15 poems, copied out of the yellow legal pads he left behind.
The mountains are black bearssleeping on their sides, snow dusting their fur.In the summer as children we sat in the front yardlong past dark and watched Brush Mountain crackleorange with fire. No sounds but the crickets.Gleefully we pointed out airplanes flashingthrough the stars. One night we stayed out lateto wait for Telestar, the only white spotmoving in the sea of stars. The grass was cool.We lay on our backs looking up like the ancients.
She wanted meto keep herSusan B. Anthony dollar.As if it was safewith me. As if everythingis safe with Daddyand couldn't disappear.As near as i can tellshe thinks I'm a small god.Awful! She'll soon learnthe truth. I'll spend it.Purely by accident.
All of us,the boys,we didn't know anythingabout men. So, we hookedourselves to our sisteras she went shooting throughher twenties, and a little intoher thirties.
None of us believedit would end. And whenit did, we went crazy, runningaround, bumping into each other,making startling accusationsabout love. A whole family dyingfrom the inside out.
When her life stopped, all the lineswent slack, and we fought ourselvesfor the best places in the mourning line.We pounded everything.I bruised. And whenwe came to the edge whereyou're finally free enough to believeyourself, we shuddered and went inside.
He was waiting.He took us in, and webecame sons again.We hooked our lines and starteddown.
nudges my pen hand as if saying, 'begin,'sniffing the empty page, gives me hintswhere to start. The head of the riverwhere it trickles from the rocksisn't necessary. 'Go downstream,' she nudges againaround the bend where the water has forgottenabout flowing slowly, and beats itself whiteAgainst the boulders. You can stayall day on shore, hesitant, resistingthat first chill, and go home disappointedyou didn't try. Or you can step in onany phrase that passes, and then move onto the next, not knowing if there's sensein any of it. Eddies are just that.The river is more than cold water over stone.When the rush of the water is deafening,and you forget the river you are in.
when I read James Wright, I write like him. an editor toldme once that two poems I had submitted to his magazinewas the best Wright poems he'd seen since Jim died in 1980.
if I read Dick Hugo, I write like Dick Hugo. hisimagination and rhythm are so enthrallingthat I swoon.
here I am nearly 40, and I love my children, my wife, certain others,and two poets who have died.
i don't know if it makes any difference.now I believe in godwho is in every living thing, or dead one.
Laden with sacks of pollen, he dropssuddenly from the sunlight into the sawgrass.He shinnies over two long blades and falls againweary in his tangle. His body glistens with ancient wisdom,and the yellow worries of the early nasturtiums.
When he reappears staggering around the bendof a white juney root, he is the young Miwok brave,Michael, heavy with old histories, Harbor Square, Seattle,1983. Drunk and forlorn, he is lost in the sacred air of his fathers.
I take him into the curve of my palm, and he is Leland,my grandfather, with the one good lungthe Pennsylvania Railroad left him, exhaustedand thinning on the couch in the weeks of his dying.
He wobbles up my finger, pauses at the tipto read the current winds, then leaps offacross a sea of small scallions into the arms of an ochra fern.
Don't ask me where he was going.I have had my own burdens and gone nowheremany times. He was a honeybee. He was beautiful.He knew the journey of burdens and was not lost.He was just trying to get up.And an ochra fern is a kindly body from whicha bearer of honey can be raised.
What about us? What about Michael?How come our blood teaches nothingwe understand? It does nothing to blame anyonethere is no balm for us in the high grass.
Christ, I am moaning again.Excuse me, anyone listening.I know the journey.I suppose I am just lazy, not lost.I will mumble a little more and then get upsooner or later and go toward my own light.
I lie in a bed of elbows and open mouths,a spoon tossed in with forks.These bones take things personally.I need pajamas with feet.This rain keeps me cold.The lake is a gray scar.I startle like a fox that suddenly stopsstalking. Who bangs this carillon by water?That boy on his skateboard last nightafter dark was a tank on a street in Belgrade.By the bridge, a catfish holds the current.Above, a mouthful of stars keeps breathing.
They fish us from the Potomac in the early morning.Depending on our dress and clean-shaveness,they either scatter our i.d. back into the current we came from,or stuff it into our pockets in no manner we would carry itand pack us off to the city morgue for reporting.If they send our papers floating lonely out into the dark channel,they whisk us away in the early morning darknessin the back of a pickup to the University Medical School.We arrive, still in darkness.What will these future fathers of medical specialities discoverabout our bodies we could not have told someonehad they only asked a little?
when the student in Gross Anatomy finds the corner of oneof my special organ severely bruised or slightly turned upand away from him, will he identify the problem?will the instructor in charge suddenly know me and my disease of lonelinessand flip the sheet back over my face?Recovering quickly, will he say, "Disregard that. It's nothing. A silly mistake God made while he was making us."And am I wrong to guess the student will like his teacher all the more because,though amusingly, he has once again connected all of the dotsbetween science on this planet, and God?
I remember the sodden shore I waded from.Just North of the 14th Street Bridge I walked in and finishedhow hard this life was.
Go on?I went onmany years.By the time I found the calling riverI had been to several other planets in the systemand found nothing.Maybe I could not reach for their hands.maybe no hands reached down for me.Anyway, I was exhausted, satisfied my journeywould never find the splendor my body longed for.
I didn't give up.Not once.I just decided to wade into the shallows and findif this river, this small arm of sea,would have me there better.
Sometimes I carry his paperbacks in my coat pocketand use his poems as guides.In the wind this morning over the apple orchard a hawkhung like a kite.I stared hard, trying to burn the scene into my memorylike a line from one of Stafford's poems, feeling something more importantwas happening than a hawk circling over apples, but I couldn't say.
I think of you sitting in a kitchen chair,The only customer of your granddaughters' salon.You lean over For Ellie to curl your hair,Extend hand for Grace to paint your nails,You chat with talkative Jane, of whom you marvel because she is"Actually Happy to sweep the floor and do it well,""You should meet my three precious granddaughters", you say,and "oh, it would be splendid if you could meet them. And they giggle at that because they are the splendid ones."Recently Ellie hung a sequined-filled watercolor in the hallway galleryJust over there.Grace had the big double in last weeks championship game ("It wasn't the championship, Nanny",Grace corrected). And,"Just yesterday, Jane cart-wheeled across the entire backyard,Like a pinwheel. So surely next year she will star in gymnastics".
This first spring they have embroidered your gravestoneWith painted pebbles. They worry about how to keep the crab grass from overgrowing your stone.Grace is ten and says she wishes she could drive so that she could tend to it more often.
All day snow fell upon snow.Darkness closing in.I pulled my sled up third streetFollowing my mother's call.Passing through the dark between the streetlights,My snow pants swishing, I chewed the iceCaked around my wrists.Falling flakes melted on my wool mittens.On up the hill, up across the yardSnow to my knees, I saw my fatherSitting at the kitchen tableReading the paper, my sister and brotherTeasing one another across the brisket.The yellow light from the windowShining on the snow waiting for me.Hallelujah.
When I put in his dentures, his facecomes awake. he motions me closer."I can't walk", he whispers.My father is 93.I whisper back, I still take xanax.Later, I said to myself, I feel weak,Like a coward on his kneesBegging life not to hurt him.I forget the simplest lessons.I forget paying attention.We're both old enough for death and have it not be a surprisebut what do we know?
I propped myself up on my elbows to show them I wasn't deadbut they kept arguing.some were angry that they hadn't been told.others said they didn't know it was that serious.The young funeral director was out of sorts.People wouldn't form a decent viewing line.
In my pre-funeral directiveI had requested that people bring wine,and toys for their children to play with,trucks and blocks.But nobody did.
Read a poem,don't lose your way,don't wander or hurry,the poem is saying something,and if you are not paying attentionyou'll miss it, all that work the writer put in,there is a consequence to notunderstanding what you're reading.maybe the writing isn't any goodand it's not your fault, but still, someone triedpiecing together a poem and it should be read with care.they may have written down a true piece of their lifeand you can read it, can know it. Imagine the rarity.
At birth your whole body suddenly gave a damnand quaked at the cold air and light,at the quiet twister the night nurse let inwhen she pushed the swinging doors and left.That urgent evening was a mean intrusion.A red beginning. Air,a sudden burgeoning your lungs keened for,I whispered to your mother's breastyour scream meant nothing but good.I saw your blotchy skin. You, just fishedfrom that true sea, scaled in mucus.I watched the tender black handsof the nurse. How they spoke to your bodylike the son of her only daughter.
She liked your red wrinkled handscoming out as if they'd stayed too longin a bath; how they attacked the ceiling lightwith mad jabbing fists, convincedthat steel shrouded sunwasn't the sun, and didn't belong.I saw her last at the bus stopnear the hospital. She tugged a bagof groceries up three steel steps.Something in her saidshe had tugged forever. I didn't stop.I didn't take her hand and tell herhow your five fingers took my oneand made it yours, when you walkedthe top of your first stone wall. Orhow each of your steps balanced me moreas you brutally pretended to flattenthat rocky world with your small feet.