Two Aleut boys, poles sawed off for work,
run along the banks, over keels and gunwales
of dragged-up skiffs, following the ripples
for shadows of a fin;
the submerged eyes intent on dreaming home
under the shirring water, under the clouds,
the life swimming inland,
hooked suddenly and fought up the steep bank,
a saw-mouthed sockeye flips on the wet stones
until they club it and slit its belly open.
All my life I have tried to make sense
of what I cannot see. Those days alone
I thought I was close to it, swimming freely
under the watery clouds. Then I was hooked
and flapping, exposed to another sky.
Still being human, I wanted to dissolve,
to escape beyond my limited knowledge
of blank hills and riprap, road and gull cry,
to swim out further than I knew, and find
the skill of children fishing on a river.
The mounds of pocket gophers punctuate
these prairie stutterings of growth: willow
and poplar and cottonwood, bluestem grass—
and look, a little slip of a cowslip pokes
up from the muddy fringes of a creek.
The market value of such local knowledge
plunges yearly to new depths—one’s failure
to sophisticate these vast edges drear
with monologues on God’s withdrawing roar
(for all I know, She hasn’t arrived yet).
No shepherd parks his flock in this here field
and over yonder cash is all they grow.
The only oaten reed or reedy oat
I know’s the railroad’s melancholy note—
the train wails by ten times a day and traps
the traffic between Target and Cash Wise.
The eclogues you despise are hard to write.
Should I apologize for small-town ways
that offer to the critic nothing new?
Well, let me add what Mrs. Ferndale says,
counting train cars: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . .”