Apologia
 

There was a river
driven down a chute,
gargling rocks for speech,
and for that
I would ruin everything.

It hurts to think of it--
trees next to the bank
undermined, rolling
in stains of soil
down river, a history.

I want to go to each one of you
without telling the others,
because the secrets between two
are like that river,
wild and ruinous.

Yet up on the divide
I can step over the river
that whelmed me. Once,
it was believed
this is the work of solitude,

a view above the wreckage,
for all it's worth,
where rain in threads
veins the rocks, and the valleys
breed and deluge below.

A land was laid down there,
each ridge humped and stream-sided
by carving creeks
of pain and repentance,
and with a step forward I

lived and let go the waters.
 

 

                    Out of Memory

 
Memory always approaches by air, plunges
between the mountains and skims the narrows,
banks into some scene of love or defeat--
you and that dark pilot afloat again
each time the present drops from your hands, bumps
and lands on the whitecaps of the channel.

You remember then a barge of a town
run aground, the sad rain-shine of the walks,
stench of mud flats and seagulls in the street.
Neon-slicks, the pulse and steam of the bars
calling their passengers and throwing them out--
fishbone, people at the edge of the world.

Then here they come in their rustbucket cars,
out of the outskirts and in toward memory,
a dust-parade up the one sorry street
that seemed their drifting urge for direction,
and the readiness of dust to be mud
every time a small world is rained away.

The town's washed out. Maybe you should look up--
the clock is counting out the wastes of time.
There's a new land all alive on paved roads,
children to teach, and a world to save, but
the tide has left that thin frontier of debris,
and you say who, who will remember these ghosts?

 
 

   Basketball in the Squall
 

Mad wind! The rind of the ball,
skin of it oval in my hands.
The foothills bent and turbulent with trees
and the clock running down!
This is good country for old men,
a landscape ready to capsize,
with rainy air full of fish stink
and blown gulls captious and carping.

When I dreamed I was a player
no one remembers now, I launched
the shot I believed would orbit
a world of absurd boys
missing shots and calling foul forever--
my father coming from the house
to try the two-handed push shot,
wingspread of an extinct bird.

Later I said they cut a hole in the net
so the ball could be free--
not a caught and befouled fish
or sewn shut like a nest or house.
While all the others are at home
I'll confess to a terror of the nest,
those graves of the eggs of gulls
downwatching wildly from the hills.

And before I go there gladly
I'll play one against the weather--
wind on defense, trash-talking birds,
pluvious air, pressure full-court.
Barometric, unbearable--
the heartbreaking skin of the ball,
the beauty under the glum sky
that miss or make flies toward the net.

               Poem from Exile
 
 
   Chop it down, it grows back.
   Poison it, the poison won't take.
   Burn it, it floats out of the ashes like smoke.
 
   No use trying to pulverize it.  Don't worry,
   it's not going to be pulverized.

   Have your dog attack it--
   that dog won't hunt.  The dog just
   falls in love with it! Give it
   as a gift to someone at Christmas who next year
   gives it back with a laugh!

   Try to forget it, it won't be forgotten.
   Try to bribe it, it won't take the money.
   Drown it in noise, it drinks up the sound.

   It's a little too hungry to be starved out.
 
   Jail it, it escapes the next day.  Some things
   won't be incarcerated.

   Toss it to the working class, it looks you in the eye.

   Marry it to someone
   it slips from the house
   every time it sees the moon.

   Let it die of old age-- that might work--
   or it might choose some hearts to remember it,
   and be the light that squeezes
   between the trees,
   the cold in the morning at their camp by the river.
 
 

 

                     Whiskey
 

Seasons asked for it— the color of rivers
when fall leaves drown in bedrock holes.
An elegiac drink, not without hope.
I wrapped the pint in an oily rag
and put it in the tool box. Then I climbed,
groaned that truck up the rock roads to heaven.

Land asked for it— the woods all shipwrecked,
white tombstone stumps staring from ridges,
old cedars cut and dead in the draws
with full heads of hemlock hair. Beached and beaten,
a wilderness run aground. Strewn and slashed,
the land in zones and amputated limbs.

It's supposed to be like this: you go to the top
of the world and drink the drink of fire.
But it was the county all before me then,
and each sip was a spotfire. Any east wind
could have carried that mood to town,
red flames running in duff and debris.

Night didn't fall in those hills. It assembled
behind stumps, the dark moonsides of leaves.
And whiskey put its own fire out.
Whatever I wanted seemed close to home,
smeared, or just beyond the headlights—
the road lost and deer bursting through the beams.
 

 

Picture of an Escaped Convict in the Newspaper
 

I think thirty years and it apprehends me,
alive, behind the newspaper. I change
the Robert to Bob and then I remember him--
wild on rivers and sullen in school.
Even then he was a fist, clenched,
and dressed all wrong in a sneer.
I don't recall a human voice.
We weren't friends and never talked.

If I dream hills are outlaws again,
he escapes without hurting me.
If I dream a river runs through the newspaper,
it rafts him home to begin again
in that ticking heart of hills
where we were born. But I think
thirty years and he is here with a gun--
screaming that we never talked.
 

          Some Photographs
 

Let's get rid of some old pictures.
This one's the forest funereal--
lives spent in jails of fir. Notice:
too much abundance of weather,
too much willingness to fail.
Wind riots around the house
and rain is an organism
so fresh from a lurching ocean
it stalls, then squalls in coils and swells.

She came in this blue volkswagen,
left in a bluer one toward
a clearer sky to the escaped east,
a scrape of mountains high enough
to change birds and trees, no more
faced with a glass pane face of rain.
If it could be oxygen to her--
so what if the world were chatter,
carbon dioxide, and nothing?

Later the trap of such ideas
never shows in the picture-- crap
about the enemy: belonging,
and the wrongs of material.
Whoever lives without regrets
should step up and explain themselves--
my photo most deserves the frame,
a home in a detriment of wood,
cold as a face from the Klondike.

Here it is-- this is the best picture of her
with guitar and a bandanna
adorning the neck of her dog.
She sang the flooded songs of Baez,
round and sad as raindrops. Once,
out in the inundated field,
she glance-saw the yellow spadix
of a skunk cabbage, mistook it
for the breast of a meadowlark

that doesn't even fly on this side of the mountains.
 
 

 

   Never sailed with a drunkard
   though with courtly and listing face
   he wooed me by mildew's flagship,
   his fungus-skow, hull and home.
   Yet he meant to live in spite of me--
   washed, balmed, annointed-- a king
   in the rude chop and channel trough
   with a bellyful of wet wind in his sails.
                       Then bound to return,
   with a look keen and crucified,
   soaked alive in the dock-bashed boat.
   Wasn't this his craft-- stacking wood,
   fixing a roof or fence in town,
   working the wharf, staying afloat? Yet
   he meant to die in spite of me--
   I heard it in his whetted laugh,
   that prow of pain that slices the fog
   of the past and raises the drowned.
   (There's a lithe boat in his moorage now,
   fit for the next regatta.)
   He was just nobody, a misfit,
   asea on the docks each red morning,
   a staggering sun in his eyes--
   as he sailed to wave and welcome
   the flanks of furrowing freighters,
   those rusty Liberian plows
   that heaved him out of their way.