Songs of Unreason Read online

  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 t
he 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.