In the old days sometimes longhorns,
like the Lakota had, had the sense to attack
Cavalry contingents, goring what could be gored.
Even now a few, not quite bred or beaten
into senescence, struggle wildly with these invisible
telemetric collars wrapped tightly around our necks
though it’s fatally illegal to take them off.
6
O BLM, BLM, and NFS,
what has your mother, the earth,
done to you that you rape and scalp
her so savagely, this beautiful woman
now mostly scar tissue?
7
O that girl, only young men
dare to look at her directly
while I manage the most sidelong of glances:
olive-skinned with a Modigliani throat,
lustrous obsidian hair, the narrowest
of waists and high French bottom, ample
breasts she tries to hide in a loose blouse.
Though Latino her profile is from a Babylonian
frieze and when she walks her small white dog
with brown spots she fairly floats along,
looking neither left nor right, meeting no one’s
glance as if beauty was a curse. In the grocery
store when I drew close her scent was jacaranda,
the tropical flower that makes no excuses.
This geezer’s heart swells stupidly to the dampish
promise. I walk too often in the cold shadow
of the mountain wall up the arroyo behind the house.
Empty pages are dry ice, numbing the hands and heart.
If I weep I do so in the shower so that no one,
not even I, can tell. To see her is to feel
time’s cold machete against my grizzled neck,
puzzled that again beauty has found her home in threat.
8
Many a sharp-eyed pilot has noticed
while flying in late October
that remnant hummingbirds rob piggyback
rides on the backs of southward-flying geese.
9
I hedge when I say “my farm.”
We don’t ever own, we barely rent this earth.
I’ve even watched a boulder age,
changing the texture of its mosses
and cracking from cold back in 1983.
Squinting, it becomes a mountain fissure.
I’ve sat on this rock so long we celebrate
together our age, our mute geologic destiny.
10
I know a private mountain range with a big bowl in its center that you find by following the narrowest creek bed, sometimes crawling until you struggle through a thicket until you reach two large cupped hands of stone in the middle of which is a hill, a promontory, which would be called a mountain back home. There is iron in this hill and it sucks down summer lightning, thousands and thousands of strokes through time, shattering the gigantic top into a field of undramatic crystals that would bring a buck a piece at a rock show. I was here in a dark time and stood there and said, “I have put my poem in order on the threshold of my tongue,” quoting someone from long, long ago, then got the hell off the mountain due to tremors of undetermined source. Later that night sleeping under an oak a swarm of elf owls (Micrathene whitneyi) descended to a half-dozen feet above my head and a thousand white sycamores undulated in the full moon, obviously the living souls of lightning strokes upside down along the arroyo bed. A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven’t quite found the words.
11
Today the warblers undulate
fishlike, floating down,
lifting up with wing beats
while below me in the creek
minnows undulate birdlike,
floating down, lifting up with fin beats.
For a minute I lose the sense
of up and down.
12
I was hoping to travel the world
backward in my red wagon,
one knee in, the other foot pushing.
I was going to see the sights I’d imagined:
Spanish buildings, trellised with flowers,
a thousand Rapunzels brushing their long
black hair with street vendors singing
the lyrics of Lorca. I’d be towed
by a stray Miura over the green Pyrenees,
turning the bull loose before French customs.
At the edge of the forest René Char was roasting
a leg of lamb over a wood fire. We shared
a gallon of wine while mignonettes frolicked for us.
This all occurred to me forty-two
years ago while hoeing corn and it’s time
for it all to come to pass along with my canoe
trip through Paris, with Jean Moreau trailing
a hand in the crystalline Seine, reading me Robert Desnos.
Why shouldn’t this happen? I have to rid
myself of this last land mine, the unlived life.
13
Try as you might there’s nothing
you can do about bird shadows
except try to head them off
and abruptly stop, letting them pass
by in peace. Looking up and down
at the very same moment is difficult
for a single-eyed man.
The ones coming behind you,
often cautious crows or ravens,
strike hard against the back and nape nerve.
Like most of life your wariness
is useless. You wobble
slightly dumbstruck, queasy,
then watch the shadow flit across
the brown wind-tormented grass.
14
As a geezer one grows tired of the story
of Sisyphus. Let that boulder stay
where it is and, by its presence,
exactly where it wished to be,
but then I’m old enough to have
forgotten what the boulder stood for?
I think of all of the tons of junk
the climbers have left up on Everest,
including a few bodies. Even the pyramids,
those imitation mountains, say to the gods,
“We can do it too.” Despite planes
you can’t get off the earth for long.
Even the dead meat strays behind, changing
shape, the words drift into the twilight
across the lake. I’m not bold enough
to give a poetry reading while alone
far out in the desert to a gathering
of saguaro and organ-pipe cactus
or listen to my strophes reverberate off a mountain
wall. At dawn I sat on a huge boulder
near Cave Creek deep in the Chiracahuas
and listened to it infer that it didn’t want
to go way back up the mountain but liked
it near the creek where gravity bought
its passage so long ago. Everest told me
to get this crap off my head or stay at home
and make your own little pyramids.
15
Concha is perhaps seven. No one knows this cow dog’s age for sure but of course she could care less. Let us weep for the grandeur of rebellious women. After a lifetime of service as a faithful tender of cattle her mind has changed itself. She’s become daffy and won’t do her job. She’s the alpha bitch and leads the other cow dogs off on nightly runs after javelina and deer, maybe herding steers when she shouldn’t, driving horses mad. They return worthlessly exhausted. Now the death sentence hangs above her mottled gray head like a halo of flies. She’s chained to a mesquite, barking for hours without pause. I bring her biscuits on frosty mornings and she shivers without in her solitary confinement but inside it’s obvious that she
’s hot and singing. Her head with its streaks of barbed-wire scars awaits the trigger finger. But then on a dark, wet morning, the grace of El Niño in this parched land, her reprieve arrives. She’s being exiled to a ranch in Mexico just south of here where they need a crazed bitch who’s kick-ass with range bulls. She’ll drive one into an outhouse if that’s what you want. This is a triumph beyond good-byes and I watch through the window as she leaves the barnyard in the back of a pickup, the wind and rain in her face, baring her teeth in anger or a smile, her uncertain future, which by nature she ignores, so much better to me than none.
16
My favorite stump straddles a gully a dozen
miles from any human habitation.
My eschatology includes scats, animal poop,
scatology so that when I nestle under this stump
out of the rain I see the scats of bear, bobcat,
coyote. I won’t say that I feel at home
under this vast white pine stump, the roots
can encircle them, as if you were under the body
of a mythic spider, the thunder ratcheting
the sky so that the earth hums beneath you.
Here is a place to think about nothing,
which is what I do. If the rain beats down
hard enough tiny creeks form beside my shit-strewn
pile of sand. The coyote has been eating mice,
the bear berries, the bobcat a rabbit. It’s dry
enough so it doesn’t smell except for ancient
wet wood and gravel, pine pitch, needles. Luckily
a sandhill crane nests nearby so that in June
if I doze I’m awakened by her cracked
and prehistoric cry, waking startled, feeling
the two million years I actually am.
17
I was sent far from my land of bears.
It wasn’t an asylum but a resting place
to get well buttoned-up against my fugal state
wherein whirl is both the king and queen,
the brain-gods who stir a thousand revolutions
a second the contents of this graying cocotte.
Stop it please. Please stop it please.
There was one other poet from Yankeeland
who rubbed himself, including private parts,
with sandpaper. His doctor searched his room,
even his anus where he had secreted a tightly
bound roll. Across the wide yard and women’s
quarters a lovely soprano sang TV jingles.
One day it was, “Fly the friendly skies of United,”
over and over. Her friend fed her peanut butter
and marshmallows to quell her voice, plus
a daily goblet of Thorazine. If you dive down deep
enough there are no words to bring you up. Not my
problem. If you fly too high there are no words
to help you land. I went back to my land of bears
and learned to bob like an apple on the river’s surface.
18
I was commanded, in a dream naturally,
to begin the epitaphs of thirty-three friends
without using grand words like love pity pride
sacrifice doom honor heaven hell earth:
1. O you deliquescent flower
2. O you always loved long naps
3. O you road-kill Georgia possum
4. O you broken red lightbulb
5. O you mosquito smudge fire
6. O you pitiless girl missing a toe
7. O you big fellow in pale-blue shoes
8. O you poet without a book
9. O you lichen without tree or stone
10. O you lion without a throat
11. O you homeless scholar with dirty feet
12. O you jungle bird without a jungle
13. O you city with a single street
14. O you tiny sun without an earth
15. Forgive me for saying good-night quietly
16. Forgive me for never answering the phone
17. Forgive me for sending too much money
18. Pardon me for fishing during your funeral
19. Forgive me for thinking of your lovely ass
20. Pardon me for burning your last book
21. Forgive me for making love to your widow
22. Pardon me for never mentioning you
23. Forgive me for not knowing where you’re buried
24. O you forgotten famous person
25. O you great singer of banal songs
26. O you shrike in the darkest thicket
28. O you orphaned vulture with no meat
29. O you who sucked a shotgun to orgasm
30. Forgive me for raising your ghost so often
31. Forgive me for naming a bird after you
32. Forgive me for keeping a nude photo of you
33. We’ll all see God but not with our eyes
19
I sat on a log fallen over a river and heard
that like people each stretch had a different voice
varying with the current, the nature
of its bed and banks, logjams, boulders,
alder or cedar branches, low-slung
and sweeping the current, the hush of eddies.
In a deep pool I saw the traces of last night’s moon.
20
Who is it up to if it isn’t up to you?
In motels I discover how ugly I am,
the mirrors at home too habitual to be noted.
I chose methodically to be anti-beautiful,
Christian fat keeps you safe from adultery!
With delight I drown my lungs in smoke
and drink that extra bottle of wine
that brings me so much closer to the gods.
Up the road a dozen wetbacks were caught
because one stopped at a ranch house, desperate
for a cigarette. Olive oil and pork sausage
are pratfalls, an open secret to the stove.
In the newspaper I read that thirty-two
dairy cows ate themselves to death on grain
by shaking loose an automatic feeder
(“They just don’t know any better,” the vet said).
Of course false modesty is a family habit.
The zone-tailed hawk looks like and mimics
the harmless turkey vultures with which it often
flies for concealment, stoops in flight and devours
the creatures who thought, “It’s just a vulture.”
21
In the Cabeza Prieta from a hillock I saw no human sign for a thousand square miles except for a stray intestinal vapor trail with which we mar the sky. I naturally said, “I’m alone.” The immense ocotillo before me is a thousand-foot-high rope to heaven but then you can’t climb its spiny branches. In Daniel’s Wash I heard and saw the great mother of crotalids, a rattler, and at a distance her rattles sounded exactly like Carmen Miranda’s castanets, but closer, a string of firecrackers. In 1957 in New York I was with Anne Frank who was trying to be a writer but they wouldn’t buy her dark stories. We lived on Macdougal south of Houston and I worked as a sandhog digging tunnels until I was crushed to death. She cooked fairly well (flanken, chicken livers, herring salad). Now Ed Abbey rides down from the Growler Mountains on a huge mountain ram, bareback and speechless. This place is a fearsome goddess I’ve met seven times in a decade. She deranges my mind with the strangest of beauties, her Venusian flora mad to puncture the skin. It’s ninety degrees and I wonder if I’m walking so far within her because I wish to die, so parched I blow dust from my throat. Finally I reach the hot water in my car and weep at the puny sight. Is this what I’ve offered this wild beauty? Literally a goddamned car, a glittering metallic tumor.
22
“Life’s too short to be a whore anymore,”
I sang
out to the Atlantic Ocean
from my seaside room in St. Malo,
the brain quite frugal until I took
a long walk seaward at low tide
and watched closely old French ladies
gathering crustaceans. When they left
they shook their fingers saying, “marée, marée,”
and I watched them walk away toward shore
where I had no desire to go. A few
stopped and waved their arms wildly.
The tide! The tide goes out, then comes in
in this place huge, twenty feet or so,
the tidal bore sweeping slowly in
but faster than me. I still didn’t want to leave
because I was feeling like a very old whore
who wanted to drown, but then this wispy
ego’s pulse drifted away with a shitting gull.
Before I died I must eat the three-leveled
“plateau” of these crustaceans with two bottles
of Sancerre. It’s dinner that drives the beaten
dog homeward, tail half-up, half-down,
no dog whore but trotting legs, an empty stomach.
23
My soul grew weak and polluted during captivity, a zoo creature, frantic but most often senescent. One day in the Upper Peninsula I bought a painting at a yard sale of the supposed interior of a clock. The tag said, “Real Oil Painting Nineteen Bucks.” People around me grinned, knowing I wasn’t a yard-sale pro. Never go to a supermarket when you’re hungry, my mother said, or a yard sale after a Côtes du Rhône. The painting was quite dark as there’s little sunlight within clocks but the owners had wiped it with oil and there was a burnished glow to its burnt sienna. I couldn’t see into the cavern in the center but I didn’t have my glasses with me. Back at the cabin I was lucky enough to have the magnifying glass that comes with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, the true source of agony. There were grinning mice sailing along on Eilshemius-type clouds in a corner of the clock’s metallic shell, and miniature assemblage print that said, “flyways, byways, highways” in a lighter cavern, also “Je souffre but so what,” also “I am a buggered cherubim,” an alarming statement. On the central cavern walls there were the usual cogs and wheels, straight-forward, not melting Dali-esques. In the lower left-hand corner it was signed “Felicia” with a feminine bottom from which emerged a candle, lighting the artist’s name. Here was a wedding present for a couple you didn’t really like. Children, even future artists, should never take the backs off of discarded Big Bens. They’ll never make sense of these glum, interior stars with their ceaseless ticking, saying that first you’re here and then you’re not.