[January 23, 2003]

Ignoring decades
Of global warning,
The network
Some weatherhead in 212ville
Presents chill factors
By map
“out in”
Kneebrassker,
Uhlassker,
Mitchigin,
Like we wear
Cured bearskins,
Warmed by dung-fires
In sod huts,
Buried under ice mounds,
Venturing out
On snowshoes
To kill our meat,
Some of us
Freezing blue
To be found
In spring by
Adventursome
Easterners
Passing thru the Rustbelt,
Their notion of
Adventure travel.
We’re like a zoo
Out here, waiting
For the nice people
To come take
Pitchers, eh,
Toss us pemmican,
Jerky, summer
Sno-cones
Visitors hoping
We’ll copulate
In public
Like red-ass
Baboons --
Which we just might.

The early fish, womb-time, dark and wet
I flail, my mind gone winder-wander,
commending my body to lickety luck.

On Mars all those ruddy canals 
in miles-deep canyons,
no fishing. 

Come, my Martian friends,
join me here before sunlight,
when differences assert themselves.

I wade the ink legless,
casting my bread upon their lies.
The brownies here are wise by necessity;
little cover in narrow water.

I sit mindlessly
on my breakfast log,
cold beer and Moon Pie,
fifteen minutes after bobos
with pompous purpose and Countess Mara
silk ties start counting angels on pinheads,
seeking meaning in numbers.

No gafooneys out here,
or the need for them.

On a hilltop above my river
stirring beans and Bermuda loops,
watching the foiled trout blacken
on a small campfire,
I see a distant glow below,
where mosquitos gather.

Separate camps
divided by night,
I wonder who sleeps there
and why the dark is a wall
between us.

The river
talks to each of us, but we
may not talk to each other,
this law immutable.

Bones of honor rot in the loam
with mastodons, few finders, fewer lookers,
let the dead rest, they say, where they fell.
In the high season the guides have scouts
who trek cross-country to the sweet holes
on the River of the Good Father,
Mon Pere, Marquette,
stake them out like precious claims,
holding ground with the resolve of mud Marines
or Jesuits in service to le roi,
until the drift boats swirl into view
gondolas with no songs,
powered by the specie of clients,
two-fifty, half up-front,they tell me, a day;
sometimes the guides don't show.
No pro bono in this court, only cash,
no refunds on the river.
You never get
what you have to pay cash for
up front, and dispensations?

Sqawkling gulls flick the slick,
dive-bomb the surface and light
behind me, beside a red sign,
NO TRESPASSING THIS MEANS YOU,
to tear at their breakfasts
while leg-long Atlantics
perform aerobatics above quicksilver.

My cat sometimes sits by the wall
by the stairs leaping
for the sheer pleasure of it,
suspending at the top of shadows' eyes,
defying gravity, or denying it,
I can't say which.

I see in Sasha and salmon
shared exuberance,
to do what they are born to do
without pay.

Midnight, far up a Little South feeder
under a canopy of white periwinkle
and black velvet, I squat in the shallows
smoke, listen to the river's night talk.  Upstream,
an hour before, I heard noise, foreign,
the kind men make
when they're not wise
to the night river.
More than that, or less, I'm not sure which.  The sound
eats at me like the cow elk
trying to leap the Black above Blue Lakes,
way up north,
landing short, yards between us,
she snorted fear or disgust,
I couldn't say which, only that she raised a wave,
a seiche that darted past me,
too small to surf,
made the female Adams wiggle just right,
drew a lusty strike from a native
with a strong green back
masterfully vermiculated, as good as Buonarroti.
The new sound will not relent; I imagine
an invitation to look, but smoke on it
as the Nish-naw-be did when there was thinking to do.
A voice called, rather I thought
there was a voice, sweetly estrogenic,
this a certainty,
calling me up the river, a siren beckoning
in my cortex where unthought piles up
in its own order;
I went, mouth dry, against the current
legs shaking in the dark and saw,
sitting on a rock, the river glowing blue at her feet.
A delicate hand drawn from the water;
droplets fell,
Seeds, she said, of me.
I felt the comfort of her smile.
Fearful of silence, I could not help myself. 
Do I know you?
Imperfectly, she said. Which is to be expected.  You think
too much.  I've watched you.
I'm not sure what to say.
A laugh, soft as wind chimes,
Is speech so important? Sit beside me,
which I did until light swallowed her.

You can never know the river
until you spend the night,
holding her hand in silence.

Hordes in five-mil neoprene
slinging quarter-pound spiders,
drifting red roe in pantyhose sacks
in the shadow of migrant camps
and rotting sucker shacks,
raunchy Rockettes dancing out of step
along jagged boulders and cement shards,
barking, "Fish on,"
their heavy reels raging at the current,
a war of skunk works for OCDs.

I fled to my secret river,
the dead river where there is no need to talk,
except to myself.  The water defines
meander or perhaps it's the other way,
the point is solitude,
to be alone with a few fish
of immense self-interest. 
White clay ribbons mark the chutes;
stay to the hardtack gravel,
obey the river's rhythm or pay. 

Autumn deep as holes and
frog-green water, the trees barren,
curled brown leaves like floating
caskets on green water;
the crowds avoid this place
like the plague.
No damn fish, they say,
and too many ghosts.
Two black men crawl up the bank
carrying a quivering black king,
a great fish with slashes of white scar,
just dead or about to be,
I wonder if their black skin scars white.
No rods.
Nice fish, I say, but they hurry on,
from a stone trap under the cement bridge
for food not game,
the difference clear to some.
Heat wiggles from the water
the way it escapes the sand
of Death Valley
in shimmering tendrils
like glass-snake threads
inviting mirages.

The winter river is a cruel companion,
landscape changing whimsically,
low and brushy tag alder,
hummocks of scrub oak and small red pines,
a deep gorge over the oxbow under
a canopy of leaning white cedar,
a place that could be six hundred miles north
or in Hokkaido.

The trout and salmon here must be raised
to anger or instinct.  They do not eat,
carry no Moon Pies in canvas creels
or cold pork and gherkins on hard onion rolls.
Reproduction at the heart of it,
matching their genes against others and odds,
eternity the prize.  These are not carefree
creatures, as if any were, but the possession
here seems stronger, like magnetic north,
where the lines dive earthward,
compelling obedience.

Nine hours in the river, wading, casting,
my arm needs no instruction,
has been here before, perfected the routine,
asserts its independence, which I gladly grant.
The line sings softly, a single strand of hair,
wrestled by a blustery wind.  The takes here are
gentle as a wakeup kiss at 4 a.m.;
they invite a response, demand nothing.
A whitetail doe and two fawns,
last spring's, wander above me, wondering
what manner of creature I am.
Dangerous! I bark, scattering their flags. 
Best they keep their discomfort around me,
the way the fish do.

 

Nine hours, two takes, no fish, I leave no scars.
Only one salmon, seen at a distance in tea-brown water,
scooting up river, a small black coho, jack,
one of the stubborn few to leap the mesh weir
with singlemindedness.
The fish here used to be dense as a Russian proverb,
but now just me in my secret river
where experts say there are no trout.

At home she asks, Catch any?
No.  The usual, then.

[Apirl 25, 1993]

Lounging on a flat rock
beside a culvert,
letting a baby crawler
bump hisself downstream,
through the ringed metal tunnel,
no snags,
a definite allure
for the lazy.

A tug,
a bump, a gentle take,
I pull it back
and let it go,
eight inches of greenback.

An old man with gnarled hands,
liver spots,
grasping a Moon Pie,
chocolate flakes
in his moustaches,
staring down, says,
chuckling,
Be damned, catching fish
in a tube and this the first
I know of,
probably a blind pig finds an acorn
now and then,
like this, I suppose.

Not the first,
but the eighth
in only an hour,
trout, like ideas, being seldom
where others expect them.

[April 25, 1993]

Spring and still snowing,
the first time out
in new water,
clear and fast over
black-ocher gravel
the size and shape of mountain oysters.
I cast the riffles
with a nameless nymph,
a dozen times,
letting it curl back
to me in a whirlpool
over a black hole
and see motion,
a quick gray shadow beside
my right leg, striking hungrily,
glad for spring,
hooking itself
and me.
A gray-green native,
seventeen inches,
gloriously muscled,
scared too, like me
quivery old warriors, the two of us.
I have no hunger
for the flesh of fish
or warriors,
let it go,
arrive home,
satisfied.

Did you read the booklet
Regulations on cheap paper,
babbling of bureaucrats,
paper pushed by statute,
I don't keep fish,
I remind her.
Good thing, she says,
since you're ten days early,
out of season,
still a selfish boy,
in love with yourself.

[Building 88. April 25,1993]

Talons of winter's fury
on us with a desperation
of the soon-to-die, resisting
the pull of vernal equinox,
the wind gusting down from Alberta,
snow pelting insulated panes,
a tantalizing tattoo,
the death song.

I sit among Countess Maras
adherents smug in crispy gray,
sartorial, seamless people of wool,
perusing computer printouts,
inputs holding forth on outputs,
I am a captive among both species,
slogging through their runes,
ruins, indistinguishable,
they chant mantras of P and L,
factoring factory factors,
alliterative, glitterless,
they are intent on strategic planning:
how many caplets can be sold
in x-time at y-cost of goods,
the difference the only thing,
with markets being flat and still
as a dead man's vitals.

When will he die and who will ascend?
They see the climb, but not the fall.

The Chairman has a tick, no tock,
talks a language all his own,
mumbling incoherently, lists port,
finger-points, the sinking maestro,
leading the orchestra
of nodding yay-men, slit-eyed
narcoleptics breathing softly,
syncopated, metronomic,
reptilian;
the automotonic succubi
anticipating his last gasp,
MBA, Made By Aliens,
soon to shed their skins,
they have no souls these bottom-feeders,
they want it all
in a bright sun
on a green planet
of their own making.

In the morning the Chairman sags
in a motorized, computerized
wheelchair that can be rigged to run
by straw-powered air from the lips
of the near-dead;
he takes poison from clear tubing
into withered blue-hard veins,
(packed with bluestone clay maybe),
can see it drippety-drop-drip into him,
hard wires worked too long,
beyond the dealer's warranty
and expiration dating,
doomed by stress and genetics,
ambitions too,
they've lost their elasticity,
to kill the cancer in his spine.

He has diaphanous flesh,
the heinous sort
old Ed Gheinous yearned for
up in Rhinelandrous, WI,
the color of campfire smoke,
hiding in his back-office,
the office within the office
within the office,
Oriental if nothing else,
slumped on the electric throne,
the Zen: he is a man alone,
setting an example of dedication,
cornered by carcinoma,
soon to die
while profits accumuate
and stocks go unoptioned.

[March 23, 1994]

Yo! puffle-ruffing in the look-see,
yo shadow be makin' shadow mah man,
mus' be that burger-thick'nin' sickness
can you dig it,?
even the Jap-men be gettin it,
eat you up to
sumo-humongousness and death,
cells smushed paper-thin,
moisture squoze out dry
as ball-glove leather in winter.
I can hear your medial minisci clicketing
as you dance the gopak, mutha-fucka.
                  Call yo mama get yo sorry ass
                  mutha-fucka
                  ain' you got no shame, man
                  come out here like that
                  all shiny-fat-whiteman-pink
                  like a shoat fo slaughta?
Get off’n my flow fat boy,
tell yo mama boil some greens.

[March 27, 1994]

Taken for granted,
based in legends, no snow
on the ground for March Madness,
the time when city states
and copper towns
vie for superiority
on the backs and legs of native
sons on artificial hardwoods.
A sign of spring, these kids
in hunded-dollar high-tops,
lit-heeled neon technospringy,
air-boosted upper-jumpers,
Armani warm-ups
touted by the money-makers,
the choice of shoe jackers
and Eastern European tourists.
No snow, they say, down below
when cager flocks gather
for basket battles, Flivvers and Pilots,
hues of Devil, Model Towners, Iron Men,
Copper Kings and Doughboys,
chasing dreams, all but four to fail.

I don't doubt dreams,
only the authorship.

To play for it all,
the Big Gamimba,
on the television,
in front of everyone,
and to win,
to win at sixteen or eighteen,
barely out of babyhood
to stand on Olympus
and then what,
with a whole life spread
out ahead
like a sloped gauntlet?

Not sport,
something else.

[March 31, 1994]

Probie, my proxie,
you rednecked,
Red Wing bad boy,
tater-faced, broke-tooth
shit-disturber
caught by the border dicks
with crack in the crotch of your BVDs,
and a sixteen-year-old stripper,
snapping her gum and all,
I cheer your upper cuts
to chump-snoots and glass jaws.

Thursday nights,
deep into the week,
I've had my fill of shit sandwiches,
sit tube-side in the electron glow
waiting for you to kill
what I can't, Big Boy.

[Breaux Bridge, LA. March 28, 1994]

Big, fat white Caddie
pinked over with Cajun dust,
I cruise the Zydeco Road
in search of Breaux Bridge,
the crawdad capital,
lookin' for wimmens
and les bons temps.

Out dere, dat padre he say,
dey be coon-ass
villes up on rickety-stickety stilts
in dat Bayou Teche,
way up-fom dose cottonmouts,
yew know,
an' gator gliders,
an' slick-skin lil ol' girls
built like da Co-Kola bottles
dancin loose-titty wid mens till
da dawn be done.

You gone hang wid
da coon ass, yew gots to suck
da head of life, ma-boy.

How much you done pay
cash money

dat Cadillac coupe dere?

[April 2, 1994]

Four flat in the wet grass,
freshly cut with hand scythes,
we pause in the scarlet Jitney
draped by scapuli and images
of the Holy Mother of Jesus,
the obligation of strangers
to pay respects to dead bodies
of other strangers
en route to a factory
where they paint on velvet,
Ford-style.
Hank, I hear, built a factory
in Magnitogorsk in Russia
the idea of making something
out of parts spreading on its own power,
you do an arm,
me a foot, and like that,
piecework by body part,
same as the Mayor of Angeles City
in the grass of the yard
with his wife and daughters
skirts hiked up to their thin waists.
Garterbelt women, they wear
no pantyhose in these parts
or over theirs.
Some places they leave a corpse
face down to trap its spirit.
Here I can't say why,
we're just passing through,
in search of diversions
with the sometime living.
Come down from the mountains,
descendents of the Hukbalahaps
of the old days running now
under the name of Beatles,
the group, I Want to Hold Your Hand,
ready to rock and roll for justice
of their own definition.
Sprayed the four
at their front door
with Kalashnikovs,
returning from St. Something's,
freshly confessed,
one presumes,
clean in soul and clothing
and no scanties underneath,
the only image that persists
three decades later.

No frog-stranglers in a month or more,
the leaves a listless red and gold,
too dry for pat hunting,
fresh bear scat ripe with dry berries
on the two-track out by Frenchman's Swamp,
taken as a warning.  I'm wet to the skin
under my wools, too hot for hunting birds
and no damn dog, Toodles back home
content to sniff the behinds of strangers
or take a nap in the bright light
of Indian summer, leaving me
to cope alone, the lazy bitch.

Stuffed the twelve-gauge in its case,
in the bed of the truck,
bounced the Triple A road to Lost Glory,
a sandy crossroads with a tavern
and sign, Food (Pasties fresh-made)
and Drink & Live Bands & Bait and Ammo,
one-stop shopping, no name
but known the way
good steelhead holes
are known up here,
by what they offer,
not what they're called.

Tish the Dish behind the bar,
fondling the glassware. Nighttimes
she swallows long-neckers no hands,
labels and all, leering lasciviously
at the possibilities.  Few takers though,
the Dish's old man's a carver
doing time Down Below
for taking the fingers off an insurance man
from Ishpeming, fiftiesh with three kids,
caught with his right hand
spelunking under Tish's pleats
in the parking lot after closing time
her old man supposed to be off
jack-lighting deer,
and so bloody much for plans and alibis
when you mess with married women.

Prancing behind the redwood bar
in a red miniskirt shorter than my imagination
and a halter top stretched past its warranty.
Shadows of black hair under her bare arms,
Tish Dish, Earth Goddess in eternal estrus,
worse I heard since her old man went off. 
How come they call this the temperate zone
with the mercury running
from a hundred above and change in summers
to seventy below some winters,
now ninety when it ought to be less than half that?

I tell her:  Gimme a Shorts and
a double-Jack shooter.
I confess I don't mind a look
at those legendary legs,
but hereabouts you need to mind
your business or lose it. 
I don't mind random violence
long as I assign the P-factor. 

Behind me there's six pool tables
and an old coot named Lute Maki
shooting nine-ball with a carrot top,
buck a game, the sort of man-boy
intimate with the entrails of Motor City beaters. 
Can't tell the score, but there's an edge to the game. 
Cold-blooded folk need their cold
to keep the hot blood in its place. 
Absent cold, we're all
awash in a murdering mood. 
In August I don't talk
if the thermometer's up,
but this is October
and ninety, something's in the air
like a storm getting up its head
on the taiga of upper Manitoba.

Not long till I seen a dollar bill flitty-floating, a crinkled quakey-leaf fluttering indecisively toward the tabletop, green on green, the move of a green gamer, done in youthful ignorance, the wrong move when it's ninety in October and too hot to think.  No time for gawking:  I drop cash on the cork-scarred bartop, pause at the door below a blinking Budweiser sign, hear a pool cue snap against something hard, an angry killer bee, bred in Brasilia or Benton Harlem, something with the hard-nosed, no-nonsense directness of a denizen of the Cass Corridor.

Tish the Dish is all legs
on the slippery hood of my truck,
her little feet in red dancing slippers
clawed into the bumper for purchase,
her chin down hang-doggy.
Hey you, she says, I need wheels,
a ride you know, over to my place
on the Yellow Dog Plains
just outside Dodge City.  You it?

Dunno, I say, tell the truth,
your old man and such,
bad odds even for the innocent of heart
and him caged like a rogue bear
in some house of corrections that won't take. 
I ain't no gambler, sweet cakes.

My old man ain't no prob,
not no longer, not since last night
when some nigger gutted him brisket to balls
with a butter knife strop-honed
in the stamp mill where they make the license plates,
opened him up and poured gasoline
into his belly, they tell me, lit him on fire and watched. 
Dead men don't chop off no fingers, Mister. 
Do I get that ride or what?

I confess to a weakness
for long-legged women
in red dancing shoes
who can swallow long-neckers,
no hands, labels and all. 
I don't mind if you don't, I tell her.

I figured it would turn bad
when he went up with rump rangers
and rapists, he was just a country boy
who knew a good knife when he saw it. 
Live by the blade, die by the same.
I hear it's in the Bible
somewhere, though I'm not much on churches
or unlimited arc slo-pitch softball."

Her shack had two floors
outer walls of black tar paper
tacked on by pine strips
and rusty nails like a faded blackboard; the yard spilling
flotsom and jetsam, piles of soup cans,
derelict automobiles twisted on their sides,
a pack of black dogs that sang at the sight of her. 
Up this way where appearances
don't count, people dump what they have to
outside the back door in winter
to let the snow cover it up
and come spring there's so much
to do more pleasing than policing
they don't have the will to finish. 
Not finishing is something
we know about.

She says, You should know
that the dew of lust gathered
heavy in my short hairs when I was fourteen.
It set me in the fornicating mood,
and that's the truth, but I ain't loose, Mister.
You lay a hand on me, my dogs'll eat
fresh red meat tonight.  You want a brandy?
I wouldn't mind a sit on the stumps out back,
to enjoy the weather
and civilized conversation
about the effects of the moon
on the migration of glaciers.

Above a dutch oven made of red sandstone,
I see a black mantel and blue Mason jars
filled with the pale fingers of men
with poor timing or bad luck.
Don't fret, she says.  They ain't
my idea of Better Homes and Garters.  You want,
give 'em to the dogs to hold 'em till supper."
She sat stark naked on a red and white
personal flotation device
stuffed into the top of a pine stump.

Used to be a whole forest here,
dandy white pines tall as the sky
until that winter so cold
it started them to blowin' up
at two in the morning
and all the dogs howling scared shitless,
like a firefight, my old man said,
not the one got gutted, but before him. 
I never stay with one too long
on account of men try to take you over. 
You ever take over a woman,
steal her soul?
No doubt you have, all men do.  Indians say
when you've given up your soul
a dozen times, you lose it forever. 
Generally I don't put much stock
in Indian gibberish, since I seen
how they can't handle ferments,
but they ain't like us,
so you never know. 
How's that brandy?

Not exactly what I wanted
on a ninety-degree day
in October.  Good, the best.
Shapely long legs get you
to dishing out compliments
the same way your leg pops up
when the doctor
gives you a smack
on the knee.

Lose them clothes, Hon. 
How come you're dressed
so warm on a day like this?
Sat there on the stumps, drinking brandy,
sweat running out our pores,
a dog barking lazily now and then,
us too.

You leave me I'll kill myself,
she said after a long silence. 
Said with flashing eyes
and only the hint of a smile.
Cause of your old man?
Cause of I feel like it. 
Tired of getting left so maybe
it's time I do the leaving
especially when I can see by your pecker
you're only here for the brandy. 
I'm all alone, mister, a gig I done plenty.
I never been much on mourning,
except for dogs.  I seen your eyes
back there in the tavern,
seen what you wanted. 
I never been able to say no
to a man who wants me bad as that.
Slid off her perch, walked toward me. 
I never been straight
on all this business about heaven. 
You think they take in felons up there?
Not that he'd be such a great addition. 
He'd go sweet on some poor thing
and the first time Jesus set eyes on her
he'd be lopping off the Lord's fingers. 
That'd make a mess for sure. 
Imagine the Lord having to bless people with stumps. 
Still, a man gets killed for no reason,
they ought to be sendin' him off to heaven
even if he's gonna make a mess.  You think?
I got this way of just sayin'
whatever pops into my mind.
Gets me in trouble sometimes.
You believe people should suffer,
like their brains all filled with cancer
and babbling about some sulky
they used to bet the beer money on?
If I was in pain
I'd want somebody to off me.
You think I'm slanky? 
I hear that lots round last call,
drunked-up men whispering, You so slanky-hot,
like that bad bitch Madonna
with the aluminum titties.

I seen the Queen of the Englands
once, over to the Soo, she weren't no skank.
If I get off to sleep don't be fearin'
I can't find my way back to the shack.
I walked that trail many a night
and couldn't say I'd a wanted
it any other way.
I been in crowds when I was alone
and alone when I was in crowds
and mostly I don't like any numbers
over the sum of two so if you're
interested in something more than the sights
this might be the time to
be declarin' your intentions
in words a girl can't get
mixed up in her brandy.

Gentlemen don't talk out of school,
so let's leave it at this:
I confess to a weakness
for long-legged women
in red dancing shoes
who can swallow long-neckers,
no hands, labels and all. 

[Flanders. February 1991]

On a verdant wedge of
frosted key lime pie,
a ridge there in Flanders
south of Wipers
near the sunken railbed
once contested by scrambling,
clanking, stiff-legged men,
their bones brittle with hoarfrost,
up against the guns
rushed the Hun and
Kings Rifles, back and forth,
a game of give and take
and give again, or take,
high ground the only point,
really, sixty meters above the
sea's level was all
and now just ground,
its scars covered with spongy lichen,
a carpet for children,
big-boned, pink-cheeked enfants,
Christian youth, a club
scampering about, limbs akimbo,
wiggling Barbary apes quick-
chattering with good fellowship,
oblivious to the dark secrets
buried beneath their Adidas.
Eight on a pillbox,
adolescent boys and girls
smiling obediently
for a Hasselblad on tripod,
anxious to be captured
for all eternity,
not knowing or caring,
and no way to know
what that means.
Soldiers turned sheep, replacements,
a ram with swollen brisket
herds his harem to a grassy knoll,
their rumps sprayed red or green;
he makes peace with all strains
it seems, that ram
hot for his ladies on Hill 60.
Now and again Winter
and tectonic thrusting
pushes up rusty shrapnel
or yellowed fibias, mementos,
bits of this or that,
yesterday's grisly gewgaws
brought forward through time,
deposited in plain sight
at the feet of children and sheep
which have no eyes
for anything but themselves.