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    All of Us: The Collected Poems

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      weeping and writing in our new kitchen.

      The Mailman as Cancer Patient

      Hanging around the house each day

      the mailman never smiles; he tires

      easily, is losing weight,

      that’s all; they’ll hold the job —

      besides, he needed a rest.

      He will not hear it discussed.

      As he walks the empty rooms, he

      thinks of crazy things

      like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey,

      shaking hands with Franklin D. Roosevelt

      at Grand Coulee Dam,

      New Year’s Eve parties he liked best;

      enough things to fill a book

      he tells his wife, who

      also thinks crazy things

      yet keeps on working.

      But sometimes at night

      the mailman dreams he rises from his bed

      puts on his clothes and goes

      out, trembling with joy…

      He hates those dreams

      for when he wakes

      there’s nothing left; it is

      as if he’d never been

      anywhere, never done anything;

      there is just the room,

      the early morning without sun,

      the sound of a doorknob

      turning slowly.

      Poem for Hemingway

      & W. C. Williams

      3 fat trout hang

      in the still pool

      below the new

      steel bridge.

      two friends

      come slowly up

      the track.

      one of them,

      ex-heavyweight,

      wears an old

      hunting cap.

      he wants to kill,

      that is catch & eat,

      the fish.

      the other,

      medical man,

      he knows the chances

      of that.

      he thinks it fine

      that they should

      simply hang there

      always

      in the clear water.

      the two keep going

      but they

      discuss it as

      they disappear

      into the fading trees

      & fields & light,

      upstream.

      Torture

      FOR STEPHEN DOBYNS

      You are falling in love again. This time

      it is a South American general’s daughter.

      You want to be stretched on the rack again.

      You want to hear awful things said to you

      and to admit these things are true.

      You want to have unspeakable acts

      committed against your person, things

      nice people don’t talk about in classrooms.

      You want to tell everything you know

      on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges,

      on yourself most of all.

      You want to implicate everyone in this!

      Even when it’s four o’clock in the morning

      and the lights are burning still —

      those lights that have been burning night and day

      in your eyes and brain for two weeks —

      and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade,

      but she won’t turn off the lights that woman

      with the green eyes and little ways about her,

      even then you want to be her gaucho.

      Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say

      as you reach for the empty beaker of water.

      Dance with me, she says again and no mistake.

      She picks this minute to ask you, hombre,

      to get up and dance with her in the nude.

      No, you don’t have the strength of a fallen leaf,

      not the strength of a little reed basket

      battered by waves on Lake Titicaca.

      But you bound out of bed

      just the same, amigo, you dance

      across wide open spaces.

      Bobber

      On the Columbia River near Vantage,

      Washington, we fished for whitefish

      in the winter months; my dad, Swede —

      Mr Lindgren—and me. They used belly-reels,

      pencil-length sinkers, red, yellow, or brown

      flies baited with maggots.

      They wanted distance and went clear out there

      to the edge of the riffle.

      I fished near shore with a quill bobber and a cane pole.

      My dad kept his maggots alive and warm

      under his lower lip. Mr Lindgren didn’t drink.

      I liked him better than my dad for a time.

      He let me steer his car, teased me

      about my name “Junior,” and said

      one day I’d grow into a fine man, remember

      all this, and fish with my own son.

      But my dad was right. I mean

      he kept silent and looked into the river,

      worked his tongue, like a thought, behind the bait.

      Highway 99E from Chico

      The mallard ducks are down

      for the night. They chuckle

      in their sleep and dream of Mexico

      and Honduras. Watercress

      nods in the irrigation ditch

      and the tules slump forward, heavy

      with blackbirds.

      Rice fields float under the moon.

      Even the wet maple leaves cling

      to my windshield. I tell you Maryann,

      I am happy.

      The Cougar

      FOR JOHN HAINES AND KEITH WILSON

      I stalked a cougar once in a lost box-canyon

      off the Columbia River gorge near the town and river

      of Klickitat. We were loaded for grouse. October,

      gray sky reaching over into Oregon, and beyond,

      all the way to California. None of us had been there,

      to California, but we knew about that place—they had

      restaurants

      that let you fill your plate as many times as you wanted.

      I stalked a cougar that day,

      if stalk is the right word, clumping and scraping along

      upwind of the cougar, smoking cigarettes too,

      one after the other, a nervous, fat, sweating kid

      under the best of circumstances, but that day

      I stalked a cougar…

      And then I was weaving drunk there in the living room,

      fumbling to put it into words, smacked and scattered

      with the memory of it after you two had put your stories,

      black bear stories, out on the table.

      Suddenly I was back in that canyon, in that gone state.

      Something I hadn’t thought about for years:

      how I stalked a cougar that day.

      So I told it. Tried to anyway,

      Haines and I pretty drunk now. Wilson listening, listening,

      then saying, You sure it wasn’t a bobcat?

      Which I secretly took as a put-down, he from the Southwest,

      poet who had read that night,

      and any fool able to tell a bobcat from a cougar,

      even a drunk writer like me,

      years later, at the smorgasbord, in California.

      Hell. And then the cougar smooth-loped out of the brush

      right in front of me—God, how big and beautiful he was —

      jumped onto a rock and turned his head

      to look at me. To look at me! I looked back, forgetting to shoot.

      Then he jumped again, ran clear out of my life.

      The Current

      These fish have no eyes

      these silver fish that come to me in dreams,

      scattering their roe and milt

      in the pockets of my brain.

      But there’s one that comes —

      heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,

      that simply holds against the current,

      closing its dark mouth against

      the current, closing and openi
    ng

      as it holds to the current.

      Hunter

      Half asleep on top of this bleak landscape,

      surrounded by chukkers,

      I crouch behind a pile of rocks and dream

      I embrace my babysitter.

      A few inches from my face

      her cool and youthful eyes stare at me from two remaining

      wildflowers. There’s a question in those eyes

      I can’t answer. Who is to judge these things?

      But deep under my winter underwear,

      my blood stirs.

      Suddenly, her hand rises in alarm —

      the geese are streaming off their river island,

      rising, rising up this gorge.

      I move the safety. The body gathers, leans to its work.

      Believe in the fingers.

      Believe in the nerves.

      Believe in THIS.

      Trying to Sleep Late on a

      Saturday Morning in November

      In the living room Walter Cronkite

      prepares us for the moon shot.

      We are approaching

      the third and final phase, this

      is the last exercise.

      I settle down,

      far down into the covers.

      My son is wearing his space helmet.

      I see him move down the long airless corridor,

      his iron boots dragging.

      My own feet grow cold.

      I dream of yellow jackets and near

      frostbite, two hazards

      facing the whitefish fishermen

      on Satus Creek.

      But there is something moving

      there in the frozen reeds,

      something on its side that is

      slowly filling with water.

      I turn onto my back.

      All of me is lifting at once,

      as if it were impossible to drown.

      Louise

      In the trailer next to this one

      a woman picks at a child named Louise.

      Didn’t I tell you, Dummy, to keep this door closed?

      Jesus, it’s winter!

      You want to pay the electric bill?

      Wipe your feet, for Christ’s sake!

      Louise, what am I going to do with you?

      Oh, what am I going to do with you, Louise?

      the woman sings from morning to night.

      Today the woman and child are out

      hanging up wash.

      Say hello to this man, the woman says

      to Louise. Louise!

      This is Louise, the woman says

      and gives Louise a jerk.

      Cat’s got her tongue, the woman says.

      But Louise has pins in her mouth,

      wet clothes in her arms. She pulls

      the line down, holds the line

      with her neck

      as she slings the shirt

      over the line and lets go —

      the shirt filling out, flapping

      over her head. She ducks

      and jumps back—jumps back

      from this near human shape.

      Poem for Karl Wallenda,

      Aerialist Supreme

      When you were little, wind tailed you

      all over Magdeburg. In Vienna wind looked for you

      in first one courtyard then another.

      It overturned fountains, it made your hair stand on end.

      In Prague wind accompanied serious young couples

      just starting families. But you made their breaths catch,

      those ladies in long white dresses,

      the men with their moustaches and high collars.

      It waited in the cuffs of your sleeves

      when you bowed to the Emperor Haile Selassie.

      It was there when you shook hands

      with the democratic King of the Belgians.

      Wind rolled mangoes and garbage sacks down the streets of Nairobi.

      You saw wind pursuing zebras across the Serengeti Plain.

      Wind joined you as you stepped off the eaves of suburban houses

      in Sarasota, Florida. It made little noises

      in trees at every crossroads town, every circus stop.

      You remarked on it all your life,

      how it could come from nowhere,

      how it stirred the puffy faces of the hydrangeas

      below hotel room balconies while you

      drew on your big Havana and watched

      the smoke stream south, always south,

      toward Puerto Rico and the Torrid Zone.

      That morning, 74 years old and 10 stories up,

      midway between hotel and hotel, a promotional stunt

      on the first day of spring, that wind

      which has been everywhere with you

      comes in from the Caribbean to throw itself

      once and for all into your arms, like a young lover!

      Your hair stands on end.

      You try to crouch, to reach for wire.

      Later, men come along to clean up

      and to take down the wire. They take down the wire

      where you spent your life. Imagine that: wire.

      Deschutes River

      This sky, for instance:

      closed, gray,

      but it has stopped snowing

      so that is something. I am

      so cold I cannot bend

      my fingers.

      Walking down to the river this morning

      we surprised a badger

      tearing a rabbit.

      Badger had a bloody nose,

      blood on its snout up to its sharp eyes:

      prowess is not to be confused

      with grace.

      Later, eight mallard ducks fly over

      without looking down. On the river

      Frank Sandmeyer trolls, trolls

      for steelhead. He has fished

      this river for years

      but February is the best month

      he says.

      Snarled, mittenless,

      I handle a maze of nylon.

      Far away —

      another man is raising my children,

      bedding my wife bedding my wife.

      Forever

      Drifting outside in a pall of smoke,

      I follow a snail’s streaked path down

      the garden to the garden’s stone wall.

      Alone at last I squat on my heels, see

      what needs to be done, and suddenly

      affix myself to the damp stone.

      I begin to look around me slowly

      and listen, employing

      my entire body as the snail

      employs its body, relaxed, but alert.

      Amazing! Tonight is a milestone

      in my life. After tonight

      how can I ever go back to that

      other life? I keep my eyes

      on the stars, wave to them

      with my feelers. I hold on

      for hours, just resting.

      Still later, grief begins to settle

      around my heart in tiny drops.

      I remember my father is dead,

      and I am going away from this

      town soon. Forever.

      Goodbye, son, my father says.

      Toward morning, I climb down

      and wander back into the house.

      They are still waiting,

      fright splashed on their faces,

      as they meet my new eyes for the first time.

      Where Water Comes Together

      with Other Water

      I

      Woolworth’s, 1954

      Where this floated up from, or why,

      I don’t know. But thinking about this

      since just after Robert called

      telling me he’d be here in a few

      minutes to go clamming.

      How on my first job I worked

      under a man named Sol.

      Fifty-some years old, but

      a stockboy like I was.

      Had worked his way

      up to noth
    ing. But grateful

      for his job, same as me.

      He knew everything there was

      to know about that dime-store

      merchandise and was willing

      to show me. I was sixteen, working

      for six bits an hour. Loving it

      that I was. Sol taught me

      what he knew. He was patient,

      though it helped I learned fast.

      Most important memory

      of that whole time: opening

      the cartons of women’s lingerie.

      Underpants, and soft, clingy things

      like that. Taking it out

      of cartons by the handful. Something

      sweet and mysterious about those

      things even then. Sol called it

      “linger-ey.” “Linger-ey?”

      What did I know? I called it

      that for a while, too. “Linger-ey.”

      Then I got older. Quit being

      a stockboy. Started pronouncing

      that frog word right.

      I knew what I was talking about!

      Went to taking girls out

      in hopes of touching that softness,

      slipping down those underpants.

      And sometimes it happened. God,

      they let me. And they were

      linger-ey, those underpants.

      They tended to linger a little

      sometimes, as they slipped down

      off the belly, clinging lightly

      to the hot white skin.

      Passing over the hips and buttocks

      and beautiful thighs, traveling

      faster now as they crossed the knees,

      the calves! Reaching the ankles,

      brought together for this

      occasion. And kicked free

      onto the floor of the car and

      forgotten about. Until you had

      to look for them.

      “Linger-ey.”

      Those sweet girls!

      “Linger a little, for thou art fair.”

      I know who said that. It fits,

      and I’ll use it. Robert and his

      kids and I out there on the flats

      with our buckets and shovels.

      His kids, who won’t eat clams, cutting

      up the whole time, saying “Yuck”

      or “Ugh” as clams turned

     
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