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  The Mailman as Cancer Patient

  Hanging around the house each day

  the mailman never smiles; he tires

  easily, is losing weight,

  that’s all; they’ll hold the job —

  besides, he needed a rest.

  He will not hear it discussed.

  As he walks the empty rooms, he

  thinks of crazy things

  like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey,

  shaking hands with Franklin D. Roosevelt

  at Grand Coulee Dam,

  New Year’s Eve parties he liked best;

  enough things to fill a book

  he tells his wife, who

  also thinks crazy things

  yet keeps on working.

  But sometimes at night

  the mailman dreams he rises from his bed

  puts on his clothes and goes

  out, trembling with joy…

  He hates those dreams

  for when he wakes

  there’s nothing left; it is

  as if he’d never been

  anywhere, never done anything;

  there is just the room,

  the early morning without sun,

  the sound of a doorknob

  turning slowly.

  Poem for Hemingway

  & W. C. Williams

  3 fat trout hang

  in the still pool

  below the new

  steel bridge.

  two friends

  come slowly up

  the track.

  one of them,

  ex-heavyweight,

  wears an old

  hunting cap.

  he wants to kill,

  that is catch & eat,

  the fish.

  the other,

  medical man,

  he knows the chances

  of that.

  he thinks it fine

  that they should

  simply hang there

  always

  in the clear water.

  the two keep going

  but they

  discuss it as

  they disappear

  into the fading trees

  & fields & light,

  upstream.

  Torture

  FOR STEPHEN DOBYNS

  You are falling in love again. This time

  it is a South American general’s daughter.

  You want to be stretched on the rack again.

  You want to hear awful things said to you

  and to admit these things are true.

  You want to have unspeakable acts

  committed against your person, things

  nice people don’t talk about in classrooms.

  You want to tell everything you know

  on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges,

  on yourself most of all.

  You want to implicate everyone in this!

  Even when it’s four o’clock in the morning

  and the lights are burning still —

  those lights that have been burning night and day

  in your eyes and brain for two weeks —

  and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade,

  but she won’t turn off the lights that woman

  with the green eyes and little ways about her,

  even then you want to be her gaucho.

  Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say

  as you reach for the empty beaker of water.

  Dance with me, she says again and no mistake.

  She picks this minute to ask you, hombre,

  to get up and dance with her in the nude.

  No, you don’t have the strength of a fallen leaf,

  not the strength of a little reed basket

  battered by waves on Lake Titicaca.

  But you bound out of bed

  just the same, amigo, you dance

  across wide open spaces.

  Bobber

  On the Columbia River near Vantage,

  Washington, we fished for whitefish

  in the winter months; my dad, Swede —

  Mr Lindgren—and me. They used belly-reels,

  pencil-length sinkers, red, yellow, or brown

  flies baited with maggots.

  They wanted distance and went clear out there

  to the edge of the riffle.

  I fished near shore with a quill bobber and a cane pole.

  My dad kept his maggots alive and warm

  under his lower lip. Mr Lindgren didn’t drink.

  I liked him better than my dad for a time.

  He let me steer his car, teased me

  about my name “Junior,” and said

  one day I’d grow into a fine man, remember

  all this, and fish with my own son.

  But my dad was right. I mean

  he kept silent and looked into the river,

  worked his tongue, like a thought, behind the bait.

  Highway 99E from Chico

  The mallard ducks are down

  for the night. They chuckle

  in their sleep and dream of Mexico

  and Honduras. Watercress

  nods in the irrigation ditch

  and the tules slump forward, heavy

  with blackbirds.

  Rice fields float under the moon.

  Even the wet maple leaves cling

  to my windshield. I tell you Maryann,

  I am happy.

  The Cougar

  FOR JOHN HAINES AND KEITH WILSON

  I stalked a cougar once in a lost box-canyon

  off the Columbia River gorge near the town and river

  of Klickitat. We were loaded for grouse. October,

  gray sky reaching over into Oregon, and beyond,

  all the way to California. None of us had been there,

  to California, but we knew about that place—they had

  restaurants

  that let you fill your plate as many times as you wanted.

  I stalked a cougar that day,

  if stalk is the right word, clumping and scraping along

  upwind of the cougar, smoking cigarettes too,

  one after the other, a nervous, fat, sweating kid

  under the best of circumstances, but that day

  I stalked a cougar…

  And then I was weaving drunk there in the living room,

  fumbling to put it into words, smacked and scattered

  with the memory of it after you two had put your stories,

  black bear stories, out on the table.

  Suddenly I was back in that canyon, in that gone state.

  Something I hadn’t thought about for years:

  how I stalked a cougar that day.

  So I told it. Tried to anyway,

  Haines and I pretty drunk now. Wilson listening, listening,

  then saying, You sure it wasn’t a bobcat?

  Which I secretly took as a put-down, he from the Southwest,

  poet who had read that night,

  and any fool able to tell a bobcat from a cougar,

  even a drunk writer like me,

  years later, at the smorgasbord, in California.

  Hell. And then the cougar smooth-loped out of the brush

  right in front of me—God, how big and beautiful he was —

  jumped onto a rock and turned his head

  to look at me. To look at me! I looked back, forgetting to shoot.

  Then he jumped again, ran clear out of my life.

  The Current

  These fish have no eyes

  these silver fish that come to me in dreams,

  scattering their roe and milt

  in the pockets of my brain.

  But there’s one that comes —

  heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,

  that simply holds against the current,

  closing its dark mouth against

  the current, closing and opening

  as it holds to the current.

/>   Hunter

  Half asleep on top of this bleak landscape,

  surrounded by chukkers,

  I crouch behind a pile of rocks and dream

  I embrace my babysitter.

  A few inches from my face

  her cool and youthful eyes stare at me from two remaining

  wildflowers. There’s a question in those eyes

  I can’t answer. Who is to judge these things?

  But deep under my winter underwear,

  my blood stirs.

  Suddenly, her hand rises in alarm —

  the geese are streaming off their river island,

  rising, rising up this gorge.

  I move the safety. The body gathers, leans to its work.

  Believe in the fingers.

  Believe in the nerves.

  Believe in THIS.

  Trying to Sleep Late on a

  Saturday Morning in November

  In the living room Walter Cronkite

  prepares us for the moon shot.

  We are approaching

  the third and final phase, this

  is the last exercise.

  I settle down,

  far down into the covers.

  My son is wearing his space helmet.

  I see him move down the long airless corridor,

  his iron boots dragging.

  My own feet grow cold.

  I dream of yellow jackets and near

  frostbite, two hazards

  facing the whitefish fishermen

  on Satus Creek.

  But there is something moving

  there in the frozen reeds,

  something on its side that is

  slowly filling with water.

  I turn onto my back.

  All of me is lifting at once,

  as if it were impossible to drown.

  Louise

  In the trailer next to this one

  a woman picks at a child named Louise.

  Didn’t I tell you, Dummy, to keep this door closed?

  Jesus, it’s winter!

  You want to pay the electric bill?

  Wipe your feet, for Christ’s sake!

  Louise, what am I going to do with you?

  Oh, what am I going to do with you, Louise?

  the woman sings from morning to night.

  Today the woman and child are out

  hanging up wash.

  Say hello to this man, the woman says

  to Louise. Louise!

  This is Louise, the woman says

  and gives Louise a jerk.

  Cat’s got her tongue, the woman says.

  But Louise has pins in her mouth,

  wet clothes in her arms. She pulls

  the line down, holds the line

  with her neck

  as she slings the shirt

  over the line and lets go —

  the shirt filling out, flapping

  over her head. She ducks

  and jumps back—jumps back

  from this near human shape.

  Poem for Karl Wallenda,

  Aerialist Supreme

  When you were little, wind tailed you

  all over Magdeburg. In Vienna wind looked for you

  in first one courtyard then another.

  It overturned fountains, it made your hair stand on end.

  In Prague wind accompanied serious young couples

  just starting families. But you made their breaths catch,

  those ladies in long white dresses,

  the men with their moustaches and high collars.

  It waited in the cuffs of your sleeves

  when you bowed to the Emperor Haile Selassie.

  It was there when you shook hands

  with the democratic King of the Belgians.

  Wind rolled mangoes and garbage sacks down the streets of Nairobi.

  You saw wind pursuing zebras across the Serengeti Plain.

  Wind joined you as you stepped off the eaves of suburban houses

  in Sarasota, Florida. It made little noises

  in trees at every crossroads town, every circus stop.

  You remarked on it all your life,

  how it could come from nowhere,

  how it stirred the puffy faces of the hydrangeas

  below hotel room balconies while you

  drew on your big Havana and watched

  the smoke stream south, always south,

  toward Puerto Rico and the Torrid Zone.

  That morning, 74 years old and 10 stories up,

  midway between hotel and hotel, a promotional stunt

  on the first day of spring, that wind

  which has been everywhere with you

  comes in from the Caribbean to throw itself

  once and for all into your arms, like a young lover!

  Your hair stands on end.

  You try to crouch, to reach for wire.

  Later, men come along to clean up

  and to take down the wire. They take down the wire

  where you spent your life. Imagine that: wire.

  Deschutes River

  This sky, for instance:

  closed, gray,

  but it has stopped snowing

  so that is something. I am

  so cold I cannot bend

  my fingers.

  Walking down to the river this morning

  we surprised a badger

  tearing a rabbit.

  Badger had a bloody nose,

  blood on its snout up to its sharp eyes:

  prowess is not to be confused

  with grace.

  Later, eight mallard ducks fly over

  without looking down. On the river

  Frank Sandmeyer trolls, trolls

  for steelhead. He has fished

  this river for years

  but February is the best month

  he says.

  Snarled, mittenless,

  I handle a maze of nylon.

  Far away —

  another man is raising my children,

  bedding my wife bedding my wife.

  Forever

  Drifting outside in a pall of smoke,

  I follow a snail’s streaked path down

  the garden to the garden’s stone wall.

  Alone at last I squat on my heels, see

  what needs to be done, and suddenly

  affix myself to the damp stone.

  I begin to look around me slowly

  and listen, employing

  my entire body as the snail

  employs its body, relaxed, but alert.

  Amazing! Tonight is a milestone

  in my life. After tonight

  how can I ever go back to that

  other life? I keep my eyes

  on the stars, wave to them

  with my feelers. I hold on

  for hours, just resting.

  Still later, grief begins to settle

  around my heart in tiny drops.

  I remember my father is dead,

  and I am going away from this

  town soon. Forever.

  Goodbye, son, my father says.

  Toward morning, I climb down

  and wander back into the house.

  They are still waiting,

  fright splashed on their faces,

  as they meet my new eyes for the first time.

  Where Water Comes Together

  with Other Water

  I

  Woolworth’s, 1954

  Where this floated up from, or why,

  I don’t know. But thinking about this

  since just after Robert called

  telling me he’d be here in a few

  minutes to go clamming.

  How on my first job I worked

  under a man named Sol.

  Fifty-some years old, but

  a stockboy like I was.

  Had worked his way

  up to nothing. But grateful

  for his job, same as m
e.

  He knew everything there was

  to know about that dime-store

  merchandise and was willing

  to show me. I was sixteen, working

  for six bits an hour. Loving it

  that I was. Sol taught me

  what he knew. He was patient,

  though it helped I learned fast.

  Most important memory

  of that whole time: opening

  the cartons of women’s lingerie.

  Underpants, and soft, clingy things

  like that. Taking it out

  of cartons by the handful. Something

  sweet and mysterious about those

  things even then. Sol called it

  “linger-ey.” “Linger-ey?”

  What did I know? I called it

  that for a while, too. “Linger-ey.”

  Then I got older. Quit being

  a stockboy. Started pronouncing

  that frog word right.

  I knew what I was talking about!

  Went to taking girls out

  in hopes of touching that softness,

  slipping down those underpants.

  And sometimes it happened. God,

  they let me. And they were

  linger-ey, those underpants.

  They tended to linger a little

  sometimes, as they slipped down

  off the belly, clinging lightly

  to the hot white skin.

  Passing over the hips and buttocks

  and beautiful thighs, traveling

  faster now as they crossed the knees,

  the calves! Reaching the ankles,

  brought together for this

  occasion. And kicked free

  onto the floor of the car and

  forgotten about. Until you had

  to look for them.

  “Linger-ey.”

  Those sweet girls!

  “Linger a little, for thou art fair.”

  I know who said that. It fits,

  and I’ll use it. Robert and his

  kids and I out there on the flats

  with our buckets and shovels.

  His kids, who won’t eat clams, cutting

  up the whole time, saying “Yuck”

  or “Ugh” as clams turned

  up in the shovels full of sand