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  rolling and churning in the last accident,

  bubbles in lava.

  Behold

  the poet must remember the words that will carve themselves

  on his gravestone.

  If you walk in the right cemetery,

  that card catalogue of dirt, that grassy anthology,

  you may read them:

  It is only art.

  A lifetime, muttering.

  The Lamb's Head Inn at Lebanon,

  the Little Miami River limbering

  its length through Troy toward Cincinnati,

  the Symphony Orchestra, the Wiedemann's Brewery,

  the blue, indoors & smoky air

  through which I watched

  The Big O, Oscar Robertson,

  turning his wheel of grace,

  lofting a lifetime of basketballs.

  First we lived on Glade Street, then

  on Richwood Ave. I swear it.

  And now all Cincinnati—

  the hills above the river,

  the lawn that sloped toward Richwood Ave.

  like a valley of pleasant uncles,

  the sultry river musk that slid

  its compromising note

  through my bedroom window—

  all Cincinnati seethes. The vats

  at Procter & Gamble cease their slick

  congealing. The soap reverts to animal fat.

  Up north, near Lebanon and Troy an Rosewood,

  the corn I skulked in as a boy

  lays back its ears like a shamed dog.

  Hair along the hog's spine rises,

  the Holstein pivots his massive head

  at dusk toward where the barn was.

  The spreading stain he sees is his new owner.

  It is like being in a Catholic church

  the night before Easter.

  The statues stir under the heavy purple drapes.

  The stiff gods we have made

  so lovingly

  ripple their stony muscles.

  The slime crests toward the Mississippi.

  Cairo, Natchez, New Orleans,

  the litany of the new flood.

  What we imagined was

  the fire-storm.

  Or, failing that, the glacier, or

  we hoped we'd get off easy,

  losing only California.

  With the seismologists & mystics

  we saw the last California ridge

  crumble into the ocean

  like Parmesan.

  We would learn to love Nevada

  and develop a taste for salt

  in our water, our thirst

  become a wound.

  We were ready with elegies:

  O California, sportswear

  & defense contracts, gases that induce deference,

  high school girls with their own cars,

  we wanted to love you

  without pain.

  O California

  when you were moored to us

  like a splinter of melon bobbing among tankers

  we knew the European tongue was cobblestone.

  But now you are lost at sea,

  your cargo of mudslides & vineyards

  lost, the prints of the old movies

  lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods

  snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor

  they lie like hands of a broken clock.

  We're all coming west

  inexorably, bringing our ruinous

  self-knowledge,

  quoting Ecclesiastes.

  We'll be there Friday, early,

  your time.

  Meanwhile

  because this poem does not stop for lamentation

  Kansas is stuck in unspeakable gluck,

  in geological purge.

  The jayhawk plummets in mid-flight,

  drawn down by anklets of DDT.

  Now we are about to lose our voices

  we remember:

  tomorrow is our echo.

  O the old songs, the good days:

  strip mining & civil disobedience,

  sloppy scholarship, heart attacks.

  Now the age of footnotes is ours.

  So much for the Rockies,

  so much for the rest.

  Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid.

  While the rivers thickened

  and fish rose like oil slicks

  the students of water

  stamped each fish with its death date.

  Now we hear the sea rising

  like a new vowel

  in our throats.

  Sticks & Stones

  Because I have lived by poetry

  lines nag me lovingly.

  Like these from Roethke's notebooks:

  "I'm sick of women. I want God"

  and

  "Does God want all this attention?"

  Or Margaret Atwood's lines:

  "you become slowly more public,

  in a year there will be nothing left

  of you but a megaphone."

  Soon, will I be reciting these lines?

  Will there be a party

  after the reading?

  Who will be there?

  Moonrock, the anthologist.

  A woman poet

  afraid of living on her looks—

  may she grow older.

  There will be groupies—

  may their pubic hair

  clog the teeth of bad poets.

  There will be the poet

  whose marriage poems

  are really about his writing students—

  may his divorce poems

  be better.

  There will be the poet

  overlooked by Moonrock—

  may he turn in his sleep

  like a lottery drum.

  The Dark Prince will be there

  in a dust-jacket,

  sexual strip-miner and Dust

  Midas, a love only

  a mother could face.

  Someone will know a cruel joke

  so funny he'll tell it anyhow.

  Will Twitch the Ironist be there?

  Will the best young poet

  in America be there?

  Dervish will be there—

  may his disciples

  return to him

  the gift of himself.

  We don't need each other.

  We need ceremonies of self-love

  performed without witnesses.

  We need to leave the party,

  like a car starting across the fields.

  It is time to be lost

  again, weeping into the trenches

  of our palms

  until the hands are flooded

  and the need begins to grow

  like rice in a paddy

  to hold something.

  Then if I pick up a pen

  and write a poem

  I will want to read it to someone

  and the poem will be the party

  to honor whomever I read it to,

  a fallen apple branch

  cut into firewood,

  cold milk in the morning,

  a long walk at night.

  Rising and Falling (1979)

  Spring Snow

  Here comes the powdered milk I drank

  as a child, and the money it saved.

  Here come the papers I delivered,

  the spotted dog in heat that followed me home

  and the dogs that followed her.

  Here comes a load of white laundry

  from basketball practice, and sheets

  with their watermarks of semen.

  And here comes snow, a language

  in which no word is ever repeated,

  love is impossible, and remorse....

  Yet childhood doesn't end,

  but accumulates, each memory

  knit to the next, and the fields

  become one field. If to die is to lose

  all detail, th
en death is not

  so distinguished, but a profusion

  of detail, a last gossip, character

  passed wholly into fate and fate

  in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.

  Moving Again

  At night the mountains look like huge

  dim hens. In a few geological eras

  new mountains may

  shatter the earth's shell

  and poke up like stone wings.

  Each part must serve for a whole.

  I bring my sons to the base

  of the foothills and we go up.

  From a scruff of ponderosa

  pines we startle gaudy swerves

  of magpies that settle in our rising

  wake. Then there's a blooming

  prickly pear. "Jesus, Dad, what's that?"

  Willy asks. It's like a yellow tulip

  grafted to a cactus: it's a beautiful

  wound the cactus puts out

  to bear fruit and be healed.

  If I lived with my sons

  all year I'd be less sentimental

  about them. We go up

  to the mesa top and look down

  at our new hometown. The thin air

  warps in the melting light

  like the aura before a migraine.

  The boys are tired. A tiny magpie

  fluffs into a pine far below

  and farther down in the valley

  of child support and lights

  people are opening drawers.

  One of them finds a yellowing

  patch of newsprint with a phone

  number penciled on it

  from Illinois, from before they moved, before

  Nicky was born. Memory

  is our root system.

  "Verna," he says to himself

  because his wife's in another room,

  "whose number do you suppose this is?"

  Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo

  There are only a hundred or so

  snow leopards alive, and three

  of them here. Hours I watch them jump

  down and jump up, water being

  poured. Though if you fill a glass

  fast with water, it rings high to the top,

  noise of a nail driven true. Snow

  leopards land without sound,

  as if they were already extinct.

  If I could, I'd sift them

  from hand to hand, like a fire,

  like a debt I can count but can't pay.

  I'm glad I can't. If I tried to

  take loss for a wife, and I do,

  and keep her all the days of my life,

  I'd have nothing to leave my children.

  I save them whatever I can keep

  and I pour it from hand to hand.

  The News

  From each house on the street,

  the blue light of the news.

  Someone's dog whirps three times

  and scuffs the leaves.

  It's quiet, a school night.

  The President and his helpers

  live at one end of the news,

  parents at the other.

  The news for today

  is tape recordings

  of dry ice, sports

  for today is weather.

  Lights go back into the walls.

  These might as well be

  my neighbors. The news

  uses us all to travel by.

  I might as well be one

  of their children, bees

  sleeping the treaty of honey.

  The news will find me soon

  enough. I veer between

  two of their houses

  home through the woods.

  Strange Knees

  It's one of the ways you see

  yourself. Over the snow's blue skin

  you go strictly, to honor the slag

  of calcium in your knees,

  to honor the way you say

  Bad Knees, Bad Dog, Bad Luck.

  Your sons love to hear how you

  collapsed in the lobby

  of Cinema II, a latch in your knee

  not catching.

  It's true your knees

  hurt all the time but your sons dote

  wrongly on that fact. They make you Pain's

  Firework. They want to know why

  they love you and they eat your stories

  up. You saved the cat. You're squeaking

  home two miles over the moonwashed

  snow because your car broke down.

  The stories grow crooked inside

  you and your knees grow bad.

  Living Among the Dead

  There is another world,

  but it is in this one.

  —Paul Eluard

  First there were those who died

  before I was born.

  It was as if they had just left

  and their shadows would

  slip out after them

  under the door so recently closed

  the air in its path was still

  swirling to rest.

  Some of the furniture came from them,

  I was told, and one day

  I opened two chests

  of drawers to learn what the dead kept.

  But it was when I learned to read

  that I began always

  to live among the dead.

  I remember Rapunzel,

  the improved animals

  in the Just-So Stories, and a flock

  of birds that saved themselves

  from a hunter by flying in place

  in the shape of a tree,

  their wings imitating the whisk

  of wind in the leaves.

  My sons and I are like some wine

  the dead have already bottled.

  They wish us well, but there is nothing

  they can do for us.

  Sebastian cries in his sleep,

  I bring him into my bed,

  talk to him, rub his back.

  To help his sons live easily

  among the dead is a father's great work.

  Now Sebastian drifts, soon he'll sleep.

  We can almost hear the dead

  breathing. They sound like water

  under a ship at sea.

  To love the dead is easy.

  They are final, perfect.

  But to love a child

  is sometimes to fail at love

  while the dead look on

  with their abstract sorrow.

  To love a child is to turn

  away from the patient dead.

  It is to sleep carefully

  in case he cries.

  Later, when my sons are grown

  among their own dead, I can

  dive easily into sleep and loll

  among the coral of my dreams

  growing on themselves

  until at the end

  I almost never dream of anyone,

  except my sons,

  who is still alive.

  Left Hand Canyon

  for Richard Hugo

  The Rev. Royal Filkin preaches

  tomorrow on why we are sad.

  Brethren, Montana's a landscape

  requiring faith: the visible

  government arrives in trucks,

  if you live out far enough.

  If you live in town, the government's

  gone, on errands, in trucks.

  Let citizens go to meetings,

  I'll stay home. I hate a parade.

  By the time you get the trout

  up through the tiny triangular

  holes in the Coors cans, they're so

  small you have to throw them back.

  Glum miles we go

  to Grandmother's house.

  The earth out here doesn't bear us

  up so much as it keeps us out,

  an old trick of the beautiful.

  Remember what Chief Lef
t Hand said?

  Never mind. Everything else

  was taken from him,

  let's leave his grief alone.

  My Eastern friends ask me

  how I like it in the West,

  or God's country, as it's sometimes

  called, though God, like a slumlord,

  lives in the suburbs: Heaven.

  And I don't live "in the West";

  I live in this canyon among a few

  other houses and abandoned

  mines, vaccinations that didn't take.

  In Memory of the Utah Stars

  Each of them must have terrified

  his parents by being so big, obsessive

  and exact so young, already gone

  and leaving, like a big tipper,

  that huge changeling's body in his place.

  The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.

  The year I first saw them play

  Malone was a high school freshman,

  already too big for any bed,

  14, a natural resource.

  You have to learn not to

  apologize, a form of vanity.

  You flare up in the lane, exotic

  anywhere else. You roll the ball

  off fingers twice as long as your

  girlfriend's. Great touch for a big man,

  says some jerk. Now they're defunct

  and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19,

  rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench,

  his pet of a body grown sullen

  as fast as it grew up.

  Something in you remembers every

  time the ball left your fingertips

  wrong and nothing the ball

  can do in the air will change that.

  You watch it set, stupid moon,

  the way you watch yourself

  in a recurring dream.

  You never lose your touch

  or forget how taxed bodies

  go at the same pace they owe,

  how brutally well the universe