Heat

Only June and we're haying the horses,
Last year's bales almost depleted.  The first
Cutting weeks off, if ever.  The sky
A flatiron, a whitish sheet
Threadbare with longing.  Every morning
We check the forecast.  Another scorcher,
No rain in sight.  Red bullseye
On the weather map.  The broken records,
Wells running dry.  Whirlpools of flies
Envelope the woodlot the horses shun
To stamp in baleful sun.  Small stingers
Abrade their long-lashed eyes.  Sweatbees
Settle on our naked shoulders.  The chorus of
Heat raises its ecclesiastical voice.

Lake Effect

Skin

Its capacity for holding in
the vulnerable
and harmonious organs.

Egyptian priests preserved it
oiled and wrapped like cocoons.
After George Parrott, the train robber,
was hanged, Doc Osborne had him
skinned and tanned
into a pair of fine leather shoes.
The Nazis made lampshades
from the skins of Jews.

In “The Trees” Richter describes
Indians skinning a captured
wolf, letting it run red
and hopeless into the woods
while they jeered drunk
on white man's whiskey.

As we age, our skin thins,
its map splotches with destroyed cities.
The continent of the self erodes.
Theologians insist our bodies
will arise on the Last Day
in wondrous skins of belief..

10X3 Plus

Deja Vu

The pears have ripened.

They are firm as idols.

Every branch makes obeisance

To its fruit. A light wind

Holds the gold flesh in its fingers.

The stems neither glue themselves

Fiercely nor do they break at touch.

Their adhesion is now perfect.

The time of this phenomenon is brief

Next week will see

Windfall rivers in mottled light.

The pure scent of pears

Like fairest flesh, like clearest water,

Suffused with the antique odor

Of love beginning to bruise.

We walk through the pear orchard.

Summer is almost over.

The nights are cooler.

The trees shudder with golden tears

As if a goddess in the root

Whispered of waste and winter.

An oracle

Mists along the distant river.

Its truths go up in smoke.

We have been here.

We have been here.

Windless Orchard

Bears

Hiking

in the Beartooth range

we fasten bells to our packs.

Tattered lodgepole pines

betray a bear's territory.

We sing loudly. We look for fresh sign.

Later, picking blueberries,

a figure in a shaggy black coat

angles into my vision.

It is not a portly man

as I, for a split-second, thought.

The dog heckles it off.

Bears. The gypsies

taught them to dance

on a bed of hot coals.

The bearleader

striding into a village. The bear

with a ring in its nose.

Jugglers and musicians,

women in gaudy skirts

and gold bangles sweeping through the dust.

The bear jigging its mockery of joy

while tambourines shake and coins shower.

Bears.

They swagger into campsites

looking for coolers.

Their little pigeyes

red and vicious. They

swing their snouts

savoringly over garbage.

Thirteen people have been killed

by grizzlies in Glacier

in the last decade. Mostly

they were asleep in down bags

or making love. The mutilated women

were menstruating--this could be a factor.

Smell of blood. Smell of sexual

activity.

The killer bears

traditionally sows with cubs

or old crippled males

are getting younger and bolder.

One theory: cubs who observe their mother

driving off humans, will imitate her behavior.

A full-grown grizzly

can break a moose spine with one blow.

Separate a man's face from his skull

easy as filleting a trout,

drag a screaming woman

through the woods for miles.

A child wakes up screaming.

All he can tell you is bears

bears. He is beyond comfort.

At last his whimper

ebbs., he snuggles into his pillow,

the light goes off, the door closes,

he sleeps

hugging the bear to his heart.

Bears. In the old stories

their skins fell off.

A prince stood silhouetted against the fire

with the spell lifting. All it took was love.

Tomorrow

How I Came to Write This Poem

First, set pieces

Clever as zircons,

Then weather,

A sky of cawing birds

And roiling clouds, my

Metaphor or badlands

Deceivingly pink and gold in dawnlight.

It is the angle of sun

Which captivates,

The molten canyon driving west

At sunset. The pearly morning

Centered with a redbird

Uttering his distinctive query

From the low bush beyond the south window.

The rimrocks hovering like

Ogre nursemaids

Massive, flat-topped

While the town below darkens

And sparkles.

A leaf is an anthem

Everything stands for something,

We paddle still waters

Making a silver groove

From which our existence

Like waterbirds perpetually slides forward.

A ring of firs. Black rock.

And always

The dream of white-eyed horses.

When you died, the voices chorused

Like migrating redwings

Filling the bare March trees

With amazing noise, then silence.

I could not open your book,

Examine the photograph or look

At the slanted signature

Of your love. I could not

Feel.

Poetry repulsed me,

Its bleeding scab. Streaking windows

Of rain. Gravel embedded

In mudslick. Why

Write or sing or draw or think,

As Auden said it changes

Nothing.

Last spring the rivers rose

Out of their banks in a hundred-year flood.

A terrified boy was swept away

As the news cameras followed. Men

Lowered ropes, attempting to grasp

An extremity as he boiled past

In the deluge crying out.

This boy, a stranger, breaks

My heart. I wept for him

As I never could for you or myself.

Today, the poem says

I will be spoken the way buds clench

Then burst in the false precursor flower.

The true leaf unfurls its nature

Its delicate ribs, fabric tough

And strange, greenskinned,

Thinskinned, willing to suffer

Loss with the wind. All over earth

Turning to powder, the least of us

Essential and here and now.

Barrellhouse

THE COMING OF BLINDNESS

                                                                                    People become faces, the

                                                                                    Books had no illustrations,

                                                                                    I couldn’t see myself in the

                                                                                    Looking glass.

                                                                                                Jorge Luis Borges

Like blindness, losing each other was gradual

The petals of the white lilacs

Fell softly, vanished

And you held me at arms length

Like newsprint.

The streetlights wore haloes

Of martyrs.

There was a blankness

In the center of making love.

I no longer

Believed our bodies could

Solve equations of loss. We disengaged

To argue over coffee.

Every remark led

To a stupid argument the way

Failing sight makes a man

Stumble over thresholds.

If we had learned Braille,

The language of feeling,

Would anything be different?

Borges says black and red

Are the first colors to be dismissed,

Colors of drama, passion,

Deadly games of challenge.

The blind live

In a luminous greenish mist,

A sort of confusion and grief,

Like this, like this.

Interim

1943

Moon helmets and webbed belts,

Voices in the basement.

Black shutters close over our windows.

In the picture book

A collie dog is helping a soldier.

My cousins in fat white boots

Twirling batons up the street, behind them

A brass clamour of trombones and cornets.

Names on a white stone

Women in black coats stand

Hands hanging from their sleeves.

The auditorium. Flag and a cross. Jesus arching

Like an alley cat. Loud song.

God Bless America. Dark giant of voices.

I too am singing.

I break all my crayolas, sullen, won’t

Be sorry. Fat white moon

Of Sister’s face shining into mine. So:

Those hollow shadows are eyebrows!

Black, arched as heaven, as suffering Jesus,

As planes heavy with bombs

As the slant eyes

Of evil yellow pilots, the demented cross

Of a swastika. I like

Smilin’ Jack and Daddy Warbucks.

The black cocker spaniel I might get

Next year when I am five

Like the one on my mother’s playing cards

Queen of Hearts, King of Diamonds. Not the Jack

With shifty eyes, grownup voices lowering

Then forgetting, saying Kamikazi, death

Mother crying into the telephone,

Aunt heaving up the stairs, her breath

Black wheezes. Someone hands me

A rosary. Round black beads.

Gold cross hanging.

Patsy Boy

White sailor suit wrinkling the sunlight

How he would throw me

Into the air, frock and hairbows flying

Poetry