The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

  don’t worry, it’s fine to be dead,

  they say; we were a little early

  but could not help ourselves.

  Everyone dies as the child they were,

  and at the moment, this secret,

  intricately concealed heart blooms

  forth with the first song anyone

  sang in the dark, “Now I lay me

  down to sleep, I pray the Lord

  my soul to keep…”

  Now this oddly gentle winter, almost dulcet,

  winds to a blurred close with trees full

  of birds that belong farther south,

  and people are missing something

  to complain about; a violent March

  is an unacknowledged prayer;

  a rape of nature, a healing blizzard,

  a very near disaster.

  So this last lament:

  as unknowable as the eye of the crow

  staring down from the walnut tree,

  blind as the Magellanic clouds,

  as cold as that March mud puddle

  at the foot of the granary steps,

  unseeable as the birthright of the LA

  whore’s Nebraska childhood of lilacs

  and cornfields and an unnamed prairie

  bird that lived in a thicket

  where she hid,

  as treacherous as a pond’s spring

  ice to a child,

  black as the scar of a half-peeled

  birch tree,

  the wrench of the beast’s heart just

  short of the waterhole,

  as bell-clear as a gunshot at dawn,

  is the ache of a father’s death.

  It is that, but far more:

  as if we take a voyage out of life

  as surely as we took a voyage in,

  almost as frightened children

  in a cellar’s cold gray air;

  or before memory – they put me on a boat

  on this river, then I was lifted off;

  in our hearts, it is always just after

  dawn, and each bird’s song is the first,

  and that ever-so-slight breeze that touches

  the tops of trees and ripples the lake

  moves through our bodies as if we were gods.

  HORSE

  What if it were our privilege

  to sculpt our dreams of animals?

  But those shapes in the night

  come and go too quickly to be held

  in stone: but not to avoid these shapes

  as if dreams were only a nighttime

  pocket to be remembered and avoided.

  Who can say in the depths of

  his life and heart what beast

  most stopped life, the animals

  he watched, the animals he only touched

  in dreams? Even our hearts don’t beat

  the way we want them to. What

  can we know in that waking,

  sleeping edge? We put down

  my daughter’s old horse, old and

  arthritic, a home burial. By dawn with eye

  half-open, I said to myself, is

  he still running, is he still running

  around, under the ground?

  COBRA

  What are these nightmares,

  so wildly colored? We’re in every

  movie we see, even in our sleep.

  Not that we can become what

  we fear most but that we can’t

  resist ourselves. The grizzly

  attack; after that divorce

  and standing outside the school

  with a rifle so they can’t take my

  daughter Anna. By god! Long ago

  in Kenya where I examined the

  grass closely before I sat down

  to a poisonous lunch, I worried

  about cobras. When going insane I worried

  about cobra venom in Major Grey’s Chutney.

  Simple as that. Then in overnight sleep I became

  a lordly cobra, feeling the pasture grass

  at high noon glide beneath my

  stomach. I watched the house with

  my head arched above the weeds,

  then slept in the cool dirt under the granary.

  PORPOISE

  Every year, when we’re fly-fishing for tarpon

  off Key West, Guy insists that porpoises

  are good luck. But it’s not so banal

  as catching more fish or having a fashion

  model fall out of the sky lightly on your head,

  or at your feet depending on certain

  preferences. It’s what porpoises do to the ocean.

  You see a school making love off Boca Grande,

  the baby with his question mark staring

  at us a few feet from the boat.

  Porpoises dance for as long as they live.

  You can do nothing for them.

  They alter the universe.

  THE BRAND NEW STATUE OF LIBERTY

  to Lee Iacocca (another Michigan boy)

  I was commissioned in a dream by Imanja,

  also the Black Pope of Brazil, Tancred,

  to design a seven-tiered necklace

  of seven thousand skulls for the Statue of Liberty.

  Of course from a distance they’ll look

  like pearls, but in November

  when the strongest winds blow, the skulls

  will rattle wildly, bone against metal,

  a crack and chatter of bone against metal,

  the true sound of history, this metal striking bone.

  I’m not going to get heavy-handed –

  a job is a job and I’ve leased a football

  field for the summer, gathered a group of ladies

  who are art lovers, leased in advance

  a bull Sikorsky freight helicopter

  to drop on the necklace: funding comes

  from Ford Foundation, Rockefeller, the NEA.

  There is one Jewish skull from Atlanta, two

  from Mississippi, but this is basically

  an indigenous cast except skulls from tribes

  of blacks who got a free ride over from Africa,

  representative skulls from all the Indian

  tribes, an assortment of grizzly, wolf,

  coyote and buffalo skulls. But what beauty

  when the morning summer sun glances

  off these bony pates! And her great

  iron lips quivering in a smile, almost a smirk

  so that she’ll drop the torch to fondle the jewels.

  THE TIMES ATLAS

  For my mentor, long dead, Richard Halliburton

  and his Seven League Boots.

  Today was the coldest day in the history

  of the Midwest. Thank god for the moon

  in this terrible storm.

  There are areas far out at sea where

  it rains a great deal. Camus said

  it rained so hard even the sea was wet.

  O god all our continents are only rifted

  magma welled up from below. We don’t

  have a solid place to stand.

  A little bullshit here as the Nile

  is purportedly eighty miles longer

  than the Amazon. I proclaim it a tie.

  Pay out your 125 bucks and find out the world

  isn’t what you think it is but what

  it is. We whirl so nothing falls off.

  Eels, polar bears, bugs and men enjoy

  the maker’s design. No one really

  leaves this place. O loveliness

  of Caribbean sun off water under

  trade wind’s lilt.

  Meanwhile the weather is no longer amusing.

  Earth frightens me, the blizzard, house’s

  shudder, oceanic roar, the brittle night

  that might leave so many dead.

  NEW LOVE

  With these dire portents

  we’ll learn the la
nguage

  of knees, shoulder blades,

  chins but not the first floor up,

  shinbones, the incomprehensible

  belly buttons of childhood,

  heels and the soles of our feet,

  spines and neckbones,

  risqué photos of the tender

  inside of elbows, tumescent fingers

  draw the outlines of lost parts

  on the wall; bottom and pubis

  Delphic, unapproachable as Jupiter,

  a memory worn as the first love

  we knew, ourselves a test pattern

  become obsession: this love

  in the plague years – we used to kiss

  a mirror to see if we were dead.

  Now we relearn the future as we learned

  to walk, as a baby grabs its toes,

  tilts backward, rocking. Tonight I’ll touch

  your wrist and in a year perhaps grind

  my blind eye’s socket against your hipbone.

  With all this death, behind our backs,

  the moon has become the moon again.

  WHAT HE SAID WHEN I WAS ELEVEN

  August, a dense heat wave at the cabin

  mixed with torrents of rain,

  the two-tracks become miniature rivers.

  In the Russian Orthodox Church

  one does not talk to God, one sings.

  This empty and sun-blasted land

  has a voice rising in shimmers.

  I did not sing in Moscow

  but St. Basil’s in Leningrad raised

  a quiet tune. But now seven worlds

  away I hang the cazas-moscas

  from the ceiling and catch seven flies

  in the first hour, buzzing madly

  against the stickiness. I’ve never seen

  the scissor-tailed flycatcher, a favorite

  bird of my youth, the worn Audubon

  card pinned to the wall. When I miss

  flies three times with the swatter

  they go free for good. Fair is fair.

  There is too much nature pressing against

  the window as if it were a green night;

  and the river swirling in glazed turbulence

  is less friendly than ever before.

  Forty years ago she called, Come home, come home,

  it’s suppertime. I was fishing a fishless

  cattle pond with a new three-dollar pole,

  dreaming the dark blue ocean of pictures.

  In the barn I threw down hay

  while my Swede grandpa finished milking,

  squirting the barn cat’s mouth with an udder.

  I kissed the wet nose of my favorite cow,

  drank a dipper of fresh warm milk

  and carried two pails to the house,

  scraping the manure off my feet

  in the pump shed. She poured the milk

  in the cream separator and I began cranking.

  At supper the oilcloth was decorated

  with worn pink roses. We ate cold herring,

  also the bluegills we had caught at daylight.

  The fly-strip above the table idled in

  the window’s breeze, a new fly in its death buzz.

  Grandpa said, “We are all flies.”

  That’s what he said forty years ago.

  ACTING

  for J.N.

  In the best sense,

  becoming another

  so that there is no trace left

  of what we think is the self.

  I am whoever.

  It is not gesture

  but the cortex of gesture,

  not movement

  but the soul of movement.

  Look at the earth with your left eye

  and at the sky with your right.

  Worship contraries.

  What makes us alike

  is also what makes us different.

  From Man to Jokester to Trickster

  is a nudge toward the deep,

  the incalculable abyss

  you stare into so it will

  stare back into you.

  We are our consciousness

  and it is the god in us

  who struggles to be in everyone

  in order to be ourselves.

  When you see the chalked form

  of the murdered man on the cement

  throw yourself onto it and feel

  the heat of the stone-hard fit.

  This is the liquid poem,

  the forefinger traced around both

  the neck and the sun:

  to be and be and be

  as a creek turns corners

  by grace of volume, heft of water,

  speed by rate of drop,

  even the contour of stone

  changing day by day.

  So that: when you wake in the night,

  the freedom of the nightmare

  turned to dream follows you

  into morning, and there is no

  skin on earth you cannot enter,

  no beast or plant,

  no man or woman

  you may not flow through

  and become.

  MY FRIEND THE BEAR

  Down in the bone myth of the cellar

  of this farmhouse, behind the empty fruit jars

  the whole wall swings open to the room

  where I keep the bear. There’s a tunnel

  to the outside on the far wall that emerges

  in the lilac grove in the backyard

  but she rarely uses it, knowing there’s no room

  around here for a freewheeling bear.

  She’s not a dainty eater so once a day

  I shovel shit while she lopes in playful circles.

  Privately she likes religion – from the bedroom

  I hear her incantatory moans and howls

  below me – and April 23rd, when I open

  the car trunk and whistle at midnight

  and she shoots up the tunnel, almost airborne

  when she meets the night. We head north

  and her growls are less friendly as she scents

  the forest-above-the-road smell. I release

  her where I found her as an orphan three

  years ago, bawling against the dead carcass

  of her mother. I let her go at the head

  of the gully leading down to the swamp,

  jumping free of her snarls and roars.

  But each October 9th, one day before bear season

  she reappears at the cabin frightening

  the bird dogs. We embrace ear to ear,

  her huge head on my shoulder,

  her breathing like god’s.

  CABIN POEM

  I

  The blond girl

  with a polka heart:

  one foot, then another,

  then aerial

  in a twisting jump,

  chin upward

  with a scream of such

  splendor

  I go back to my cabin,

  and start a fire.

  II

  Art & life

  drunk & sober

  empty & full

  guilt & grace

  cabin & home

  north & south

  struggle & peace

  after which we catch

  a glimpse of stars,

  the white glistening pelt

  of the Milky Way,

  hear the startled bear crashing

  through the delta swamp below me.

  In these troubled times

  I go inside and start a fire.

  III

  I am the bird that hears the worm,

  or, my cousin said, the pulse of a wound

  that probes to the opposite side.

  I have abandoned alcohol, cocaine,

  the news, and outdoor prayer

  as support systems.

  How can you make a case for yourself

  before an ocean of trees, or stan
ding

  waist-deep in the river? Or sitting

  on the logjam with a pistol?

  I reject oneness with bears.

  She has two cubs and thinks she

  owns the swamp I thought I bought.

  I shoot once in the air to tell her

  it’s my turn at the logjam

  for an hour’s thought about nothing.

  Perhaps that is oneness with bears.

  I’ve decided to make up my mind

  about nothing, to assume the water mask,

  to finish my life disguised as a creek,

  an eddy, joining at night the full,

  sweet flow, to absorb the sky,

  to swallow the heat and cold, the moon

  and the stars, to swallow myself

  in ceaseless flow.

  RICH FOLKS, POOR FOLKS, AND NEITHER

  I

  Rich folks keep their teeth

  until late in life,

  and park their cars in heated garages.

  They own kitsch statues of praying hands

  that conceal seven pounds of solid gold,

  knowing that burglars hedge at icons.

  At the merest twinge they go to the dentist,

  and their dogs’ anuses are professionally

  inspected for unsuspected diseases.

  Rich folks dream of the perfect massage

  that will bring secret, effortless orgasm,

  and absolutely super and undiscovered

  islands with first-rate hotels

  where they will learn to windsurf

  in five minutes. They buy clothes that fit –

  a forty waist means forty pants – rich folks

  don’t squeeze into thirty-eights. At spas

  they are not too critical of their big asses,

  and they believe in real small portions

  because they can eat again pretty quick.

  Rich folks resent richer folks

  and they also resent poor folks

  for their failures at meniality.