Andrew

The German who killed my mother’s youngest brother,

probably never knew he did it.

It was cold that day in the Ardennes, snow everywhere,

the forest shrouded in fog that hid their Panzers

from our grounded aircraft.

My uncle had been in action forty-eight hours without

a break, his tank out of ammo, almost out of fuel,

no match for the heavier armored Tigers patrolling

the main roads that had outflanked retreating

remnants of the First Armored.

Behind the lines, my uncle may have removed his helmet,

believing himself safe for awhile. He was drinking coffee.

From old news photos I have to recreate him

as he must have looked that day, the boyish stubble

on his face, the heavy circles underneath his eyes,

lifting the canteen cup half full and steaming in the bitter air.

The German mortarman was probably tired as my uncle,

maybe as young, with a wife and child like my uncle’s

he would never return to. In that iron cold I have to

imagine him fumbling rounds into his weapon’s mouth,

trying to match the spotter’s coordinates

somewhere beyond an intervening hill, a fringe of trees,

hearing between reports the distant heavy thud,

half muffled by snow, of his fatal handiwork.

I have to see his mittened hand sweeping in one

quick arc, the way it was drilled into him,

dumping the round in tailfins first, and hear it slide

down the tube and fire, he ducking and covering

one ear closest to the muzzle blast.

I have to imagine the shape of the round at its apex,

turning over and starting its long demented plunge,

containing the fragment that would separate my uncle

from himself, the others already shouting and diving

for cover, and my uncle just standing there, lifting

the unholy aluminum grail of the canteen to his lips.

I remember Mother holding the telegram that morning

and crying my uncle’s name, her voice so choked it seemed

at first she was saying, And you! And you!

(First appeared in Willow Springs.)

Be Boppity Bop

Thelonious Monk, his tonsure his hat,

I love to hear him play, fingers strafing

the keys, whimsical, unpredictable.

Come back caught clef in the halo

of her hair, black sign lost in white space.

Give back the sounds we never imagined,

so we can never forget the way she looked

bent toward him that way, love in her eyes,

love in her eyes and the lights turned low.

The bass picks up where being begins

and strums the drums along. I haven’t felt

this way for a long, long while, she sings alone

in the shower, but here’s where the blues start

on a rainy autumn night, the oldest and saddest

song, lost innocence and a broken heart.

And Miles asks, Why clutter it up? A dot here,

a sudden dash there, some strange new code,

rice paper splashed with ink.

We ought to think with our bodies

and park our shoes on the doorstep.

We need to be barefoot to feel the blues.

It’s the phrasing again, the spaces

around notes, the sound

of one hand suspended over the keys.

I saw the wooden door shut twice

inside the wooden face before the eyes

lit up and gave the face away.

Lady Day, Lady Day, we miss you

sounding off for all you’re worth,

lamenting the lot of every woman.

What can we do, whatever do,

when the world goes wrong?

And when the music died.

I took the train down south

to practice other sounds:

the snap of tracers burning the air,

the same pollution everywhere,

falling in, falling out, endless shouting

yard to yard through the barracks

of human wrong.

What could I do but turn again to song?

We pound the tusks or pluck the gut

to tease the venom out,

because the tortured, beautiful notes

won’t leave us alone.

Whoever asks, say we couldn’t wait

but left these maps behind that they might,

tracing the paths we took, discover others--

imitation, then innovation, riffing,

leap-frogging in fours, kneading the notes

into new surprising forms, jamming

after hours for the pure joy of it

until uncool dawn horns in with

its tiresome, usual commerce.

Love itself is rare enough you have

to treasure it until it goes.

That’s when the blues begin.

You feel them like a woman

alone with midnight, smoking in

the shadows between two lights.

God bless my stubborn heart, I believe

I saw her in the epistrophal dawn

like a note hanging from a stave,

pure essence of love, pure essence

beyond my wordy reach,

though I have spent my life trying,

believing in love’s healing voice,

the glorious sounds from the garden

where the enraptured bird sings.

Burial at Sea

No word can name this thing

I feel brooding over the Pacific

and their scattered remains:

my poor, dead mother,

the pale film of her ashes cast

overboard and drifting astern.

My stepfather whose name

I carry like a cloud of my birth-

father’s unknowing, and last,

my uncle, feeble-minded and

adrift in Seattle streets before

they picked him up to lose him

again in some other home

for the homeless, then month’s

after my mother’s death, found

me, sole survivor, to sign away

his morgued and frozen remains.

When my time comes, and I am

urned in the arms of my wife,

should I be cast like them

to the sea, belled to the rips

they race through?

Beneath black polished granite,

my friend rests at the edge of a bluff

that will someday crumble

to the same Strait and salt rush

we fished together for salmon,

drawn by the moon’s and heart’s

gravities and stubborn pace.

I can’t make sense of it:

the lights of fishing boats like

a broken rosary or promise, those

fog-bound shouts against the cliffs

still signaling wrong, wrong.

Sometimes I crave a faith simple

as my dog’s who bides against

the gate until his supper comes,

body and blood and joy in which

a master’s absence is forgiven.

Beside these waters I am

learning signs to recite by heart,

what sea takes back cast up again:

shell, glass, stone, stick, worn

down to soft weed-wound

abstraction, the forms a human

soul might take through its

weddings and divorces of

energy and matter, waters

we come from and go back

to, that walk this earth awhile

in the temporal form of us.

Deschutes

Six deer file ahead of me

parting the sagebrush

as they pass, the youngest

barely free of its spots,

curious to understand

what possible danger I pose,

swiveling its ears to catch

the crunch of boots,

the slap of a fly line loosely

strung through guides,

the whisper of bird feathers

and, yes, deer hair in crude

approximation of a spent caddis.

Who knows what else they hear?

Now they turn and clatter

through shale, heading for

rimrock where a vulture

rides the updrafts.

So beautiful they are

I forget a moment

to watch my step.

The river’s note is wrong,

a soft whirring too close

to be water, too continuous

for one of those great gray

grasshoppers you always think

is what this is--a necklace of harm

sounding its dry, cautionary tail.

Around us, river, desert,

and the six deer seem to listen.

Where do you think you’re going?--

less question than complaint from

one accustomed to his own way,

a crossroads bully cocked, and ready.

I could bash its head in with a stone,

unholster a round to strike it blind.

Instead I wait, intent on fishing

the next riffle, if it will let me.

The trail is steep and narrow.

Gradually its sizzle subsides,

cooling in the desert pan,

its tongue’s Y probing the air

as if forgetful of what troubled it,

tension subsiding down its whole

length, its hammer head uncocked.

With a last zzzt, it gathers itself

into a ground squirrel’s burrow

and disappears, like the vulture

over the rimrock and the six deer,

leaving me to myself.

Downstream, the trout can wait.

(First appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal.)

Modern American Poetry

I loathe poetry, I hate the clotted,

dicty poems of the great modernists . . .

--William Matthews

In 1962, Roethke, smoking a cigar

as he read us Wallace Stevens,

leaned toward a sorority girl

who had wrinkled her nose

and asked her, “Does this

lay an egg for you, Honey?”

And when she answered, “It’s all

these cutesy little words he uses,”

Roethke tipped back in his chair

and said, “That’s it in a pig’s eye.”

And the perfect O of smoke he blew

hung like an indictment above us.

No one said anything, and one

or two nervously giggled, but

in the years since, I’ve sometimes

wondered if Roethke ever guessed

that the Stevens he loved

never liked his poetry that much.

In a National Book Award

committee meeting Stevens asked,

“Who’s the coon?” pointing at

a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.

And never mind the anti-Semitism

of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Or the fascism so fashionable among

the unacknowledged legislators of that

time, who should have known better.

I know, I know, the times were different.

William Stafford said you must change

your life, a line that also appears

in a sonnet of Rilke’s. But it’s clear

now, the road to hell being paved

with good intentions, etc., that

some write well despite themselves,

and the less deserving, o Salieri!

might wink like stars above us.

Art saves lives, a bumper sticker claims.

I’d like to believe it, but the devil in

me offers up another point of view:

I think of Hemingway and Berryman,

Plath and Sexton, Kees and Crane,

and a few others I needn’t mention.

Auden, what poetry makes happen

is sometimes catastrophic: the man

who imported starlings because they

appeared in Shakespeare’s plays

couldn’t have imagined starlings

and a Lockheed Electra colliding.

When Williams said, “Erase while

you have the chance,” he wasn’t

kidding. A stray word, like launch

for lunch, could destroy the world.

Plato also had his reasons—not all

of them bad—for banning poets.

And what about Marianne Moore’s

“I, too, dislike it”? She, too, had her

doubts. Still, given the alternatives,

and able to find a name for anything

but a failed Ford venture in tasteless

design, she gave herself to poetry.

When one of my freshmen asked

why poets write so much about death

I tried to answer her without sarcasm:

“Maybe because we can’t imagine it,

only experience it,” and was instantly

ashamed of sounding so pompous.

And a few weeks ago, when my doctor

gave me the news, I knew that poetry

couldn’t save me. “Cancer is strange,”

he said. “Normal cells die and are

replaced (they call it apoptosis)

but cancer cells don’t.”

How could I make sense of this?

Or stop brooding about it? As memory

disturbs the current that erodes it,

wise men practice their non-attachment

and the difficult discipline of letting go.

But I am not wise, and I won’t let go.

What refuses to die kills us--

old ideas, beliefs we cling to despite

good evidence to the contrary, beliefs

some of us would gladly die for.

And that most stubborn belief of all:

that words might make a difference.

A short while before he died, Roethke

stopped me and said, “My doc says

if I don’t lay off the booze I’ve only got

six months,” and a few beats later,

“Let’s grab a beer at the Blue Moon.”

What could I do then but follow?

________________________________________________________________

Nature

My wife can’t stand those programs where something

is killing something else. And who can blame her?

It’s nature, I tell her, as if that made a difference.

The death of the least furred thing brings her to tears,

as if she were responsible and might prevent it.

The cheetah streaks after a Thompson’s gazelle,

trips it and seizes it by the throat. A mother wildebeest

tries in vain to save its calf from a pack of hyenas.

And Genevieve turns her head from this carnage,

angry because I go on watching night after night,

the Serengeti, Sarajevo, trying to sort out the difference

between the lion that kills a cheetah’s cubs and leaves

them to rot, and a sniper’s estimate of the distance

between himself and a mother out gathering wood.

I know I should try harder to shield my wife from what

she cannot bear, and yet some streak of yellow-eyed

watchfulness instructs me to wait and do nothing,

like the scientist who will not interfere because nature,

as he perceives it, condemns the weak to inherit nothing.

Once, a harder-minded woman scoffed when

I broke up a fight between two stupid mallards bent

on murder, or so it seemed to me, the air full of down.

It must have looked silly, a man in up to his knees,

shouting at ducks, so I didn’t blame her for laughing.

But let me always right the beetle struggling on its back,

stand between the dog and cat and the cat and sparrow,

foolish and impractical as she accused me of being.

And let me remember also why I married Genevieve.

Because she is kind and will not accept what others take

for granted: that nature is otherwise and man no better.

(First appeared in Poetry.)

Oregon

Weeks pass this time of year without a glimpse

of sunlight, and a clammy, chilly dampness clings

to everything, wet rotting leaves, fog in the trees

through a dripping web of trunks and gray branches.

On the riverbanks the bleached, decaying carcasses

of the last spawned-out salmon, jaws sprung like

broken traps, and everything colorless, featureless

in the falling rain but the moss in visionary

shades of green, and the jade-gray papery lichen.

And on the topmost bare limb of the maple tree,

my black, iridescent friend, the crow, laughing.

Sometimes I long for a different landscape.

Not the dry desert of the Southwest, or the tropics--

those blonde beaches rife with escaping flesh--

but something plainer, flatter, clarified by

the chill of midwinter, smoke from chimneys

rising straight up into a blue sky,

remote farms scattered among fallow fields,

wind through wires, ice ticking against glass,

and everything sharpened to a promise

flamboyant as a cock pheasant in snow.

I know these are the tricks of elsewhere.

Once there, I would dream of bare wet branches,

plain dark bodies that one by one take the leaves'

places before they flutter off like leaves.

Each place has its beauty, unappreciated

until we lose it. Each person the same. We have

to dig to remember the unrest that brought us

to this state, for something resists

the emptiness we felt standing before a window,

looking out, or plodding head down through

rain puddles, through snow, recalling

conversations that never quite connected, alien

faces of the too familiar. Yet it all seemed

wonderful at first, the new life just beginning,

or else ending like a novel: And so we think

he drove off that morning knowing he was never

coming back. The sun was just topping the hill

as his truck cleared the front gate.

Simply clear out and never come back--that

is the hope, and yet we always do come back,

if not in flesh, in thought, and everything

is fixed forever as it was, though edited

by memory, that revisionist, that liar.

The empty spaces with their scatterings

of quaint houses, a church and small shops,

will never yield to shopping centers and avenues

of trash. And the inhabitants, sanctified by nostalgia,

will stay as we want them to, their petty slights

forgotten, for what is memory without amnesia,

that country of fog rising to meet the rain?

Sometimes I dread the thought of dying here,

in this place I have always dreamed of leaving,

until I realize that the place we dream of

will always be another we carry with us, not

the one we finally find ourselves in.

Old age, as Larkin said, is having lighted rooms

inside your head with people moving

and conversing, ghosts, the friends who died

or moved away, their letters fading,

their faces forgotten, nothing left but words,

my stepfather's still strong as iron as he

shook my hand two days before he died, words--

So long, Good-bye, Take care--down corridors,

in airports, depots, before the last door closes.

I've always loved that rush down the runway

and the weightlessness as the wheels lift free,

the past falling behind, rain scribbled

by acceleration before the blank whiteness

that seems endless until it thins to blue,

the world's curvature carved by a silver wing,

time itself suspended as altitude slows us

to a crawl.

Then it was only the new world

we were leaving that seemed old,

only future time we were flying toward, the sun

at our tail we hurried to meet in a new place,

a novel adventure we might never return from.

But home, like ocean, has its undertow.

When I was Catholic I wanted to sing in the choir

but had no voice; I wanted to be an angel, dreamed

of flying with arms that worked like wings; I emptied

a holy water fount and soused myself like a Baptist,

thinking to become a saint. The priest who caught me

must have thought me crazy. I never

waited to find out, but shot through the cathedral door

like a wet dog through a nimbus of waterdrops, the sin

of excess on me as I flew from the priest's laughter.

I would dream of the holy virgin opening her robes,

gathering me in, canonized, and wake to find myself

erect. Bernini understood the erotic in that mystery,

and St. John, with Christ's tongue stuck in his heart.

From treble to bass the choiring voices fell.

The morning my wife left I sat on the stairs and wept,

scared by the hurt animal sound of it. I wanted to stop.

There were shadows on the walls where paintings had hung,

blank spaces on the shelves her books had stood on,

no couch, no chairs, no table, no linen or bed.

When Ray came he said through a cloud of cigarette smoke,

This place looks like a house in one of my stories.

It feels like death. You've got to sell it.

He knew, he'd been there once.

Three years later he was dead and I'm still here,

my boat docked on its trailer, my rods racked and still

rigged with the last lures we used to fish the Strait.

Ray, this entire country begins to look like

a house in one of your stories.

In some trailerhouse of the spirit, at the dead end of

hope, a cigarette burns down in an ashtray

beside a half empty glass of whiskey,

as the TV with its twisted, foil-wrapped rabbit-

ear antenna shrieks--monster trucks leaping

the crushed chaos of Camaros and Impalas.

I haven’t the saint’s generosity, or Whitman’s,

to call it beautiful, only the pure fear of death

instructs me to call it better than nothing,

to grind this butt in the ashes of grace.

You’re gone, and so is Stafford, who loved this place,

a saintlier man than either of us, and Oregon persists

in being Oregon, God’s country to those

who have never lived here or any place but here.

I haven’t the arrogance to call this

God’s country, it seems so equally the Devil’s.

Last night an earthquake rattled the windows,

the second this year, and the year barely begun.

Maybe it will shake some sense into us.

Maybe it will scare me into loving

what I’ve taken for granted.

Last fall I watched a single pair of salmon hovering

over a redd on a tailout that once held hundreds.

The male was hook-nosed and battered, charging

an enterprising trout on the prowl for eggs.

The female turned on her side, fanning away the silt

from the streambed with her frayed tail. All afternoon

I watched until their spawning began--

the female thrashing as she cast her burden

to the stream, the clean declivity where her eggs

could swirl and rest, and the male’s great

shuddering spasm as he loosed his sperm and

the white flood swirled over the redd and clouded

the current downstream. They would spend

the short remainder of their lives guarding that spot.

I felt the terrible privilege of my place at the

river’s edge, called to witness the end of something.

I wanted to put back every fish I had ever caught,

I wanted to beg forgiveness of everyone I’d hurt,

but the feeling passed. We learn remorse

by the feeblest fits and starts, we learn to love

when what we should have loved is lost.

(First appeared in Crazyhorse.)