The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems Read online

  for flies, audible heat from the field where steers fed.

  I’m going to Stonehenge to recant, or from the manure pile

  behind this shed I’m going to admit to a cow that I’ve lied.

  He writes with a putty knife and goo, at night the North Star

  hangs on the mountain peak like a Christmas ornament.

  On the table the frozen rattlesnake thaws, the perfect club!

  The perfect crime! Soon now to be skinned for my hatband.

  VII

  Says he, “Ah Edward I too have a dark past of manual labor.”

  But now Trivium Charontis seem to want me for Mars.

  If her thighs weigh 21 pounds apiece what do her lips weigh?

  Do that trick where you touch your toes. Do that right now.

  The bold U.S.A. cowpoke in Bozeman, Montana, hates hippies,

  cuts off their hair, makes $200 a month, room and board.

  We want the sow bear that killed Clark’s sheep to go away.

  She has two cubs but must die for her terrible appetite.

  Girl-of-my-dreams if you’ll be mine I’ll give up poetry

  and be your index finger, lapdog, donkey, obvious unicorn.

  VIII

  The color of a poppy and bruised, the subalpine green that

  ascends the mountainside from where the eagle looked at sheep.

  Her sappy brain fleers, is part of the satin shirt (Western) she

  wears, chartreuse with red scarf. Poeet he says with two ees!

  The bull we frighten by waving our hats bellows, his pecker

  lengthens touching the grass, he wheels, foam from the mouth.

  How do we shoot those things that don’t even know they’re animals

  grazing and stalking in the high meadow: puma elk grizzly deer.

  When he pulled the trigger the deer bucked like a horse, spine

  broken, grew pink in circles, became a lover kissing him goodnight.

  IX

  He said the grizzly sat eating the sheep and when the bullet

  struck tore the sheep in two, fell over backward dead.

  With her mouth warm or cold she remains a welcome mat, a hole

  shot through it many years ago in Ohio. Hump. Hemp treaded.

  Is there an acre left to be allotted to each man & beast so

  they might regard each other on hands and knees behind fences?

  The sun straight above was white and aluminum and the trout

  on the river bottom watched his feet slip clumsily on the rocks.

  I want an obscene epitaph, one that will disgust the Memorial

  Day crowds so that they’ll indignantly topple my gravestone.

  X

  Praise me at Durkheim Fair where I’ve never been, hurling

  grenade wursts at those who killed my uncle back in 1944.

  Nothing is forgiven. The hurt child is thirty-one years old

  and the girl in the pale blue dress walks out with another.

  Where love lies. In the crawl space under the back porch

  thinking of the aunt seen shedding her black bathing suit.

  That girl was rended by the rapist. I’ll send her a healing

  sonnet in heaven. Forgive us. Forgive us. Forgive us.

  The moon I saw through her legs beneath the cherry tree had

  no footprints on it and a thigh easily blocked out its light.

  Lauren Hutton has replaced Norma Jean, Ava Gardner, Lee Remick

  and Vanessa Redgrave in my Calvinist fantasies. Don’t go away.

  XI

  The brain opens the hand which touches that spot, clinically

  soft, a member raises from his chair and insists upon his rights.

  In some eye bank a cornea is frozen in liquid nitrogen. One day

  my love I’ll see your body from the left side of my face.

  Half the team, a Belgian mare, was huge though weak. She died

  convulsively from the 80-volt prod, still harnessed to her mate.

  Alvin C. shot the last wolf in the Judith Basin after a four-year

  hunt, raising a new breed of hounds to help. Dressed out 90 lbs.

  When it rains I want to go north into the taiga, and before I

  freeze in arid cold watch the reindeer watch the northern lights.

  XII

  Says Borges in Ficciones, “I’m in hell. I’m dead,” and the dark

  is glandular and swells about my feet concealing the ground.

  Let us love the sun, little children but it is around too

  much to notice and has no visible phases to care about.

  Two pounds of steak eaten in deference to a tequila hangover.

  His sign is that of a pig, a thousand-pound Hampshire boar.

  Some would say her face looked homely with that thing sticking

  out of it as if to feed her. Not I, said Wynken, not I.

  The child is fully clothed but sits in the puddle madly

  slapping the warm water on which the sun ripples and churns.

  XIII

  The night is thin and watery; fish in the air

  and moonglint off her necklace of human teeth.

  Bring O bring back my Bonnie and I’ll return yours

  with interest and exhaustion. I’m stuck between those legs.

  Dangers of drugs: out in the swamp’s middle he’s stoned

  and a bear hound mammothly threatens. Dazed with fright.

  Marcia I won’t go to Paris – too free with your body –

  it’s mine it’s mine it’s mine not just everyone’s.

  Now in this natal month Christ must be in some distant

  nebula. O come down right now and be with us.

  In the hole he fell in, a well pit, yellow jackets stung

  him to death. Within minutes death can come by bees.

  XIV

  That heartless finch, botulinal. An official wheeze passes through

  the screen door into the night, the vision of her finally dead.

  I’ve decided here in Chico, Montana, that Nixon isn’t president

  and that that nasty item, Agnew, is retired to a hamster farm.

  And that those mountains hold no people but geologists

  spying on each other, and beasts spying on the geologists.

  Mule deer die from curiosity – what can that thing be

  wandering around with a stick, forgotten from last year?

  Some tourists confuse me for an actual cowboy, ecstasy in

  deceit, no longer a poet but a bona fide paper buckaroo.

  I offer a twenty-one-gun salute to the caress as the blackflies buzz

  around me and the rotting elk hides. The true source of the stink.

  XV

  Why did this sheep die? The legs are thin, stomach hugely

  bloated. The girl cries and kicks her legs on the sofa.

  The new marvels of language don’t come up from the depths

  but from the transparent layer, the soiled skin of things.

  In London for puissant literary reasons he sits with the other

  lost ones at a Soho striptease show. An endless oyster bar.

  We’ll need miracles of art and reason to raise these years

  which are tombstones carved out of soap by the world’s senators.

  We’ll have to move out at dawn and the dew is only a military

  metaphor for the generally felt hidden-behind-bushes sorrow.

  XVI

  It is an hour before dawn and even prophets sleep

  on their beds of gravel. Dreams of fish & hemlines.

  The scissors moves across the paper and through

  the beard. It doesn’t know enough or when to stop.

  The bear tires of his bicycle but he’s strapped on

  with straps of silver and gold straps inlaid with scalps.

  We are imperturbable as deer whose ancestors saw the last

  man and passed on the sweet knowledge by shitting on graves.
<
br />   Let us arrange to meet sometime in transit, we’ll all take

  the same train perhaps, Cendrars’s Express or the defunct Wabash.

  Her swoon was officially interminable with unconvincing

  geometric convulsions, no doubt her civic theater experience.

  XVII

  O Atlanta, roseate dawn, the clodhoppers, hillbillies, rednecks,

  drunken dreams of murdering blacks; the gin mills still.

  Our fried chicken and Key lime pie and rickets. To drain all

  your swamps and touch a match, Seminoles forbidden drink.

  Save the dogs everywhere. In France by actual count, Count

  Blah Blah shot 885 pheasants in one day, his personal record.

  There was a story of a lost child who remained lost & starved

  to death hiding in a hollow log from both animals and searchers.

  Cuba is off there beyond the Tortugas, forever invisible; Isle

  of Pines where Crane wept, collecting tons of starfish and eels.

  Her love was committed to horses and poets weighing less than

  150 lbs. I weigh 200 and was not allowed into her Blue Fuck Room.

  XVIII

  I told the dark-haired girl to come down out of the apple

  tree and take her medicine. In a dream I told her so.

  We’re going to have to do something about the night. The tissue

  won’t restore itself in the dark. I feel safe only at noon.

  Waking. Out by the shed, their home, the Chicano cherry pickers

  sing hymns on a hot morning, three guitars and a concertina.

  We don’t need dime-store surrealists buying objects to write

  about or all this up-against-the-wall nonsense in Art News.

  Even in the wilderness, in Hell Roaring Creek Basin, in this

  grizzly kingdom, I fear stepping into a hidden missile silo.

  My friend has become crippled, back wrenched into an “S” like

  my brain. We’ll go to Judah to wait for the Apocalypse.

  XIX

  We were much saddened by Bill Knott’s death.

  When he reemerged as a hospital orderly we were encouraged.

  Sad thoughts of different cuts of meat and how I own no

  cattle and am not a rancher with a freezer full of prime beef.

  A pure plump dove sits on the wire as if two wings emerged

  from a russet pear, head tucked into the sleeping fruit.

  Your new romance is full of nails hidden from the saw’s teeth,

  a board under which a coral snake waits for a child’s hand.

  I don’t want to die in a foreign land and was only in one

  once, England, where I felt near death in the Cotswolds.

  The cattle walked in the shallow water and birds flew

  behind them to feed on the disturbed insects.

  XX

  Some sort of rag of pure language, no dictums but a bell

  sound over clear water, beginning day no. 245 of a good year.

  The faces made out of leaves and hidden within them, faces

  that don’t want to be discovered or given names by anyone.

  There was a virgin out walking the night during the plague when

  the wolves entered Avila for carrion. The first took her neck.

  The ninth month when everything is expected of me and nothing

  can be told – September when I sit and watch the summer die.

  She knelt while I looked out the car window at a mountain

  (Emigrant Peak). We need girls and mountains frequently.

  If I can clean up my brain, perhaps a stick of dynamite will

  be needed, the Sibyl will return as an undiscovered lover.

  XXI

  He sings from the bottom of a well but she can hear him up

  through the oat straw, toads, boards, three entwined snakes.

  It quiets the cattle they say mythically as who alive has

  tried it, their blank stares, cows digesting song. Rumen.

  Her long hissing glides at the roller-skating rink, skates

  to calves to thighs to ass in blue satin and organ music.

  How could you be sane if 250,000 came to the Isle of Wight

  to hear your songs near the sea and they looked like an ocean?

  Darling companion. We’ll listen until it threatens and walls

  fall to trumpet sounds or not and this true drug lifts us up.

  That noise that came to us out in the dark, grizzly, leviathan,

  drags the dead horse away to hollow swelling growls.

  XXII

  Maps. Maps. Maps. Venezuela, Keewanaw, Iceland open up

  unfolding and when I get to them they’ll look like maps.

  New pilgrims everywhere won’t visit tombs, need living

  monuments to live again. But there are only tombs to visit.

  They left her in the rain tied to the water with cobwebs,

  stars stuck like burrs to her hair. I found her by her wailing.

  It’s obvious I’ll never go to Petersburg and Akhmadulina

  has married another in scorn of my worship of her picture.

  You’re not fooling yourself – if you weren’t a coward you’d be

  another target in Chicago, tremulous bull’s-eye for hog fever.

  XXIII

  I imagined her dead, killed by some local maniac who

  crept upon the house with snowmobile at low throttle.

  Alcohol that lets me play out hates and loves and fights;

  in each bottle is a woman, the betrayer and the slain.

  I insist on a one-to-one relationship with nature.

  If Thursday I’m a frog it will have to be my business.

  You are well. You grow taller. Friends think I’ve bought you

  stilts but it is I shrinking, up past my knees in marl.

  She said take out the garbage. I trot through a field with the

  sack in my teeth. At the dump I pause to snarl at a rat.

  XXIV

  This amber light floating strangely upward in the woods – nearly

  dark now with a warlock hooting through the tips of trees.

  If I were to be murdered here as an Enemy of the State you would

  have to bury me under that woodpile for want of a shovel.

  She was near the window and beyond her breasts I could see

  the burdock, nettles, goldenrod in a field beyond the orchard.

  We’ll have to abandon this place and live out of the car again.

  You’ll nurse the baby while we’re stuck in the snow out of gas.

  The ice had entered the wood. It was twenty below and the beech

  easy to split. I lived in a lean-to covered with deerskins.

  I have been emptied of poison and returned home dried

  out with a dirty bill of health and screaming for new wine.

  XXV

  O happy day! Said overpowered, had by it all and transfixed

  and unforgetting other times that refused to swirl and flow.

  The calendar above my head made of unnatural numbers, day

  lasted five days and I expect a splendid year’s worth of dawn.

  Rain pumps. Juliet in her tower and Gaspara Stampa again and

  that girl lolling in the hammock with a fruit smell about her.

  Under tag alder, beneath the ferns, crawling to know animals

  for hours, how it looks to them down in this lightless place.

  The girl out in the snows in the Laurentians saves her money

  for Montreal and I am to meet her in a few years by “accident.”

  Magdalen comes in a waking dream and refuses to cover me,

  crying out for ice, release from time, for a cool spring.

  XXVI

  What will I do with seven billion cubic feet of clouds

  in my head? I want to be wise and dispense it for quarters.

  All these push-ups are making me a
muscular fatman. Love would

  make me lean and burning. Love. Sorry the elevator’s full.

  She was zeroed in on by creeps and forgot my meaningful glances

  from the door. But then I’m walleyed and wear used capes.

  She was built entirely of makeup, greasepaint all the way through

  like a billiard ball is a billiard ball beneath its hard skin.

  We’ll have to leave this place in favor of where the sun

  is cold when seen at all, bones rust, it rains all day.

  The cat is mine and so is the dog. You take the orchard,