Saving Daylight Read online

  into the steady current, and that it wouldn’t force you

  downward beyond the limit of your breath.

  In high school I flunked chemistry, unable to bear

  up under the foreign odors or comprehend the structure

  of water. It’s one thing to say out loud “H-two-O,”

  and another to have spent thousands of days in the company

  of lakes, creeks and rivers seeing fish breathe

  this liquid air. An old man feels the slow struggle

  of dying, say for ten years, which drowning shortens

  to a minute or so. People say it’s the best way to die.

  Once in the Humboldt current off the coast of Ecuador

  I looked into the eye of a whale and later wondered

  if she communed with the soul of water. At nineteen

  or twenty the cup is overflowing but not understood.

  The dread is there won’t be time to drink it.

  Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found

  a large cinder on a long walk along abandoned

  country railroad tracks, a remnant of steam

  trains, the cinder similar to those our fathers

  shoveled from coal furnaces in the early winter mornings

  before stoking the fire. In your dark bedroom

  you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump

  when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.

  Now the trains are all diesel and in Livingston at night

  I hear them pass, Burlington & Northern, the horn

  an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.

  Some complain but I love this night music,

  imagining that a few of the railroad cars are from

  my youth when I stood in a pasture and thrilled

  to my favorite, “Route of Phoebe Snow.”

  To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.

  There’s a dullish ache, a restlessness in those

  who walk their dogs along the river’s levee.

  None of us wants to find the body

  but then it’s our duty to look in this early morning

  light with a cool breeze coming off the crumpled water.

  A tree plucked from the bank sails by and beauty

  is visited by the terror of power. When my sister

  was killed at nineteen I began to disbelieve

  in destiny, in clocks and calendars, that the downward

  thrust of time that hammers us into the ground

  is planned, that the girl in France who wrote

  me a letter before suicide was drawn to that place

  by an ignored, thus insignificant, universe where God

  wakes up cross, yawns and the dead are tossed

  like confetti into the void. If there’s a divinity

  that shapes our ends it’s beyond our ken. A tree

  by its nature seeks its future moment by moment.

  The child in grade-school science looks out the window

  bemused that his singularity was chosen from millions

  of his parents’ eggs and sperms. There’s much less time

  than he thinks no matter how long he lives. The heart

  can never grasp these unbearable early departures.

  A concert in the park on the 4th of July sponsored

  by the networks in New York. Someone named Sheryl Crow,

  Hank Williams Junior not Senior, and my old favorite,

  Los Lobos. As a claustrophobe I can’t walk the four blocks

  into the crowds but from my studio

  I can hear the Latino music wafting through maple

  trees, imagining I’m at our winter casita near Patagonia,

  Arizona, on the Mexican border, the music so much

  closer to love and death than our own, the heart

  worn on the sleeve, the natural lament of flowers, the moon

  visible. Smiling skeletons are allowed to dance

  and the gods draw closer to earth, the cash registers

  drowned out in the flight of birds, the sound of water.

  You can’t row or swim upstream on the river.

  This moving water is your continuing past

  that you can’t retrace by the same path

  that you reached the present, the moment by moment

  implacable indifference of time. At one point

  in my life nearly every tree on earth was shorter

  than me, and none of the birds presently here

  were here at my birth except an aged macaw

  in Bahia. Not a single bear or bug, dog or cat,

  but a few turtles and elephants who greeted

  my arrival. We can’t return for a second

  to those golden days of the Great Depression, World War II,

  the slaughter of the Jews, the Stalinist purges,

  the yellow horde of China feeding on its afterbirth,

  the Japanese gearing up scientific experiments

  that would kill a quarter of a million. How auspicious

  it is when people talk of the marvelous sixties

  with the extermination of JFK, Bobby Kennedy,

  Martin Luther King, Vietnam, and enough music

  to divert us from the blood-splattered screen

  of immediate history. Within time and the river

  no one catches their breath, a vast prayer wheel

  without a pivot spinning off into the void.

  We’re wingless birds perpetually falling north.

  Maybe I’m wrong. After years of practice

  I learned to see as a bird but I refuse

  to do it now, not wanting to find the body.

  I traveled east to our cabin in Michigan

  where I learned that my Zen master, Kobun

  Chino Sensei, drowned in a cold pond trying to save

  his three-year-old daughter, who also drowned.

  I make nothing of this but my mind suddenly

  rises far upward and I see Kobun in his black

  robes struggling in the water and he becomes

  a drowning raven who then frees himself for flight,

  his daughter on the pond’s bottom rising to join him.

  What could the vision mean but a gift? I said

  maybe I’m wrong. The Resurrection is fatally correct.

  As an early and relentless swimmer I couldn’t imagine

  death by water until I saw a spring runoff

  in the Manistee River, a shed floating by

  as if powered by a motor, a deafening wave curling

  upward at a log jam. I don’t want to die

  in a car, at war, in an airliner where I searched

  for the pulse of an old lady who collapsed

  in the aisle, found nothing, and everyone said

  she seemed to be smiling. She left the plane behind.

  But water at least is an earthly embrace.

  It was my wife who found the body while walking

  her dog Mary beside the river at Mayor’s landing.

  I was in Michigan in a cabin beside the river

  made turbulent by an hour-long cloudburst.

  I wish it wasn’t you, I said. “But it was,” she said.

  “It had to be someone. Why not me?”

  In Livingston I’m back home in Reed City

  over fifty years ago when trains were steam but the cows

  and alleys were the same, the friendly town mongrels

  I said hello to, one who walked with me an hour

  before turning home when we crossed his street.

  From the park bridge I watch a heron feed and at the edge

  of town there were yellow legs, Wilson’s phalaropes

  wandering a sand and rock bar, at home in the river

  because they could fly over it. I’m going to swim

  across it on a moonlit night. Near the porch steps

  of the house next door are two stone Chinese lions


  looking at the street with the eyes of small gods,

  the eyes that were given us that we don’t wish to use

  for fear of madness. Beside the river’s bend

  where he drowned colored stones are arranged

  to say “We love you, T.J.” Not loved in past

  tense but love in the way that the young have the grace

  of their improbable affections, their hearts

  rising to the unkempt breath and beat of the earth.

  Hill

  For the first time

  far in the distance

  he could see his twilight,

  wrapping around the green hill

  where three rivers start,

  and sliding down toward him

  through the trees until it reached

  the blueberry marsh and stopped,

  telling him to go away, not now,

  not for the time being.

  Buried Time

  Our bodies leap ahead

  and behind our years.

  Our bodies tracked the sun

  with numbers at play and curiosity

  not for slavery.

  Time often moves sideways,

  its mouth full and choking

  on rubbery clocks.

  In the elephant’s heart

  the uncounted sunrises, the muscle

  pumping blood to its

  red music.

  The world’s air is full

  of orphaned ghosts and on the ground

  so many mammals that feed

  at night for safety.

  Our bodies move sideways

  and backwards of their own accord

  in scorn of time.

  I didn’t divorce the sun and moon

  but we had an amicable separation

  for a while.

  I established myself in the night.

  I organized seven nights in a row

  without any days.

  I liked best the slender cracks

  between nights and days where I bloomed

  like an apple tree.

  I collected dawns and twilights.

  They are stored in my room between

  two volumes of poetry, their titles secret.

  In geologic time we barely exist.

  I collected memories of my temporary host

  leaving a trace of words, my simian tracks.

  The universe is the Great Mother.

  I haven’t met the father. My doubt

  is the patina of shit the culture

  paints on my psyche.

  There is no “I” with the sun and moon.

  Time means only the irretrievable.

  If I mourn myself, the beloved dead,

  I must mourn the deaths of galaxies.

  Despite gravity we’re fragile as shadows.

  They crushed us with time-as-money,

  the linear hoax.

  At the cabin standing in the river

  on a warm night the female coyote

  near the logjam can see the moon’s glint

  off my single front tooth.

  When she barks her voice wraps

  itself with me in the moving water,

  the holy form of time.

  Angry Women

  Women in peignoirs are floating around

  the landscape well out of eyesight

  let alone reach. They are as palpable

  as the ghost of my dog Rose whom I see

  on long walks, especially when exhausted

  and my half-blind eyes are blurred by cold wind

  or sleet or snow. The women we’ve mistreated

  never forgive us nor should they, thus their ghostly

  energies thrive at dawn and twilight in this vast

  country where any of the mind’s movies can be played

  against this rumpled wide-screened landscape.

  Our souls are travelers. You can tell when your own

  is gone, and then these bleak, improbable

  visits from others, their dry tears because you were

  never what you weren’t, so that the world

  becomes only what it is, the unforgiving flow

  of an unfathomable river. Still they wanted you otherwise,

  closer to their dreamchild, just as you imagined

  fair maidens tight to you as decals to guide

  you toward certainties. The new pup, uncrippled by ideals,

  leaps against the fence, leaps at the mountains beyond.

  Before the Trip

  When old people travel, it’s for relief

  from a life that they know too well,

  not routine but the very long slope

  of disbelief in routine, the unbearable

  lightness of brushing teeth that aren’t all

  there, the weakened voice calling out

  for the waiter who doesn’t turn;

  the drink that once was neither here

  nor there is now a singular act of worship.

  The sun that rises every day says

  I don’t care to the torments of love

  and hate that once pushed one back

  and forth on the blood’s red wagon.

  All dogs have become beautiful

  in the way they look at cats and wonder

  what to do. Breakfast is an event

  and bird flu only a joke of fear the world

  keeps playing. On the morning walk

  the horizon is ours when we wish.

  We know that death is a miracle for everyone

  or so the gods say in a whisper of rain

  in the immense garden we couldn’t quite trace.

  Paris Television

  Thinking of those Russian schoolchildren. How can what we call depression be approached directly? It can’t. I have this triumverate of ghosts–John, Rose, Suzanne Wilson–who visit me. Mortality is gravity, the weight we bear up under daily. I can only create lightness out of doors–walking, fishing, standing in the yard looking at Linda’s flowers or the Absaroka mountains, or in the Upper Peninsula looking at the peculiar vastness of Lake Superior, the night sky, watching my grandsons. How can I lift my weight each day when my own words began to fail me this year, or my perceptions began to fail my words? When both my inside and outside worlds became incomprehensible? But then the source of all religion is incomprehension. The first day of school for the Russian children. Their dogs walk halfway, figure it out, return home to wait in the just-beginning-to-wane summer heat, with all flowers shedding themselves and neglected wheat stalks in the corners of fields dropping their grains, some dogs howling at the fireworks, and then the parents of the children joining them. My voice becomes small as a molting bird’s, barely a whisper until I can fly again, if ever.

  Opal

  O Opal, your ear

  in my heart

  both hear

  the glorious void,

  preferring the birds.

  The Man Who Looked for Sunlight

  Nine days of dark, cold rain

  in October, some snow, three gales

  off Lake Superior with the cabin’s tin roof

  humming Beethoven, the woodcock weather vane

  whirling and thumping like a kettledrum,

  tree limbs crashing in the woods;

  at dawn a gust made small whitecaps on the river.

  Marquette NPR promised sunlight

  on Thursday. I sit here reflecting

  I’ve burned a whole cord of wood this week.

  I’m ten years old again sitting here waiting

  for the sunlight, petting my dog Rose,

  sitting by the window straining for sunlight.

  I’m not going to drown myself in the cold

  dark river but I really would like sunlight.

  Finally clouds rush by well beyond the speed

  limit, and there’s a glimpse of sunlight,

  a few seconds of sunlight, enough for today,

  the sunlight glistening on the wet forestr />
  and my dog sleeping by the window.

  Alcohol

  In the far back room of the school

  for young writers are two big illegal

  formaldehyde glass jars holding the kidneys

  and livers of Faulkner and Hemingway

  among the tens of thousands of empty bottles

  of everything they drank to fuel themselves

  through their bloody voyages. Alive, their arms

  were crooked out as question marks trying

  to encircle the world. Dead, they are crazy

  old men who convinced us of the reasonableness

  of their tales, their books deducted from their caskets

  at the last possible moment. And now we hold

  them tightly as if they ever truly cared.

  No one should wish to enter this room

  but still some of us hurl ourselves against

  the invisible door as if our stories and alcohol

  were Siamese twins ineluctably joined at the head,

  our hearts enlarged until they can barely beat.

  En Veracruz en 1941

  Giselle me dio una estatuilla primitiva

  de la Virgen de Sonora, estrellas radiando de su cabeza,

  labios y cejas astillados, nariz descascarada

  y debajo de su manto el niño

  Jesús mira saludando con dos manos

  elevadas, anunciando su llegada entre nosotros.

  Giselle, ningún hombre puede acostarse con las tres:

  madre, amante, Virgen.

  Confieso que tus pezones son rojo rubí

  pero en la muerte se tornarán turquesas.

  Con tu pie desnudo sobre mi falda confieso también

  que me despojaré de tu insoportable estatuilla,

  o camino a La Habana la dejaré caer en el océano,

  para que descanse en la falda del poeta de América, Hart Crane,

  quien no pudo aprender el lenguaje de los chiles y las flores,