by the isolation of the spot and the terrible dry winds
that blow down upon south Utah.
and what she had to ward them off
were not the slow dreams of indians
but a pool table and a rack of cold sandwiches.
The beer was cold
The four sat and drank.
Hot, the climate was tolerable only
within the confines of bars or on
the open stretches of road at mad speed
or at night when the bitter cold sat over the southern
Colorado cliffs.
In the bitterness of the great desert
they tried to get comfortable in car seats.
Utterly left behind was
a mixed past, of friends and a comfortable house.
They felt sorry for themselves perhaps
for no real reason, there had never
been in their baggage more than a few stars
and a couple of moons, you’ve seen their surfaces
in pictures.
They came finally to the brick facade
of salt lake & much beyond. A year later
those who remained celebrated—
almost as an afterthought, and remembered
that day it snowed when they left,
September 1st . . . now it is October
and winter has not yet sent her punitive expedition.
Warm days. It is afternoon. The leaves
come and go in the Alberta wind sliding down
across our country
and they sit still facing the north slopes
of the mountains, the remnant of a Southern Idea
in their minds.
Idaho Out
For Hettie and Roi
“The thing to be known is the natural landscape. It becomes known through the totality of its forms”
Carl O. Sauer
1
Since 1925 there are now no
negative areas he has ignored
the poles have been strung for our time together
and his hand is in the air as well
areal is hopefully Ariel
So black & red simplot fertilizer smoke
drifts its excremental way
down the bottle of our
valley
toward the narrowing
end
coming into the portneuf gap
where its base aspects . . .
a large cork could be placed
but which proceeding from inkom
or toward
past the low rooves
of sheep’s sheds the slope
gains rough brusque edges
and you are in it more quickly
than its known forms allow
or the approach from
the contrary side of the valley
there is a total journal
with the eyes
and the full gap stands
as the grand gate from our
place
to utah bad lands and
thus down
to those sullen valleys
of men who have apparently
accepted all of the vital
factor of their time
not including humanity.
And not to go too far with them
they were the first white flour makers
they jealously
keep that form and turn the sides
of the citizens’ hills into square documents
of their timid endeavor. The only
hard thing they had was first massacre
and then brickwork
not propaedeutic to a life of grand design
wherein all men fit
but something
for all its pleasure of built surface
and logic of substances as
the appeal of habitat
for salt lake downtown is
not ugly,
but to a life of petty retreat
before such small concourses
as smoking, drinking, and other less
obvious but
justly necessary bodily needs
not including breeding which in their hands
is purposive.
From this valley
there is no leaving by laterals.
Even george goodhart,
a conventional man, as all
good hearts are
knew, with a horse
and access crosswise
to creekheads
the starving indian women could be fed
with surplus deer.
Who was the pioneer boy who died in a rest home
and was a new local, i.e.,
there is implied evidence
he never heard the cry of the pawnee
in his territory.
Which, it is said in the human
ecology term
is to be a hick, howsoever travelled. And
while we are at it it is best said here:
The mark of the pre-communication
westerner
travelled in local segments
along a line of time
utterly sequestered
thus his stupidity required the services
of at least one of his saddle bags
and, in the meantime
his indian friends
signalled one another over his head
as he passed on his businesslike way
in the depressions
between them, in long shadows
they looking deaf and dumb, moving fingers
on the slight rounds
of nebraskan hills.
Of a verge
of the land North
and an afternoon is no good
there is the width of the funnel rim
and sad people for all their smiles
do scurry and sing across its mouth
and there are no archipelagoes of real laughter
in alameda
and no really wild people save stiff
inhibited criminals.
So when gay youth was yours
in those other smaller towns on the peneplain
of central america and the jerseys
the white legs of girls stand truly by stoplights
and Edward Hopper truly did stop painting
all those years. But we stray
we strays, as we always do
and those mercies always wanted
an endless price, our jazz came
from the same hip shops we walked past
the truly, is no sense speaking of universes,
hanging from that hook
I had in mind the sweet shop
something so simple as main street
and I’ll be around.
But I was escorting you out of Pocatello,
sort of north.
Perhaps past that physiographic
menace the arco desert and
what’s there
of the leakage of newclear seance
to Lemhi
again a mormon nomenclature
where plaques to the journey of Lewis & Clark
but the rises across the too
tilted floors of that corridor
at high point the birch
and then toward North Fork
you must take that
other drainage where yes
the opposites are so sheer
and the fineness of what growth
there is that lifting
following
of line, the forever bush
and its thin colored sentinelling
of those streams
as North Fork comes on
on the banks of the magnificent salmon
we come smack up on a marvelous beauty from Chi.
Who has
a creaky cheap pooltable
to pass the winter with
and the innocent loudmouthed handsome
boys
who inhabit the
winter there. The remarkably quiet winter
there,
all alone where the salmon forks.
It is so far away but never long ago.
You may be sure Hudson.
And
She said
shaking her dark hair
she used to work at arco
and knew the fastest way
from salmon to idaho falls—
you may be sure
and in a car
or anywhere,
she was a walking invitation
to a lovely party
her body was that tactile to the eye
or what I meant
she is part
of the morphology
the last distant place of idaho north,
already in effect Montana.
Thus, roughly free,
to bring in relative terms.
Her husband, though it
makes no difference,
had sideburns, wore
a kind of abstract spats
wore loose modern beltless pants
and moved with that accord to the earth
I deal with
but only the heavy people
are with.
They are “the pragmatic ‘and’
the always unequated remnant”
2
My desire is to be
a classical poet
my gods have been men . . .
and women.
I renew my demand
that presidents and chairmen everywhere
be removed to a quarantine outside the earth
somewhere,
as we travel northward. My
peculiar route is across
the lost trail pass past
in the dark draws somewhere
my north fork beauty’s husband’s
dammed up small dribbling creek
fetching a promising lake (she showed
me the pictures) a too good to be true
scheme she explained to me,
to draw fishermen with hats on
from everywhere
they wanted to come from.
One of the few ventures I’ve
given my blessing . . . she
would look nice rich.
3
We were hauling . . .
furniture. To Missoula.
We stopped in the biting
star lit air often to have
a beer and to stretch our legs.
My son rode with me
and was delighted that a state
so civilized as Montana
could exist, where the people,
and no matter how small
the town,
and how disconnected in
the mountain trails,
could be so welcoming to a lad,
far from the prescribed ages
of idaho where they chase that
young population out, into
the frosty air. There is
an incredible but true fear
of the trespassing there of such
patently harmless people aged 13.
But not to go too much into
that ethnic shit, because
this is geographic business,
already, in the bitteroot
there sat snow on the tallest
peaks and that moisture factor
caused trees now gliding by
from one minor drainage
to another until we came
to the great bitteroot
proper and the cotton woods
and feather honey locusts
lining its rushing edges.
Once, when I was going the other way
in august,
a lemhi rancher
told me the soil content
of the bitteroot was of
such a makeup that the cows
got skinnier whereas
in the lemhi, you know
the rest, although of course
the lemhi is dry. It’s
like a boring popular song
all by himself he’d love
to rest his weary head
on somebody else’s shoulder
as he grows older.
From Florence to Missoula
is a very pragmatic distance
And florence is the singularity
Montana has, one is so drunk
by that time. Fort Benton,
to your right, across stretches
of the cuts of the Blackfoot, through
Bowman’s Corner, no
the sky
is not
bigger in Montana. When
for instance you come
from Williston
there seems at the border a change
but it is only because man has
built a tavern there
and proclaims himself of service
at a point in time, very much,
and space is continuous from Superior
to Kalispel. And indeed
That is what the dirtiest
of human proportions are built on
service by men there before you
could have possibly come
and you never can.
But if men can live in Moab
is on the run and seeding very badly
and that environmentalism, old word,
is truly dead.
4
So he goes anywhere apparently
anywhere and space is muddied
with his tracks
for ore he is only after,
after ore.
He is the most regretful factor
in a too miniscule cosmic
the universe it turns out your neighbors are
The least obnoxious of all
the radiating circles bring
grossnesses
that are of the strength of bad dreams.
5
Let me remind you we were in Florence
Montana.
Where the Bitteroot is thick
past Hamilton, a farm machinery
nexus
for all that unnutritious hay
and in florence we stop.
Everyone gets out of the trucks
and stretching & yawning moves
through the biting still starlit night
a night covered with jewels
and the trucks’ radiators begin
to creak and snap in their cooling off.
We shiver. Each limbjoint
creaks and shudders and we talk
in chatters of the past road, of the failing
head lights on the mountain road—and in
we go.
A wildly built girl
brushes past us
as we enter. Inside
it is light, a funny disinherited place
of concrete block. The fat woman
bartender,
has an easy smile as we head for the fireplace
in the rear and as we go by the box is putting out
some rock and twist, and on the table
by the fireplace there are canned things, string beans
and corn, and she brings us the beer.
Florence. It is hardly a place.
To twist it, it is a wide spot
in the valley. The air is cold. The fire
burns into our backs while we sit on the hearth.
The girl of the not quite
believable frame
returns, and her boyfriend is pulled
by the vertically rhythmic tips of her fingers
reluctantly off the stool,
but he can’t
he, the conservative under riding buttress
of our planet can’t, he has been drinking beer
while she, too young for a public place
has been pulling a bottle apart in the car.
&nb
sp; So there you are. She is
as ripe and bursting as that
biblical pomegranate.
She bleeds spore in her
undetachable black pants
and, not to make it seem too good
or even too remote
or too unlikely near
she has that
kind of generous smile
offset by a daring and hostile look
again, I must insist, her hair
was black, the color of hostile sex
the lightest people, for all
their odd beauty,
are a losing game.
... I can’t leave her.
Her mother was with her.
She, in the tavern, in Florence
was ready,
with all her jukeboxbody
and her trips to the car
to the bottle.
There are many starry nights thus occupied
while the planet, indifferent, rattles on
like the boxcars on its skin
and when moments like that transpire
they with all good hope begin again somewhere.
She made many trips to the car that night . . .
an unmatchable showoff
with her eyes
and other accomplishments.
6
And onward
bless us, there are no eyes
in Missoula, only things, the new
bridge across Clark Fork
there is civilization again,
a mahogany bar
and tickertape
baseball, and the men are men,
but there are no eyes
in Missoula
like in little orphan annie and is?
the sky bigger there?