All of Us: The Collected Poems Read online

  The ravages of alcoholism and sexual betrayal give way to a new ease and largesse in the poems of Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985) and Ultramarine (1986), the work British readers first met in the collection In a Marine Light (1987), published the year before his death at age fifty from lung cancer. These poems expressed, among other things, a thankfulness even for his trials, and for having been delivered into a life he considered happy. This amplitude carried him into the final poems of A New Path to the Waterfall (1989), written in the last six months of his life. Art and life were his focus. Death, mosquito-like, hovered and supped at the periphery.

  I recall in those last days being aware that I was, for Ray, the only reader of those poems he would have. I laughed and cried with them, reading them as they came. His humor, lashed as it was to pain, positively unraveled me. In “What the Doctor Said” we don’t expect eagerness and the turnabout of thankfulness from a man receiving news of his oncoming death. But that is what we get:

  he said I’m real sorry he said

  I wish I had some other kind of news to give you

  I said Amen and he said something else

  I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do

  and not wanting him to have to repeat it

  and me to have to fully digest it

  I just looked at him

  for a minute and he looked back it was then

  I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me

  something no one else on earth had ever given me

  I may even have thanked him habit being so strong

  *

  It’s steelhead season, early January 1996. I’ve been rereading Ray’s poems here at Sky House where he wrote so many of them. Below in the valley, men are walking the banks of Morse Creek, the river which became the central metaphor of Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

  Just yesterday our neighbor, Art LaMore, recalled Ray’s amazing luck. One morning Ray had dropped a hook baited with salmon roe off the footbridge and caught a ten-pound steelhead. He’d carried it to Art’s door, hooked over his fingers by its gills, to show him. He had felt blessed beyond reason. By the time I came home, he’d cleaned the fish on the kitchen floor. There are still knife marks in the linoleum. Men fish for years on Morse Creek and never catch a steelhead. I don’t think Ray knew this or cared. He simply accepted the gift.

  We often walked along this river, sorting out the end of a story, as with “Errand”, or discussing our plans for trips. Always we found release and comfort in noticing—that pair of herons, ducks breaking into flight upriver, the picked-over carcass of a bird near the footpath, snow on the mountains—the very kinds of attentiveness which bind his poems so effortlessly to our days.

  When I think of the will that carried him through a lifetime in poetry, I recall particularly one afternoon in the summer of 1988. We had finished assembling and revising his last book of poems, A New Path to the Waterfall. We were preparing for a fishing trip to Alaska which we knew would, in all likelihood, be our last. Ray wanted to go to Morse Creek once more, so I drove as close as I could get and we climbed out of the jeep onto the bank. We just stood together a while, looking into the water. Then, without saying anything, we began to walk toward the mouth where this freshwater river joins the Strait of Juan de Fuca, some seventy miles east of the Pacific. It was hard going for him and we had to stop often, to sit down and pull up, twenty feet at a time.

  It was important, that walk, hyphenated by rests—his breath gathered inside him, again and again. We would talk quietly in those moments sitting on the ground, and I recall saying like a mantra, “It isn’t far now.” He was traveling on his remaining right lung, but carrying himself well in the effort, as if this were the way to do it, the way he had always done it. When we made it to the river mouth, there was an intake of joy for us both, to have crossed that ground. It was one of those actions that is so right it makes you able in another dimension, all the way back to the start of your life. We savored it, the river’s freshwater outrush into salt water, that quiet standing up to life together, for as long as it was going to last.

  “When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers,” Czeslaw Milosz writes.* For Ray, I think poems, like rivers, were places of recognition and healing:

  Once I lay on the bank with my eyes closed,

  listening to the sound the water made,

  and to the wind in the tops of the trees. The same wind

  that blows out on the Strait, but a different wind, too.

  For a while I even let myself imagine I had died —

  and that was all right, at least for a couple

  of minutes, until it really sank in: Dead.

  As I was lying there with my eyes closed,

  just after I’d imagined what it might be like

  if in fact I never got up again, I thought of you.

  I opened my eyes then and got right up

  and went back to being happy again.

  I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you.

  (“For Tess”)

  Ray made the ecstatic seem ordinary, within reach of anyone. He also knew something essential which is too often sacrificed for lesser concerns—that poetry isn’t simply reticence served up for what we meant to say. It’s a place to be ample and grateful, to make room for those events and people closest to our hearts. “I wanted to tell you.” And then he did.

  TESS GALLAGHER

  Sky House

  Port Angeles, Washington

  14 January 1996

  * * *

  * “A Magic Mountain” in Czeslaw Milosz: Selected Poems, rev. ed. (New York: Ecco Press, 1980) 93.

  Fires

  And isn’t the past inevitable,

  now that we call the little

  we remember of it “the past”?

  — WILLIAM MATTHEWS, from Flood

  I

  Drinking While Driving

  It’s August and I have not

  read a book in six months

  except something called The Retreat From Moscow

  by Caulaincourt.

  Nevertheless, I am happy

  riding in a car with my brother

  and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.

  We do not have any place in mind to go,

  we are just driving.

  If I closed my eyes for a minute

  I would be lost, yet

  I could gladly lie down and sleep forever

  beside this road.

  My brother nudges me.

  Any minute now, something will happen.

  Luck

  I was nine years old.

  I had been around liquor

  all my life. My friends

  drank too, but they could handle it.

  We’d take cigarettes, beer,

  a couple of girls

  and go out to the fort.

  We’d act silly.

  Sometimes you’d pretend

  to pass out so the girls

  could examine you.

  They’d put their hands

  down your pants while

  you lay there trying

  not to laugh, or else

  they would lean back,

  close their eyes, and

  let you feel them all over.

  Once at a party my dad

  came to the back porch

  to take a leak.

  We could hear voices

  over the record player,

  see people standing around

  laughing and drinking.

  When my dad finished

  he zipped up, stared a while

  at the starry sky—it was

  always starry then

  on summer nights —

  and went back inside.

  The girls had to go home.

  I slept all night in the fort

  with my best friend.

  We kissed on the lips

  and touched each other.
<
br />   I saw the stars fade

  toward morning.

  I saw a woman sleeping

  on our lawn.

  I looked up her dress,

  then I had a beer

  and a cigarette.

  Friends, I thought this

  was living.

  Indoors, someone

  had put out a cigarette

  in a jar of mustard.

  I had a straight shot

  from the bottle, then

  a drink of warm collins mix,

  then another whisky.

  And though I went from room

  to room, no one was home.

  What luck, I thought.

  Years later,

  I still wanted to give up

  friends, love, starry skies,

  for a house where no one

  was home, no one coming back,

  and all I could drink.

  Distress Sale

  Early one Sunday morning everything outside —

  the child’s canopy bed and vanity table,

  the sofa, end tables and lamps, boxes

  of assorted books and records. We carried out

  kitchen items, a clock radio, hanging

  clothes, a big easy chair

  with them from the beginning

  and which they called Uncle.

  Lastly, we brought out the kitchen table itself

  and they set up around that to do business.

  The sky promises to hold fair.

  I’m staying here with them, trying to dry out.

  I slept on that canopy bed last night.

  This business is hard on us all.

  It’s Sunday and they hope to catch the trade

  from the Episcopal church next door.

  What a situation here! What disgrace!

  Everyone who sees this collection of junk

  on the sidewalk is bound to be mortified.

  The woman, a family member, a loved one,

  a woman who once wanted to be an actress,

  she chats with fellow parishioners who

  smile awkwardly and finger items

  of clothing before moving on.

  The man, my friend, sits at the table

  and tries to look interested in what

  he’s reading—Froissart’s Chronicles it is,

  I can see it from the window.

  My friend is finished, done for, and he knows it.

  What’s going on here? Can no one help them?

  Must everyone witness their downfall?

  This reduces us all.

  Someone must show up at once to save them,

  to take everything off their hands right now,

  every trace of this life before

  this humiliation goes on any longer.

  Someone must do something.

  I reach for my wallet and that is how I understand it:

  I can’t help anyone.

  Your Dog Dies

  it gets run over by a van.

  you find it at the side of the road

  and bury it.

  you feel bad about it.

  you feel bad personally,

  but you feel bad for your daughter

  because it was her pet,

  and she loved it so.

  she used to croon to it

  and let it sleep in her bed.

  you write a poem about it.

  you call it a poem for your daughter,

  about the dog getting run over by a van

  and how you looked after it,

  took it out into the woods

  and buried it deep, deep,

  and that poem turns out so good

  you’re almost glad the little dog

  was run over, or else you’d never

  have written that good poem.

  then you sit down to write

  a poem about writing a poem

  about the death of that dog,

  but while you’re writing you

  hear a woman scream

  your name, your first name,

  both syllables,

  and your heart stops.

  after a minute, you continue writing.

  she screams again.

  you wonder how long this can go on.

  Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year

  October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen

  I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face.

  Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string

  of spiny yellow perch, in the other

  a bottle of Carlsbad beer.

  In jeans and denim shirt, he leans

  against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.

  He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,

  wear his old hat cocked over his ear.

  All his life my father wanted to be bold.

  But the eyes give him away, and the hands

  that limply offer the string of dead perch

  and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,

  yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either,

  and don’t even know the places to fish?

  Hamid Ramouz (1818—1906)

  This morning I began a poem on Hamid Ramouz —

  soldier, scholar, desert explorer —

  who died by his own hand, gunshot, at eighty-eight.

  I had tried to read the dictionary entry on that curious man

  to my son—we were after something on Raleigh —

  but he was impatient, and rightly so.

  It happened months ago, the boy is with his mother now,

  but I remembered the name: Ramouz —

  and a poem began to take shape.

  All morning I sat at the table,

  hands moving back and forth over limitless waste,

  as I tried to recall that strange life.

  Bankruptcy

  Twenty-eight, hairy belly hanging out

  of my undershirt (exempt)

  I lie here on my side

  on the couch (exempt)

  and listen to the strange sound

  of my wife’s pleasant voice (also exempt).

  We are new arrivals

  to these small pleasures.

  Forgive me (I pray the Court)

  that we have been improvident.

  Today, my heart, like the front door,

  stands open for the first time in months.

  The Baker

  Then Pancho Villa came to town,

  hanged the mayor

  and summoned the old and infirm

  Count Vronsky to supper.

  Pancho introduced his new girl friend,

  along with her husband in his white apron,

  showed Vronsky his pistol,

  then asked the Count to tell him

  about his unhappy exile in Mexico.

  Later, the talk was of women and horses.

  Both were experts.

  The girl friend giggled

  and fussed with the pearl buttons

  on Pancho’s shirt until,

  promptly at midnight, Pancho went to sleep

  with his head on the table.

  The husband crossed himself

  and left the house holding his boots

  without so much as a sign

  to his wife or Vronsky.

  That anonymous husband, barefooted,

  humiliated, trying to save his life, he

  is the hero of this poem.

  Iowa Summer

  The paperboy shakes me awake. “I have been dreaming you’d come,”

  I tell him, rising from the bed. He is accompanied

  by a giant Negro from the university who seems

  itching to get his hands on me. I stall for time.

  Sweat runs off our faces; we stand waiting.

  I do not offer them chairs and no one speaks.

  It is only later, after they’ve gone,

  I realize they have delivered a letter.
r />   It’s a letter from my wife. “What are you doing

  there?” my wife asks. “Are you drinking?”

  I study the postmark for hours. Then it, too, begins to fade.

  I hope someday to forget all this.

  Alcohol

  That painting next to the brocaded drapery

  is a Delacroix. This is called a divan

  not a davenport; this item is a settee.

  Notice the ornate legs.

  Put on your tarboosh. Smell the burnt cork

  under your eyes. Adjust your tunic, so.

  Now the red cummerbund and Paris; April 1934.

  A black Citröen waits at the curb.

  The street lamps are lit.

  Give the driver the address, but tell him

  not to hurry, that you have all night.

  When you get there, drink, make love,

  do the shimmy and the beguine.

  And when the sun comes up over the Quarter

  next morning and that pretty woman

  you’ve had and had all night

  now wants to go home with you,

  be tender with her, don’t do anything

  you’ll be sorry for later. Bring her home

  with you in the Citroën, let her sleep

  in a proper bed. Let her

  fall in love with you and you

  with her and then … something: alcohol,

  a problem with alcohol, always alcohol —

  what you’ve really done

  and to someone else, the one

  you meant to love from the start.

  *

  It’s afternoon, August, sun striking

  the hood of a dusty Ford

  parked on your driveway in San Jose.

  In the front seat a woman

  who is covering her eyes and listening

  to an old song on the radio.