text:
Labor Rights and the Ludlow Massacre
Strikers' tent colony, Ludlow, Colorado
Labor Day: for most, it's a three-day weekend signaling the end of summer. But the fact that we have weekends at all — along with child-labor laws, workplace safety rules, minimum wage, and the eight-hour workday — is only thanks to the struggles of working-class men and women. Before the rise of unions, striking workers often faced not only firing, but getting beaten, arrested, or even murdered. Case in point: the Ludlow Massacre. It was called "one of the bleakest and blackest episodes of American labor history" and "the deadliest labor struggle in American history." Yet, like most labor struggles, it's virtually absent from the history books.
The Company Town
In the early 1900s, Colorado was booming, thanks to its gold and coal mines. Coal was especially valuable, as it was the fuel that powered the newly industrialized nation. Thus one company was booming more than any other: Colorado Fuel and Iron, or CF&I. It was the state's largest employer and landowner, its coal used to power the steel mills in Pueblo, which in turn powered the rapid expansion of the railroads and American industry in general.
Originally owned by America's first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., CF&I was later given to his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as a birthday gift. As one of the wealthiest Americans of the time, Rockefeller exerted great control over Colorado's government. "Oversight" was a cruel joke — the few regulations on the mining industry were rarely enforced. For example, despite a booming extraction industry, the state only employed three mine inspectors, and of the over 90 mine-related deaths in one county, the state coroner only attributed one to the fault of the mine owner.
Rockefeller ran his coal mines just as ruthlessly, starting with how he chose his laborers. He recruited immigrants from many different countries, mostly from Eastern Europe and Mexico, who spoke many different languages. This was not out of some benevolent belief in multiculturalism. Rockefeller wanted workers who would be unable to communicate with each other so that they couldn't unionize.
The work itself was physically exhausting — miners had to clear trees and brush to get to new areas of the mines, then, shore up the shafts with scaffolding, lay railroad track, and set explosives to loosen the rock. None of this "dead work" was paid for — miners were only paid by the amount of coal they brought up. To make matters worse, the person weighing the coal would often refuse to pay for any coal they claimed had impurities in it.
It was also extremely dangerous work. In addition to the long-term effects of coal-dust inhalation, mule kicks, explosions, and cave-ins were common occurrences in most mines. But Colorado mines — most of which were owned by CF&I — had the highest fatality rate in the nation, twice the national average. In 1910 alone, some 400 people died in their mines.
But the company's domination didn't stop at the end of the work day; CF&I controlled every aspect of its workers' lives. Workers were forced to live in company housing — flimsy wooden-frame shacks with little to no insulation. Rent — as well as the cost of the explosives and other equipment — was deducted directly from their paychecks.
Even though it was illegal, the miners and other workers were paid in company scrip — basically coupons that could only be spent at the company store, where goods were sold at wildly inflated prices. If a worker dared leave and shop at another store, they would be fired.
Only company-approved books were stocked in the library. Only company-approved movies were shown in the cinema. Even the children were schooled in company schools, using company-approved curriculum. And around this tightly controlled company town were tall fences patrolled by private company guards, so that workers had to have permission to go in and out.
Tensions Were Rising
Needless to say, CF&I's workers weren't exactly thrilled by these conditions. However, CF&I owned most local law enforcement just as they did the state government. When union organizers would come to a town to speak to the workers there, local sheriffs and their deputies — along with private goons paid for directly by CF&I and other mine owners — would run them out of town. Union organizers were the frequent target of threats, assaults, and arrests. So the union organizers learned to stay hidden.
Then in August of 1913, during a state labor convention in nearby Trinidad, a United Mine Workers of America organizer died in a shootout in the street. His murderers were members of the Baldwin-Felts gang, which specialized in crushing labor uprisings.
This ignited a wave of anger among Colorado's miners. In one last-ditch attempt to avoid a strike, the union asked CF&I representatives to meet with them about their grievances, but the company refused to meet with them.
In mid-September, the UMWA put out the official notice that if their demands weren't met, mine workers would walk off the job and strike on Sept. 23. Their demands were:
Recognition of their union
2. A 10 percent pay increase
3. Eight-hour workdays for all mine workers
4. Payment for "dead work"
5. The right to elect the person who weighed the coal for payment
6. The right to trade in any store, live where they choose, and visit any doctor they choose
7. The enforcement of Colorado state mining safety laws and the elimination of armed guards around the company town.
Rockefeller, unsurprisingly, refused every demand.
So on Sept. 23, with freezing sleet and snow falling, some 8,000 Colorado mine workers — somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the entire mine workforce — went on strike.
The strikers and their families were immediately evicted from their company housing, so they moved into tents provided by the UMWA. The encampments were clustered in several "colonies" in the nearby Sangre de Christo mountains. The largest tent colony, that of Ludlow, became home to some 1,200 men, women, and children. They chose as their spokesperson a Greek American, Louis Tikas, who, like most of the Greek workers, was a veteran of the Balkan Wars and was well trusted by nearly everyone. He had also led a walkout at a mine in Frederick.
While in Ludlow, the strikers — from 19 different nations, speaking 36 languages — worked together to keep their tent city functioning. The colony included a communal kitchen, nursery, and medical tent. They would sometimes organize baseball games to keep their spirits up.
One of the strikers, a young woman named Mary Thomas, later wrote in her memoir: "Looking back now on those bitter days, I can see a wonderful thing in them despite the terror, the disappointments, the deprivations. Our suffering with the extreme cold and hunger had brought us all together … We had become a 'family' of world citizens, petitioning for the right to make an honest living as free human beings."
But everything was not peace and love. There was tension, and violence, from both sides. Strikers would intimidate and even attack workers brought in to cross the picket lines. Trains suspected of bringing in scabs were fired upon, as were deputies escorting scabs to the mines. In another town, an anti-union marshal was killed in a confrontation with strikers there.
CF&I forces, though, had the strikers outgunned and outmanned. They brought in an armored vehicle and set up machine guns pointing at the tent colonies. Anyone leaving the colony alone was attacked and beaten by CF&I forces. Occasionally, they would fire randomly into the area, just to terrorize the strikers. In Walsenberg, CF&I forces fired on a crowd of strikers, killing three. At the Forbes tent colony, CF&I goons strafed the place, killing one man and injuring another.
In October, on the urging of Rockefeller, Colorado Gov. Elias Ammons called up the National Guard (also called the militia) to "keep the peace." At first, the strikers believed the miltia was there to protect them from CF&I's hired goons, and welcomed them warmly. But they probably didn't realize the militia was under the command of Capt. Philip Van Cise, who had previously been involved in breaking up a strike in Cripple Creek. It became clear that the militia wasn't neutral in the matter when they raided the tent colonies and seized weapons, but didn't disarm CF&I's guards. In response, many strikers dug large pits beneath their tents both to hide weapons and as a place to take shelter from gunfire.
The strike went on for months, and the winter of 1913–14 was especially harsh. But the strikers didn't back down. At one point, the famed Mother Jones, fresh out of jail for her "agitating" in the West Virginia coalfields, visited Ludlow to support the strike. She was ejected from company property several times and arrested twice, prompting women from the tent colonies and the town of Trinidad to march in the streets demanding her release. Police on horseback waded into the crowd of women, kicking and beating them.
Editorial writers across the country came to her defense, and to the defense of the marchers, shining a spotlight on the injustices in the Colorado coal mines.
Meanwhile, the militia members who had originally been sent to Ludlow had been rotated out with new recruits, these paid directly by Rockefeller. Many of these new recruits were former mine company guards, and they had no love for the strikers. Cise, on no one's authority but his own, declared martial law over what he called the Military District of Colorado — the area around the coal mines. Without warrants, his men arrested, beat, and tortured anyone suspected of sympathizing with the strikers. When local prosecutors released these people from jail, Cise threatened to arrest them, too.
When spring came with no resolution, Rockefeller went to Congress, where he framed the standoff as "a national issue, whether workers shall be allowed to work under such conditions as they may choose." In other words, he was making the case that union organizers were really just outside agitators, and the miners were perfectly happy with their working conditions.
But when the body of a scab was found outside the nearby Forbes tent colony, Cise ordered all the men of that colony arrested and the tents dismantled. The folks at Ludlow feared they would be next.
The morning of April 20
Sunday, April 19, was Greek Orthodox Easter. Amidst the celebrations, militia men rode their horses onto the strikers' makeshift baseball diamond, disrupting the game. When they were jeered for doing so, they reportedly responded, "That's all right, girlie — you have your big Sunday, but we will have our roast tomorrow."
The next morning, the commander of the militia stationed at Ludlow called up Tikas to come to their camp to discuss a rumor that a man was being held prisoner in Ludlow. Tikas at first refused, stating there was no such man in Ludlow. After much badgering, he finally agreed to meet the militia at the nearby train depot.
Both sides came to the meeting heavily armed, and the militia set up machine guns along a rise overlooking the colony. To this day, it's not proven who fired the first shot. Three explosions went off, signaling the militia to battle. Gunfire broke out and continued between the militia and the tents throughout the day. Armed strikers took up position on a nearby rise to draw the militia's fire away from the colony. Women, carrying babies and leading children, desperately tried to escape as the militia strafed the colony with machine-gun fire. One survivor's account states that militia sharpshooters would pick the women off as they fled. At one point, one militia man was shot in the neck — the first, and only, militia fatality that day. One passerby was shot dead, and an 11-year-old boy caught a stray bullet in the head as he sat inside his family's tent, killing him as well.
Tikas, waving a white flag and trying to avert disaster, fled back to the camp. Meanwhile, more troops arrived from Trinidad.
Then, in the evening, the tents began to burn. Some survivors recall seeing militia men with kerosene and torches setting them on fire. The blaze, which started in the area closest to where the militia were, spread quickly, consuming the entire colony and everything within it.
Tikas and two other men were arrested and brought to the militia commander. The militia men later denied it, but the evidence is clear: Tikas was hit in the head with the butt of the commander's rifle so hard it cracked his skull. He was then shot three times in the back, along with his two companions, and left on the ground where they fell, as the Ludlow tent colony burned to the ground.
The next morning, a woman named Mary Petrucci emerged from the smouldering ruins. She reeked of smoke and seemed disoriented. But she was able to lead searchers to the tent she had emerged from.
There, beneath the scorched ruins of a bedframe, they found a 350-square-foot pit dug into the ground. In it were the bodies of two women and 11 children — including Petrucci's three children. They had taken cover from the gunfire and died of smoke inhalation.
Total deaths in the Ludlow Massacre vary; some place the number as high as 55, others as low as 25. Regardless of the actual number, it shocked the nation. Upon learning of the massacre, strikers throughout Colorado became enraged; union organizers urged their members to take up arms. For 10 days, as Alan Prendergast writes in his feature, "Bloody Ludlow,"
"They marched on the mines, dynamited the entrances, torched the equipment and shot suspected scabs, striking as far north as Cañon City. They took over parts of Trinidad and engaged the militia in an epic battle on the hogback above Walsenburg. It was one of the most violent insurrections since the Civil War, claiming the lives of at least six strikers and 24 mine employees, and it didn't stop until President Woodrow Wilson sent in federal troops."
The uprising was later called "The Ten Day War," and is considered part of the wider Colorado Coalfield War.
After the uprising dispersed under the threat of federal force, hundreds of strikers were indicted, though in the end, they were acquitted or had their convictions overturned. Only a few militia men were court-martialed for their role in the massacre; only one man was convicted of any wrongdoing — the commander who murdered Tikas. For this, he only received a reprimand.
The UMWA ran out of money and finally called off the strike in December. The strikers had failed to get their demands, and many of them had been replaced by scabs.
Despite the failure of the strike and the uprising, the public's sympathy lay with the miners. Under public pressure, in 1915, the Congressional Commission on Industrial Relations held hearings over the situation. They took testimony from representatives of the mine owners as well as the strikers and the UMWA. In the end, the commission recommended that mine workers be given the right to organize as a union, that there be restrictions placed on the use of private detectives by mine companies, and that the state had a responsibility for protecting workers' rights.
Neither Pres. Wilson or Congress accepted the commission's recommendations. Rockefeller, sensing increased public scorn, went on what could be called the first modern PR campaign to salvage his image. He traveled to Colorado and met with mine workers, where he agreed to a few toothless reforms, such as allowing its workers to join a company-controlled "union" and upgrading the roads and facilities in his company towns.
Even though it was objectively a failure for the workers, the Ludlow Massacre became a rallying cry for union organizers and labor activists for years afterwards. It would be decades before the rights the Ludlow strikers fought for — such as the right to join an independent union, an eight-hour workday, and child labor laws — were enshrined in law with the passing of the National Labor Relations and Wagner acts as part of FDR's New Deal. These strong protections for unions paved the way for the longest period of prosperity in American history, the Long Boom of the post-WWII economy.
Though it has been mostly forgotten by the history books, the Ludlow Massacre inspired historians Howard Zinn and George McGovern to write about it. Musicians such as Woody Guthrie, Jason Boland, and others wrote songs about Ludlow.
Today the Ludlow Monument, originally built by the UMWA, stands at the site of what was the Ludlow colony. It is now officially a national historic landmark, commemorating "a pivotal event in American history," when workers and their families fought — and died — so that they did not have to surrender their rights and freedom at the job site.
May they rest in power.
*Note: contains affiliate links
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text:
NASCAR Canada / Breaking news
Jacques Villeneuve, DJ Kennington part of new Hall of Fame class
Tim Southers
Second-generation drivers become the first pair of father-son duos to enter the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame.
It was a who's who of Canadian racers, organizers and partners inducted into this year's class during a ceremony Saturday evening at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Glenn Gould Studio in downtown Toronto.
Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame chairman Dr. Hugh Scully and master of ceremonies and legendary motorsports reporter Norris McDonald kicked the evening off before the eight inductions into the 2018 class.
A former Formula 1 champion joined a pair of former NASCAR Pinty's Series champions as eight talented and influential people and organizations joined the prestigious organization.
Villeneuve, who joined his late father Giles in the hall, was recognized for his accomplishments that included winning the 1997 Formula One title along with the 1995 Indianapolis 500 and the 1995 CART championship.
Kennington joined his father Doug - who was inducted in 2004 - as the second father-son combination to become members of the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame.
The younger Kennington won series crowns in 2010 and 2012 and still competes in the NASCAR Pinty's Series and holds the record as the only driver in the history of the series to start every NASCAR-sanctioned event.
"True honor to be here tonight, I never dreamed in a million years I would wind up here when I started racing go karts when I was five years-old," said Kennington. "My journey has been an awesome one.
"We've come a long way from Delaware Speedway. My whole career has been presented by Castrol and I wouldn't be here today without them. To have won two championships and partner with them for 25 years that's almost unheard of in this sport."
In addition to his accomplishments in his home country, the St. Thomas, Ontario native has also competed frequently in NASCAR national series as well in the United States.
"To come from there to run two Daytona 500, it's not just me, I'm just the lucky guy that gets to drive and have my name up on the board," said Kennington. "My dad, everybody knows, is my hero. My dad said I git here much sooner than him but the only reason I did was because of him. I wouldn't be here without you."
Scott Steckly, a four-time NASCAR Pinty's Series champion, was the first inducted during the evening. He last competed in the series as a driver in 2015, but has since continually fielded cars for championship contenders such as fellow CMHOF member Alex Tagliani, Donald Theetge and Marc-Antoine Camirand.
Also inducted in the ceremony with NASCAR ties is legendary television producer Jim Robinson.
Robinson was instrumental in broadcasting motorsports in Canada and his legeacy continues today with his son Joel, continuing to produce not only all NASCAR Pinty's Series broadcasts throughout Canada, but various motorsports events every year.
Also inducted was Jim Tario who has been instrumental in bringing and keeping the Honda Indy Toronto event in the city on the street course for several decades.
Francois Dumontier joined Tario for induction thanks to his efforts in promoting the only Formula One race held in the country in Montreal for several decades.
Honda Motor Company was also recognized and up-and-coming Canadian racer Nicholas Latifi was recognized with the Rising Star Award by the organization.
The 2018 inductees are:
Formula Atlantic championship winning engineer Doug Crosty;
Grand Prix du Canada promoter Francois Dumontier;
two-time NASCAR Canada champion Douglas James "D. J." Kennington;
television producer and filmmaker Jim Robinson;
championship driver and race association official John Sambrook;
four-time NASCAR Canada champion Scott Steckly;
Honda Indy Toronto official Jim Tario; and,
Formula One world champion, CART champion, and Indianapolis 500 winner Jacques Villeneuve.
Four finalists named for NASCAR's Betty Jane France Humanitarian Award
NASCAR Heat 3 review: A welcome standout in the Sim Racing genre
Series IndyCar , NASCAR Canada
Drivers Jacques Villeneuve , D.J. Kennington , Scott Steckly
Author Tim Southers
2020 NASCAR Pinty's schedule revealed, dirt track added
Andrew Ranger wins his third NASCAR Pinty's Series title
Roundtable: Will a new crew chief solve the No. 48's problems?
Andrew Ranger completes western swing with Edmonton win
NASCAR Roundtable: How will PJ1 affect the racing at Pocono?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
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_for Will Hearst_
Life never answers.

It has no ears and doesn't hear us;

it doesn't speak, it has no tongue.

It neither goes nor stays:

we are the ones who speak,

the ones who go,

while we hear from echo to echo, year to year,

our words rolling through a tunnel with no end.

That which we call life

hears itself within us, speaks with our tongues,

and through us, knows itself.

Octavio Paz, from "Response and Reconciliation," translated

by Eliot Weinberger

# Contents

  * Title Page
  * Note to Reader

  1. Broom
  2. Notation
  3. American Sermon
  4. Arts
  5. Bird's-Eye View
  6. Poet Warning
  7. A Part of My History
  8. The Muse in Our Time
  9. Muse II
  10. Poet at Nineteen in NYC
  11. Sister
  12. Skull
  13. Horses
  14. René Char II
  15. Xmas Cheeseburgers
  16. Mary the Drug Addict
  17. Night Creatures
  18. Deaf Dog's Bark
  19. June the Horse
  20. Poet No. 7
  21. A Puzzle
  22. Rumination
  23. Dan's Bugs
  24. Invisible
  25. Mary
  26. Remote Friends
  27. Poet Science
  28. Ache
  29. Oriole
  30. Blue Shawl
  31. River I
  32. River II
  33. River III
  34. River IV
  35. River V
  36. River VI
  37. River VII
  38. Spring
  39. Sky
  40. March in Patagonia, AZ
  41. Brazil
  42. Grand Marais
  43. Desert Snow
  44. Reality
  45. She
  46. Love
  47. Back into Memory
  48. Debtors
  49. Prisoners
  50. Corruption
  51. Our Anniversary
  52. Doors
  53. Greed
  54. Cereal
  55. D.B.
  56. Sunlight
  57. Brutish
  58. Nightfears
  59. Blue
  60. The Current Poor
  61. Moping
  62. Church
  63. Chatter
  64. Return
  65. Prado
  66. Death Again
  67. Suite of Unreason

  * About the Author
  * Books by Jim Harrison
  * Acknowledgments
  * Copyright
  * Special Thanks

## BROOM

To remember you're alive

visit the cemetery of your father

at noon after you've made love

and are still wrapped in a mammalian

odor that you are forced to cherish.

Under each stone is someone's inevitable

surprise, the unexpected death

of their biology that struggled hard, as it must.

Now to home without looking back,

enough is enough.

En route buy the best wine

you can aff ord and a dozen stiff brooms.

Have a few swallows then throw the furniture

out the window and begin sweeping.

Sweep until the walls are

bare of paint and at your feet sweep

until the floor disappears. Finish the wine

in this field of air, return to the cemetery

in evening and wind through the stones

a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.

## NOTATION

They say the years are layers, laminae.

They lie. Our minds aren't stuck together

like trees. We're much nearer to a ball of snakes

in winter, a flock of blackbirds, a school of fish.

Your brain guides you away from sentences.

It is consoled by the odor of the chokecherry tree

that drifts its sweetness through the studio window.

Chokecherry trees have always been there

along with crab apples. The brain doesn't care

about layers. It is both vertical and horizontal

in a split second, in all directions at once.

Nearly everything we are taught is false

except how to read. All these poems that drift

upward in our free-floating minds hang there

like stationary birds with a few astonishing

girls and women. Einstein lights a cigarette

and travels beyond the galaxies that have

no layers. Our neurons are designed after 90 billion galaxies.

As a shattered teenager I struggled to paint

a copy of El Greco's View of Toledo to Berlioz's Requiem.

The canvas was too short but very deep. I walked

on my knees to see what the world looked like

to Toulouse-Lautrec. It didn't work. I became seven

again. It was World War II. I was about

to lose an eye. The future was still in the sky

above me, which I had to learn to capture

in the years that never learned as clouds

to be layered. First warm day. Chokecherry burst. Its song.

## AMERICAN SERMON

I am uniquely privileged to be alive

or so they say. I have asked others

who are unsure, especially the man with three

kids who's being foreclosed next month.

One daughter says she isn't leaving the farm,

they can pry her out with tractor

and chain. Mother needs heart surgery

but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking

with pork fat. My friend Sam has made

five hundred bucks in 40 years

of writing poetry. He has applied for 120

grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps

strict track. The fact is he's not very good.

Back to the girl on the farm. She's been

keeping records of all the wildflowers

on the never-tilled land down the road,

a 40-acre clearing where they've bloomed

since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries

with a young female bear who eats them. She's being

taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down

to Lansing where Dad has a job in a

bottling plant. She won't survive the move.

## ARTS

It's better to start walking before you're born.

As with dancing you have to learn the steps

and after that free-form can be the best.

Stevens said technique is the proof of seriousness,

though the grace of a Maserati is limited to itself.

There is a human wildness held beneath the skin

that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable.

I can't walk in the shoes cobbled for me.

They weren't devised by poets but by shoemakers.

## BIRD'S-EYE VIEW

In the Sandhills of Nebraska

the towns are mere islands, sandspits,

in the ocean of land while in the Upper Peninsula

of Michigan, the towns seem not very successful

attempts to hold back the forest. In Montana

the mountains are so dominant that some days

the people refuse to look at them as children

turn away from the fathers who beat them.

But of course in most places the people

have won, the cities and highways have won.

As in nearly all wars both sides have lost

and the damage follows until the end of our time.

It seems strange that it could have been done well.

Greed has always fouled our vast nest.

Tiring of language, the mind takes flight

swimming off into the ocean of air thinking

who am I that the gods and men have disappointed me?

You walk through doorways in the mind you can't walk out

then one day you discover that you've learned to fly.

From up here the water is still blue, the grass green

and the wind that buoys me is 12 billion years old.

## POET WARNING

He went to sea

in a thimble of poetry

without sail or oars

or anchor. What chance

do I have, he thought?

Hundreds of thousands

of moons have drowned out here

and there are no gravestones.

## A PART OF MY HISTORY

I took the train from Seville to Granada with a vintner friend. I had been reading Federico García Lorca for over fifty years and needed to see where he was murdered on the mountainside near Granada. Beware old man! We visited the site of the murder, drank a little wine, and I began to drown in melancholy. We went to our hotel where I planned to stay in Lorca's room but it frightened me and I moved to another. We toured the city in the morning and I stared at the Sierra Nevada glistening with snow that was somehow somber as the jewelry of the dead. I took a nap and wept for no reason. We went to a magnificent flamenco concert on a hill across from the Alhambra and ate very late in the evening. I became quite ill. My friend had to leave for her home in Collioure. I spent the day reading my empty journal, the white pages swarming with nothing. At 5 a.m. I went to an airport hours away in the darkness, flew to Madrid, then from Madrid to Chicago sitting next to a girl of surpassing beauty who said that she was an Erasmus scholar, an honor of sorts. I slept for eight hours and dreamt that Erasmus was a girl. At a Chicago airport hotel I thought I was slipping away and was taken to a hospital in an ambulance and my journal was crushed in my pocket. I stayed in ER for seven hours and a Chinese magician restored me. At dawn I flew to Montana and barely recognized our dog. My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.

## THE MUSE IN OUR TIME

We were born short boys in tall grass.

We became the magicians who actually

sawed the girl in half. We were prosecuted

unfairly by the gods for this simple mistake

and exiled to the tropics where we wore

the masques of howler monkeys

until we became howler monkeys

in the fabulous zoo of our culture.

Now as an amateur surgeon I'm putting

the girl back together stitch by painful stitch

beside the creek in the winter twilight.

She begs me to stop. She wants to become

a night-blooming cereus only seen

every decade or so in the random dark.

## MUSE II

Pretty girls most often have pretty

parents but then for unknown genetic

reasons a beautiful woman is born

of homely parents. She is not happy

about being set aside by the gods.

At family gatherings truly ugly relatives

want to murder her but this is rarely

done in poetry since William Shakespeare.

Out in the orchard she is buggered

nearly to death by her cousins who all

become scientists who devise products

we never imagined we would need.

She is sent into the world. She crawls

into the low door of the city but yearns

to stand straight. She floats up a river

into the country and lives with wild dogs

who are soon hunted to death for sport.

She wants to step off the world but can't find

the edge. A man flies her to Mexico

and makes her a prostitute. She escapes

but a pimp slashes her face, a happy

moment because now she's not beautiful.

She walks twenty miles down an empty beach

and lives with an old, deaf fisherman.

Now her soul swells with the grandeur of the ocean,

the beauty of fish, the silence of man,

the moon and stars she finally understands.

## POET AT NINETEEN IN NYC

The poet looking for an immortal poem

from his usual pathetic position as a graduate

student in a university that doesn't exist.

He knows three constellations, this expert

of the stars, and sometimes notices the moon

by the time it reaches its first quarter.

He's admirable and keeps his chin high

in the city's arctic winds. He drinks

a hundred drinks a month, three a day

and a bit more for courage. He has a room

and a half, the half a tiny kitchenette,

and his table for writing and eating

is a piece of plywood he places on the bed.

Tacked above the bed are pictures of his heroes,

Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Lorca and Faulkner,

and of course Rimbaud. He doesn't fear rejection

because he keeps his work to himself. He thinks

he's as inevitable as a river but doesn't have time

to keep time. The hardest part is when the river

is too swift and goes underground for days on end.

## SISTER

I wanted to play a song for you

on our old $28 phonograph

from 1954 but the needle is missing

and they no longer make the needles.

It is the work of man to make a voice

a needle. You were buried at nineteen

in wood with Daddy. I've spent a lifetime

trying to learn the language of the dead.

The musical chatter of the tiny yellow finches

in the front yard comes closest. It's midnight

and I'm giving my nightly rub to the dog's

tummy, something she truly depends on.

Maybe you drifted upward as an ancient

bird hoping to nest on the moon.

## SKULL

You can't write the clear biography

of the aches and pains inside your skull.

Will I outlive my passport expiration?

Will the knots of the past beat me to death

like limber clubs, the Gordian knots

that never will be untied, big as bowling balls?

Maybe not. Each time I row the river

for six hours or so the innards of my skull

slightly change shape. Left alone knots

can unravel in the turbulence of water.

It isn't for me to understand why loved ones

died. My skull can't withstand

the Tao of the mighty river carrying me along

as if I were still and the mountains

capped by clouds were rushing past.

After we submerge do we rise again in another form?

Meanwhile I speculate on the seven pills

I must take each day to stay alive.

I ask each one, "Are we doing your job?"

The only answer I've found is the moving

water whose music is without a single lyric.

## HORSES

In truth I am puzzled most in life

by nine horses.

I've been watching them for eleven weeks

in a pasture near Melrose.

Two are on one side of the fence and seven

on the other side.

They stare at one another from the same places

hours and hours each day.

This is another unanswerable question

to haunt us with the ordinary.

They have to be talking to one another

in a language without a voice.

Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,

sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

Linguists say that language comes after music

and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech

to order our days.

We live far out in the country where I hear

creature voices night and day.

Like us they are talking about their lives

on this brief visit to earth.

In truth each day is a universe in which

we are tangled in the light of stars.

Stop a moment. Think about these horses

in their sweet-smelling silence.

## RENÉ CHAR II

What are these legitimate fruits

of daring?

The natural brain, bruised by mental

somersaults.

On a bet to sleep naked

out in the snow.

To push your forefingers into your ears

until they meet the brain.

To climb backwards into the heavens because

we poets live in reverse.

It is too late to seduce the heroine

in my stories.

How can enough be enough

when it isn't?

The Great Mother has no ears and _hallelujah_

is the most impossible word in the language.

I can only say it to birds, fish, and dogs.

## XMAS CHEESEBURGERS

I was without Christmas spirit

so I made three cow dogs,

Lola and Blacky and Pinto,

cheeseburgers with ground chuck

and French St. André cheese

so that we'd all feel better.

I delivered them to Hard Luck Ranch

and said, "Chew each bite 32 times."

They ignored me and gobbled.

The world that used to nurse us

now keeps shouting inane instructions.

That's why I ran to the woods.

## MARY THE DRUG ADDICT

Mary, spayed early so a virgin like her ancient namesake, is a drug addict. She was stomped on as a puppy by an angry little girl and thus a lifetime of spinal problems. Now an old woman she waits for her pain pills every day and then she's a merry animal. Up until a few years back she'd run much farther than her Lab sister until she was a tiny black peppercorn in the alfalfa field. She walks much closer now turning to check if I'm following along. She's an English cocker and sniff s the ground then pauses to meditate on the scent. To understand Mary we have to descend into the cellar, the foundation of our being, the animal bodies we largely ignore. She sleeps a lot, eats kibble without interest and craves meat tidbits with the pleasure making her wiggle. Outdoors, her eyes wide to the open she acts with exuberance, our lost birthright. Like all beautiful women she has become beautifully homely. In the evening I lift her onto the couch despite her brush with a skunk, and we speak a bone-deep language without nouns and verbs, a creature-language skin to skin.

## NIGHT CREATURES

"The horses run around, their feet

are on the ground." In my headlights

there are nine running down the highway,

clack-clacking in the night, swerving

and drifting, some floating down the ditch,

two grays, the rest colorless in the dark.

What can I do for them? Nothing, night

is swallowing all of us, the fences

on each side have us trapped,

the fences tight to the ditches. Suddenly they turn.

I stop. They come back toward me,

my window open to the glorious smell of horses.

I'm asking the gods to see them home.

## DEAF DOG'S BARK

A bit flinty. Trace of a squeak.

Does she hear herself?

"I hear only my own music," said Beethoven.

Is it an announcement or warning

from one so small and crippled

in youth by a child

who stomped her spine?

She listens to the glory of her past.

She knows where she is

in our home. She's Mary,

the deer chaser, a woman

of power, a lion in her mind,

roaring so weakly into the dark,

trying to make hips follow chest.

## JUNE THE HORSE

Sleep is water. I'm an old man surging

upriver on the back of my dream horse

that I haven't seen since I was ten.

We're night riders through cities, forests, fields.

I saw Stephanie standing on the steps of Pandora's Box

on Sheridan Square in 1957. She'd never spoken

to me but this time, as a horse lover, she waved.

I saw the sow bear and two cubs. She growled

at me in 1987 when I tried to leave the cabin while her cubs

were playing with my garbage cans. I needed a drink

but I didn't need this big girl on my ass.

We swam up the Neva in St. Petersburg in 1972

where a girl sat on the bank hugging a red icon

and Raskolnikov, pissed off and whining, spat on her feet.

On the Rhône in the Camargue fighting bulls

bellowed at us from a marsh and 10,000 flamingos

took flight for Africa.

This night-riding is the finest thing I do at age seventy-two.

On my birthday evening we'll return to the original

pasture where we met and where she emerged from the pond

draped in lily pads and a coat of green algae.

We were children together and I never expected her return.

One day as a brown boy I shot a wasp nest with bow and arrow,

releasing hell. I mounted her from a stump and without

reins or saddle we rode to a clear lake where the bottom

was covered with my dreams waiting to be born.

One day I'll ride her as a bone-clacking skeleton.

We'll ride to Veracruz and arcelona, the up toVenus.

## POET NO. 7

We must be bareback riders. The gods

abhor halters and stirrups, even a horse

blanket to protect our asses is forbidden.

Finally, our legs must grow into the horse

because we were never meant to get off.

## A PUZZLE

I see today that everyone on earth

wants the answer to the same question

but none has the language to ask it.

The inconceivable is clearly the inconceivable.

Bum mutter, teethchatter, brain flotsam,

we float up from our own depths

to the sky not the heavens, an invention

of the murderers. Dogs know the answer

by never asking the question but can't advise us.

Here is the brain that outran the finish line:

on a dark day when the world was slate

the yellow sun blasted the mountain across

the river so that it flung its granitic light

in the four directions to which we must bow.

Life doesn't strangle on ironies, we made

that part up. Close after dawn the sheep next door

leave their compound, returning at twilight.

With the rains this was a prodigious green year,

and now the decay of autumn sleeps in dead comfort.

Words are moving water — muddy, clear, or both.

## RUMINATION

I sit up late dumb as a cow,

which is to say

somewhat conscious with thirst

and hunger, an eye for the new moon

and the morning's long walk

to the water tank. Everywhere

around me the birds are waiting

for the light. In this world of dreams

don't let the clock cut up

your life in pieces.

## DAN'S BUGS

I felt a little bad about the nasty earwig

that drowned in my nighttime glass of water,

lying prone at the bottom like a shipwrecked mariner.

There was guilt about the moth who died

when she showered with me, possibly a female.

They communicate through wing vibrations.

I was careful when sticking a letter

in our rural mailbox, waiting for a fly to escape,

not wanting her to be trapped there in the darkness.

Out here in the country many insects invade our lives

and many die in my nightcap, floating and deranged.

On the way to town to buy wine and a chicken

I stopped from 70 mph to pick up

a wounded dragonfly fluttering on the yellow line.

I've read that some insects live only for minutes,

as we do in our implacable geologic time.

## INVISIBLE

Within the wilder shores of sky

billions of insects are migrating

for reasons of sex and food,

or so I'm told by science,

in itself as invisible as the specters

of love and death. What can I see

from here but paper and the mind's

random images? A living termite

was found on sticky paper at 19,000 feet.

Perhaps she thought she had lost

the world as I think I must, barring

flora, fauna, family, dogs, the earth,

the mind ground of being as it is.

A few years back I began to lose

the world of people. I couldn't hold on.

Rüppell's vulture was seen at 36,000 feet

for reasons the gods keep from us.

## MARY

How can this dog on the cushion

at my feet have passed me

in the continuum of age, a knot

in our hearts that never unwinds? This dog

is helplessly herself and cannot think otherwise.

When called she often conceals herself

behind a bush, a tree, or tall grass

pondering if she should obey. Now crippled

at twelve, bearing up under pain

on the morning run, perhaps wondering

remotely what this is all about, the slowness

that has invaded her bones. Splayed out

now in a prone running pose

she moves in sleep slowly into the future

that does not welcome us but is merely

our destiny in which we disappear

making room for others on the long march.

The question still is how did she pass me

happily ahead in this slow goodbye?

## REMOTE FRIENDS

Yes, in the predawn black

the slim slip of the waning moon,

the cuticle of an unknown god,

perhaps Mother Night, the outline

of her back between points of stars,

she's heading south toward Mexico

preferring mountains, rivers, oceans, jungles

that return her affection for earth.

It's been hard work to guide migrating

birds for 150 million years. To her

we're newcomers, but then she married

me, a stranger whom she's worn thin as water.

## POET SCIENCE

In my recent studies I have discovered cancer.

Last year it was the language of birds

and the year before, time by drowning a clock in the toilet.

It is life's work to recognize the mystery

of the obvious. Cancer is a way the gods

have learned to kill us. In numbers it's tied

with war and famine. Time is the way

our deaths are numbered precisely. The birds

and their omnipresent language, their music,

have resisted conclusions as surely as the stars

above them which they use for navigation.

I have prayed willingly to their disinterest,

the way they look past me into the present,

their songs greeting both daylight and dark.

They've been on earth fifty times longer than us

right down to the minute, and they've told me

that cancer and time are only death's music,

that we learned this music before birth without hearing it.

Like cancer cells we've lost our way and will do anything to live.

My mind can't stop its only child so frightened of the dark.

## ACHE

All this impermanence and suffering

we share with dogs, bees, crows,

the aquatic insect that lives but a single

minute on a summer evening

then descends to its river burial,

perhaps into the mouth of a trout

already full of its brothers and sisters

while in a nearby meadow the she

wolf approaches an infant elk

she'll share with her litter.

Many of us live full term never seeing

the bullet, the empty plate of hunger,

the invisible noose of disease.

We can't imagine the rings of the bristlecone

that lived for millennia. We cut it down

to number the years like our own insolent birthdays.

## ORIOLE

Emerging after three months to the edge

of the hole of pain I arrange

ten orange halves on a stiff wire

off the patio between a small tree

and the feeder. Early next morning

five orioles of three species appear:

Scott's, hooded, Bullock's. Thinking

of those long nights: this is what agony wanted,

these wildly colored birds to inhabit

my mind far from pain.

Now they live inside me.

## BLUE SHAWL

The other day at the green dumpsters,

an old woman in a blue shawl

told me that she loved my work.

## RIVER I

I was there in a room in a village

by the river when the moon fell into the window

frame and was trapped there too long.

I was fearful but I was upside down

and my prayers fell off the ceiling.

Our small dog Jacques jumped on the sofa

near the window, perched on the sofa's back

and released the moon to head south.

Just after dawn standing in the green yard

I watched a girl ride down the far side

of the railroad tracks on a beauteous white horse

whose lower legs were wrapped in red tape.

Above her head were mountains covered with snow.

I decided we were born to be moving water not ice.

## RIVER II

Another dawn in the village by the river

and I'm jealous of the 63 moons of Jupiter.

Out in the yard inspecting a lush lilac bush

followed by five dogs who have chosen

me as their temporary leader. I look up

through the vodka jangle of the night before,

straight up at least 30,000 feet where the mountains

are tipping over on me. Dizzy I grab the lilacs

for support. Of course it's the deceitful clouds

playing the game of becoming mountains.

Once on our nighttime farm on a moonlit walk

the clouds pushed by a big western wind

became a school of whales swimming hard

across the cold heavens and I finally knew

that we walk the bottom of an ocean we call sky.

## RIVER III

Saw a poem float by just beneath

the surface, another corpse of the spirit

we weren't available to retrieve.

It isn't comforting to admit that our days

are fatal, that the corpse of the spirit

gradually becomes the water and waits

for another, or perhaps you, to return

to where you belong, not in the acting

of a shaker sprinkling its salt

everywhere. You have to hold your old

heart lightly as the female river holds

the clouds and trees, its fish

and the moon, so lightly but firmly

enough so that nothing gets away.

## RIVER IV

The river seems confused today because it

swallowed the thunderstorm above us. At my age

death stalks me but I don't mind. This is to be

expected but how can I deal with the unpardonable

crime of loneliness? The girl I taught to swim

so long ago has gone to heaven, the kind of thing

that happens while we're on the river fishing and

seeing the gorgeously colored western tanagers and the

profusion of nighthawks that some call bullbats,

nightjars, and down on the border they call them

goatsuckers for stealing precious milk. I love

this misfiring of neurons in which I properly

understand nothing, not the wild high current

or the thunderstorm on which it chokes. Did the

girl swim to heaven through the ocean of sky?

Maybe. I can deny nothing. Two friends are mortally

ill. Were it not for the new moon my sky

would collapse tonight so fed by the waters of memory.

## RIVER V

Resting in an eddy against dense greenery

so thick you can't see into it but can fathom

its depth by waning birdcalls, hum of insects.

This morning I learned that we live and die

as children to the core only carrying

as a protective shell a fleshy costume

made up mostly of old scar tissue

from before we learned how to protect ourselves.

It's hard to imagine that this powerful

river had to begin with a single drop

far into the mountains, a seep or trickle

from rocks and then the runoff from snowmelt.

Of course watershed means the shedding

of water, rain, a hundred creeks, a thousand

small springs. My mind can't quite

contain this any more than my own inception

in a singe sperm joining a single egg

utterly invisible, hidden in Mother's moist

dark. Out of almost nothing, for practical

purposes nothing, then back as ancient

children to the great nothing again,

the song of man and water moving to the ocean.

## RIVER VI

I thought years ago that old Heraclitus was wrong.

You can't step into the same river even once.

The water slips around your foot like liquid time

and you can't dry it off after its passage.

Don't bother taking your watch to the river,

the moving water is a glorious second hand.

Properly understood the memory loses nothing

and we humans are never allowed to let our minds

sit on the still bank and have a simple picnic.

I had an unimaginable dream when young

of being a river horse that could easily plunge upstream.

Perhaps it came from our huge black mare June

whom I rode bareback as she swam the lake

in big circles, always getting out where she got in.

Meanwhile this river is surrounded by mountains

covered with lodgepole pines that are mortally diseased,

browning in the summer sun. Everyone knows

that lightning will strike and Montana burn.

We all stay quiet about it, this blessed oxygen

that makes the world a crematory. Only the water is safe.

## RIVER VII

The last trip to the river this year. Tonight I think

of the trout swimming in a perfect, moonless

dark, navigating in the current by the tiny pinpoint

of stars, night wind rippling the eddies,

and always if you stick your head under

the surface, the slight sound of the pebbles

rubbing against pebbles. Today I saw two dead

pelicans. I heard they are shot because they eat

trout, crows shot because they eat duck eggs,

wolves shot for eating elk or for chasing

a bicyclist in Yellowstone. Should we be shot

for eating the world and giving back our puke?

Way down in Notch Bottom, ancient winter camp

for long-gone Indians, I am sweetly consoled

by our absolute absence except for a stretch

of fence on the bank, half washed away

by the current, a sequence of No Trespassing signs

to warn us away from a pricey though miasmic swamp.

The river can't heal everything. You have to do your part.

We've even bruised the moon. Still the birds are a chorus

with the moving flow, clearly relatives of Mozart,

the brown trout so lovely the heart flutters. Back home

something has eaten the unfledged swallows. It wasn't us.

I'm on another river now, it's swollen and turbulent.

"The spirit is here. Are you?" I ask myself.

## SPRING

Something new in the air today, perhaps the struggle of the bud to become a leaf. Nearly two weeks late it invaded the air but then what is two weeks to life herself? On a cool night there is a break from the struggle of becoming. I suppose that's why we sleep. In a childhood story they spoke of "the land of enchantment." We crawl to it, we short-lived mammals, not realizing that we are already there. To the gods the moon is the entire moon but to us it changes second by second because we are always fish in the belly of the whale of earth. We are encased and can't stray from the house of our bodies. I could say that we are released, but I don't know, in our private night when our souls explode into a billion fragments then calmly regather in a black pool in the forest, far from the cage of flesh, the unremitting "I." This was a dream and in dreams we are forever alone walking the ghost road beyond our lives. Of late I see waking as another chance at spring.

## SKY

Here along the Mexican border

working on the patio between

two bamboo thickets and facing

the creek, all that I hear while

staring down at the unforgiving paper

is chatter and song,

the crisp fluff of birds flying

back and forth to the feeders,

the creek that actually burbles,

and the nearly imperceptible sound

of the sky straining to keep

us on earth despite our disappointments,

our fatal cries that disappear

into her blueness, her blackness.

## MARCH IN PATAGONIA, AZ

Some days in March are dark

and some altogether too glittery

and loud with birds. There is recent news

of ancient cosmic events that have lost

significance. I recognize the current

moon from Granada several years

ago, a big Spanish moon though here

it hangs over Mexico, shining on blood

and the music wandering lost in the air.

At the ranch starving cattle

bawl loudly in the drought.

## BRAZIL

"It rains most in the ocean off Trinidad

so that the invisible sea flowers

never stop blooming on the lid of water."

Or so she said on a balcony in Bahia

in 1982, brushing her long black hair

upward into the wet moonlit night.

I'm staring east at the island of Itaparica

spangled with light a dozen miles at sea.

I think that it's not for me to determine the truth.

A half hour ago it was a snake far to the west

in the jungle which only ate flowers the color

of blood and laid seven red eggs every year.

In Brazil I'm adding to my knowledge

of the impossible. In her remote hometown

a condor stole and raised a child as its own.

At dinner of a roasted fish she said the child

had learned to fly and I broke, saying no,

that our arms have the wrong kind of feathers.

She was pissed and said, "I went to Miami

with an aunt when I was seven to fix my heart.

You only make guns, bombs, cars, and count money.

"Your ocean stank of gasoline, your food was white.

I saw an alligator eat a dog. A river

didn't run into the sea but went backwards.

"A century ago in my hometown the Virgin Mary

appeared and sang about her lost child in the river

of men. If you don't believe me you're wicked."

Back home in the cold our dogs run across

clear ice, their feet and shadows watched by fish.

I drop three lighted candles into moving water to survive Brazil.

## GRAND MARAIS

The wind came up so strongly at midnight

the cabin creaked in its joints and between

the logs, the tin roof hummed and shuddered

and in the woods you could hear the dead

trees called widow-makers falling

with staccato crashes, and by 3 a.m.

the thunderous roar of Lake Superior miles away.

My dog Rose comes from the sofa

where she invariably sleeps. Her face is close

to mine in the dark, a question on her breath.

Will the sun rise again? She gets on the bed trembling.

I wonder what the creature life is doing

without shelter? Rose is terribly frightened

of this lordly old bear I know who visits

the yard for the sunflower seeds I put out

for the birds. I placed my hand on his head one night

through the car window when I was drunk.

He doesn't give a shit about violent storms

knowing the light comes from his mind, not the sun.

## DESERT SNOW

I don't know what happens after death

but I'll have to chance it. I've been waking

at 5 a.m. and making a full study of darkness.

I was upset not hearing the predicted rain

that I very much need for my wildflowers.

At first light I see that it was the silent rain

of snow. I didn't hear this softest sigh

of windless snow softly falling

here on the Mexican border in the mountains,

snow in a white landscape of high desert.

The birds are confounded by this rare snow

so I go out with a spatula to clean the feeders,

turn on the radio not to the world's wretched news

but to the hot, primary colors of cantina music,

the warbles and shrieks of love, laughter, and bullets.

## REALITY

Nothing to console the morning but the dried grasshopper

on my desk who fell apart at my powerful touch.

Two days ago at dawn I awoke with a large black tear

stuck to my cheek that felt like a globule of tar.

The MRI machine at the Nogales hospital revealed

that the black tear is connected to heart, brain, penis

with three pieces of nearly invisible spiderweb.

My friend the urologist said that if even one breaks

Eros is dead in my body, a corpse of the memory of love.

Luckily I was diverted for a day by helping my wife

make Thanksgiving dinner for ten friends and neighbors,

brooding about the souls of 35 million turkeys

hovering visibly in the blue sky above our naked earth.

They can't fly away like the game birds I hunt, doves and quail.

As with people we've bred them so that they're unable to escape.

At certain remote locations they see through the fence

their mysterious cousins flying to tree limbs

and weep dry turkey tears of bitter envy.

I made the gravy, the most important substance on earth,

but now on Friday morning I'm back to my black tear

on my old brown cheek of barely alive Eros.

In slightly more than a week I'll be seventy-two.

How can I concoct this intricate fantasy of making love

to three French girls on a single Paris afternoon?

It begins with a not very good pot of coffee

in my room at the Hôtel de Suède on rue Vaneau

where at night I heard an owl, a chouette in the garden.

I meet two of the girls in the Luxembourg on a morning walk

where one, astoundingly, is reading a novel I wrote.

I demand ID to make sure they're of legal age.

One must be safe from the police in fantasies.

We go shopping and I buy them 100-euro

tricornered hats. We go to an apartment

and meet the older sister of one. She's twenty-three.

I sign my books they own and when I turn

they sit on the sofa with soft cotton skirts raised.

I forgot to add that it's a warm day in April.

Should I choose by saying, "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,"

or would this Michigan idiom frighten them?

I make a dream swan dive into a day of love and laughter

then suddenly I'm back at Hard Luck Ranch

giving the cow dogs biscuits. Old nitwit Petey

pisses in his food and water as Man in Our Time.

I am liberated back into the fragility of childhood.

## SHE

Nothing is as it appears to be.

What is this aging? What am I to make

of these pale, brutal numbers? For a moment I'm fourteen.

The sky didn't fall in, it fell out.

Men suck on their sugary black pistols

but the world isn't ruled for a second.

The pen is mightier than the sword

only in the fretwork of a poet's language.

At fourteen green was green and women

were the unreachable birds of night,

their fronts and backs telling us

we might not be alone in the universe,

their voices singing that the earth is female.

The humid summer night was as warm as birth,

and she swam out into the night beyond the dock light.

## LOVE

Love is raw as freshly cut meat,

mean as a beetle on the track of dung.

It is the Celtic dog that ate its tail in a dream.

It chooses us as a blizzard chooses a mountain.

It's seven knocks on the door you pray not to answer.

The boy followed the girl to school eating his heart

with each step. He wished to dance with her

beside a lake, the wind showing the leaves'

silvery undersides. She held the moist bouquet

of wild violets he had picked against her neck.

She wore the sun like her skin

but beneath, her blood was black as soil.

At the grave of her dog in the woods

she told him to please go away forever.

## BACK INTO MEMORY

The tears roll up my cheek

and the car backs itself south.

I pull away from the girl and reverse

through the door without looking.

In defiance of the body the mind

does as it wishes, the crushed bones

of life reknit themselves in sunlight.

In the night the body melts itself

down to the void before birth

before you swam the river into being.

Death takes care of itself like a lightning

stroke and the following thunder

is the veil being rent in twain.

The will to live can pass away

like that raven colliding with the sun.

In age we tilt toward home.

We want to sleep a long time, not forever,

but then to sleep a long time becomes forever.

## DEBTORS

They used to say we're living on borrowed

time but even when young I wondered

who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa

died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,

his four sons gathered, his papery hand

grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.

Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time

while I'm alive wondering whom I owe

for this indisputable gift of existence.

Of course time is running out. It always

has been a creek heading east, the freight

of water with its surprising heaviness

following the slant of the land, its destiny.

What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?

Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us

birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water

and all living things borrowing time.

Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

## PRISONERS

In truth I have lost my beauty

but this isn't as important as the violation

of the myth of the last meal due those

about to be executed. I believe in the sacred

obligation to give a man about to be dead

what he wants to eat. Not true. In Texas

it's limited to what's on hand, the hundreds

of tons of frozen garbage prisoners feed on.

Not to worry. I'm ineligible to be executed,

not being convicted of killing anyone, but after

a lifetime of chewing I'd choose a saltine cracker.

After all, we chew and chew and chew. Pigs, fish,

melancholy cows and gamboling lambs pass

through us, not to speak of fields of wheat

and lettuce, tomatoes and beans. Our jaws are strong

as a woman's thighs pumping up the stairs

of a tall building to throw herself from the roof

because she's tired of chewing, being penetrated

by swallowing, and of a man who chews

as if his life depended on it, which it does.

## CORRUPTION

Like Afghanistan I'm full of corruption.

My friend McGuane once said, "I'd gladly

commit a hundred acts of literary capitulation

to keep my dog in Alpo." The little ones needed

dental braces and flutes, cars and houses.

Off and on I've had this dangerous golden touch

like a key to a slot machine streaming 20-dollar

gold pieces. It was so easy to buy expensive

French wine that purges the grim melancholy

of livelihood, the drudgery of concocting fibs.

I know a man, happily married, who bought

a girl a hundred-dollar pair of panties. I was stunned.

For this price I buy a whole lamb each fall.

Now lamb and panties are gone though the panties

might be on a card table at a yard sale.

Right now a wind has come up and there's a strange

blizzard of willow buds outside my studio.

I'm on death row but won't give up corruption.

I've waterboarded myself. I'm guilty of everything.

## OUR ANNIVERSARY

I want to go back to that wretched old farm

on a cold November morning eating herring

on the oil tablecloth at daylight, the hard butter

in slivers and chunks on rye bread, gold-colored

homemade butter. Fill the woodbox, Jimmy.

Clots of cream in the coffee, hiss and crackle

of woodstove. Outside it's been the hardest freeze

yet but the heels still break through into the earth.

A winter farm is dead and you want to head for the woods.

In the barn the smell of manure and still-green hay

hit the nose with the milk in the metal pails.

Grandpa is on the last of seven cows,

tugging their dicklike udders, a squirt in the mouth

for the barn cat. My girlfriend loves another

and at twelve it's as if all the trees have died.

Sixty years later seven hummingbirds at the feeder,

miniature cows in their stanchions sipping liquid sugar.

We are fifty years together. There are still trees.

## DOORS

I'm trying to create an option for all

these doors in life. You're inside

or out, outside or in. Of late, doors

have failed us more than the two-party system

or marriages comprising only one person.

We've been fooled into thousands of dualisms

which the Buddha says is a bad idea.

Nature has portals rather than doors.

There are two vast cottonwoods near a creek

and when I walk between them I shiver.

Winding through my field of seventy-seven

large white pine stumps from about 1903

I take various paths depending on spirit.

The sky is a door never closed to us.

The sun and moon aren't doorknobs.

Dersu Uzala slept outside for forty-five years.

When he finally moved inside he died.

## GREED

I'm greedy for the pack rat to make

it across the swift creek. It's my first swimming

pack rat and I wonder why he wants the other side.

The scent of a pack-rat woman perhaps.

I'm greedy for those I prayed for to survive

cancer, greedy for money we don't need,

for the freshest fish to eat every day

without moving to the ocean's shore,

to have many lovers who don't ruin my marriage

and that my dog will live longer than me

to avoid the usual sharp boyhood heartbreak,

to regain the inch and a half I lost with age, to see

my youngest aunt pull up her nylons again in 1948.

Oh how I wanted a real sponge, a once-living

creature, and a wide chamois cloth to wash

cars for a quarter, a huge twenty-cent burger

and a five-cent Coca-Cola for lunch, greedy

that my beloved wife will last longer than me,

that the wind will blow harder up the girl's

summer dress, for three dozen oysters

and a bottle of 1985 Pétrus at twilight,

to smoke a cigarette again in a bar, that my

daughters live to be a hundred if they so wish,

that I march to heaven barefoot on a spring morning.

## CEREAL

Late-night herring binge causes sour

gut. My dog ate the Hungarian partridge

eggs in the tall grass, her jaws dripping

yolk, therefore I ate a cereal for breakfast

guaranteed to restore my problematic health.

Soon enough I'll be diving for my own

herring in the North Atlantic, or running so fast

I nearly take off like the partridge mother

abandoning her eggs to the canine monster.

It will be strange to be physically magnificent

at my age, the crowds of girls cooing

around me as I bounce up and down

as if my legs cannot contain their pogo strength,

but I leave the girls behind, bouncing across

a river toward the end of the only map we have,

the not very wide map of the known world.

## D.B.

A winter dawn in New York City

with people rushing to work

eating rolls, drinking paper cups

of coffee. This isn't the march of the dead

but people moving toward their livelihoods

in this grim, cold first sign of daylight.

I watched the same thing in Paris

and felt like the eternal meddler sitting

at the window, trying to avoid

conclusions about humans, their need

to earn their daily bread, as we used to say.

In Paris I know a lovely woman

who wears a twenty-foot-long wool skirt

to hide her legs from men. Who can blame

her though I fear the grave dangers

of this trailing garment clipped and woven

from lowly sheep. What a burden

it is to drag this heavy skirt

throughout the workday to hide from desire

as if her sexuality had become a car bomb

rather than a secret housepet hidden

from the landlords of the world who are always there.

## SUNLIGHT

After days of darkness I didn't understand

a second of yellow sunlight

here and gone through a hole in clouds

as quickly as a flashbulb, an immense

memory of a moment of grace withdrawn.

It is said that we are here but seconds in cosmic

time, twelve and a half billion years,

but who is saying this and why?

In the Salt Lake City airport eight out of ten

were fiddling relentlessly with cell phones.

The world is too grand to reshape with babble.

Outside the hot sun beat down on clumsy metal

birds and an actual ten-million-year-old

crow flew by squawking in bemusement.

We're doubtless as old as our mothers, thousands

of generations waiting for the sunlight.

## BRUTISH

The man eating lamb's tongue salad

rarely thinks of the lamb.

The oral surgeon jerking twenty teeth out

in a day still makes marinara sauce.

The German sorting baby shoes at Treblinka

writes his wife and children frequently.

The woman loves her husband, drops two kids

at day care, makes passionate love

to an old boyfriend at the Best Western.

We are parts. What part are you now?

The shit of the world has to be taken

care of every day. You have to choose

your part after you take care of the shit.

I've chosen birds and fish, the creatures

whose logic I wish to learn and live.

## NIGHTFEARS

What is it that you're afraid of at night?

Is it the gunman at the window, the rattler

slipping into your boot on the patio, the painful

quirk in your tummy or the semitruck

drifting across the centerline because the driver

is text-messaging a she-male girlfriend in El Paso?

Is it because so many birds these days are born

with one wing like poets in campus infirmaries,

that the ghouls of finance, or the post office,

have taken your paycheck to pay for Kool-Aid

parties around their empty pools? The night

has decided to stick around for a week

and people are confused, we creatures of habit

who took the sun for granted. She had decided

on whim to keep herself from us, calling down

the descent of a galactic cloud, to let flowers

wilt and die. Whole countries expire in hysteria

and troops must march in the glare of headlights.

When the red sun decides to rise again we humans

of earth swim through the acrid milk of our brains

toward the rising light, a new song on our lips,

but all creatures retreat from us, their murderers.

In real dawn's early light my poached egg is only an egg.

## BLUE

During last night's blue moon

the Great Matter and Original Mind

were as close as your skin.

In the predawn dark you ate muskmelon

and the color of the taste lit up the mind.

The first finch awoke and the moon

descended into its mountain burial.

## THE CURRENT POOR

The rich are giving the poor bright-colored

balloons, a dollar a gross, also bandages,

and leftover Mercurochrome from the fifties.

It is an autumn equinox and full moon present,

an event when night and day are precisely

equal, but then the poor know that night

always wins, grows wider and longer

until Christmas when they win a few minutes.

Under the tree there's an orange big as a basketball.

It is the exiled sun resting in its winter coolness.

## MOPING

Please help me, gentle reader. I need advice.

I need to carbonate my brain

before nightfall. One more night

with this heaviness will suffocate me.

It's probably only the terror

of particulars. Memories follow us

like earaches in childhood. I'm surrounded

by sad-eyed burros, those motel paintings

I thought were book reviewers and politicians

but no, they're all my dead friends

who keep increasing in numbers until

it occurs to me that I might join them one day

floating out there in the anemic ether

of nothingness, but that's not my current business.

Just for the time being my brain needs oxygen

though I'm not sure what it is, life's puzzle

where you wake in a foreign land and the people

haven't shown themselves but the new birds

are haunting. The mind visits these alien Egypts,

these incalculable sunrises in a new place,

these birds of appetite with nowhere to land.

## CHURCH

After last night's storm the tulip

petals are strewn across the patio

where they mortally fluttered. Only the gods

could reconnect them to their green stems

but they choose not to perform such banal

magic. Life bores deep holes in us

in hopes the nature of what we are

might sink into us without the blasphemy

of the prayer for parlor tricks. Ask the gods

to know them before you beg for favors.

The pack rat removes the petals one by one.

Now they are in a secret place, not swept away.

The death of flowers is unintentional. Who knows

if either of us will have a memory of ourselves?

If you stay up in the mountains it's always cold

but if you come down to the world of men you suffocate

in the folds of the overripe ass of piety, the smell

of alms not flowers, the smiling beast of greed.

## CHATTER

Back on the blue chair before the green studio

I'm keeping track of the outside world

rather than the inside where my brain seethes

in its usual mischief. Like many poets

I'm part blackbird and part red squirrel

and my brain chatters, shrieks, and whistles

but outside it tends to get real quiet

as if the greenery, garden, and mountains

can be put into half sleep though a female

blackbird is irritated with me. She's protecting

her fledgling child that died last Friday.

I placed a small white peony on its body.

Meanwhile the outside is full of the stuff of life.

Inside it's sitting there slumped with the burden

of memory and anecdotal knowledge, the birds of appetite

flitting here and there singing about sex and food,

the girl bending over with her impossible target,

or will it be foie gras or bologna and mayo?

The fish back then were larger and swam past

along with a few horses and dogs. Japanese

archers once used dogs for target practice

and that's why we won the war. A dead friend

still chatters his squirrel chatter like the squirrel

in the TV hunting program shot in the gut,

scurrying in a circle carrying the arrow

on a narrowing route. Funerals, parties,

and voyages greet the mind without gentleness.

Outside the mother blackbird shrieks. I can't help.

## RETURN

Leaving on an exciting journey

is one thing, though most of all

I am engaged in homecoming —

the dogs, the glass of wine, a favorite

pillow that missed your head, the local

night with its familiar darkness.

The birds that ignored your absence

are singing at dawn assuring you

that all is inconceivable.

## PRADO

After the ghostly Prado and in the Botanic

Gardens I tried to get in touch with Goya's

dogs. I called and called near the tiny blue roses

but likely my language was wrong

for these ancient creatures. Maybe they

know we destroyed the good hunting

in Spain and won't leave their paintings.

I can't give up. My waning vision

is fairly good at seeing dog souls. I wait

listening to unknown birds, noting the best voice

comes from one small and brown.

I feel a muzzle on my hand and knee

while thinking of the Caravaggio with David

looking down at the slain Goliath. This never

happens, this slaying of the brutal monster.

We know the ones that have cursed our lives.

Franco can't hear me talking to the ghost dog.

I was lucky that early on the birds and fish

disarmed me and the monster in my soul fled.

But where am I? Where can an animal hide?

## DEATH AGAIN

Let's not get romantic or dismal about death.

Indeed it's our most unique act along with birth.

We must think of it as cooking breakfast,

it's that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl

or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin

after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,

slide into the fire. Of course it's a little hard

to accept your last kiss, your last drink,

your last meal about which the condemned

can be quite particular as if there could be

a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers

sweep by the inner eye, but it's mostly a placid

lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon

call, and staring into the still, opaque water.

We'll know as children again all that we are

destined to know, that the water is cold

and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.

## SUITE OF UNREASON

Nearly all my life I've noted that some of my thinking was atavistic, primitive, totemistic. This can be disturbing to one fairly learned. In this suite I wanted to examine this phenomenon.

The moon is under suspicion.

Of what use is it?

It exudes its white smoke of light.

Her name was imponderable.

Sitting in the grass seven feet

from the lilacs she knew

she'd never have a lover.

She tends to her knitting

which is the night.

That morning the sun forgot to rise

and for a while no one noticed

except a few farmers, who shot themselves.

The girl near the Théâtre de l'Odéon

walked so swiftly

we were astonished.

The fish with the huge tumor

jumped higher than my head

from my hand when released.

The girl in the green dress

sang a wordless carol

on the yellow school bus.

The truest night of the hunter

is when like his prey

he never wakes up.

Only one cloud

is moving the wrong way

across the sky

on Sunday morning.

The girl kissed a girl,

the boy kissed a boy.

What would become of them?

The violent wind.

The violent wind.

The violent wind.

On watch on the ship's stern.

The past disappears

with the ship's wake

and the furling dark waters.

A local girl walked over the top

of the Absaroka Mountain Range

and was never seen again. Some say

a grizzly bear got her, some say aliens,

I think that fueled by loneliness

she is still walking.

One day a heron walked

up our front steps and looked

into the front-door window.

Was it a heron and also

something else?

Years ago at the cabin when returning

from the saloon at night

I'd scratch the ears of a bear

who'd rest his chin on the car windowsill.

Azure. All told a year of water.

Some places with no bottom.

I had hoped to understand it

but it wasn't possible. Fish.

She told me in white tennis shorts

that when you think you can't

take it anymore you're just getting started.

No pieces can be put back together.

Last week in this pasture it was 75.

Today it's 29 and snowing. The world is too small

with a limited amount of weather

with no cosmic 15,000-mph winds.

A piece of luck!

These birds. Cutting up often dreary

life and letting joy seep through.

What are they? It's not for me to know

but to sense, to feel flight and song,

even in today's gray snowy sky.

Why does the mind compose this music

well before the words occur? The gods

created the sun and we the lightbulb

and the medicine that kept the happy child alive.

Some of my friends sought their deathbeds,

Celtic dogs with their death tails

in their teeth. I thought I knew

them but I didn't. They ignored birds.

Late October and now I wear a wool

cap around the clock, take three naps a day.

I've no clear memory why this happens,

something about the earth tilting on an axis.

Yesterday twenty-three sandhill cranes flew north. Why?

I pray for seven women I know

who have cancer. I can't tell you why

they have cancer and neither can doctors.

They are beaten by a stranger with no face.

Recently ghosts are more solid than we are,

they have color and meat on their bones,

even odor and voices. You can only tell them

by what's missing. A nose, ear, feet on backward,

their hair that floats though the air is still.

We fear the small hole in our brain

that made its tubular descent to the center of the earth

when we were born. In the loveliest landscape,

the tinge of death. The photo of the mammoth grizzly

gaining on the young buffalo? No, the tinge is in the air.

Fifty years ago in our cold, snowbound

house in the north, Carlos Montoya brought sunlight.

When I finally went to Seville and Granada,

the cold house sometimes entered my hotel rooms,

a flash of snowdrifts among the orange trees.

Off Ecuador the whale was so close I could smell

her oily smell, look into a soccer-ball eye.

I was frightened when the motor quit

and I couldn't see land. Now I can't see

the ocean in the mountains, only watch the rivers run.

After a long siege of work

I wake up to a different world.

I'm older of course, but colors and shapes

have changed. The mountains have moved a bit,

our children are older. How could this happen?

When young I read that during the Philippine War

we shot six hundred Indians in a wide pit. It didn't seem fair.

During my entire life I've been helpless

in this matter. I even dream about it.

I read so much that my single eye became hot

as if it had been staring into nebulae.

Of course it had. On some clear nights in the country

the stars can exhaust us. They only mean what they are.

In summer I walk the dogs at dawn

before the rattlesnakes awake. In cold weather

I walk the dogs at dawn out of habit.

In the pastures we find many oval deer beds

of crushed grass. Their bodies are their homes.

The tree only intends what it is with its dictator

genome. Like us they don't see what's coming.

They often rot from inside out though it can take

decades. When sawed down you smell the sharp

edged ripeness of their lives, their blood.

The clouds are only a foot above my head

and there's a brisk cold wind from the north.

Still, when I pass the yard headed for the hills

the garden is lavish with dying and dead

flowers, so many wild immutable colors

that my cold head soars up through the clouds.

Out in the pasture I found the second concealed

hole descending to a room sculpted from hard dirt.

The previous owner was frightened of atomic attack.

Now it's the home of the beast god forgot to invent.

This is where our bodies will sit down to eat us.

On television I saw a tall willowy girl jump

seven feet in the air. How grand to have a dozen

of these girls weaving in and out of the pines

and willows in the yard and jumping so high,

perhaps to Stravinsky, the landscape visible

under their bodies. They don't have to be nice.

Art often isn't though it scrubs the soul fresh.

The beauty of the rattlesnake is in its threat.

As the Bulgarians say, the moon is to blame.

Come to think of it that's right. The moon

works in waves of power like the ocean

and I was swept away into wrongdoing

when the moon was large. I am innocent.

Of late I can wake up and the world

isn't quite recognizable or I'm finally

with age losing my touch, my control.

Three days seemed identical but then they were

and perhaps in losing my self all became lucid.

This isn't a brave new world but one finally revealed.

The brush I scrub my soul with each morning

is made of the ear-hairs of a number of animals:

dogs, pigs, deer, goat, raccoon, a wolverine,

and pinfeathers of particular birds, a secret.

Brush too hard, your ambitions will be punished.

I took the girl to the dance but she returned

with another. I forgave her. I took her to another

dance and she went home with two men. I forgave

her again. This became a pattern, I forgave

her so the maggots of hatred wouldn't eat my brain.

The night is long for a hungry dog.

We're not with them in spirit. They're alone.

The small teddy bear Lulu gave me in France

suddenly tipped over on my desk. Does this mean

my beloved is dead? She's ninety-three. Her

food and wine were the essence of earth.

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

and mountains of the Mexican border

I've followed the calls of birds

that don't exist into thickets

and up canyons. I'm unsure

if all of me returned.

I left this mangy little

three-legged bear two big fish

on a stump. He ate them at night

and at dawn slept like a god

leaning against the stump

in a chorus of birds.

The day was so dulcet and beautiful

I could think about nothing.

I lost my head.

A big warm wind in November,

yellow willow leaves

swirl around one hundred

white sheep.

This world is going to sleep.

Woke up from a nap and in an instant

knew I was alive. It was startling

to the point of fear. Emotions and sensations

were drowning me. This had never happened before.

On a blue chair in a pasture I relearned the world.

I've heard it three times from the woods,

le cri de Merlin. Fear is the price

you pay for remoteness, pure fear, somber

and penetrating. Maybe it's just that female wolf

I saw. The world is not what we thought it was.

In the Yucatán the jungle was from the movies

until the second day, then became itself.

I go away then come home but the jungle's

birds and snakes are with me in the snow.

You carry with you all the places you've ever been.

In a foreign city, even New York, I'm never

convinced I'll get back home where I wish to be.

It seems unlikely. The routes disappear.

You can follow the birds home but they're too fast

and often change their minds. Especially crows.

Reading Gilfillan's _Warbler Road_ I learn

what I don't care about anymore by its absence.

These tiny birds are the living jewelry of the gods.

They clothe my life in proper mystery telling me

that all is not lost, harboring as they do stillborn children.

I'm quite tired of beating myself up

to write. I think I'll start letting

the words slip out like a tired child.

"Can I have a piece of pie" he asks,

and then he's asleep back on the cusp of the moon.

Again I wonder if I'll return.

France twice this fall, then New York. Will I know

if I don't return? The basic question of life.

Does Robert Frost know he's dead? His Yankee wit

a dust mote. God's stories last until no one hears.

The fly on the window is not a distant crow

in the sky. We're forced into these decisions.

People are forever marrying the wrong people

and the children of the world suffer.

Their dreams hang in the skies out of reach.

There's no question about circles, curves,

and loops, life's true structures, but the edges,

straight lines, squares come from us.

We must flee these shapes, even linear sentences

that limit us to doors, up and down ladders,

straight trajectories which will curve in eternity.

In Africa back in 1972 one day I studied

a female lion with blood on her fluttering whiskers,

traces of dark blood on her muzzle. A creature died

as we all must. In my seventies I see the invisible

lion not stalking but simply waiting, the solution

of the mystery I don't want to solve. She's waiting.

One day near here there was an earthquake

that started a new river in the mountains. During

the ponderous snowmelt in spring the river

is hundreds of feet deep and massive boulders roll

crashing along the bottom though you can't see them.

I've traveled back to the invention of trees

but never water. Water is too far in the blind past

whereas trees have eyes that help us see

their penetration of earth. Much that you see

isn't with your eyes. Throughout the body are eyes.

Of course we are condemned to life without parole

until the gods usher us in to our executioners

who live in a hot windowless room, always dark.

But then our fragility imagines everything

and the final moment is a kiss from the lipless gods.

Years before Hubble I thrust myself

far up into the night and saw that the constellations

were wildly colored. This frightened me

so I swam a river at night waiting for the stars

to resume their whiteness to adapt to my limits.

Years before Hubble I thrust myself

far up into the night and saw that the constellations

were wildly colored. This frightened me

so I swam a river at night waiting for the stars

to resume their whiteness to adapt to my limits.

In Fillmore, Utah, night of the full moon,

Nov. 20, a day of blizzard, driving rain,

at 4:44 a.m. I'm arranging my tiny petrified

truffles from the Dordogne on the motel table.

They look like the decayed teeth of a small predator.

I'll leave one behind to start a new civilization.

The birds of winter. How I brooded

about them in my childhood. Why not fly south?

In the kingdom of birds everyone lives until they don't.

It's sudden. The chickadee hanging on a barb

of wire half eaten by the northern shrike. Birds kill

each other like we do but to eat. We're both five billion.

Whoever destroys their home rapes the gods.

The body wins another little argument

with doom. You wake to a crisp, clear morning

and you're definitely not dead. The golden light

flows down the mountain across the creek. A little vodka

and twelve hours of sleep. Nature detonates your mind

with the incalculable freshness of the new day.

The creek bed in front of our casita

has many tracks: javelina, deer, mountain

lion, and sometimes in the sand the serpentine

trace of a fat rattler. Foremost I love

the tracks left by hundreds of species of birds

that remain in the air like we do.

What vices we can hold in our Big Heads

and Big Minds, our Humor and Humility.

We don't march toward death, it marches toward us

as a summer thunderstorm came slowly across

the lake long ago. See the lightning of mortality dance,

the black clouds whirling as if a million crows.

Doom should be ashamed of itself.

It's so ordinary happening to billions

of creatures. It's common as a toilet seat,

the discarded shoes of a lifetime. It's proper

that it often hides itself until the last moment

and then the eternal silent music begins.

I'm unaware of what kind of singer I've become.

Each night there's a glass of vodka that quickly

becomes the color of my blood, the color of the guts

of archangels, the color pumped in dirt by the hearts

of soldiers. Any more than one glass of vodka

smears the constellations, the true source of light.

In my final moment I'll sing a nonsense ditty

of reconciliation knowing that music came

before words. I'm only a painter in Lascaux.

I've sold my destiny for a simple quarter that bought

me the world that I've visited at twilight.

I will sing even with my tongue sliced

into a fork. At the hospital this morning

I learned I'll be a nursemaid forever

or exactly as long as forever lasts. I study birds

that give me the tentative spaciousness of flight.
About the Author

Jim Harrison, one of America's most versatile and celebrated writers, is the author of thirty-four books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—including _Legends of the Fall,_ the acclaimed trilogy of novellas, and _The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems._ His books have been translated into two dozen languages, and in 2007 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With a fondness for open space and anonymous thickets, he divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.
Books by Jim Harrison

POETRY COLLECTIONS

Plain Song

Locations

Outlyer and Ghazals

Letters to Yesenin

Returning to Earth

Selected and New Poems: 1961-1981

The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems

After Ikkyū

The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted

Kooser

Saving Daylight

In Search of Small Gods Songs of Unreason

NONFICTION

Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction

The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving

Gourmand

Off to the Side: A Memoir

NOVELS

Wolf: A False Memoir A Good Day to Die Farmer

Warlock

Sundog

Dalva

The Road Home

True North

Returning to Earth

The English Major

The Great Leader

NOVELLA TRILOGIES

Legends of the Fall

The Woman Lit by Fireflies

Julip

The Beast God Forgot to Invent

The Summer He Didn't Die

The Farmer's Daughter

CHILDREN'S

The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

Links

jimharrison.com
Acknowledgments

"Suite of Unreason" appeared in _Narrative._ "Blue" and "René Char II" appeared in _New Poets of the American West_ (Many Voices Press)."Sunlight" appeared in _Reflections_ (Yale Divinity School).
Copyright 2011 by Jim Harrison

All rights reserved

Cover art: Russell Chatham, _Summer Storm,_ 1998.

Lithograph 16" x 20".

ISBN: 978-1-55659-389-5

eISBN: 978-1-61932-038-3

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