor.
And then chopped it in two when it continu
ed
to writhe. We saw we couldn’t hold out
any longer. We were beaten.
We wanted to get down on our knees
and say forgive us our sins, forgive us
our lives. But it was too late.
Too late. No one around would listen.
We had to watch as the house was pulled down,
the ground plowed up, and then
we were dispersed in four directions.
Energy
Last night at my daughter’s, near Blaine,
she did her best to tell me
what went wrong
between her mother and me.
“Energy. You two’s energy was all wrong.”
She looks like her mother
when her mother was young.
Laughs like her.
Moves the drift of hair
from her forehead, like her mother.
Can take a cigarette down
to the filter in three draws,
just like her mother. I thought
this visit would be easy. Wrong.
This is hard, brother. Those years
spilling over into my sleep when I try
to sleep. To wake to find a thousand
cigarettes in the ashtray and every
light in the house burning. I can’t
pretend to understand anything:
today I’ll be carried
three thousand miles away into
the loving arms of another woman, not
her mother. No. She’s caught
in the flywheel of a new love.
I turn off the last light
and close the door.
Moving toward whatever ancient thing
it is that works the chains
and pulls us so relentlessly on.
Locking Yourself Out,
Then Trying to Get Back In
You simply go out and shut the door
without thinking. And when you look back
at what you’ve done
it’s too late. If this sounds
like the story of a life, okay.
It was raining. The neighbors who had
a key were away. I tried and tried
the lower windows. Stared
inside at the sofa, plants, the table
and chairs, the stereo set-up.
My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me
on the glass-topped table, and my heart
went out to them. I said, Hello, friends,
or something like that. After all,
this wasn’t so bad.
Worse things had happened. This
was even a little funny. I found the ladder.
Took that and leaned it against the house.
Then climbed in the rain to the deck,
swung myself over the railing
and tried the door. Which was locked,
of course. But I looked in just the same
at my desk, some papers, and my chair.
This was the window on the other side
of the desk where I’d raise my eyes
and stare out when I sat at that desk.
This is not like downstairs, I thought.
This is something else.
And it was something to look in like that, unseen,
from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.
I don’t even think I can talk about it.
I brought my face close to the glass
and imagined myself inside,
sitting at the desk. Looking up
from my work now and again.
Thinking about some other place
and some other time.
The people I had loved then.
I stood there for a minute in the rain.
Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.
Even though a wave of grief passed through me.
Even though I felt violently ashamed
of the injury I’d done back then.
I bashed that beautiful window.
And stepped back in.
Medicine
All I know about medicine I picked up
from my doctor friend in El Paso
who drank and took drugs. We were buddies
until I moved East. I’m saying
I was never sick a day in my life.
But something has appeared
on my shoulder and continues to grow.
A wen, I think, and love the word
but not the thing itself, whatever
it is. Late at night my teeth ache
and the phone rings. I’m ill,
unhappy and alone. Lord!
Give me your unsteady knife,
doc. Give me your hand, friend.
Wenas Ridge
The seasons turning. Memory flaring.
Three of us that fall. Young hoodlums —
shoplifters, stealers of hubcaps.
Bozos. Dick Miller, dead now.
Lyle Rousseau, son of the Ford dealer.
And I, who’d just made a girl pregnant.
Hunting late into that golden afternoon
for grouse. Following deer paths,
pushing through undergrowth, stepping over
blow-downs. Reaching out for something to hold onto.
At the top of Wenas Ridge
we walked out of pine trees and could see
down deep ravines, where the wind roared, to the river.
More alive then, I thought, than I’d ever be.
But my whole life, in switchbacks, ahead of me.
Hawks, deer, coons we looked at and let go.
Killed six grouse and should have stopped.
Didn’t, though we had limits.
Lyle and I climbing fifty feet or so
above Dick Miller. Who screamed—“Yaaaah!”
Then swore and swore. Legs numbing as I saw what.
That fat, dark snake rising up. Beginning to sing.
And how it sang! A timber rattler thick as my wrist.
It’d struck at Miller, but missed. No other way
to say it—he was paralyzed. Could scream, and swear,
not shoot. Then the snake lowered itself from sight
and went in under rocks. We understood
we’d have to get down. In the same way we’d got up.
Blindly crawling through brush, stepping over blow-downs,
pushing into undergrowth. Shadows falling from trees now
onto flat rocks that held the day’s heat. And snakes.
My heart stopped, and then started again.
My hair stood on end. This was the moment
my life had prepared me for. And I wasn’t ready.
We started down anyway. Jesus, please help me
out of this, I prayed. I’ll believe in you again
and honor you always. But Jesus was crowded out
of my head by the vision of that rearing snake.
That singing. Keep believing in me, snake said,
for I will return. I made an obscure, criminal pact
that day. Praying to Jesus in one breath.
To snake in the other. Snake finally more real
to me. The memory of that day
like a blow to the calf now.
I got out, didn’t I? But something happened.
I married the girl I loved, yet poisoned her life.
Lies began to coil in my heart and call it home.
Got used to darkness and its crooked ways.
Since then I’ve always feared rattlesnakes.
Been ambivalent about Jesus.
But someone, something’s responsible for this.
Now, as then.
Reading
Every man’s life is a mystery, even as
yours is, and mine. Imagine
a château with a window opening
onto Lake Geneva. There in the window
on warm and sunny days is a man
so engrossed in reading he d
oesn’t look
up. Or if he does he marks his place
with a finger, raises his eyes, and peers
across the water to Mont Blanc,
and beyond, to Selah, Washington,
where he is with a girl
and getting drunk for the first time.
The last thing he remembers, before
he passes out, is that she spit on him.
He keeps on drinking
and getting spit on for years.
But some people will tell you
that suffering is good for the character.
You’re free to believe anything.
In any case, he goes
back to reading and will not
feel guilty about his mother
drifting in her boat of sadness,
or consider his children
and their troubles that go on and on.
Nor does he intend to think about
the clear-eyed woman he once loved
and her defeat at the hands of eastern religion.
Her grief has no beginning, and no end.
Let anyone in the château, or Selah,
come forward who might claim kin with the man
who sits all day in the window reading,
like a picture of a man reading.
Let the sun come forward.
Let the man himself come forward.
What in Hell can he be reading?
Rain
Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
Money
In order to be able to live
on the right side of the law.
To always use his own name
and phone number. To go bail
for a friend and not give
a damn if the friend skips town.
Hope, in fact, she does.
To give some money
to his mother. And to his
children and their mother.
Not save it. He wants
to use it up before it’s gone.
Buy clothes with it.
Pay the rent and utilities.
Buy food, and then some.
Go out for dinner when he feels like it.
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