James Welch - Riding The Earthboy 40

 

Contents

KNIVES

Magic Fox

Verifying the Dead

Song for the Season

Dreaming Winter

Toward Dawn

Blue Like Death

Crystal

Picnic Weather

Directions to the Noman

Gesture Down to Guatemala

Life Support System

The World’s Only Corn Palace

Arizona Highways

Night Hawk

Trestles by the Blackfoot

THE RENEGADE WANTS WORDS

In My First Hard Springtime

Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat

In My Lifetime

Spring for All Seasons

There Are Silent Legends

Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation

Riding the Earthboy 40

Going to Remake This World

Plea to Those Who Matter

The Man from Washington

Blackfeet, Blood, and Piegan Hunters

The Last Priest Didn’t Even Say Goodbye

D-Y Bar

The Only Bar in Dixon

Thanksgiving at Snake Butte

The Renegade Wants Words

DAY AFTER CHASING PORCUPINES

Day After Chasing Porcupines

Surviving

Snow Country Weavers

Visit

Dancing Man

Birth on Range 18

The Wrath of Lester Lame Bull

There Is a Right Way

Getting Things Straight

The Versatile Historian

THE DAY THE CHILDREN TOOK OVER

The Day the Children Took Over

Call to Arms

Two for the Festival

You Gone, the King Dead

Day to Make Up Incompletes

Counting Clouds

Grandma’s Man

Gravely

Grandfather at the Rest Home

Legends Like This

Lady in a Distance Face

Never Give a Bum an Even Break

KNIVES

MAGIC FOX

They shook the green leaves down,

those men that rattled

in their sleep. Truth became

a nightmare to their fox.

He turned their horses into fish,

or was it horses strung

like fish, or fish like fish

hung naked in the wind?

Stars fell upon their catch.

A girl, not yet twenty-four

but blonde as morning birds, began

a dance that drew the men in

green around her skirts.

In dust her magic jangled memories

of dawn, till fox and grief

turned nightmare in their sleep.

And this: fish not fish but stars

that fell into their dreams.

VERIFYING THE DEAD

We torn the green tree down

searching for my bones.

A coyote drove the day back

half a step until we killed

both him and it. Our knives

became a bed for quick things.

It's him all right

I heard old Nine Pipe say,

As we turned away,

a woman blue as night

stepped from my bundle,

rubbed her hips and sand

of a country like this far off.

SONG FOR THE SEASON

It was September,

September fourth I think

the night his light went out

in the great bedroom

on the lake. Moontime

seared the junipers

rimming the great house.

September and the mountain ash

was stopped quite cold,

its spindly bole going dead

as though the fingers

of the quite dead man

had pinched a vital nerve.

Think of it. The man had done

so much and now, even

the trees would fold

and wither at his icy touch.

His small boat, tied securely

to the dock, fiddled out

across the lake its dirge.

Too late, he found, that for the great

as well as for the weak,

the wrong instruments ease you out

and the coming on of autumn.

DREAMING WINTER

Don't ask me it these knives are real.

I could paint a king or show a map

the way home - to go like this:

Wobble me back to a tiger's dream,

a dream of knives and bones too common

to be exposed. My secrets are ignored.

Here comes the man I love. His coat is wet

and his face is falling like the leaves,

tobacco stains on his Polish teeth.

I could tell jokes about him - one up

for the man who brags a lot, laughs

a little and hangs his name on the nearest knob.

Don't ask me.  I know it's only hunger.

I saw that king - the one my sister knew

but was allergic to. Her face ran until

his eyes became the white of several winters.

Snow on his dead told him that the silky tears

were uniformly man and all the money in the world

couldn't bring him to a tragic end. Shame

or fortune tricked me to his table, shattered

my one standing like with new kinds of fame.

Have mercy on me, Lord. Really. If I should die

before I wake, take me to that place I just heard

banging in my ears. Don't ask me. Let me join

the other kings, the ones who trade their knives

for a sack of keys. Let me open any door,

stand winter still and drown in a common dream.

TOWARD DAWN

Today I search for a name.

Not too long, they said,

nor short. A deer crashes

in the wood. A skunk

swaggers to the distant creek.

There is a moment, I think,

when the eyes speak

and speak of a world too much.

Such a moment, a life.

BLUE LIKE DEATH

You see, the problem is

no more for the road. Moon fails

in snow between the moon

and you. Your eyes ignite

the way that butterfly

should move had you not killed it

in a dream of love.

The road forked back

and will fork again the day

you earn your lies,

the thrill of being what you are

when shacks begin to move

and coyotes kill the snakes

you keep safe at home in jars.

The girl let you out. She prized

your going the way some people

help a drunk to fall.

Easy does it, one two three

and let him lie. For he was blue

and dirt is where the bones

meet. You met his eyes

out there where the road dips

and children whipped the snake

you called Frank to death

with sticks. Now you understand:

the way is not your going

but an end. That road awaits

the moon that falls between

the snow and you, your stalking home.

CRYSTAL

Near Canada, between patches

of spring wheat and tumbleweed,

the horses begin to son.

Why should I, drunk

as I am, try to understand?

Here, there, the moon blooms,

draws a bead on coyotes

abroad, afraid to lie down,

golden in Crystal's gray dawn.

PICNIC WEATHER

I know the songs we sang,

the old routine, the dozen masks

you painted when we left you

alone, afraid, frightened of yourself

the day the bull snakes rose,

seething out of dreams, has made you

what you are - alone, afraid, stronger.

Here we go again. The same sad tune.

You knew you would die some night,

alone, no folks, and I, no face, alone,

weaker in the knees and in the heart.

Picture this as your epitaph:

the bull snakes rising against you,

you popping their necks with a clean jerk

and the sky the drab blue of spring.

Winter now: here your image dies.

I can't grab hold of you like the snakes.

I know the dream:  you, alone, stronger

than the night I popped your neck,

left you squirming on the ground, afraid

you'd find your hole and disappear,

and me, my fingers strong around your head,

my  head making clicking sounds - 

nothing like the music in your bones.

DIRECTIONS TO THE NOMAD

Past the school and down

this little incline - 

you can't miss it.

Tons of bricks and babies

blue from the waist down.

Their heads are cheese

and loll as though

bricks became their brains.

What's that - the noble savage?

He's around, spooked and colored

by the fish he eats,

red for rainbow, blue

for the moon. He instructs stars,

but only to the thinnest wolf.

When you get there

tell the mad decaying creep

we miss him. We never

meant it. He'll treat you right,

show you poems

the black bear couldn't dream.

One more thing - if he tries

to teach you mountains

or whisper imagined love

to the tamarack, tell him

you adore him,

then get the hell out, fast.

GESTURE DOWN TO GUATEMALA 

( For Dave McElroy )

All things come cheap when schools turn civic

in despair. You bless the kids, gringo, rough shoes

banging past the comedor. Quick handout, one friend.

Here no one calls you sweetheart. Fried beans are foreign

and wind will toss your face in other fields - some dream.

Pantomimes are common; a pat stance, the best.

Always playing yourself up to second fiddle

and angry to learn, you left the pines to turn

a bad direction. Clouds and friends can mix you up.

Shawls color the rainbow a new odor. Those

pajamas

you sport are simply tired old friends.

(Why do they have to paint the walls of houses pink?)

Drink too much or let the Indians touch you

with terrible words that mean you have chosen right

and that lovely blonde from Montana died a  year ago

in Peru. (Paint is pink in Missoula too.) Before you teach

the clouds your past, or learn new names in  Mayan ruins,

call me amigo, break old women down to gestures

of love, and quick Pase adelante, jovencito, pase!

 

LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM

Again I am in Gallup

and the wind grazes my face.

If I cross the street

I will surely be killed.

Men whisper in alleys.

A girl lifts her arms

to the window, crying

for a boy she loses

always this time of year.

My eyes kiss that hot wind.

I reach for her hair.

The men continue ti whisper.

In time they will notice

what it has taken us mons

and just such alleys to decide.

THE WORLD'S ONLY CORN PALACE

They came with knives and sticks - 

no one called, no one reminded

the wild man of his right to scream,

to fall sobbing to his knees.

With sticks they came - this pack

so bent on killing all his bones.

Some looked away; others in their throats

began to laugh, not loud, but blue,

a winter blue that followed

mongrels out the door. With knives

those killers carved initials on his heart

till his eyes grew white with wonder.

Thunderbird came heavy on our heads.

Too much of a good thing

can spoil it for poets, you said.

I agree. Down by the river we sang

sad tunes and O the stars

were bright that melancholy night.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

I see her seventeen,

a lady dark, turquoise

on her wrists. The land

astounded by a sweeping rain

becomes her skin. Clouds

begin to mend my broken eyes.

I see her singing by a broken shack,

eyes so black it must be dawn.

I hum along, act sober,

tell her I could love her

if she dressed better, if her father

got a job and beat her more.

Eulynda. There's a name

I could live with. I could

thrash away the nuns, tell them

I adopt this girl, dark,

seventeen, silver on her fingers,

in the name of the father, son,

and me, the holy ghost.

Why not? Mormons do less

with less. Didn't her ancestors

live in cliffs, no plumbing,

just a lot of love and corn?

Me, that's corn, pollen

in her hair. East, south, west, north - 

now - see my role - religious.

The Indian politician made her laugh.

Her silver jingled in her throat,

those songs, her fingers busy

on his sleeve. Fathers, forgive me.

She knows me in her Tchnindii dream,

always a little pale, too much

bourbon in my nose, my shoes

too clean, belly soft as hers.

I'll move on. My schedule

says Many Farms tomorrow, then

on to Window Rock, and finally home,

that weathered nude, distant

as the cloud I came in on.

NIGHT HAWK

He's worried about his rights.

They are clear: the air.

Night holds just one secret.

He doesn't know it

so he cries air, the air.

I know finicky secrets.

In the mountains, for instance,

a man lives close to his eyes.

For another, he speaks

with his hands. And another:

man is afraid of his dark.

TRESTLES BY THE BLACKFOOT

Fools by chance, we traveled

cavalier toward death. Fish ran up

to break the black pools

we could not reach. Evening

and the rattle train shook trestles

one quiet inch behind our eyes.

Why not this sentimental stance?

You, me, the shaggy manes

we chose to disappear, inky caps

so spurious we clapped

our hands for calm. You see

the danger in your pose? One foot

between the ties, the other

in your mouth? Inky does

as inky do. It just won't do.

Funky jokes can't separate

this monster from his meal.

Let's be nice, pretend we sail

twelve feet out and down,

perfect cats returning from their night,

sunrise, knives between out toes.

Sliced and faded, those fish

will know us by the noise we chose - 

black train rattle, steel on steel.

THE RENEGADE WANTS WORDS

IN MY FIRST HARD SPRINGTIME

Those red men you offended were my brothers.

Town drinkers, Buckles Pipe, Star Boy,

Billy Fox, were blood to bison. Albert Heavy Runner

was never civic. You are white and common.

Record trout in Willow Creek chose me

to deify. My horse, Centaur, part cayuse,

was fast and mad and black. Dandy in flat hat

and buckskin, I rode the town and called it mine.

A slow hot wind tumbled dust against my door.

Fed and fair, you mocked my philosophic nose,

my badger hair. I rolled your deference

in the hay and named it love and lasting.

Starved to visions, famous cronies top Mount Chief

for names to give respect to Blackfeet streets.

I could deny them in my first hard springtime,

but choose amazed to ride you down with hunger.

CHRISTMAS COMES TO MOCCASIN FLAT

Christmas comes like this: Wise men

unhurried, candles bought on credit (poor price

for calves), warriors face down in wine sleep.

Winds cheat to pull heat from smoke.

Friends sit in chinked cabins, stare out

plastic windows and wait for commodities.

Charlie Blackbird, twenty miles from church

and bar, stabs his fire with flint.

When drunks drain radiators for love

or need, chiefs eat snow and talk of change,

an urge to laugh pounding in their ribs.

Elk play games in high country.

Medicine Woman, clay pipe and twist tobacco,

calls each blizzard by name and predicts

five o’clock by spitting at her television.

Children lean into her breath to beg a story.

Something about honor and passion,

warriors back with meat and song,

a peculiar evening star, quick vision of birth.

Blackbird feeds his fire. Outside, a quick 30 below.

IN MY LIFETIME

This day the children of Speakthunder

run the wrong man, a saint unable

to love a weasel way, able only to smile

and drink the wind that makes the others go.

Trees are ancient in his breath.

His bleeding feet tell a story of run

the sacred way, chase the antelope naked

till it drops, the odor of run

quiet in his blood. He watches cactus

jump against the moon. Moon is speaking

woman to the ancient fire. Always woman.

His sins were numerous, this wrong man.

Buttes were good to listen from. With thunder-

hands his father shaped the dust, circled

fire, tumbled up the wind to make a fool.

Now the fool is dead. His bones go back

so scarred in time, the buttes are young to look

for signs that say a man could love his fate,

that winter in the blood is one sad thing.

His sins - I don't explain. Desperate in my song,

I run these woman hills, translate wind

to mean a kind of life, the children of Speakthunder

are never wrong and I am rhythm to strong medicine.

SPRING FOR ALL SEASONS

Let the sloughs back up and history

will claim that lakes were here

and Indians poled their way from Asia

past monsoons and puddled heat of carp.

We know better. We know this land

wouldn't bring a dime for rain in China.

Practice your grin when clouds are red,

sky falls blue against the buttes.

Morning brings flood to the verbena, planted

by some fool who thinks July forgets

the past. Our past is ritual,

cattle marching one way to remembered mud.

Bring on the fools. Let some sap declare

a ten year rain, a Japanese current

to carry us west to rain forests or east

or south and down. Eskimos are planting

corn where lunar waves crawl the ice,

snow, the Arctic desert gone.

THERE ARE SILENT LEGENDS

You might be bucking bales or hazing strays

and get a bug in your ear, some meaningless

tapping on the wind. You'd look up, 

relax your stare until you saw a willow shift

or a hasty pheasant flushed. He's be there,

watching your eyes jump to the black hair hung

against the ditch bank. Deafy knew he was a legend,

could see it in your face. Drunk, just enough beard,

a mad Mongol sniffing a few feet ahead

of your downwind fear. Dusk and birdsongs

banged against his drum-tight ear and you could yell

until his thin body turned to stone.

Though he never heard your stories, never heard the one 

you told about the crazy Indian, the slick black hair

dangling at his belt, his ears lost mysterious

in St. Louis in that alley no one quite recalls - 

Though wind has shut his ears for good, he squats

for hours at the slough, skipping stones, dreaming

of a moon, the quiet nights and a not quite done

love with a lady high in costly red shoes.

HARLEM, MONATANA:

JUST OFF THE RESERVATION

We need no runners here. Booze is law

and all the Indians drink in the best tavern.

Money is free if you're poor enough.

Disgusted, busted whites are running

for office in this town. The constable,

a local farmer, plants the jail with wild

raven-haired stiffs who beg just one more drink.

One drunk, a former Methodist, becomes a saint

in the Indian church, bugs the plaster man

on the cross with snakes. If his knuckles broke,

he'd see those women wail the graves goodbye.

Goodbye, goodbye, Harlem on the rocks,

so bigoted, you forget the latest joke,

so lonely, you'd welcome a battalion of Turks

to rule your women. What you don't know,

what you will  never know or want to learn - 

Turks aren't white. Turks are olive, unwelcome

alive in any town. Turks would use

your one dingy park to declare a need for loot.

Turks say bring it, step quickly, lay down and

dead.

Here we are when men were nice. This photo, hung

in the New England Hotel lobby, shows them nicer

than pie, agreeable to the warring bands of redskins

who demanded protection money for the price of food.

Now, only Hutterites out north are nice. We hate

them. They are tough and their crops are always good.

We accuse them of idiocy and believe their belief all wrong.

Harlem, your hotel is overnamed, your children

are raggedy-assed but you go on, survive

the bad food from the two cafes and peddle

your hate for the wild who bring you money.

When you die, if you die, will you remember

the three young bucks who shot the grocery up,

locked themselves in and cried for days, we're rich,

help us, oh God, we're rich.

RIDING THE EARTHBOY 40

Earthboy: so simple his name

should ring a bell for sinners,.

Beneath the clowny hat, his eyes

so shot the children called him

dirt, Earthboy farmed this land

and farmed the sky with his words.

The dirt is dead. Gone to seed

his row become marker to a grave

vast as anything but dirt.

Bones should never tell a story

to a bad beginner. I ride

romantic to those words,

those foolish claims that he

was better than dirt, in rain

that bleached his cabin

white as bone. Scattered in the wind

Earthboy calls me from my dream:

Dirt is where the dreams must end.

GOING TO REMAKE THIS WORLD

Morning and the snow might fall forever.

I keep busy. I watch the yellow dogs

chase creeping cars filled with Indians

on their way to the tribal office.

Grateful trees tickle the busy underside

of our snow-fat sky. My mind is right, 

I think, and you will come today

for sure, this day when the snow falls.

From my window, I see bundled Doris Horseman,

black in the blowing snow, her raving son,

Horace, too busy counting flakes to hide his face.

He doesn't know. He kicks my dog

and glares at me, too dumb to thank the men

who keep him on relief and his mama drunk.

My radio reminds me that Hawaii calls

every afternoon at two. Moose Jaw is overcast,

twelve below and blowing. Some people . . .

Listen: if you do not come this day, today

of all days, there is another time

when breeze is tropic and riffs the green sap

forever up these crooked cottonwoods.

Sometimes,

you know, the snow never falls forever.

PLEA TO THOSE WHO MATTER

You don't know I pretend my dumb.

My songs often wise, my bells could chase

the snow across these whistle-black plains.

Celebrate. The days are grim. Call your winds

to blast these bundled streets and patronize

my past of poverty and 4-day feasts.

Don't ignore me. I'll build my face a different way,

a way to make you know that I am no longer

proud, my name not strong enough to stand alone.

If I lie and say you took me for a friend,

patched together in my thin bones,

will you help me be cunning and noisy as the wind?

I have plans to burn my drum, move out

and civilize this hair. See my nose? I smash it

straight for you. These teeth? I scrub my teeth

away with stones. I know you help me now I matter.

And I - I come to you, head down, bleeding from my smile,

happy for the snow clean hands of you, my friends.

THE MAN FROM WASHINGTON

The end came easy for most of us.

Packed away in our crude beginnings

in some far corner of a flat world,

we didn't expect much more

than firewood and buffalo robes

to keep us warm. The man came down,

a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes,

and spoke to us. He promised

that life would go on as usual,

that treaties would be signed, and everyone - 

man, woman, and child - would be inoculated

against a world in which we had no part,

a world of money, promise and disease.

BLACKFEET, BLOOD AND PIEGAN HUNTERS

If we raced a century over hills

that ended years before, people couldn't

say our run was simply poverty or promise

for a better end. We ended sometime

back in recollections of glory, myths

that meant the hunters meant a lot

to starving wives and bad painters.

Let glory go the way of all sad things.

Children need a myth that tells them to be alive,

forget the hair that made you Blood, the blood

the buffalo left, once for meat, before

other hunters gifted land with lead for hides.

Comfortable we drink and string together stories of white buffalo, medicine men who promised

and delivered horrible cures for hunger,

lovely tales of war and white men massacres.

Meaning gone, we dance for pennies now,

our feet jangling dust that hides bones

of sainted Indians. Look away and we are gone.

Look back. Tracks are there, a little faint,

our song strong enough for headstrong hunters

who look ahead to one more kill.

THE LAST PRIEST DIDN'T EVEN SAY GOODBYE

The wages of sin is to live where

the mountains give down to the Indian town.

Even the priest has decorated the one pink church

with hate and hate for sweat.

I planned a celebration, hard candy

for the kids, more hate for the old.

The priest wasn't in. His study smelled

of incense and bourbon. The saints all disapproved.

The Virgin glared and said the priest is gone.

The local jokers say he lasted longer than most.

The graveyard is empty, the women live forever

and the kids . . .

the kids are fishing for the priests' black hat.

D-Y BAR

The tune is cowboy; the words, sentimental crap.

Farther out, wind is mending sagebrush,

stapling it to earth in rows only a badger

would recommend. Reservoirs are dry,

the sky commands a cloud high

to skip the Breaks bristling with heat

and stunted pine.

In stunted light, Bear Child tells a story

to the mirror. He acts his name out,

creeks muscling gorges fill his glass

with gumbo. The bear crawls on all fours

and barks like a dog. Slithering snake-wise

he balances a nickel on his nose. The effect,

a snake in heat.

We all know our names here. Summer is a poor

season to skip this place or complain

about marauding snakes. Often when wind

is cool off mountains and the flats

are green, cars stop for gas, motors clicking

warm to songs of a junction bar, head down,

the dormant bear.

THE ONLY BAR IN DIXON

These Indians once imitated life.

Whatever made them warm

they called wine, song or sleep,

a lucky number on the tribal roll.

Now the stores have gone the gray

of this November sky. Cars

whistle by, chrome wind, knowing

something lethal in the dust.

A man could build a reputation here.

Take that redhead at the bar - 

she knows we're thugs, killers

on a fishing trip with luck.

No luck. No room for those

sensitive enough to know they're beat.

Even the Flathead turns away,

a river thick with bodies,

Indians on their way to Canada.

Take the redhead - yours for just a word,

a promise that the wind will warn

and all the saints come back for laughs.

THANKSGIVING AT SNAKE BUTTE

In time we rode that trail

up the butte as far as time

would let us. The answers to our time

lay hidden in the long grasses

on the top. Antelope scattered

through rocks before us, clattered

unseen down the easy slope to the west.

Our horses balked, stiff-legged,

their nostrils flared at something unseen

gliding smoothly through brush away.

On top, our horses broke, loped through

a small stand of stunted pine, then jolted

to a nervous walk. Before us lay

the smooth stones of our ancestors, the fish,

the lizard, snake and bent-kneed

bowman - etched by something crude,

by a wandering race, driven by their names

for time: its winds, its rain, its snow

and the cold moon tugging at the crude figures

in this, the season of their loss.

THE RENEGADE WANTS WORDS

We died in Zortman on a Sunday

in the square, beneath sky so blue

the eagles spoke in foreign tongues.

Our deeds were numbered: burning homes,

stealing women, wine and gold.

No one spoke of our good side,

those times we fed the hulking idiot,

mapped these plains with sticks

and flint, drove herds of bison wild

for meat and legend. We expected

no gratitude, no mercy on our heads.

But a word - the way we rode

naked across these burning hills.

Perhaps spring breakup made us move

and trust in stars. Ice, not will,

made our women ice. We burned

homes for heat, painted our bodies

in blood. Who can talk revenge?

Were we wild for wanting men to listen

to the earth, to plant only by moons?

In Zortman on a Sunday we died.

No bells, no man in black

to tell us where we failed.

Makeshift hangman, our necks,

noon and the eagles - not one good word.

DAY AFTER

CHASING PORCUPINES

DAY AFTER CHASING PORCUPINES

Rain came. Fog out of the slough and horses

asleep in the barn. In the fields, sparrow hawks

glittered through the morning clouds.

No dreamers knew the rain. Wind ruffled quills

in the mongrel’s nose. He sighed cautiously,

kicked further beneath the weathered shed and slept.

Timid chickens watched chickens in the puddles.

Watching the chickens, yellow eyes harsh

below the wind-drifting clouds, sparrow hawks.

Horses stamped in the barn. The mongrel whimpered

in his dream, wind ruffled his mongrel tail,

the lazy cattails and the rain.

SURVIVING

The day-long cold hard rain drove

like sun through all the cedar sky

we had that late fall. We huddled

close as cows before the bellied stove.

Told stories. Blackbird cleared his mind,

thought of things he’d left behind, spoke:

"Oftentimes, when sun was easy in my bones,

I dreamed of ways to make this land."

We envied eagles easy in their range.

"That thin girl, old cook’s kids, stripped naked

for a coke or two and cooked her special stew

round back of the mess tent Sundays.'

Sparrows skittered through the black brush.

That night the moon slipped a notch, hung

black for just a second, just long enough

for wet black things to sneak away our cache

of meat. To stay alive this way, it's hard. . . .

SNOW COUNTRY WEAVERS

A time to tell you things are well.

Birds flew south a year ago.

One returned, a blue-wing teal

wild with news of his mother’s love.

Mention me to friends. Say

wolves are dying at my door,

the winter drives them from their meat.

Say this: say in my mind

I saw your spiders weaving threads

to bandage up the day. And more,

those webs were filed with words 

that tumbled meaning into the wind.

VISIT

I come alone. To surprise you

I leave no sign, my name

shucked at the familiar gate.

Your name is implied in exile.

I bring meat for your memory,

wine for the skinning of muskrats.

I leave this wood, not much,

but enough to streak your face

a winter red despair.

Why no songs, no ceremony?

Set your traps to catch my one

last track, the peculiar scent,

goodbyes creaking in the pines.

DANCING MAN

He swung gracefully into midnight

that man on the plains.

The stories he told were true enough

and we were young

to understand his beetle eye.

It wasn’t till later

the dream broke

and we spun solid as a rock

back to the cold cactus ground,

winehappy and stubborn.

All it takes: a few sticks,

a fire, all the tea 

in Chine . . .

there isn't much to do

nights

Heart Butte

in the dead of spring.

BIRTH ON RANGE

His great thighs nosed the pebbles;

his head rolled in the socket

of the earth; became the sky

with one quick jerk. The green of spring

came hard and the mother, bearing

easy, one two three, caught our stare

and stared our eyes away. Moon

eclipsed the night. We rode the wind

the only distance we could muster – 

quick paces and a space of mind.

THE WRATH OF LESTER LAME BULL

Bears are in the cabbage again,

cunning soles crashing down carrots,

faces thick to wear a turnip green.

Not even the onion dissents.

Lester Lame Bull in his garden grows

twenty rows of winter store,

a piddling score to court

against the blue of mountain ash.

Cottonwood limbs rattle his bones.

Lester storms those pesky winds,

stoning crows from purple cups. 

Quirky grins are thick in muscatel.

Elephants are whispering in backyards.

THERE IS A RIGHT WAY

The justice of the prairie hawk

moved me; his wings tipped

the wind just right and the mouse

was any mouse. I came away,

broken from my standing spot,

dizzy with the sense of a world

trying to be right, and the mouse

a part of a wind that stirs the plains.

GETTING THINGS STRAIGHT

Is the sun the same drab gold?

The hawk - is he still rising, circling,

falling above the field? And the rolling day,

it will never stop? It means nothing?

Will it end the way history ended when

the last giant climbed Heart Butte, had his vision,

came back to town and drank himself

sick? The hawk has spotted a mouse.

Wheeling, falling, stumbling to a stop,

he watches the snake ribbon quickly

under a rock. What does it mean?

He flashes his wings to the sun, bobs

twice and lifts, screaming

off the ground. Does it mean this to him:

the mouse, a snake, the dozen angry days

still rolling since his last good feed?

Who offers him a friendly meal?

Am I strangling his grip?

Is he my vision?

THE VERSATILE HISTORIAN

I came through autumn forests needing

wind that needed fire. Sun on larch,

fir, the ponderosa told me to forget

the friends I needed years ago.

Sky is all the rage in country steeped

in lore, the troubled Indians wise within

their graves. The chanting clouds

crowded against the lowest peak. I sang

of trouble to the north. Sleeping weasels robbed

my song of real words. Everywhere, rhythm raged.

Sun beneath my feet. I became

the statue needing friends in wind

that needed fire, mountains to bang against.

THE DAY

the CHILDREN

TOOK OVER

THE DAY THE CHILDREN TOOK OVER

And though the sky was bright, snow fell down.

Children ran out. Mothers read letters'

that said the world would end in fire.

Snow fell on driveways, on trestles and trees.

It fell on lovers locked together

in  bedrooms and back seats of new Buicks

out of sight in green wild fields.

And yes, it fell with a vengeance

on statesmen who predicted peace in our time.

Priests who left the pulpit for a fine new wife

walked about, pure and heavy beneath a wet sun.

All around town, children ran out,

rolled their show, stuck buttons, carrots,

old hats and bits of coal on shapeless lumps

to create life, in their own image.

CALL TO ARMS

We spoke like public saints

to the people assembled in the square.

Our gestures swayed the morning light

and bathed the town in public guilt.

All the weather poured down that hour

our lips witched the ears of thousands.

Whiny kids broke from their mother's arms,

charged the fields, armed with sticks.

Men wept and women clutched their steaming

heads and beat the savage mildness

from their hearts. The eyes were with us,

every one, and we were with the storm.

We rode out that night, our ponchos slick

and battered down against our thighs.

Our horses knew the way. None looked behind,

but heard the mindless suck of savage booted feet.

TWO FOR THE FESTIVAL

No sun but awkward rhyme the sun

arrested in its curve. A boy lit up

the night, his coattails flying

in electric flame. In town

the usual customer, one drink and home,

stone figure in the weeds, looked up

and saw his future falling.

I know this boy, a week-chinned Greek

drowning cats in clouds. One drink,

the customer and town drove bleeding

strangers sane. A boy lit up the road,

falling. Two dancers passed, one young,

the other awkward in his rhyme.

He carried in his hand a blind toad,

a fox and thirteen lumpy stones.

Money listened; all wars stood still

till the car of a customer's past

reflected in his face. The rest is real:

black-faced, the boy fell smiling

through the weeds. A toad glistened

in the sky. Fox, the awkward dancer,

hugged his stones. One drink, them home.

YOU GONE, THE KING DEAD

                     

from a distant cabin in the woods,

a meadow lark - you have not come.

                       

I accuse them of taking you, the members

of the wedding, to some careless feast

across the land, beyond an evening slough.

Snows come gently from the south.

Heavy, heavy the house creaks assassin,

heard only by the man who dies alone.

His hand is on my shoulder. Something in his touch

tells me he is wise and knows the drifting

snow will smother any love I try.

Silent at his side, the woman I take

to be his bride, lifts a finger to  my brain,

signals I am dead. Snow blows gently

from the south. The man, not tall but wide

across the heart, beckons to his unfamiliar bride,

touches her hand and drifts, upward to the stars.

DAY TO MAKE UP INCOMPLETES

Because the day came (and now,

why not, because I am older)

that people fell dropping

not hard or fast, but soft

like the cottonwood snow

in my mother's yard, and the soft grasses

of my father's fields swarmed

before a thickening wind

out of the north,

I came (why not) to the conclusion

of rain beating the shingle roof

above my bed, and this day

like all my days

found me badly in need

of encyclopedias

and moths to tickle the itch

from my burning feet.                                                                     

COUNTING CLOUDS

A long way to come - 

this rain so old on my bones

crackle no before you speak.

A way to come: downwind

before the sudden clouds appear,

turn you to statue - no, I say,

no to the north and no, no

to your crummy mirror.

Once I loved this gravy land

so famous in my blood

my hair turned black

with love. A way to think:

so cold the sun could call me

friend. Now the daughters

call me son till wheat

and son work one against me.

(He was good, had friends.

Never knew the color

of his past, those days

the gentle fish

danced gentle to his arms.)

Np, the dancing man could never

teach you sundown, or show

the way a river ends

in wine. I forget the way

the days go, but it must

be easy - counting clouds

or drinking beer with friends.

Now you go the rhymes

grow silly in these bones.

The no dissolves itself

in tears, in rain, the acid rain

of lost daughters in Mexico.

GRANDA'S MAN

That day she threw the goose over the roof

of the cowshed, put her hand to her lips

and sucked, cursing, the world ended. In blood

her world ended though these past twenty years

have healed the bite and that silly goose

is preening in her favorite pillow.

Her husband was a fool. He laughed too long

at lies told by girls whose easy virtue disappeared

when he passed stumble-bum down the Sunday street.

Baled hay in his every forty, cows on his allotted range,

his quick sorrel quarter-horse, all neglected for

the palms of friends. Then, he began to paint LIFE.

His first attempt was all about a goose that bit

the hand that fed it. The obstacles were great.

Insurmountable. His fingers were too thick to grip

the brush right. The sky was always green

and hay spoiled in the fields. In wind,

the rain, the superlative night, images came, geese

skimming to the reservoir. This old man listened.

He got a bigger brush and once painted the cry

of a goose so long, it floated off the canvas

into thin air. Things got better. Sky turned white.

Winter came and he became quite expert at snowflakes.

But he was growing wise, Lord, his hair white as snow.

Funny, he used to say, how mountains are blue

in winter and green in spring. He never ever

got the things quite right. He thought a lot about the day

the goose bit Grandma's hand. LIFE seldom cam

the shade he wanted. Well, and yes, he died well,

but you should have seen how well his friends took it.

GRAVELY

we watched her go the way she came,

unenvied, wild - cold as the last spring rain.

Mule deer browsed her garden down

to labored earth, seed and clean carrots.

Dusk is never easy, yet she took it

like her plastic saint, grandly, the day

we cut those morning glories down

and divvied up her odds and ends.

Daughters burned sheets the following Monday.

All over God's city, the high white stars

welcomed her the way she's planned: a chilly

satellite ringing round the great malicious moon.

GRANDFATHER AT THE REST HOME

I am standing high and frail.

Worms are breathing in my bones.

My eyes are cataracts

and dams back up my blood.

The birds are singing chirps,

chirps go in my ears.

I am drowning.

I should have known you would come

today, the birds sing

in my bones. Stranger to me now,

your words go through the grass

like snakes. My appetite is pure

for the quick sweet taste of apples.

Apples, here come the apples,

That bulgy, baggy brown sack

you carry in your skin

is filled with apples.

Apples for me now,

apples for the king!

Oh, that murderous, knifing waltz

we counted on so many years ago

is going, gone, the price the keen apples.

My blood sings the birds farewell.

LEGENDS LIKE THIS

Here it is written: Stoned

before the cross, three dark poets

dying in the sight of God.

He gave them everything:

eyes, teeth, heart.

their beautiful bone.

He never learned their names.

Oh, they tried everything:

they knelt, they sprawled

face down upon the altar,

killed their beautiful parents.

He never thought to tell them

what He wanted, who they were . . .

and they, of course, burned His church

and hid out for a long, long time.

LADY IN A DISTANT FACE

The odd way you comb your hair,

those big hands drawing circles in a room

and a Mormon background - you become

the Sunday all-day Scotch friend

that needs a friend to keep these mountains back.

We come upcountry, not knowing

your Paris days, the summer-wide search

for Frenchmen with wild hair

and eyes that made for easy lies.

No life is chilly as your own

when time makes parents foreign and brothers

come to mock you when you're drunk.

Summer was no lifetime. It rolled with games

and plays on sand with sullen kings.

Bikinis fit you then; you fit the beaches

with your famous boys - life so shallow

you could end it with a kiss.

What bird could go alone this unnotices?

On those beaches - did you fly for seven years,

then drop, exhausted, in the sea?

The fushermen - they knew you for a fraud,

rescued you with words that meant go home.

Home. The steamer edged you

from that scene of what is nice, the Paris days

of sun and mortgaged gold.

And now, here, in these mountains

that hold you from yourself, the wind

blowing down your final face,

you tell us what we know: Time is clean

and brief for girls in a wild time,

past for ladies up like smoke in narrow wind.

NEVER GIVE A BUM AN EVEN BREAK

He could have come to tell us

of his new-found luck - the strolling

players who offered him a role

in their latest comedy, or the uncle

who promised him hundreds of dollars

just to stay away - instead he spoke

of a role so black the uncle died

out of luck in a west-end shack.

I walked him to the door. Behind me

my house, my wife and mirror disappeared.

We sit now, a steady demolition team,

under one of the oldest bridges in town.

Andy day we will crawl out to settle

old scores or create new roles, our masks

glittering ina comic rain.