The sky disdains
to be thus associated and treacherous cowboys
who drive cars live there.
Say the purity of blue over Houston
that unwholesome place
is prettier
and the graininess over Michoacan is moodier
and I have been to wyoming.
7
The trip back sadly as all trips
back are
dull
and I did
see the old bartender woman of florence
this time in her restaurant part 50 yards
away from the tavern between which
she ran apparently with the speed
of some sort of stout gazelle
but not the broad with the fabulatory build.
She that day was probably off in an office somewhere.
Pity daytime lives.
But everyone was tired. We had unloaded
the furniture, early the next morning
and before the bite of the sun quelled the bite
of the stars we left, going the long, time consuming
way
south. Sober business.
The Beauty of North Fork was there as she will be
till she dies sometime
(and by the way she runs a tavern)
Thence to salmon and across the narrow bridge
and out
into the lemhi. I say
if it weren’t for the distances
and for the trees & creeks I would
go mad, o yes, land, that one forces
a secondary interest in, vanishes
as a force as you drive onward.
This is only obvious.
This is only some of the times we spend.
You go through it as though it were
a planet of cotton wadding . . . and love
its parts as you do the parts of a woman
whose relations with earth are more established
than your own.
But of physical entirety
there is no need to elaborate, one has
one’s foot
on the ground, which is the saying
of all common and communicable pleasures
and my arm around your shoulder is the proof of that.
But I am ashamed of my country
that, not as areal reality, but as act
it shames me to be a citizen in
the land where I grew up. The very air chills
your bones, the very ungraciousness of its replies
and the pressures of its not replying
embarrass my presence here. God knows
we do what we can to live.
But the intimidations thrown at us
in the spurious forms they have learned truth
can take, in a time which should have been
plenty and engaging of the best that each man,
if he were encouraged to be even that, and
not slapped in the face as stupid, cut off
from all other peoples to make him hygienic of
views not viable to this soil, which is no more
sacred I tell you than any other the earth
has to offer, for she in her roundness has kept
an accord with her movements great time has not yet
seen aberrant. Mice crawling on a moving body?
can they, may they really offset great movement?
The very air,
if you are awake, can chill your bones
and there is little enough of beauty
finally scratched for. It is not
the end pursuit of my countrymen
that they be great
in a great line of men.
An occasional woman, won’t,
though I wish she could,
justify a continent. In the parliaments
of miniscule places she is there
and gives them substance,
as in Florence, and North Fork
for she was gracious as leaders
are now not and I begin to believe after all
these years there is an aristocracy
of place and event and person
and as I sit here above this valley
I sought to involve you with
and take you out on a trip
that had no point, there remains Montana
and it is nice. But not infallible.
The sky is a hoax.
And was meant,
once suggested,
to catch your eye. The eye
can be arbitrary,
but its subject matter cannot.
Thus the beauty of some women.
And from Williston
along the grand missourian length
of the upper plains you go, then the Milk
to Havre
that incredible distance once along a route
all those clamorous men
took . . . they now grow things there not horticultural
only storageable, things of less importance
than fur
for furs then were never stockpiled, it would
hurt the hair,
that Astor,
he’d never have done it.
And yes Fort Benton is lovely
and quiet, I would gladly give it as a gift
to a friend, and with pride, a place of marked
indolence, where the river closes, a gift
of marked indifference, if it were mine.
If the broad grass park were mine
between the river and the town
and to the quick rise behind.
And then up to the median altitude of Montana
Sugar beets and sheep and cattle.
Where the normal spaces
are the stretches of Wyoming
and north Dakota, Idaho
is cut
by an elbow
of mountain that swings
down, thus she is
cut off by geologies she says
I’m sure
are natural
but it is truly the West
as no other place,
ruined by an ambition and religion
cut, by a cowboy use of her nearly virgin self
unannealed
by a real placement
this,
this
is the birthplace
of Mr. Pound
and Hemingway in his own mouth
chose to put a shotgun.
Song
This afternoon was unholy, the sky
bright mixed with cloud wrath, I read Yeats,
then black, and their land of heart’s desire
where beauty has no ebb
decay no flood
but joy is wisdom, time
an endless song
I kiss you
and the world begins to fade
I kiss you not, the world is not.
I would not give my soul to you yet
the desire inside me burns.
November. The eighteenth was the coldest
this season, encumbered with routine errands
out past the factory
black sulphur
and in the dense checks
of its burdensome smoke the intense yellow tanks,
hooded, there sat a smell of weak death
and we pass these days of our isolation
in our rigidly assigned shelters
heads bent in occupation
a couple of pointless daydreamers
smiles lit and thrown into the breeze,
how artful can love
suffer in the cross streets of this town
marked simply by the clicking railroad
and scratch of the janitor’s broom.
Song
Christ of the sparrows Help me!
the soot falls
along the street
into the alleys.
december.
and sometimes
its rain falls
along pocatello’s streets
into its alleys
along its black diesel thruways
There is no far away place
could satisfy
there is no forlorn bird
could outdistance my desire.
When the vacation
of my heart is that complete
the pain of this
particular moment
is unbearable. The sun
strikes my book laden table
my room is my skull
I could have you tell me
this pain behind my eyes will soon be gone
I could listen, I could die
seized by a foolishly contrived misunderstanding
or listlessly watch
the two single
figures bent
and in the rags of careful hesitation
feel their way along the sidewalk
past my window
old men
leave a city already made lonely
by the outcast words of pointless conversation
go,
along the intolerably windy highway west of here.
And mind us
there were no marks of the bruise of friends
there aren’t any traces of that turmoil, you stay
as you were, there were
a few headlong pitches onto the ground
a torn shoulder to remember
a few unhappy nights.
drunk with the high necessity to talk
fast and loud in crowded bars
And then, in the street
the cheap guilt
and all the casual half meant and self aware
inward chastisement
a petty reward for myself, like saving a nickel
and insisting even with a smile
it was my life I lived
the suspicious terror I’d turned around
too many times to keep track
I said you said I said You said I said.
The Smug Never Silent Guns of the Enemy
Their muzzles are at the door.
Did you see them, did he
see them, minutemen
rising out of the silos
A winter wonderland of
the white busy north.
The smug guns, trained on
The whites of their eyes
are grey
and disputations
of more guns come
into the ear:
The manipulated price of sugar
The death of great ladies
“I’ll shoot my second if you’ll shoot yours”
Concentrated insecticides
(flow like milk in the river
You will be greeted
on the outskirts of town
with a vegetable brush
and tips on good living
An interview with a turkey farmer
(gobbling in the background
the news that Bertrand Russell
is a sick old fool
The seminar ends when the squat madeyed colonel
announces the way to peace thru war and shoots the moderator
And more corrupted reports follow you out
the door, they implore you to think young
and you do
it is such a pleasure in the sagebrush
in the open saturated air
zipping up your pants
having made more of the latest news
on the new snow.
Mourning Letter, March 29, 1963
No hesitation
would stay me
from weeping this morning
for the miners of Hazard Kentucky.
The mine owners’
extortionary skulls
whose eyes are diamonds don’t float
down the rivers, as they should,
of the flood
The miners, cold
starved, driven from work, in
their homes float though and float
on the ribbed ships of their frail
bodies,
Oh, go letter,
keep my own misery close to theirs
associate me with no other honor.
Song: Venceremos
(for latin america
(for préman sotomayor
And there will be fresh children once more
in planalto and matto grosso
green mansions for their houses
along the orinoco
take away the oil
it is not to anoint their heads
take away the cannon
and the saber from the paunch belly
overlaid with crossed colors
those quaint waddling men
are the leaden dead toys
only their
own
children
caress
while the great eyed children
far away in the mountains, out of Quito
pass thru the crisp evening streets
of earth towns, where they caress
the earth, a substance of majority
including the lead of established
forces,
who can do nothing
but give us the measures of pain
which now define us
Take away the boats from the bananas
they are there for the double purpose
to quell insurrection first
and next to make of an equatorial food
a clanging and numerical register in chicago
this is not industrial comment,
it is not Sandburg’s chicago
not how ugly a city you did make
but whitman’s fine generosity I want
a specific measure of respect returned for the hand
and the back that bears away the stalk
as a boy, in illinois
peeled away, in amazement, the yellow, brown lined case
thicker place
when the arced phenomenon
was first put in his hand
a suggestion and a food, combustion!
keep your fingers from the coffee bush.
Nor,
in Paso de Indios
can the people be permitted
the luxurious image of Peron
and his duly wedded saint
they can be taught to deny
the dictator and his call girl
in the sports car
hide themselves in some corrupt
rooming house country
with a blue coast
and damned clergy
“memory, mind, and will
:politics
“there are men with ideas
who effect”
Force those men.
be keen to pass beyond all known use
use the grain on a common mountain
for those who are hungry
treat hunger
as a ceremony
be quick to pass by condition
and the persuasion of mere number
teach the parrot, who rises
in the sunset
a cloud
to sing,
destroy
all talking parrots
I ask you
make for the
altar
of your imaginations
some sign Keep
the small clerks of God from your precinct
be not a world, and therefore halt
before the incursions of general infection
from a stronger world,
dance,
and in your side stepping
the spirit
will tell where.
Song: Europa
Red wine will flow
sadly past your lips, and leave
with fullness their parting
october is orange
with desolation
the mountains are abandoned
each winter sunset
to those cruel marks of red
or whole lines of remote ranges
lit of desire for you as they recede
toward oregon
Nothing will happen.
The brutality of your frankness
has come to me
inches at a time,
and so slowly the pain marches
through the veins of my soul
with the heavy step of a migrating herd
tramping out the vintage
Evening is
that closing part
of you I sometimes hum as a song to myself
looking down the street through my fingers
through the wreath of myrtle
with which you have embellished
my horns
I call
with the thick weight
in my throat
over your terrain
O she is a small settlement, there
she is an atmosphere
and we are above it all
under her white gown
and against my bare shoulder
snow flakes fall
a slight scent of ginger
fresh in the wind
of our trip to Knossos
For the New Union Dead in Alabama
The Rose of Sharon
I lost in the tortured night
of this banished place
the phrase
and the rose
from wandering
away, down the lanes
in all their abstract directions
a worry about the peninsula
of the east,
and the grim territories
of the west
here in the raw greed
of the frontier my soul can find
no well of clear water
it is pressed
as a layer
between unreadable concerns,
a true sandwich, a true
grave, like a performance
in an utterly removed theater
is a grave, the unreachable action makes
a crypt
of distance,
a rose of immense beauty