Livingston Suite

in memory of T.J. Huth

Shorn of nature,

here but in small supply,

townspeople adore their dogs.

Our dogs have never lived

in a town. Neither have I

since 1967. I adore

the puzzlement of our dogs.

Each morning I walk four blocks

to this immense river,

surprised that it’s still there,

that it won’t simply disappear

into the ground like the rest of us.

In the burnt July air

the strange cool odor

of sprinkler water

creating its own little breeze

in the Livingston Park

where there are twelve rings for playing

horseshoes built before the fathers of lies

built the clouds above our heads.

A lovely girl passes on her bicycle

with a fat cat

on her shoulder who watches me

disappear through heavy lids,

then a lovely soiled girl on her knees

in a garden looks up at me

to say hello. A Christian urge tries

to make me ignore her pretty butt

cocked upward like a she-cat’s.

Four churches within a block,

Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Congregational,

surrounding me with maudlin holiness,

Sunday’s hymns a droning hum

against the ceilings. Crows and magpies think,

Oh it’s that day again.

Christ in the New World like Milne’s Eeyore,

a lumpen donkey sweating with our greed,

trying to make us shepherd his billions of birds.

Under the streets are the remnants

of an older town with caches

of Indian skulls, also wizened

white scalps from those who jumped

the gun on the westward movement

that is still ending in Santa Monica

where a girl I knew who, after taking three

California speedballs, had her brain hurled into eternity

like a jellied softball. Oh Cynthia.

I walk my dog Rose in the alleys

throughout town. Maybe it’s where poets belong,

these substreets where the contents of human life

can be seen more clearly, our shabby backsides

disappearing into the future at the precise rate

of the moon’s phases. Rose turns, hearing

an upstairs toilet flush, the dead cows,

pigs and chickens turning semiliquid

in the guts of strangers, the pretty tomato

changing shape, the potatoes that once held leaves

and blossoms in their spindly green arms. Holy days

of early summer with lilacs drooping laden

under the weight of their moist art. From a kitchen

a woman laughs a barking laugh over

something I’ll never know. A ninety-year-old

couple emerges from the Methodist church smiling,

masters of a superior secret. Back in the alley

a dirty yellow cat emerges from a garbage can

with trout remains, a sure sign of feline victory.

She holds the carcass tightly as if I might take it.

Our newspaper, The Enterprise, said,

“Grizzlies feasting on storm-killed cattle.”

An early June blizzard dropped four feet

of snow, killing a thousand cows and calves,

a few foals, and the grizzlies hungry and fresh

from hibernation are feasting. “The bears

are just thick. It’s really kind of dangerous

up here right now,” said Gus V., a rancher.

Interesting news on the summer solstice.

The cow protrudes from the snowbank with ravens

perched around the eyes & udders watching for a coyote

or bear to open the hidebound meat, nearly

a million pounds of meat spread around the

countryside. What pleasure in this natural terrorism.

On a twilight walk a violent storm moved swiftly

toward the east and south of me with the starkest

lightning striking against the slate-colored

Absaroka mountains. Closer, on a green mountainside

white trucks passed on Interstate 90,

then closer yet Watson’s Black Angus cattle

sprinkled like peppercorns against shiny

wet pale green grass. Closer, a tormented

cottonwood thicket in the rising wind, maybe

60 knots, branches flailing, closer the broad

and turbulent brown river. And finally

only me on which all things depend, standing

on the riverbank, bent to the wind, the solitary

twilight watcher wondering who is

keeping the gods alive this evening or whether

they have given up on us and our tiny forked tongues,

our bleating fears and greed, our pastel anxieties.

In 1968 when I was first here

there was a cool scent of pines

and melting snow from the mountains

carried by a southwind through the river’s

canyon. The scent is still here,

the sure fresh odor of the West.

At the oars of the drift boat

in the thrash and churn of a rapid

I have no more control over the boat,

or my life, than I had in 1968.

Swept away. And not quite understanding

that this water is heading toward

the Caribbean. A grizzly bear pisses

in a creek in the Absarokas and traces end up

nonchalantly passing New Orleans

into the Gulf of Mexico. This fuzzy air

above is from dust storms in China.

The underground river far below me

started in the Arctic and heads toward

the equator. During the Bush colonoscopy

narwhals were jousting over lady narwhals

and an immense Venezuelan anaconda gave birth

to a hundred miniatures of her kind, all quickly

eaten by waiting caimans and large wading birds.

Trapped in the compartment of a sunken ship

a man writes a letter in the dark to his wife

and children in Missouri which will never be read.

I watch a blind sheep who loves to roll in the grass.

At the rodeo the bucking horse

leaps then buckles to its knees,

recovers, then bucks up. And up.

The rider thrown, eating a face-

ful of dirt while behind the announcer’s

shack and across the river,

up a cliff and a broad green slope,

trucks pass east and west on 1-90

unmindful of the cowboy spitting dirt.

Around here they’re still voting

for Eisenhower as a write-in candidate.

Around here people still have memories

and honor their war dead. In the park

to each road guardrail a flag and white cross

are attached, and a name that is gone

but not forgotten. An old man carrying

a portable oxygen unit breathes deeply

with moist eyes looking at his brother’s name,

lost in Iwo Jima. We bow slightly

to each other, and my memory repeats the prayer

I offered at age five for my uncles Art and Walter

off in the South Pacific on warships fighting

the Japanese and the satanic Tojo. At church

we sang “Fairest Lord Jesus” and the minister

announced that a deacon’s son was lost

in what I heard as “yurp.”

Some of the men and women sobbed loudly.

I remembered him playing baseball and driving

around town in his old Ford coupe with an actual

squirrel tail attached to the aerial, and just out

of kindergarten I had it all wrong thinking who will

drive Fred’s car now? Our mothers and fathers embraced.

From different upstairs windows I see four different

mountain ranges not there to accompany the four churches:

the Absarokas, the Gallatins, the Bridgers, the Crazies.

You naturally love a mountain range called Crazies.

Of course naked women, Native and white,

run through the Crazies on moonlit nights

howling for husbands and lovers

lost to our wars. I’ve followed their red footprints

while hunting in these mountains, the small toes.

A community can drown in itself,

then come to life again. Every yard seems

to have flowers, every street its resident magpies.

In the outfield of the baseball diamond

there are lovely small white flowers that a gardener

told me are the “insidious bindweed.” All my life

I’ve liked weeds. Weeds are botanical

poets, largely unwanted. You can’t make a dollar

off them. People destroy the obnoxious dandelion

that I’ve considered a beautiful flower since early

childhood, blowing off the fuzzy seeds when they died,

sending the babies off into the grim universe,

but then I’m also fond of cowbirds and crows,

cowbirds and poets laying their eggs for others

to raise then drifting away for no reason.

Search & Rescue is “combing” the river

this morning for a drowned boy. If it were me

I’d rather float east through the night toward the rising

sun. But it’s not me. The boy probably

wasn’t literary and the parents want the body

to bury, the fourth body in the river this summer.

Currents can hold a body tight to the bottom.

A vet friend found residual gills in the head

of a dog but at our best we’re ungainly in water

compared to the clumsiest of fishes. Against the song,

we won’t fly away. Or float. We sink into earth.

In this prolonged heat wave the snow

is shrinking upward to the mountain tip-tops

to a few crevasses and ravines. On Mount Wallace

ancient peoples, likely the Crow, the Absarokas,

carved out of flat stone the imprint of a man

so you could lie there in a grizzly-claw necklace

and see only sky for three days and nights,

a very long session in your own private church.

It’s ninety-five degrees at four PM

and two girls in their early teens step

from the cooler cement sidewalk onto the street’s hot

asphalt in their bare feet, beginning to dance,

jump, prance, one in shorts and the other

in a short summer dress. It is good enough

so that only Mozart would contribute to this pure

dance that is simply what it is, beyond passing

lust, sheer physical beauty, the grace of being

on a nearly insufferable hot day in Montana.

The girls skidded their feet on sprinkler-wet grass

under a maple tree, then went indoors out of my life.

Everyone seems to have loved the drowned boy.

Destiny is unacceptable. This grand river

he’d seen thousands of times didn’t wait for him.

Nobody seems to have a clue. He died two days ago

and they’re still searching the river. Some men

carry ominous long poles with a hook in the end.

This morning walking Rose I looked at the wide

eddy with a slow but inexorable whirlpool coiling

in upon itself that no human could swim against.

You might survive by giving up the struggle

and hope that the water would cast you aside

into the steady current, and that it wouldn’t force you

downward beyond the limit of your breath.

In high school I flunked chemistry, unable to bear

up under the foreign odors or comprehend the structure

of water. It’s one thing to say out loud “H-two-O,”

and another to have spent thousands of days in the company

of lakes, creeks and rivers seeing fish breathe

this liquid air. An old man feels the slow struggle

of dying, say for ten years, which drowning shortens

to a minute or so. People say it’s the best way to die.

Once in the Humboldt current off the coast of Ecuador

I looked into the eye of a whale and later wondered

if she communed with the soul of water. At nineteen

or twenty the cup is overflowing but not understood.

The dread is there won’t be time to drink it.

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found

a large cinder on a long walk along abandoned

country railroad tracks, a remnant of steam

trains, the cinder similar to those our fathers

shoveled from coal furnaces in the early winter mornings

before stoking the fire. In your dark bedroom

you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump

when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.

Now the trains are all diesel and in Livingston at night

I hear them pass, Burlington & Northern, the horn

an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.

Some complain but I love this night music,

imagining that a few of the railroad cars are from

my youth when I stood in a pasture and thrilled

to my favorite, “Route of Phoebe Snow.”

To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.

There’s a dullish ache, a restlessness in those

who walk their dogs along the river’s levee.

None of us wants to find the body

but then it’s our duty to look in this early morning

light with a cool breeze coming off the crumpled water.

A tree plucked from the bank sails by and beauty

is visited by the terror of power. When my sister

was killed at nineteen I began to disbelieve

in destiny, in clocks and calendars, that the downward

thrust of time that hammers us into the ground

is planned, that the girl in France who wrote

me a letter before suicide was drawn to that place

by an ignored, thus insignificant, universe where God

wakes up cross, yawns and the dead are tossed

like confetti into the void. If there’s a divinity

that shapes our ends it’s beyond our ken. A tree

by its nature seeks its future moment by moment.

The child in grade-school science looks out the window

bemused that his singularity was chosen from millions

of his parents’ eggs and sperms. There’s much less time

than he thinks no matter how long he lives. The heart

can never grasp these unbearable early departures.

A concert in the park on the 4th of July sponsored

by the networks in New York. Someone named Sheryl Crow,

Hank Williams Junior not Senior, and my old favorite,

Los Lobos. As a claustrophobe I can’t walk the four blocks

into the crowds but from my studio

I can hear the Latino music wafting through maple

trees, imagining I’m at our winter casita near Patagonia,

Arizona, on the Mexican border, the music so much

closer to love and death than our own, the heart

worn on the sleeve, the natural lament of flowers, the moon

visible. Smiling skeletons are allowed to dance

and the gods draw closer to earth, the cash registers

drowned out in the flight of birds, the sound of water.

You can’t row or swim upstream on the river.

This moving water is your continuing past

that you can’t retrace by the same path

that you reached the present, the moment by moment

implacable indifference of time. At one point

in my life nearly every tree on earth was shorter

than me, and none of the birds presently here

were here at my birth except an aged macaw

in Bahia. Not a single bear or bug, dog or cat,

but a few turtles and elephants who greeted

my arrival. We can’t return for a second

to those golden days of the Great Depression, World War II,

the slaughter of the Jews, the Stalinist purges,

the yellow horde of China feeding on its afterbirth,

the Japanese gearing up scientific experiments

that would kill a quarter of a million. How auspicious

it is when people talk of the marvelous sixties

with the extermination of JFK, Bobby Kennedy,

Martin Luther King, Vietnam, and enough music

to divert us from the blood-splattered screen

of immediate history. Within time and the river

no one catches their breath, a vast prayer wheel

without a pivot spinning off into the void.

We’re wingless birds perpetually falling north.

Maybe I’m wrong. After years of practice

I learned to see as a bird but I refuse

to do it now, not wanting to find the body.

I traveled east to our cabin in Michigan

where I learned that my Zen master, Kobun

Chino Sensei, drowned in a cold pond trying to save

his three-year-old daughter, who also drowned.

I make nothing of this but my mind suddenly

rises far upward and I see Kobun in his black

robes struggling in the water and he becomes

a drowning raven who then frees himself for flight,

his daughter on the pond’s bottom rising to join him.

What could the vision mean but a gift? I said

maybe I’m wrong. The Resurrection is fatally correct.

As an early and relentless swimmer I couldn’t imagine

death by water until I saw a spring runoff

in the Manistee River, a shed floating by

as if powered by a motor, a deafening wave curling

upward at a log jam. I don’t want to die

in a car, at war, in an airliner where I searched

for the pulse of an old lady who collapsed

in the aisle, found nothing, and everyone said

she seemed to be smiling. She left the plane behind.

But water at least is an earthly embrace.

It was my wife who found the body while walking

her dog Mary beside the river at Mayor’s landing.

I was in Michigan in a cabin beside the river

made turbulent by an hour-long cloudburst.

I wish it wasn’t you, I said. “But it was,” she said.

“It had to be someone. Why not me?”

In Livingston I’m back home in Reed City

over fifty years ago when trains were steam but the cows

and alleys were the same, the friendly town mongrels

I said hello to, one who walked with me an hour

before turning home when we crossed his street.

From the park bridge I watch a heron feed and at the edge

of town there were yellow legs, Wilson’s phalaropes

wandering a sand and rock bar, at home in the river

because they could fly over it. I’m going to swim

across it on a moonlit night. Near the porch steps

of the house next door are two stone Chinese lions

looking at the street with the eyes of small gods,

the eyes that were given us that we don’t wish to use

for fear of madness. Beside the river’s bend

where he drowned colored stones are arranged

to say “We love you, T.J.” Not loved in past

tense but love in the way that the young have the grace

of their improbable affections, their hearts

rising to the unkempt breath and beat of the earth.