Men Should
 

   Men should search for gold or run trap lines.
   Men should receive mail only once
   every six months. Snow should be a problem
   for men, and storms. Men should storm.

   Men should not trap the last animal.
   The river is fouled with their searching. Men should
   go home now to their troubled sons. Can't they see
   it's snowing all over our country?
 

 Back to camp

         The Slashburn
 

  We burned that clear-cut into
  a black sea of stalks and stumps
  like scorched antlers or
  black carnassial teeth through the smoke.
  The roads were green with foresters
  who would not get dirty. Hysterical helicopters
  dripped hot goo,
  and fire in a jet-roar
  up the knobs and draws, mobbed
  the fastest scalding rabbit,
  coronated the bush bird
  with a crown of rending air.

  You thought I had no world, knew nothing
  in the corner of my eye,
  kicked up death-dust all day
  in clouds of sound from engines and pumps,
  oblivious, deafened. Blind
  to a puff of footdust in the distance,
  the precious smoke of your disappearance.

  Yet suddenly I knew
  by the weight of the heavy hose
  what you had pulled, knew everything
  of your escape to shining town and tavern waiting
  for your wages, the certainty
  that burned a hole in your pocket.
  Knew how with all your youth hanging from you
  you would declare the delusions
  that dropped you face-first into your time—
  how you would sing to the rich, woman-eyed night
  that you had walked off the job,
  weighed and away with your poetry,
  toward that gulp of leaf-light in the windy alders,
  toward a burnished world beyond the cutting line.
 

 

             How to Pan for Gold
 

  Practice with BBs left over from killing
  robins as a child. Pan it: blood on snow,
  your old man's face like a hard day,
  sighting you. If you have gray hair,
  state your intentions to skeptics. Pack.

Avoid the extra weight of secrets
old timers may have died whispering. Years
flake away, round the edges, water.
No one knows if old timers found gold
or went, rush to rush, on borrowed money.

Don't stop walking until you start to stink.
Bathe in the river wearing only a hat.
Remember: river is ritual, but water is a drink.
Make an appointment to die here, then walk
like feet had grips. Gain poise on river rocks.

Do not work at night for stars in your pan
or invent the air, crisp birds drafting up
half your silly life, not finding gold.
Look down, any glint will look up. Look out:
gold may hide in your own smoke of toil.

Black sand is heaviest next to gold.
Gold lies in that wet coat always. That's why
you brought the magnet, arch of a real law.
Save the black sand. Later you will pan it
for any lost gold in its shroud.

Gravity doesn't know you, it just works,
weighing your pan with water, sediment at last.
This is the point you expect to find gold—
where instructions fail like your eyes, squinting,
and the river pouring like rivers down the gorge.
 

 

A Few Lines for Don Wirkkula
 

So if we spoke a code of work
in some rain-town never heard of,
nights in bars, work clothes still on—
what does it matter?
                                The right way
and the wrong way to do a job?
When passes a sleek car exploding
with "music" and the music means
you never existed?
                             Better ask
the agnostic hills to speak mud
and rain of what you meant to them.
Testify what the town forgets,
then forgets out loud.
                                   Lower Cloud—
we opened their bellies with saws
for the weather we belonged to,
pushing through briars thinning trees.
Can't tell if it matters
                                  that we worked,
walked a land of broken wonder
through rainy wreckage and slashed ground,
that we climbed stumps for rivers below,
the cordage of fog
                              down in draws,
a world of drainage, our whole lives!
That we cleared creeks, let them breathe—
that the seedlings we planted are trees over our heads now.
 

 

           Scandinavian Day Parade
 

The year the parade couldn't run fast enough
I was there; I saw it conquered.
I don't remember which year it was
(the year the parade couldn't run fast enough)
for any bewildered year a parade celebrates
the year before and the year after
just as a stone saves a name
from our water-logged town, whose days
have ended like all the parades
that tried to run, that all run together.

It was a bad ship of weather
in black sail, a hill of dark rain.
It took its place at the back of the line,
worth a hundred parades, and rolled the street up
(the turn of the century was the last thing
that big to come down our main street).
What if the wood that fed us, giant timber,
and the fish that built the canneries walked also?
What if sea otters marched also,
the Indian tribes and their lost languages…

The year the parade couldn't run fast enough
it would have taken them all equally—
a squall of rain in three blocks catching
the painted clown who tried to kiss girls,
the big kid they made play tuba
in the metallic band that bounced off buildings,
the Mayor who with her umbrella tried to save
(bent rain driving petals from her corsage)
the Grand Marshall, known in a thousand towns,
from the embarrassment of our personal deluge.

Now the girls in wet garlands must marry
and mud puddles blink in the rain—
a distorted building crumbling in each one.
Years the parade can't run fast enough
it's absurd to ask time for mercy.
For that we must turn to each other yet
in every lashed direction the people storm
to warm homes, and long blocks apart
only a few of us remain in doorways,
mad as captains on the decks of our lives.
 

  Does the Same Moon Hang Over Austria?
                     (Valentine's Day, 1996)
 

This moon like a whittled shaving--
one curl of light less than eclipse,
the rest black and back-lit. That's not
the owl-eyed moon we swore allegiance to,
seeding its dust of moonlight
down onto the trails of white pumice.

The cold wind came quicker off the lake;
I was thinking of the agony of the Modocs
and couldn't get warm--
although just the wind was cold enough for that--
attacking off the lake and finding their caves,
going into their caves and finding them.

Against this we conscript the lovers
into the caves with headlamps on,
that old redeeming. Not the first soldiers
who marched off singing
to pitch their tents on the white pumice
and stake the moon for meaning.

Does the same fragment of moon
hang over Austria that I see this morning,
going to work and unlocking the car?
It's like nearly nothing to eat, salted with stars,
but I guess I should let the lovers have their day--
they love the cold in their starry way.
 

 

           Out of Bear Country

                         1.

Strange to be back on these curb-banks,
networks of streets, roiling traffic,
my life on the flood plain of machines.
The incongruity of news--
for the quick split of an instant
to be near baffled and spotless,
a spy without instructions-- leaves
flying from the hood of a car
that plows through the muscular world.

I can nearly see words falling,
defoliation(folly),  leaves
crisp as foil to the University,
and hear "truth is only in versions"
clear from here— the air is that vacant!
They say in bear country or out
the way is fog-lost in some range
or doubt-- step away, you just merge--
the light will change, the traffic charge.

Yet out there I met Dorothy
(of Skiddaw, Nab Scar, Stybarrow Crag)
rough climbing that crumble of ridge!
But don't think I just saw in her
something I was in "thoughtless youth."
I'm still all that cacophony
with bad ankles and worn-out gear,
same fear of the trap, new wrinkles
like close contour lines on a map.

Freedom for me isn't perverse--
but it flows from the negative,
lets its first light with the word "no".
Walk quietly, walk alone, walk around,
leave a distance, move on...
Yet wasn't the wind in my face, all
advice blown back into my mouth?
Better equipped and going farther
than me-- wasn't the wind behind her?

 
                        2.

She walks into a sudden break-
out of bears, black snap and winging rush
of some chaos from erupting green,
the cub's clumsy retreat to brush,
the she-bear alive in her path.

She sees waves of fear and duty
quake the sopped and shook-out fur,
steambreath of warning from the mouth.
And halting she sees everything--
the conflagration of green
across the shaggy mountainside,
the wildfire of huckleberry
under the sog of a fogbound morning,
lava of a million leaves, wet
sunrise of photosynthesis,
the green palmfuls of graying rain.

This sharpening in squally air.
Each breath seems like trespass
on the colder time and rule of snow,
winter storming back wintry to
blades of mountains, no one here.

God is time as sharp as a tooth.
(When has she ever stood this still?)
The bears fade into green cover,
dissolving in a sweep of rain
like old philosophies into
the breakout beauty of the world.