Washita (2 page)

DRINKING STONE

The wooden ladle is thin, worn away by stone.

I cup my hands in the basin, lift water to my mouth.

The high creeks find their way to quiet waters.

I was at home on the gravel bars until poetry drew me away to the city.

I fished the high lakes with my brother, dead now these many years.

An old man found the ladle in the back of his shop in Fan Tan Alley.

A wooden spoon carved in a village northwest of far Xian.

Strange, the sudden memory of a spoon I carved as a boy.

A child of the bush, I wanted to be alive in a simpler time.

It is foolish of me now to look at my hands and remember

how difficult it was to carve the ladle's bowl with a knife blade.

I think of that spoon now, the wind drying my hands.

How far away a poem can take you from the world.

The quail bring their young to the stone basin at dawn.

One and by one they lift their heads, cool water running down their throats.

EARLY PROMISES

The blue just before blue, dawn, the hard shade that promises

nothing, an old knife tempered wrong in tired coals,

the blacksmith drunk and weeping in the bar, the horses gone.

You watch the woman with the canvas coat,

the one who gathers bottles from the blue boxes tilted on the curb.

She knows the answers, but she's not telling anyone.

It's a wrong time to be awake and you don't yearn for the bed

you didn't have in the night, the girl who left you in that bar years ago.

The pool table lights turned her blonde hair blue, shadows

that lived no longer than the moment you touched them.

You wonder sometimes about the girl but she's gone into the bruised lands.

Coming out of the night is harder than you think.

You walk blind into morning thinking of a tongue on glass, the moon.

ELI, ELI

The quail in the garden eat the fallen sunflower seeds.

Terrible and sweet, the beauty in this world,

as the prayer I made in childhood:
Eli, Eli
,

save my father in the war.

My greed for simple things is endless.

The dry hills above Naples have little to do with me,

and the shallow streams running blue above Rouen

where the children play among the apple trees, screaming.

The elusive voices of the last century sing to me of who I was.

The old man carved a quail from ivory to hang from his obi.

Netsuke
.

The living birds bathe in the dust by the dying asters.

I am almost afraid to put them in this poem.

FOR THE WOMAN WHO DANCED WITH THE ASHES OF HER SON

Strange how beautiful when we are diaphanous,

a bit of ripped muslin set against the sun, the wind

soft as a child's skin. Tragedy does that to us

and we are made the greater for our smallness.

A bright pebble among the discarded shells.

There are times I am a questing mole, fierce

in my love, lost as anything alive.

HARD-ROCK

My father's chest hid his songs in the crannies.

His lungs created elaborate cathedrals from quartz dust,

a crystal symphony playing Mahler under water.

Scar tissue, the kind without nerves, which he was without,

walking always into the far reaches of the mine.

My mother told me he was silent in those days.

On a slant shadow at the mine mouth, a lynx spider rests;

difficult air, old bones, and dust under the skree.

The creature rests on nervous grass, hinged on crushed rock,

wandering cat, wilder of gullies and ravines.

My father sat much alone by the falls below the cabin.

He told me once he lived inside the crash of water on stones.

I lie beside the spider, wrists crossed, my many eyes closed.

A cellist told me once such presence is where the god waits to eat us.

HIRAGANA

In the slanted light from the window, the moon tonight cut in half.

Tonight I am a cursive fragment, a poor master.

My dead mother sent me from her knees.

She listened to the radio for word of the invasion.

Left alone, there was no place safe from my pillaging.

I address her here, humbly, with too many words, say:

the stumps from the old time are nurseries now.

They are all that is left of the great slaughter.

Swordferns and cedars shade them to their rest.

On the beach pebbles shine in the rain.

This world is best seen from the knees.

Everything is narrow now, a secular path.

I wish I could bring home the deities, but

there are only a white stone and a red stone to worship today.

I bow down in the rain, modest, a brush stroke only.

HUNGER

The doe, her fawn torn apart by dogs,

mews as a kitten does. Bewildered, she turns

her one brown eye toward the hills, and slow,

hoof by small hoof, moves tentative away.

The sounds behind her are the dogs' wet cries.

A thinness among the yelps, and her then stopping

to smell the new grass by a stone. Head down,

a single shiver across her lean rump, a fly

at rest there riding her quiet from the meadow.

IKI

And maybe it isn't beauty he wants. Maybe he wants

the feral dog draped in the ditch below Hartland dump

to be a fur stole fallen from a bare shoulder and forgotten,

a slim woman moving from the piano, every eye upon her

in the Empress Theatre of sixty years ago. It's a long way

from Bette Davis to the vultures folding their wings

in the oldest geier the world knows, their hunger spiral.

Tearer, purifier.
Or is affliction nearer to the truth of things?

Are the birds that lumber awkwardly a pantomime

as they lean to the flesh? Is
All About Eve
all about Eve?

Bette Davis lived in my father's eyes. My mother in the early photos

wore the face and shoulders of a concubine, hard and cold and without pity.

IMAGO

We come from the sea of our mother's salt blood,

hang upside down from our father's hands and weep.

And what of the birds singing in the laurel,

the brittle leaves enough to keep the cat at bay?

Where does the butterfly sleep whose wings are glory?

What wish has the fox who grins among the tall grasses,

the bear dancing in the stream?

Something tries to go dead in us all the time

even as deep in the earth the cicada dreams its imago.

INFORMIS

In the gully an Indian boy plunged his hand into an ant mound for a dollar.

I stood aside as the men from the highway crew watched his flesh

become another thing, a red swarm screaming.

Some days our bones shine through our skin,

but such times are bitter music, their history best lost.

We take away everything we can to keep the mystery intact.

It is why in the morning I turn the porridge down to seethe.

The woman who moved with me from motel to motel worked hard at her unhappiness.

She told me it was all she could do not to place her face in the steam.

There is a flawed beauty in that other world.

You could spend a whole life trying to find the portal close at hand.

The boy, the ants, and little shade on that stretch of highway north of Cache Creek.

If you want a metaphor I could say she was a pine tree without a shadow.

She was the quiet of the ewe in the paddock

dying of the dead lambs inside her,

grazing anyway at the scant desert grass after a night's rare rain,

the cactus gone mad in sudden glory blooming.

IN SNOW WHEN CREATURES AWAKEN TO SUCH BEAUTY

In the night tunnels, in the fallen grass laid waste by winter,

a creature small and questing finds its way

in the dark woven galleries of the dead.

Kneeling in the drifts I see it pass below me

in the labyrinthine galleries of snow.

Once in ice I saw a fly dance as if in amber,

a dark flaw caught by the moon, an infracted blaze,

a wound made in some alien Baltic age, a violation

beautiful as a shadow moving in the underworld,

this winter, impossible and amazed.

INCOHERENCE

He squats in the sun, the koi breaching in the pond.

Their golden backs break the waters. If he reaches out

he can touch them a moment before they flee, a moment to return,

mouths gaping as he thinks men drowning under ice must gape,

their hunger for a sky gone cold.

He knows the way out, but persists as Persephone did,

promising the dead they will have the chance to die again.

Far from the north the snowy owl waits on the fence by the airport.

She starves perfectly.

Inside her feathers there is nothing left but bones.

INNOCENCE

Delivered a baby girl one time in the North, a little one

wet with her mother's blood, the caul a veil.

The baby wept when first she breathed the world.

Secrets then were kept in silence, the young ones hidden away.

The mother signed to me, mute girl, as her father raged.

I tried to understand her hands, not knowing the sign for love.

Three days later their battered trailer swung wide

over the brown waters below Mad River bridge.

Salmon red as tears swarmed among the dead in the shallows.

A woman I know spoke to me once of the violence in my life.

Your poems are the disfigurement of innocence,
she said.

I told her the mist above the river hid the mountains,

that I tried not to think

when I washed her blood away in the creek without a name.

LICHEN WHITE

Lichen white, she lies in a narrow bed,

light among the icons and the glyphs.

The coffin is small that homes a child to rest.

Who placed her there bears her without weight.

Still, he staggers as he weaves among the stones,

his shoulders pale as a gossamer web at dawn.

A chill surrounds him, down from the Monashee,

the lines of the hills a wrong blue, the dry leaves breaking.

A hard earth waits for a poor man's shovel.

Who buries his child walks now without bones,

his flesh white as bled snow.

LIMBO

The red truck by the barn, rust on its fenders.

Ice crystals grew there like forgotten cities,

the windshield a broken star where a face found itself shining.

Close your eyes. There are only the old answers.

The antelope calf lay curled in snow, her black hooves crossed,

her head blunt as the axe my father used to break dry willow.

There are hearts that give off heat days after they stop beating.

A scuff of snow where she stumbled in the cold.

The North held me long before it let me go.

There are these fragments: the little graves outside the cemetery fence past Rosetown.

They buried the babies beyond the wire in limbo.

Plastic flowers in the snow.

There is a great fear in the world.

Jesus, sweet Jesus, I know you're not coming back.

My mother told me there are children so fragile they exist only as angels.

I swear it upon her eyes, those dark knots of blue.

LISTEN

A cougar drank at my creek, the two of us one thought.

And the chocolate lily on the talus slope on the mountain.

A frail beauty in the wind come off the snow.

My hands pick cottonwood leaves from where the birds come to bathe.

I try to remember:

my brother's last words, my father falling, a bullet in his heart.

Listen. I am a cup dropped on stone.

I lean forward because I almost have it and don't.

Do you know the wild horse poem?

The sound of unshod hooves on desert grass, running?

LITTLE HELL'S GATE

Tonight I will dream the old darkness, content.

I say
blue
and my teenage wife weeps over the kitten my father killed.

I remember the petals of her blue dress around her thin legs, kneeling.

The ice gives way at Little Hell's Gate.

Thunder on the river.

How the world dies and dies when we are torn.

There is nothing sweeter than loss.

Such blessed imperfections.

A girl on her knees holds a dead kitten.

What break in us are rivers, the ice going out.

MEDITATION IN THE BAY OF OTTERS

The singing at night among the cedars after the drums,

in the dark as all such voices are and so of loneliness and not

the scream of the heron at dusk: not that misery.

A wrenched solitude, like skin at dawn among the stones.

The smell of burnt sawdust after rain, the chains in the mill quiet at last.

You pause as the words veer down a narrow tunnel and you write:

there was the woman who bared her breasts when you were twelve,

delivering the paper to her each winter morning, her lost gesture,

and now sixty years later trying to understand the contradictions of loneliness.

The cup of thick cocoa, hot and steaming, she had made for you.

You set the cup down carefully on the pine table, pale steam rising.

I'm sorry,
you said, your voice not yet broken, the changes still to come.

Ah, but she is far away and surely dead,

or nodding in some ward where men can't hurt her anymore.

Burnt sawdust is how you remember it, thin smoke, the unsteady wind,

the drums still down the shore, and a woman in the utter dark.