Saving Daylight Read online

  fell across my not-so-sunken chest. The smallest

  gods ask me what there is beyond consciousness,

  the moment by moment enclosure the mind

  builds to capture the rudiments of time.

  Two nights ago I heard a woman from across

  the creek, a voice I hadn’t heard since childhood.

  I didn’t answer. Red was red this dawn

  after a night of the swirling milk of stars

  that came too close. I felt lucky not to die.

  My brother died at high noon one day in Arkansas.

  Divide your death by your life and you get

  a circle, though I’m not so good at math.

  This morning I sat in the dirt playing

  with five cow dogs, giving out a full pail of biscuits.

  Young Love

  In my “Memoir of an Unsuccessful Prostitute”

  I questioned what was it like to be nineteen

  in New York City in 1957, fresh from northern

  Michigan farmland, looking for sex and food.

  First of all the edges of buildings were sharp

  and if you walked around a corner too close

  to them you could cut yourself. Even though it

  was summer the daylight was short and when it

  was hot you sweated inward. You walked the streets

  as a shy elephant who within the cruelty

  of his neurons had conceived a love of women.

  A black woman said you were too white

  and a white woman said you were too brown.

  Another said you were a red Indian (“How

  exciting”). You became very thin and fell asleep

  beside fountains, on park benches, in the library

  where they roused you with a shake. Pigeons

  avoided you as a breadless monster. The circus women

  paid in used popcorn, their secret currency.

  The beatnik girl paid with crabs who tugged

  at the roots of your eyebrows, your tiny friends.

  Late one night the moon split in pieces

  and you could see two yellow shards at the ends

  of Forty-second Street where a herring sandwich

  was a quarter, Italian sausage fifty cents.

  The drug of choice was a Benzedrine inhaler

  plus three beers, after which you jumped over the hood

  of an approaching taxi with your invisible pogo stick.

  You hitchhiked the trail of a letter from a girl back home

  and New York City became more beautiful

  with each mile west.

  The Movie

  I’m making a movie about my life

  which never ends. The plot thickens

  and thickens like an overcooked soup.

  The movie features tens of thousands

  of characters including those who passed

  me on the street without knowing

  that I was a star. The film includes

  my long horizontal dives above fields

  of corpses. I’ve become proud that I’m part

  dog favoring perceptions over conclusions.

  I’m not sexy enough at my age

  to carry a movie so I’m filming my mind

  at play, with the rudiments of Eros

  backing into the camera with the force

  of a drop forge. Ultimately the poet, filmmaker,

  is the girl who didn’t have a date for the prom.

  She takes a walk and hears the music

  from the gymnasium, imagining the crepe

  paper and wilting corsages vibrating

  with the wretched music. She walks past

  the graveyard with its heavy weight

  of dirt nappers and climbs a hill steep

  as a cow’s face. From the top of the hill

  she sees the world she never made

  but has changed with words into the arena

  of the sacred. The sky becomes

  dumbfounded with her presence. If she decides

  to shoot herself it’s only to come to life again.

  The thin slip of the moon speaks French

  but the voice is compressed by trees and translated

  by fireflies. This girl is far more interesting

  than I am and that’s why I’m filming

  her rather than my trip to the mailbox

  avoiding the usual rattlesnakes in the tallgrass.

  It’s not truth that keeps us alive

  but invention, no actual past but the stories

  we’ve devised to cover our disappearing

  asses. Near a pond she hears the millions of

  tree frogs, peepers, and thinks this noise is sex.

  For a split second she wonders what it would

  be like to make love to that older poet she heard

  read in Grand Rapids, the way he grasped

  her hand when he gave her a free book. My god,

  now we’re nearly together in my movie though

  the camera is the unwilling POV and when it

  comes CLOSE she pushes down her jeans

  near the thicket where I’ve been waiting.

  In the faintest moonlight I see her pelvic curls.

  Now it is time to back away from heaven’s mouth.

  I don’t film dreams that lack narrative drive,

  and besides I have no legs to leave the thicket,

  only an imagination whose camera has chosen

  to BACK AWAY far above the crucified dogs

  and the soldiers writhing in alien courtyards,

  above the swirling cumuli where those who we

  thought were dead watch us while sitting on plastic

  lounge chairs, up where the finest music still rises,

  up there out of harm’s way where I store my life film

  in microversion around the neck of a hawk who has

  never landed since birth.

  Livingston Suite

  in memory of T.J. Huth

  Shorn of nature,

  here but in small supply,

  townspeople adore their dogs.

  Our dogs have never lived

  in a town. Neither have I

  since 1967. I adore

  the puzzlement of our dogs.

  Each morning I walk four blocks

  to this immense river,

  surprised that it’s still there,

  that it won’t simply disappear

  into the ground like the rest of us.

  In the burnt July air

  the strange cool odor

  of sprinkler water

  creating its own little breeze

  in the Livingston Park

  where there are twelve rings for playing

  horseshoes built before the fathers of lies

  built the clouds above our heads.

  A lovely girl passes on her bicycle

  with a fat cat

  on her shoulder who watches me

  disappear through heavy lids,

  then a lovely soiled girl on her knees

  in a garden looks up at me

  to say hello. A Christian urge tries

  to make me ignore her pretty butt

  cocked upward like a she-cat’s.

  Four churches within a block,

  Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Congregational,

  surrounding me with maudlin holiness,

  Sunday’s hymns a droning hum

  against the ceilings. Crows and magpies think,

  Oh it’s that day again.

  Christ in the New World like Milne’s Eeyore,

  a lumpen donkey sweating with our greed,

  trying to make us shepherd his billions of birds.

  Under the streets are the remnants

  of an older town with caches

  of Indian skulls, also wizened

  white scalps from those who jumped

  the gun on the westward movement

  that is still ending in
Santa Monica

  where a girl I knew who, after taking three

  California speedballs, had her brain hurled into eternity

  like a jellied softball. Oh Cynthia.

  I walk my dog Rose in the alleys

  throughout town. Maybe it’s where poets belong,

  these substreets where the contents of human life

  can be seen more clearly, our shabby backsides

  disappearing into the future at the precise rate

  of the moon’s phases. Rose turns, hearing

  an upstairs toilet flush, the dead cows,

  pigs and chickens turning semiliquid

  in the guts of strangers, the pretty tomato

  changing shape, the potatoes that once held leaves

  and blossoms in their spindly green arms. Holy days

  of early summer with lilacs drooping laden

  under the weight of their moist art. From a kitchen

  a woman laughs a barking laugh over

  something I’ll never know. A ninety-year-old

  couple emerges from the Methodist church smiling,

  masters of a superior secret. Back in the alley

  a dirty yellow cat emerges from a garbage can

  with trout remains, a sure sign of feline victory.

  She holds the carcass tightly as if I might take it.

  Our newspaper, The Enterprise, said,

  “Grizzlies feasting on storm-killed cattle.”

  An early June blizzard dropped four feet

  of snow, killing a thousand cows and calves,

  a few foals, and the grizzlies hungry and fresh

  from hibernation are feasting. “The bears

  are just thick. It’s really kind of dangerous

  up here right now,” said Gus V., a rancher.

  Interesting news on the summer solstice.

  The cow protrudes from the snowbank with ravens

  perched around the eyes & udders watching for a coyote

  or bear to open the hidebound meat, nearly

  a million pounds of meat spread around the

  countryside. What pleasure in this natural terrorism.

  On a twilight walk a violent storm moved swiftly

  toward the east and south of me with the starkest

  lightning striking against the slate-colored

  Absaroka mountains. Closer, on a green mountainside

  white trucks passed on Interstate 90,

  then closer yet Watson’s Black Angus cattle

  sprinkled like peppercorns against shiny

  wet pale green grass. Closer, a tormented

  cottonwood thicket in the rising wind, maybe

  60 knots, branches flailing, closer the broad

  and turbulent brown river. And finally

  only me on which all things depend, standing

  on the riverbank, bent to the wind, the solitary

  twilight watcher wondering who is

  keeping the gods alive this evening or whether

  they have given up on us and our tiny forked tongues,

  our bleating fears and greed, our pastel anxieties.

  In 1968 when I was first here

  there was a cool scent of pines

  and melting snow from the mountains

  carried by a southwind through the river’s

  canyon. The scent is still here,

  the sure fresh odor of the West.

  At the oars of the drift boat

  in the thrash and churn of a rapid

  I have no more control over the boat,

  or my life, than I had in 1968.

  Swept away. And not quite understanding

  that this water is heading toward

  the Caribbean. A grizzly bear pisses

  in a creek in the Absarokas and traces end up

  nonchalantly passing New Orleans

  into the Gulf of Mexico. This fuzzy air

  above is from dust storms in China.

  The underground river far below me

  started in the Arctic and heads toward

  the equator. During the Bush colonoscopy

  narwhals were jousting over lady narwhals

  and an immense Venezuelan anaconda gave birth

  to a hundred miniatures of her kind, all quickly

  eaten by waiting caimans and large wading birds.

  Trapped in the compartment of a sunken ship

  a man writes a letter in the dark to his wife

  and children in Missouri which will never be read.

  I watch a blind sheep who loves to roll in the grass.

  At the rodeo the bucking horse

  leaps then buckles to its knees,

  recovers, then bucks up. And up.

  The rider thrown, eating a face-

  ful of dirt while behind the announcer’s

  shack and across the river,

  up a cliff and a broad green slope,

  trucks pass east and west on 1-90

  unmindful of the cowboy spitting dirt.

  Around here they’re still voting

  for Eisenhower as a write-in candidate.

  Around here people still have memories

  and honor their war dead. In the park

  to each road guardrail a flag and white cross

  are attached, and a name that is gone

  but not forgotten. An old man carrying

  a portable oxygen unit breathes deeply

  with moist eyes looking at his brother’s name,

  lost in Iwo Jima. We bow slightly

  to each other, and my memory repeats the prayer

  I offered at age five for my uncles Art and Walter

  off in the South Pacific on warships fighting

  the Japanese and the satanic Tojo. At church

  we sang “Fairest Lord Jesus” and the minister

  announced that a deacon’s son was lost

  in what I heard as “yurp.”

  Some of the men and women sobbed loudly.

  I remembered him playing baseball and driving

  around town in his old Ford coupe with an actual

  squirrel tail attached to the aerial, and just out

  of kindergarten I had it all wrong thinking who will

  drive Fred’s car now? Our mothers and fathers embraced.

  From different upstairs windows I see four different

  mountain ranges not there to accompany the four churches:

  the Absarokas, the Gallatins, the Bridgers, the Crazies.

  You naturally love a mountain range called Crazies.

  Of course naked women, Native and white,

  run through the Crazies on moonlit nights

  howling for husbands and lovers

  lost to our wars. I’ve followed their red footprints

  while hunting in these mountains, the small toes.

  A community can drown in itself,

  then come to life again. Every yard seems

  to have flowers, every street its resident magpies.

  In the outfield of the baseball diamond

  there are lovely small white flowers that a gardener

  told me are the “insidious bindweed.” All my life

  I’ve liked weeds. Weeds are botanical

  poets, largely unwanted. You can’t make a dollar

  off them. People destroy the obnoxious dandelion

  that I’ve considered a beautiful flower since early

  childhood, blowing off the fuzzy seeds when they died,

  sending the babies off into the grim universe,

  but then I’m also fond of cowbirds and crows,

  cowbirds and poets laying their eggs for others

  to raise then drifting away for no reason.

  Search & Rescue is “combing” the river

  this morning for a drowned boy. If it were me

  I’d rather float east through the night toward the rising

  sun. But it’s not me. The boy probably

  wasn’t literary and the pa
rents want the body

  to bury, the fourth body in the river this summer.

  Currents can hold a body tight to the bottom.

  A vet friend found residual gills in the head

  of a dog but at our best we’re ungainly in water

  compared to the clumsiest of fishes. Against the song,

  we won’t fly away. Or float. We sink into earth.

  In this prolonged heat wave the snow

  is shrinking upward to the mountain tip-tops

  to a few crevasses and ravines. On Mount Wallace

  ancient peoples, likely the Crow, the Absarokas,

  carved out of flat stone the imprint of a man

  so you could lie there in a grizzly-claw necklace

  and see only sky for three days and nights,

  a very long session in your own private church.

  It’s ninety-five degrees at four PM

  and two girls in their early teens step

  from the cooler cement sidewalk onto the street’s hot

  asphalt in their bare feet, beginning to dance,

  jump, prance, one in shorts and the other

  in a short summer dress. It is good enough

  so that only Mozart would contribute to this pure

  dance that is simply what it is, beyond passing

  lust, sheer physical beauty, the grace of being

  on a nearly insufferable hot day in Montana.

  The girls skidded their feet on sprinkler-wet grass

  under a maple tree, then went indoors out of my life.

  Everyone seems to have loved the drowned boy.

  Destiny is unacceptable. This grand river

  he’d seen thousands of times didn’t wait for him.

  Nobody seems to have a clue. He died two days ago

  and they’re still searching the river. Some men

  carry ominous long poles with a hook in the end.

  This morning walking Rose I looked at the wide

  eddy with a slow but inexorable whirlpool coiling

  in upon itself that no human could swim against.

  You might survive by giving up the struggle

  and hope that the water would cast you aside