Silent hill, sparse dove
and an elbow of swifts
this morning colder
than all the rest
How do you feel?
we ask
with trepidation
and balsamroot stalks
How deep this rabbit
warren must go into
the hills,
hidden
they must think
by the fine-grained
dawn and tumbleweed
no longer prey to
the pill-round moon
and arrow-leaves
But I hear it now faint
as bird wings or wind
caught in sagebrush,
sometimes the night
stalks the day.
The dove’s song is throating and low
the swift’s song is motion—it sews the air
but morning here belongs to the quail
shouting Rod-RI-go! Rod-RI-go! Rod-RI-go!
The stars taste thin tonight.
They sing faint songs and ring
like church bells from childhood,
harping on the fact that there is
no earthly word for
a memory of something still to come,
their descant muffled by the
rich purple scent of the evening,
willing us to look back,
cajoling us only to sing
songs of fire and the past.
I embrace failure with open arms,
as sometimes the sun rises in the West.
We found the fried cod
in the glovebox two days later.
It was that kind of night
and my first in the country.
It was wretched but I
remember it fondly.
A dead man in Galway,
men dressed as nuns
and swans at the mouth
of the Corrib, and rain.
Then the few wintering souls
of Inis Mor, and its cows
lovely, soft-eyed and ambling.
And waking, myself, in a chair
to a stiff-backed dawning
and the refrain of the innkeeper,
born and raised and lived within
a stone’s throw of Blarney
but limiting his eloquence to
Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it grand?
As a chicken strutted by
self-righteous as the morning.
What compelled us to go,
every summer
filling up
the Dodge Caravan,
ice chests in the back
thumping
like the drums
that start High Noon,
do not forsake me oh my darling,
was it the emptiness of the West,
the rock in Colorado gray
as the early films
supposedly set there,
was it those tales
of cowboys and justice
that drew my mother
out to Laramie,
was it the dichotomy
of a long-held dream
and lackluster reality
that led her to cry in
some motel parking lot
in some dusty washed-up
tourist trap town,
and should we have gone back
and lived a coward, a craven coward,
or should we have gone on
to Utah, to Zion, not afraid of death,
untouchable
as we hurtled through alien
landscapes, to Craters of the Moon,
the lower Sonoran,
as Rand McNally led us,
get along, get along but why
this Gary Cooper sadness,
and why,
oh why this love
of leaving?
I am more Gertrude than ancient Beserker:
a bird is a bird is a bird.
Hope is an omnivore;
it eats both insects
and fruit
but when newly hatched
it is altricial, i.e.,
born relatively immobile
and requiring nourishment
for a certain duration.
[Eh, can’t win them all … interesting conceit though]
Enough wine to soften the edges
and I’ll sink
back in the smallest hours
of the morning
offered sudden clarity
on a surprising parade
of recollections: The smell
of the metro in July.
The tune of a song
I haven’t thought
of in years. The line
of his jaw, one day
unshaven. I am not
a sad drunk, and this
is not a melancholy
poem. It is purely
coincidence that
a bottle once poured
is never refilled,
and what might
have been often
appears in Technicolor,
putting memories
to shame.
Consider the mountain. No, consider the man.
It’s bad form to sell uphill.
So start with Palouse and build up to buttes,
sell them in spring when the grass is lush
and wildflowers run riot among the foothills.
Let the rivers tell their simple story,
running full from snowmelt,
let the personable maples
draped in moss talk,
in fact
shut up.
Everything here was shaped
by giants older and bigger
than we can comprehend.
Consider the glacier:
the slowness
of its movement,
the powerful crush
of tectonic plates to raise
a mountain range,
the long copy landscape
of the Northern Cascades.
Listen, and then consider
the mountain
and then consider the man,
so small and fragile
and very much alive.
OPTIONAL POETRY 