All of Us (7 page)

The mind can’t sleep, can only lie awake and

gorge, listening to the snow gather as

for some final assault.

It wishes Chekhov were here to minister

something—three drops of valerian, a glass

of rose water—anything, it wouldn’t matter.

The mind would like to get out of here

onto the snow. It would like to run

with a pack of shaggy animals, all teeth,

under the moon, across the snow, leaving

no prints or spoor, nothing behind.

The mind is sick tonight.

In winter two kinds of fields on the hills

outside Prosser: fields of new green wheat, the slips

rising overnight out of the plowed ground,

and waiting,

and then rising again, and budding.

Geese love this green wheat.

I ate some of it once too, to see.

And wheat stubble-fields that reach to the river.

These are the fields that have lost everything.

At night they try to recall their youth,

but their breathing is slow and irregular as

their life sinks into dark furrows.

Geese love this shattered wheat also.

They will die for it.

But everything is forgotten, nearly everything,

and sooner rather than later, please God —

fathers, friends, they pass

into your life and out again, a few women stay

a while, then go, and the fields

turn their backs, disappear in rain.

Everything goes, but Prosser.

Those nights driving back through miles of wheat fields —

headlamps raking the fields on the curves —

Prosser, that town, shining as we break over hills,

heater rattling, tired through to bone,

the smell of gunpowder on our fingers still:

I can barely see him, my father, squinting

through the windshield of that cab, saying, Prosser.

At night the salmon move

out from the river and into town.

They avoid places with names

like Foster’s Freeze, A & W, Smiley’s,

but swim close to the tract

homes on Wright Avenue where sometimes

in the early morning hours

you can hear them trying doorknobs

or bumping against Cable TV lines.

We wait up for them.

We leave our back windows open

and call out when we hear a splash.

Mornings are a disappointment.

Here my assurance drops away. I lose

all direction. Gray Lady

onto moving waters. My thoughts

stir like ruffed grouse

in the clearing across the creek.

Suddenly, as at a signal, the birds

pass silently back into pine trees.

Last night I dreamt a priest came to me

holding in his hands white bones,

white bones in his white hands.

He was gentle,

not like Father McCormick with his webbed fingers.

I was not frightened.

This afternoon the maids come with their mops

and disinfectant. They pretend I’m not

there, talk of menstrual cycles as they

push my bed this way and that. Before leaving,

they embrace. Gradually, the room

fills with leaves. I am afraid.

The window is open. Sunlight.

Across the room a bed creaks, creaks

under the weight of lovemaking.

The man clears his throat. Outside,

I hear sprinklers. I begin to void.

A green desk floats by the window.

My heart lies on the table, a parody

of affection, while her fingers rummage

the endless string of entrails.

These considerations aside,

after all those years of adventure in the Far East,

I am in love with these hands, but

I’m cold beyond imagining.

Turning through a collection

    of old photographs

I come to a picture of the outlaw,

    Wes Hardin, dead.

He is a big, moustached man

    in a black suitcoat

on his back over a boardfloor

    in Amarillo, Texas.

His head is turned at the camera

    and his face

seems bruised, the hair

    jarred loose.

A bullet has entered his skull

    from behind

coming out a little hole

    over his right eye.

Nothing so funny about that

    but three shabby men

in overalls stand grinning

    a few feet away.

They are all holding rifles

    and that one

at the end has on what must be

    the outlaw’s hat.

Several other bullets are dotted

    here and there

under the fancy white shirt

    the deceased is wearing

— in a manner of speaking —

    but what makes me stare

is this large dark bullethole

    through the slender, delicate-looking

                                                right hand.

In our cabin we eat breaded oysters and fries

with lemon cookies for dessert, as the marriage

of Kitty and Levin unfolds on Public TV.

The man in the trailer up the hill, our neighbor,

has just gotten out of jail again.

This morning he drove into the yard with his wife

in a big yellow car, radio blaring.

His wife turned off the radio while he parked,

and together they walked slowly

to their trailer without saying anything.

It was early morning, birds were out.

Later, he propped open the door

with a chair to let in spring air and light.

It’s Easter Sunday night,

and Kitty and Levin are married at last.

It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes, that marriage

and all the lives it touched. We go on

eating oysters, watching television,

remarking on the fine clothes and amazing grace

of the people caught up in this story, some of them

straining under the pressures of adultery,

separation from loved ones, and the destruction

they must know lies in store just after

the next cruel turn of circumstance, and then the next.

A dog barks. I get up to check the door.

Behind the curtains are trailers and a muddy

parking area with cars. The moon sails west

as I watch, armed to the teeth, hunting

for my children. My neighbor,

liquored up now, starts his big car, races

the engine, and heads out again, filled

with confidence. The radio wails,

beats something out. When he has gone

there are only the little ponds of silver water

that shiver and can’t understand their being here.

Now for the other life. The one

without mistakes.

—
LOU LIPSITZ

My wife is in the other half of this mobile home

making a case against me.

I can hear her pen
scratch, scratch.

Now and then she stops to weep,

then—
scratch, scratch.

The frost is going out of the ground.

The man who owns this unit tells me,

Don’t leave your car here.

My wife goes on writing and weeping,

weeping and writing in our new kitchen.

Hanging around the house each day

the mailman never smiles; he tires

easily, is losing weight,

that’s all; they’ll hold the job —

besides, he needed a rest.

He will not hear it discussed.

As he walks the empty rooms, he

thinks of crazy things

like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey,

shaking hands with Franklin D. Roosevelt

at Grand Coulee Dam,

New Year’s Eve parties he liked best;

enough things to fill a book

he tells his wife, who

also thinks crazy things

yet keeps on working.

But sometimes at night

the mailman dreams he rises from his bed

puts on his clothes and goes

out, trembling with
joy…

He hates those dreams

for when he wakes

there’s nothing left; it is

as if he’d never been

anywhere, never done anything;

there is just the room,

the early morning without sun,

the sound of a doorknob

turning slowly.

3 fat trout hang

    in the still pool

below the new

    steel bridge.

two friends

    come slowly up

the track.

    one of them,

ex-heavyweight,

    wears an old

hunting cap.

    he wants to kill,

that is catch & eat,

    the fish.

the other,

    medical man,

he knows the chances

    of that.

he thinks it fine

    that they should

simply hang there

    always

in the clear water.

    the two keep going

but they

    discuss it as

they disappear

    into the fading trees

& fields & light,

    upstream.

You are falling in love again. This time

it is a South American general’s daughter.

You want to be stretched on the rack again.

You want to hear awful things said to you

and to admit these things are true.

You want to have unspeakable acts

committed against your person, things

nice people don’t talk about in classrooms.

You want to tell everything you know

on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges,

on yourself most of all.

You want to implicate everyone in this!

Even when it’s four o’clock in the morning

and the lights are burning still —

those lights that have been burning night and day

in your eyes and brain for two weeks —

and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade,

but she won’t turn off the lights that woman

with the green eyes and little ways about her,

even then you want to be her gaucho.

Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say

as you reach for the empty beaker of water.

Dance with me, she says again and no mistake.

She picks this minute to ask you, hombre,

to get up and dance with her in the nude.

No, you don’t have the strength of a fallen leaf,

not the strength of a little reed basket

battered by waves on Lake Titicaca.

But you bound out of bed

just the same, amigo, you dance

across wide open spaces.

On the Columbia River near Vantage,

Washington, we fished for whitefish

in the winter months; my dad, Swede —

Mr Lindgren—and me. They used belly-reels,

pencil-length sinkers, red, yellow, or brown

flies baited with maggots.

They wanted distance and went clear out there

to the edge of the riffle.

I fished near shore with a quill bobber and a cane pole.

My dad kept his maggots alive and warm

under his lower lip. Mr Lindgren didn’t drink.

I liked him better than my dad for a time.

He let me steer his car, teased me

about my name “Junior,” and said

one day I’d grow into a fine man, remember

all this, and fish with my own son.

But my dad was right. I mean

he kept silent and looked into the river,

worked his tongue, like a thought, behind the bait.

The mallard ducks are down

for the night. They chuckle

in their sleep and dream of Mexico

and Honduras. Watercress

nods in the irrigation ditch

and the tules slump forward, heavy

with blackbirds.

Rice fields float under the moon.

Even the wet maple leaves cling

to my windshield. I tell you Maryann,

I am happy.

I stalked a cougar once in a lost box-canyon

off the Columbia River gorge near the town and river

of Klickitat. We were loaded for grouse. October,

gray sky reaching over into Oregon, and beyond,

all the way to California. None of us had been there,

to California, but we knew about that place—they had

restaurants

that let you fill your plate as many times as you wanted.

I stalked a cougar that day,

if stalk is the right word, clumping and scraping along

upwind of the cougar, smoking cigarettes too,

one after the other, a nervous, fat, sweating kid

under the best of circumstances, but that day

I stalked a
cougar…

And then I was weaving drunk there in the living room,

fumbling to put it into words, smacked and scattered

with the memory of it after you two had put
your
stories,

black bear stories, out on the table.

Suddenly I was back in that canyon, in that gone state.

Something I hadn’t thought about for years:

how I stalked a cougar that day.