Knife Latitudes

By

Derek Pfister

Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of the

Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

MASTER OF FINE ARTS

in

Creative Writing

August 11, 2017

Nashville, Tennessee

Approved:

Mark Jarman

Rick Hilles

Sandy Solomon The Persistence of Fragility

I think of the poet Larry Levis when I think of things going away, Levis and autumn and the pulling back of color and light and warmth, a necessary pulling away that reminds me of the importance of presence. Autumn drags its slow gold back, and delivers the absences of winter that reveal what I lack. I feel an enduring sensation of the fragility that surrounds me, as well as an enduring internal fragility.

I think of Levis and his early nostalgic leanings in his poetry that eventually give way to a voice that seems on the edge of slipping off into the lyrical swirl of leaves, the ebb and flow of a lyric voice that mimics the vortex of the past and present, memory and its insistencies on our daily lives, its surfacing and submerging back in a dizzying energy that lifts each breath. In a sequence of poems that served as the final project for my poetry work at Ohio State, I attempted to talk about this sensation:

The barns, the trees, the small stone path, the yard, All of it sharpened into a clarity, A fragility where everything persists.

All of it sharpened into a fragility. I think I still write in this mode of discovering clarity, and with clarity comes the fragility that binds each day like thread binding a shirt. The fabric of an afternoon could unravel at any time. This is one area I’m concerned with in my work, yet I haven’t pushed all the way toward this impulse. As a boy I stood at the street watching the fast traffic flashing past my father’s house, and I thought I was the only one thinking of what was going away. Then, it was only a few hours. It was the afternoon’s golden edges over Ohio

1 landscapes, the fields and flatness everyone imagines correctly when they imagine Ohio.

Incorrectly, I imagined myself as being the only one concerned with the slipping away of such a place, wandering through the sadness and exasperation particular to young people, and young boys. In “Moving Day,” the speaker acknowledges a lack of understanding in a phrase that I hope resonates across the rest of the poems:

I didn’t know the woods would be cleared out, thick acres reduced to patches. I didn’t know the driveway would be removed, all gravel gone, the vacant rows of evergreens along it left to wither without purpose.

In this meditative mode I discovered an interest in voices on the edge of some retreat, some pulling back or going away. Again I think of Levis and of my favorite music, in particular an early 1970s underground band from Memphis—Big Star. I began listening to Big Star at a young age. They released three records and never found any success, but they rose from a cult group discussed only in deep record-collecting circles to a prominent place in most music enthusiasts’ history of rock music.

I was drawn to the sparse simplicity of the lyrics, the soaring melodies, the musicianship, and the enduring fragility found everywhere in those records. The trio of records begins with a shining enthusiastic first release, before the following two albums gradually slip into a sort of realism that devolves further into cynicism and barely an effort to keep it together on the third record. From #1 Record, an overly optimistic title, I take the lyric from Alex Chilton, who was well known as the voice of the 1960s group The Box Tops:

Years ago my heart was set to live, But I’ve been trying hard against unbelievable odds.

2 The iambic pulse of the first line hoists the moving statement of intent, yet it is an intent that seems to have passed. This passing intent spills over into the fragility of having to try again.

This leads into a soaring, colloquial, southern chorus: There ain’t no one going to turn me

‘round.

This paradox of an enduring fragility, one which will neither cease nor wholly break hovers near the center of the eye with which I view the self, the world, the lyric movement in everything. Take a lyric from Big Star’s second record, from the song “What’s Going On:”

I’ve resented everyone Ever since I was young. I’m starting to understand What’s going on and how it’s planned.

The sparse, bare truth of this phrase has weighed heavily upon me and lifted me for years.

This coming-of-age lyric, coming toward the true fragility of everything, persists throughout this record, with flashes of cynicism and narcissism that most lyric voices seem to slip toward at times. There is a confessional element to these lyrics that can seem sentimental, yet the honesty of them made an impression on me throughout my childhood.

I’m thinking of The Widening Spell of the Leaves, the middle-period lyrics of Levis which have not yet totally lifted or fallen—depending on how you want to think of it—toward the lyric recesses and distances of his voice. I’m thinking of his grappling with the self and with the past as it works with the present as we find in such poems as “The Poet at Seventeen:”

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where

3 I spent it all, extravagantly, believing My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.

Or take that sparse, delicate lyric moment in “Winter Stars” when the father and son seem closest, or nearly close, in their going away, in what’s left of them:

Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind, the size of a wrist, wakes the cold again— Which may be all that’s left of you & me.

In the words of Big Star’s Chris Bell, I discovered a trace of a similar lyric fragility:

Every night I tell myself I am the cosmos, I am the wind, but that won’t bring you back again.

Bell barely guts out this lyric with a voice on the edge of collapse if it didn’t lift once again to a chorus. The rhythm of the lyric and line is consistently iambic, like many other lyrics.

In this we have a sort of tetrameter movement. These lines feel like they could fit into the Levis lyric self. These voices remind me again and again of that paradox of enduring fragility, or fragile endurance. The voices seem to be straddling an edge over which oblivion exists. I’m not talking about psychological disorders, although these voices seem to fall into those realms at times. I’m talking about the artistic construction of a voice that evokes this fleeting sense of the self in the reader. I don’t particularly feel that I need to believe the lyrics as true to the speaker. If the lines become true to me, then they are true somewhere, and that’s enough. Of course, we lost

Levis to this oblivion that he often wrote his way through. Like Levis, Bell struggled with

4 alcoholism and drug abuse. He later rid himself of all of these addictions, but died in a car crash at twenty-seven.

Tracing my way back through the voices I prefer, I see myself sitting in my father’s bare wooden house on weekends as a boy, and occasional summer days, when he would tell us unfiltered stories of the difficult lives he encountered as a social worker. I could see, then, that he faced his own issues with the fragility of life by facing the issues of others. The harsh stories of meth abuse, domestic violence, and poverty in Ohio country filled my childhood dinners at his house. Their stark, truthful quality began to sharpen the world around me. He told my brother and me to lock the doors when he wasn’t home, and to call him if anyone arrived in our gravel driveway. In “Funnel of Fragments,” the speaker acknowledges this early influence.

blood in distant country, late night text messages promising harm, harder lives I didn’t understand, at ten, as he knew we wouldn’t and so he told us, as though the stories would pass through us and come out distant, and pure, rushing with the traffic that wound around the curve of road surrounding the house.

My father carried a fear of his less trustworthy clients finding him to demand help with reducing jail sentences, or parole, or getting children back. He feared the desperation amid fragility he understood every day. Once, he told me he gathered each of his client’s information and history in a three-dimensional landscape of their lives, gleaned through face-to-face conversation. He learned to find common stories that resulted in difficult turns toward drugs or violence, often beginning with a difficult father. “It all goes back to the father,” my father said.

5 Abusive, alcoholic, anything that changed a child’s landscape in the way my father changed my landscape through these stories, the harsh reality of his life on the weekends before I returned to the suburbs, my mother, and the ease of carpeting. Within this quality of storytelling and carrying stories, locating common stories among people, I believe I have learned something from him. I have never been so close to difficulty as he has, much less the difficulty his clients have known, but I recall the stories of the people whose last names we were never allowed to know, but whose difficulties we heard often in episodic, dinner-time tales of warm shotgun shells. I see this at work in Levis’ endless exploration through the void of life, this teasing out the truth of death and struggle, and the drug use engaged in later in life. I see this at work in my favorite honest lyric voices.

At my father’s house, the land itself seemed fragile. When the huge field behind the house was sold to a developer for a retirement community, my father and neighbors fought to keep it as small as possible. Soon though neighbors began to sell their homes and move on from the spreading landscape of retirement houses. My father soon moved, too. Thus, the idea of moving, gathering all of our objects and taking them to another house, becomes an important theme in my current work. These changes in landscape changed the landscape in my work, this particular period in life. Moving is an act that contains many narrative threads that extend beyond the mere act of moving an object. Perhaps this is well-worn territory, but re-engaging with everything you own and taking it somewhere else forms a metaphorically-rich landscape for me. My father in particular has endless collections, as did his father. This connection through generations of objects, going into barns and antique stores and old houses to find something that has lasted, is another strike in the fight against fragility. Seeking those things that have lasted, I

6 find a place for them in poems. I like to catalogue these things and see what else they might mean on the page. In the first section of this thesis, tentatively titled “Gather,” I explore these themes across many poems. In “Elegy of Collecting” the speaker writes:

I followed him down dust-linked aisles and tried to understand

what pieces were worth running a hand along, when to lean toward a dresser as though toward a father’s hardened shoulder.

When I think of persevering in an interest in the world, its things, its beauty and objects in the face of fragility, I often turn to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. If I stop seeing the truth and simplicity of the things around me, I find myself turning to her lines and her imagery, from which I attempt to draw my own imagistic interests in my life. She was one of the first poets I read extensively as a younger reader. In her imagery, I sensed and continue to sense a vitality of sight, an eye that must see and continue seeing as a form of attachment to this life, as a form of exploring the external world and the internal world of the self in one sweep. While most lyric poets seemed to be in an arms race to the ether, Bishop, to me, had no interest in exploring those distances merely for the sake of it. In Bishop, I found a plainspoken diction that sounded human and present and here. The simple drama of her images and even-tempered voice appealed to my interest in seeing, and gave me an avenue to travel apart from other poets I had been told to read.

In particular, “At the Fishhouses” first struck me for the wonder of its imagery and presence:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand

7 waiting for Christmas.

I loved, and still love, the layering and repetition of this cadence. This poem unfolds a thickly-woven fabric of images and sensations. Through reading this poem and her collected poems as much as possible, I tried to incorporate imagery as a tool to hold onto what seemed to always be leaking off. At that time, Bishop expanded my imagination and showed me how to capture the world within these descriptive powers. Every few years I return to my edition of her collected poems and renew my interest in image-driven poetry. In a craft class with Mark

Jarman, I had the opportunity to explore her work with the added context and complexity of her letters with Robert Lowell. In them, I found the care and attention with which she read his work and wrote to him about seemingly-simple moments in her life. These correspondences enhanced my comprehension of her particular psychology, and further revealed why I enjoy her poetry so much. The letters also added to my resistance to Lowell’s narcissism and inability to reciprocate

Bishop’s care, focus, and attention.

In my thesis and my work, I often focus on imagery, cadence, and sound, at times too much. I prefer to linger on the image, dragging its resonance out through an intense focus on its visual and sound quality. In “Stained Glass,” the speaker finds himself drawn to the imagery adorning the walls of the church rather than the minister’s words:

The carved harmony drew me in on glass, each fluctuating pane grafted together where Christ on the cross dimmed, glowed, and weakened again beneath purple sky, and the disciples’ robes softened to monochromatic blue and red, and a last spark climbed the spear, glinted from its tip, once,

8 faded, and the whole scene diminished.

The young speaker perceives this loss of backlight illuminating the scene as a dual diminishment of imagery and meaning. I try to blend image and meaning into one sweep, and when they diminish, they often diminish together. I don’t think I’ve pushed as far along this path as I’d like to, but I often focus far more on imagery than the ego of the “I.” Often, I’ve heard criticism of my work for lacking a present, fully-explored “I.” I understand this criticism, and I accept it as mostly true. I prefer less of the lyric, ego-driven self, and more engagement with others and the world. Of course, this probably extends from my hesitant temperament, my tendency to turn away from myself and explore others. Most poets seem to use poetry as a place to explore the self. I haven’t found that use in poetry yet. In “Crossing the Old Bridge,” I see a trace of my tendency to focus on others:

Kenny cranks his window down, glances out, tightens his grip on the wheel as we crawl a few feet forward. He says he doesn’t trust these bridges. They weren’t built to sustain this much weight. I look back as another semi rolls onto the bridge, its exhaust plume lost downwind above the steep drop into bare trees reaching to scrape the crumbled underside of the concrete. I can hear him breathe.

In “Inosculation” the speaker’s gaze shifts away from the self toward an exploration of a recent loss.

You beat breast cancer five years Earlier, and that week the flu Filled you with its defeat. That weak You fell asleep or let yourself go.

9 In the final lines of “Knife Latitudes,” again the speaker turns toward a wider imagistic resonance, yet at the same time finds an intense closeness there:

I touch her arm, say a simple thank you. That world retreats like a Russian curse word warm with Europe in your ear.

In “Hearing Loss,” the speaker explores the ringing in his ear and parallels this loss with another recent loss. I can feel the speaker’s hesitance to indulge further in this self-exploration.

I can hear my hearing leaving my left ear in a hazy ringing, a sound the mind creates to mimic the sound I can no longer hear, louder now that it’s gone.

I found, I thought, a similar temperament in Bishop. Besides “In the Waiting Room” and other poems, most of her work seems less involved with the “I,” less directly self-oriented, yet still involved with the self through her intense perception of the people and landscapes around her. At present, much poetry I read strikes me as self-indulgent, lengthy explorations of the self and its place in the world. That is my own temperament about my own work showing through, and I recognize that it is a view shared by few.

When reading Bishop, I often think of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his early interest in “Dinge,” or things. To me, Rilke and Bishop share an enduring gaze on objects and things. Through his study with the sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris, Rilke learned to see the world itself, a process which dragged him out of his early lyric ego and into the world, the world which now allowed him access back inside himself to explore his inner world through Things.

Rilke was amazed by the way Rodin would focus on the simplicity of the human form and

10 capture it with great physical truth. He began to capture the forms of things in poems that would fill his New Poems collection. Many of his most well-known poems are in this collection, including “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and “The Panther.” With these new poems, Rilke was able to break his writer’s block and re-enter the world of things. Of course Rilke would later move well beyond this focus on Things, but that early-to-middle period Rilke appeals to me the most.

I discovered Rilke soon after Bishop, and I saw in both of them a strong intellect of the eye. When I read Rilke, I felt my own imagination developing along with the haunting sharpness of his images and his enduring gaze on things during this period of his work. He captures the fleeting Things of earth in order to explore his own fleeting presence, and, often, to seek transcendence. He and Bishop diverge at this point in the road, with Bishop maintaining her stay in the associative powers of the physical world. An exception of that is the ending of “At the

Fishhouses,” with that great transcendent leap toward knowledge and history. In any case, the gaze I found in both of these poets appealed to me, and continues to appeal to me. In my work, I would like to find a sharper eye, to narrow down my often-lengthy poems to their lyric-image essence, as Rilke achieves in that great collection. His images contain manifold energies and directions, opening the mind’s eye and eye’s mind in one brilliant sweep. Here is one example of that in his famous poem “The Panther:”

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

It occurs to me that Bishop’s poetry follows this same process of Einsehen, or “in- seeing.” Einsehen was Rilke’s process of seeing the inner world through studying the external

11 world. Bishop’s icy-water-turned-knowledge seems to derive from this process. I can trace a connection between Rilke and Bishop in a letter she wrote to Lowell in July 1960, in which she refers to reading Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In a letter to Marianne Moore in 1940, Bishop refers to reading Wartime Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Although Rilke’s poems often seek transcendence through images while Bishop’s do not, I sense a connection between the initial impulse of their gazes, the need to see the world first.

Elsewhere in Bishop, I admire her gaze on the natural world. Although she didn’t explicitly detail the destruction of our planet, her writing about the natural landscapes around her has influenced my interests. In the third and least-polished section of this manuscript, I begin to explore this issue of climate change and the decline of our planet. This focus on the fragility of earth comes out of the same impulse elsewhere in my work. As I’ve said, I haven’t worked far enough in this direction, but I intend to pursue it further as I continue to revise this manuscript and write.

After Bishop and Rilke, many more poets appealed to me in my early reading. I found

Jack Gilbert, Marie Howe, Richard Hugo, Andrew Hudgins, and Philip Levine. When I was at

Ohio State, I began to take poetry courses. Along with an expansion of my reading, I learned basic craft elements that continue to influence my work. I learned that blank verse serves well as the scaffolding on which poetic lines can be built. I think every poet should develop a strong ear for meter and in particular blank verse should be taught to early students. I recall my first poetry workshop being a group of students reaching through the dark for any rhythm. It wasn’t until my second workshop with Andrew Hudgins that I started to notice a change in my work and the work of my classmates. Hudgins immediately had us writing in blank verse, and required several

12 assignments to fit into this mold that I found stifling at first. Soon, though, I began to hear my favorite lyrics within this rhythmic framework. Those Big Star songs had a more well- established rhythm than I had realized. In fact, many lyricists were using this natural iambic pulse of language to create a sonically-captivating landscape of words and sound. I began my early work within this rhythm and sound.

But I had to learn a natural tone, a natural rhythm. Don’t be bouncy, Hudgins would say.

He would read such a line with extra emphasis to highlight the inauthentic sound of the over- written work we submitted at first, bobbing his head in a fascinating display of strange humor that would seem cruel if it wasn’t endearing and true. He would then soften out and read the one well-written, natural line in the poem with elegance and clarity in order to highlight the virtues we were discovering one line at a time. This back and forth was the method by which we learned to grow into this form, and into poetry itself.

I noticed a tremendous rise in the quality of everyone’s work. All of our poems began to fall into a place that sounded and felt like poetry across those short well-wrought lines. Many of my classmates were good poets, and it was a pleasure to watch them evolve. Developing a natural tone and cadence within the framework of loose blank verse became my preferred craft method in poetry. Hudgins’ work as well as many others, including much of Levis, and some of

Bishop and Rilke, fit into this line for me. Hudgins preferred short, compressed, fast poems, and always wanted our work to move quickly. To me, there is room in poetry to slow down. In any case, I found in blank verse an endurance of rhythm which mirrored the endurance I sought in poetry. This rhythm had lasted for hundreds of years, so I figured it would continue to last and thus it was a stay against fragility. A common criticism I hear about my work is my tendency to

13 stick to the left-justified, single strophe, nearly-blank-verse poem, seeking that vertical rhythm that persists in much of Philip Levine’s work. I concede that my limited use of the page may be an issue across my manuscript, as well as my tendency to stick to a mid-length line. I should seek a more varied line in my work, to expand and contract more, but I haven’t worked my way there yet.

Early on, I began to reject poets who rejected the basics of the poetic line. I still reject poems that throw word soup across the page like a cereal bowl in which letters float aimlessly in the milk. Poets who write like this without first building the foundation of knowledge of the poetic line seem lost in the recess, or perhaps abscess, of their own lyric egos. Yet, poets who do exhibit this understanding, and proceed to move into their own style, seem to be the most well- rounded line builders in our language, those poets I admire most, including Ellen Bryant Voigt,

Philip Levine, Claudia Emerson, C.K. Williams, Natasha Trethewey, and Jack Gilbert. I concede that these poets often stick to the left side of the page, so my aesthetic interests are clear.

Throughout my years at Vanderbilt, my interest and knowledge of poetry has expanded dramatically. I had never been in such a focused and tight-knit creative community before coming here. As many know, the politics and disputes within the Ohio State creative-writing community limit the connectivity among all students and faculty rather severely. At Vanderbilt, no such limiting occurs. All of the faculty and students are available and immensely helpful, and none of them disparage each other behind closed doors. There are no camps within the department. Everyone is in it together. In two craft classes with Mark Jarman, as well as workshops with Mark Jarman and Rick Hilles, I have continued to develop my thinking about the craft and history of poetry. My thoughtful, talented classmates have also been a tremendous

14 help to me. The poets who have visited Vanderbilt during my time here have also provided great encouragement, including Rickey Laurentiis, Natasha Trethewey, Ross Gay, and Jacqueline

Osherow. I still have a long way to grow, but Vanderbilt has given me incredible encouragement along this path.

Looking forward, I am still trying to craft my lyric voice. At present, my work is involved mostly with family relationships and landscapes, like many other poets who are trying to find their footing. Family often seems to be a poetic launching pad, as full as it is with pathos and resonance between reader and writer. If the reader doesn’t think about his or her own life while reading the poem, then the poem has failed, to me. I don’t like poetry that only involves itself.

When I read a poem and realize for the duration of that reading that I was only in that poem, then

I feel cheated. When I read a poem and move through my own landscape as well as the poem’s landscapes, when I feel that I’m involved in the poem in some way, then I begin to feel like I’m in touch with some of the truth of life.

I write to remain, to contain any image or moment with sonic endurance. It’s a well- known concept, that of writing to remain, but it deserves repeating. I seek an endurance of voice, the endurance of the blank verse line, the endurance of concrete, earth-bound imagery and craft, the endurance of Rilke and Bishop and the other poets whose work I’ve absorbed over the years, all of those who persist with the knowledge of fragility, all of those who have remained.

15 Gather

You know how the past tense turns a sentence dark, But leaves names, lovers, places showing through Larry Levis “Childhood Ideogram”

16 Moving Day

I didn’t know the woods would be cleared out, thick acres reduced to patches. I didn’t know the driveway would be removed, all gravel gone, the vacant rows of evergreens along it left to wither without purpose. That day, I didn’t know what would become of the house as I packed boxes, carried them to the dumpster. It held the waste of decades like a hand, deep and industrial in its stock-still grip, decades gone like geese Vs in a fog, that reappear again, now farther out, too far to shoot, too loud to lose the sight. In the attic my grandmother wiped her eyes, complaining of allergies, the dust, the heat, as she sorted through the deepest photos. We filled the moving truck up with the rest— rifles, dressers, tables, statues, chairs— my grandfather’s collections, enough antiques to decorate the generations that followed with remnants of his life, as though they were his limbs and eyes, his soul and heart intact after the heart attack. What marble post could hold a life after the life is gone? What shotgun blast and recoil against an arm could squeeze your shoulder like your father’s grasp, enough to keep you hunting again and again? We gathered clay pigeons from the trap shoot that were left behind, the rest exploded in bursts of orange—the crack and separation— the fragments scattered in the far, wide field. I didn’t know the house would stand today, unchanged, that images can grip and pull you back to face what was, like flocks of geese returned through fog to taunt you with their calls. In the gauzy attic light, her eyes

17 looked like portraits of an older time, that dim, soft glow, and fading at the edges.

18 Mountain Tunnels

The dimmer images are fading now Like driving into tunnels, the light receding, The darkness filling in the gap, in which I took a deep breath as a boy, and held The air the whole way through the mountain pass, Thinking of dynamite, drills, the rock Exploding, explorers digging through the pieces To find the other side, till mid-tunnel, lightless Behind and no light ahead, light-headed In the longest stretch, I choked And almost gave in, but held my breath until The gem of light expanded into an exit From this passage, this game, the need to hold What I had in deeper rock, carved walls That gave way to a wide, clear sky And farther stretch of road. The tunnels Are fading now, behind, like images. And I hold them long enough to choke, and gasp For more, and let them go for the light And air on the other side Until another mountain tunnel comes.

19 Elegy of Collecting

When I visit my father, I duck into his basement and see the gun rack above the piano, the longhorns curling over the dim chamber—You have to take these things

when I am gone—daggers, antlers, swords, geodes’ exposed caverns glinting purple, fishing poles, and lures drooping like metallic petals.

Now that he’s moving, he’s started to sort through all the hours we spent in barns, fields, antique stores, where I followed him down dust-linked aisles and tried to understand what pieces were worth running a hand along, when to lean toward a dresser as though toward a father’s hardened shoulder. Deeper, back to the old house where he moved among collections as a boy, the decade he shared with his father, that we cleave to still fading within these things.

But this loss cannot be worn out, like this shirt, 1950s wool, complex weave of fabric he grazes his palm along, straightening the arm—

You have to feel the itch to feel the warmth.

20 Last Easter

We ran beneath tortoise shells, bombshells, remnants of World War II, marble birds opening their marble wings. Thick with work, steel-belt beat, vulgar, Great Uncle Mike’s hand gripped mine and consumed it with hard shakes carried down through the century from his father who started the factory. The concrete musk of antiques and dust lifted when I walked upstairs to the kitchen, where Aunt Sue and Grandmother, sweating beneath floral aprons, deep blue veins surfacing along their arms, sliced ham and kielbasa, hard-snapping knives. The Dutch porcelain plates above them displayed their scenes in shades of blue and white, the images enlivened in my mind— a blue man rowing alone, his blue oar plunged into white water.

The faces held a few words for Easter before the Russian prayer, the solemn tones I didn’t understand. I looked around while they recited it then moved their hands to each side of their chest. A blue dog slung by a blue chain stared inside the white house at his family. A river flowed between cerulean banks, its blue wake breaking white. I felt the hard-locked handshakes let me go, the decay of cheeks and noses, frail irises and lungs. My grandmother left that land and each year she says to no one in particular this will be her last Easter.

21 Cold blue rain slants into blue water the way it did over the old lakes, each tone blending into the other, as if everything could be described by the white absence and blue presence, the white presence and blue absence where swans gathered while the marble falcons pioneered inside, forever halfway lifting, holding on.

22 Shoal

My father casts another line, the lure silvering over the water and slipping into it. I let my line droop. June in Canada, nothing bites. The sun’s slow collapse over the tree line lights the evergreens at the edge into a pyre. Water darkens beneath us for a hundred feet, holding shoals, those immobile, lurking layers of stone that scare me with their mystery and size. Water scrapes along the exposed slivers of stone, the rest concealed, expanding in my imagination. When I reel in, my line tangles into a wiry nest my father grabs— Shit—echoing while he unknots it, shoves it back. He reels his in, and we start toward the cabin, eyeing the depth through the bays and narrow corridors— a chink in the wake, the shrill slice of the blade scratching along a rock, the motor dying down, my father swearing us to stillness. I knew about that one…We drift where we can as the light lifts a final range of orange, deepening illuminated veins of trees, as the bay diminishes to a hard plane, flatline in windless dusk. We stop. My father rip-starts the motor. Nothing. He rips it again and again to get us going.

23 Knife Latitudes

My grandmother lifts a knife to cut the meat, the silver sheen trembling in her grip. I slide it from her hand and slice the Kielbasa from the plastic wrap, pass it to her. She holds it with both hands shaking over boiling water, drops it in. I can’t have Easter without it. She lifts the meat with tongs, pierces its skin through the speckled-red layers, releasing heat with quivering cuts. Earlier, her father hovered behind her in east Cleveland, his sour breath with Russian commands and rough hands coming too close while she cooked the Kielbasa from the eastern European vendors in the West Side Market, and held it shaking over boiling water. But he has been gone for decades. And I give her back the knife to open the meat and cut through the layers of the world behind her. How we lug our history like bruises on our arms we cannot see anymore, but know are there. I touch her arm, say a simple thank you. That world retreats like a Russian curse word warm with Europe in your ear.

24 A Toast at Easter

Uncle Mike lifts his glass for a toast on love, says that’s what our generation lacks, love songs on the radio. In his day, every song was about love. We need it for family, as in the fence factory his father founded, where the men worked in a steel-belt rite of passage, where my father leaned toward the lathe and cranked out bundled fencing to catch the drift of distant fields, the sand in Saudi Arabia, the powder coating middle Iowa, and gather it in a manageable place. A Beatles song played on his radio. When Uncle Mike arrived in the factory and heard music beneath the harsh din of machinery he lifted the radio and smashed it on the ground, plastic fragments gliding across the concrete, my father leaning away from his harsh swearing, warm breath, back into the work. When Mike walked off my father leaned behind the lathe and vomited, thinking he’d go out again that night, now that so much was gone, his father gone, the city gone, now that the song was broken on the floor. Now, Mike looks around the room at us, gazes past me. I’ve never set a lathe, so what can I say about work or love or cheap songs about love manufactured to glaze ancient ears like this champagne when Mike lifts his glass and, trembling, swallows it and the rest of us follow.

25 26 Stained Glass

The walls were hoisted with images of an angel folding in its spread-paned wings, intricate men kneeling across dark stitches, Christ shepherding a flock of sheep whose bodies brightened late in the service, and His open palms found light, or light came to them. I couldn’t tell which when I sat in the pew, dangling my legs, doodling, doing anything besides listening to the sermon’s words. The carved harmony drew me in on glass, each fluctuating pane grafted together where Christ on the cross dimmed, glowed, and weakened again beneath purple sky, and the disciples’ robes softened to monochromatic blue and red, and a last spark climbed the spear, glinted from its tip, once, faded, and the whole scene diminished. The words thudded across the wooden floor and stopped short of my pew. I already knew words faltered as soon as they fell into the world, a descent from pure silence, while the stained glass fractured light, cauterized the wound with a last low glare retreating once more from each pane, retreating still when I try to reach for it and find only these words that ask a few things about light.

27 Wood Piles

He gathers the split chunks, stacks them in a pile, looks at the pile. He looks at it so long he forgets he is looking at it, as when you stare at someone till you lose him, and you gaze through him into the air you fill with ideas and not the truth of presence, not your brother and his thin arms you haven’t touched in years, not the nature of his face, broken by stubble and work, not his dry hands that begin to split like the wood piles he gathers, and chops more.

28 My Father Driving

Riding shotgun through bare country I gaze out at nothing, my father driving, both of us staring ahead as he talks about a client, a woman who shot her abusive boyfriend, nurtured his body in dirt and admitted to all of it at first questioning, which hurt her sentencing.

He talks about a tattoo he loves, a snake coiling veins and muscles across a desert of skin to the shoulder, livid red tightening, tongue loosening at the worn wrist of a man whose weakness he tries to understand. I sit where his clients sit when he drives them to McDonald’s for some food, a mush of fries warm in the mouth, anything simple and human. He drives across Ohio country, to any home or anyone.

I sit where no one sits when he drives back out to the country alone to his distant land. We ride somewhere, never looking at each other, someone’s harder life between us, some snake crawling

29 across skin forever.

30 Crossing the Old Bridge

Ahead a horn echoes, brake lights brighten and we stop halfway across, a few cars, a semi, mufflers’ low thrumming, bumpers close. Kenny cranks his window down, glances out, tightens his grip on the wheel as we crawl a few feet forward. He says he doesn’t trust these bridges. They weren’t built to sustain this much weight. I look back as another semi rolls onto the bridge, its exhaust plume lost downwind above the steep drop into bare trees reaching to scrape the crumbled underside of the concrete. I can hear him breathe. I trust him because he studies these things, structures, foundations. I trust him because he’s careful, like ten years ago when he showed me how to snap a Vic in half for fast release and a lightness filled us, landed with our feet as we stalked the sidewalk going nowhere. Because when I turned back he kept going further into that ease, the body held by a rush of release, and we didn’t talk for years. Because he made it back to where we sit on this bridge, suspended above the gap, heavy together. He runs a handkerchief across his forehead. I lean out and try to see what’s blocking us. We make the other side.

31 Grain

Along these cornfields giving into grain, I drive a while, thinking how often I’ve wanted to be no one. Not gone, no, closer to a hesitating hand over a golden array of stalks, gathering the warmth and texture, one soft sweep before having to begin. I stop and get out. No one will pick this grain. Some huge machine will cut it without hesitation. And that’s how it should be. For now I run my hand through the worn stalks, cross-stitch through the haze, enough to feel some grip, to pull back without taking any.

32 Hearing Loss

I can hear my hearing leaving my left ear in a hazy ringing, a sound the mind creates to mimic the sound I can no longer hear, louder now that it’s gone. At night I listen to white noise, a heavier hush to mask the ringing. I’ve heard of those who hear distant melodies like a radio playing that they can never find to turn up or turn off. I remember her heavy S, like mine, and not the rest, the dissolving refrain like a radio tower releasing a transmission after the DJ has put his headphones down, the lights turned off, the station abandoned, just this signal left. When I drive I search for static. I let snow blanket my windshield the way it covers the flattened cornfields with its soft erasure before I brush it aside. I turn up the static, and I let more do the same. It’s quieter where we’re going than where we’ve gone.

33 Rust

Bumpers almost scraping, barely moving, the cars in gridlocked highway traffic drive my mother halfway to a revelation— I don’t get it, it’s all physics—the way a cluster of cars drifts forward, and another slowly starts, but by the time they’re all moving, those in front have stopped, reversing the ripple to a standstill like a lover falling back, another pursuing, both stopping without touching. I just don’t get it. I search for touch, an ease in being together without the tension of the space between us. Once, my mother threw a pork chop at my father while he stood at the window during dinner. It slapped his back and stuck, then fell and hit the hardwood floor. Later, we drove away, magnetic force propelling us somewhere else. What other sense could pull us close, and drive us apart again? What other sense could save us? We are too careful. My mother pounds the armrest— It’s not the traffic, it’s the drivers—now closer to her answer. The cars edge forward. Do you see this? On the car ahead the bumper’s rust blooms orange with golden trim.

34 Candles

“The dead alive and busie”

When I visit my mother now she tells me the ways her sister has visited her since last time: landing on the fence with red-blade wings as a cardinal whose calls later ring through the smoke alarm, car alarm, and churn into the voice of Tom Waits on the radio, the license plate ahead reading Lois, and the mystery singing message on the voicemail, unrolling, finally, on paper towels in the bathroom. That’s not suppression. That’s not even forgetting. When the dead are busy shifting from voice to voice my mother takes a cardinal and melts it into the wax of the cinnamon candle she lights on the shelf with a wing of flame, and says, Do you smell it?

35 Inosculation

Of the few absences I have, yours Is least clear. Sensing it, I sent You a text that morning: “Pizza soon?” The words suicide And death leave some space Between them, the undefined Letting go, as two trees root Beneath earth and do not touch, Do not share water. You beat breast cancer five years Earlier, and that week the flu Filled you with its defeat. That weak You fell asleep or let yourself go. Two trees grow together by proximity And need, windblown into grafting Like skin over skin, rubbing off Their separate bark, exposing inner Tissue, the way some words Grow into each other until they mean Together—absence, loss, suicide, Those S sounds sweeping you aside— The murky weddings, knotted and new. None of this is clear, with you. To connect as to make continuous, Blend. To unite by openings. Someone knocked on your Bedroom door. Don’t come in, You said. I’m fine.

36 Inauguration

You walked into your oldest Son’s room, and sat there. In late January warmth This morning, you would be Fifty-six. I still don’t know What they found in your room, If anything. If anything, Your room would tell me why You refused to leave it, the way Your mother almost refused To go to the hospital during The gala. She wanted To see Jackie Kennedy’s Ivory evening gown shining On TV. Today, I promise, you Wouldn’t want to see What’s happening on TV. You would feel the way you felt At twenty, then again at forty. Birds land on bare branches. A woman walks her dog. An augur in Ancient Rome Foretold omens divined From birds—whether they flew In groups or alone—an increase In crop, or the ascension of a king. Between Bush and Obama You wore a hospital gown And they opened your breasts, Removed cancer tissue, But five years later, that August, You diminished with something else. Five years later, I’m not Watching TV. I play Soccer on a hill where I can see

37 The skyline of Nashville, Where a warm wind runs The length of my arms, and blue Beyond blue augments The sky. I knew you between Bush, The first, and Obama. Aug, To prosper, to increase, an expansion Each year you’re gone, the way words Move on from roots, meaning, augmented By syllables and distances Like a hawk’s call carrying beyond The hawk into disembodied prophecies, And voices announcing changes From stages, more crop, more Safety, less—You wanted to see Your son’s room, maybe. You sat by his bed.

38 Funnel of Fragments

Farther across the land behind the house, we explored sundown miles, my brother and I, till our father called us back in for dinner, or didn’t call but disappeared inside while we followed. At dinner he spoke about his clients-- Joe S., Kate L., John R., I can’t tell you their last names--the stories of shotgun shootouts, meth abuse, blood in distant country, late night text messages promising harm, harder lives I didn’t understand, at ten, as he knew we wouldn’t and so he told us, as though the stories would pass through us and come out distant, and pure, rushing with the traffic that wound around the curve of road surrounding the house.

My father dropped a needle onto a hard soul record, snare snap and bass shaking the wooden floor, and we explored till dark, till plants tilted toward their darkness in the greenhouse next door, till we stopped returning to his land and the fragments of lives it held. The wooden fence leaned into the yard, decaying inside, the carpenter ants tunneling through it like red-black splinters, their antennae guiding them deeper. The few days and years we spent there we spent alone, wondering how a man’s house could fill with his life but not his name. The evergreens shuddered overhead.

39 One of them fell, once, in an arc over the deck, woodcrack echo in the middle of the night. My father rose from his sleeplessness and looked out the window into the funnel of fragments, roots splayed and branches broken together.

40 Gather

Take this yard, a museum of our lives for the last few decades. Take the barns, whose crevices will not stop expanding, filled with nuts squirrels gathered in boxes.

Take the leaning fence. Take the rocks. Take the anvil, the woodpile, the saw blade with no saw. Take the brick fireplace where we tossed brown evergreen needles and watched them wither like wicks beneath the weight of a torched match. Take the tools, gutted silver of wrenches and screwdrivers, open grip of pliers clutching nothing. Some of them we use, the rest decorations to take us back to the rust, the soot, the crust of cannonballs in the yard where he grew up. He wants to get back there, I know. I know that what he gathers gets us close to his first dirt-clogged hands, smaller crevices riding his palms, easier to fill with a few hours in his father’s barn, where he fumbled with hammers at the workbench, driving nail after nail into the wall.

41 Neighborhood Politics

42 Sawdust

We wandered the cleared-out lots, basements carved ten feet down. Wood appeared, walls lifted, bare and plywood and drywall, Bentwood Farms, Haaf Farms, Summerfield, Ashley Creek.

We explored the structures, climbed quivering stairwells, sawdust brushing across our arms. We pissed our names or profanities on the concrete. We heaved two-by-fours through glassless windows. What happened?

I uncurled a handful of Vicodin toward Kenny, pulled from someone’s prescription. My brother had his old need. The football star overdosed after injury. Slow down, the woman used to stand at the street and yell.

She’s not out today. No one is out in light that cuts over roofs of Mallard Pond, Violet Meadows, the neighborhoods complete.

Slow down? I drive out to the cornfields, keep going. We ran from the houses, palms scraped and golden with burning.

43 Neighborhood Politics

The George W. Bush signs floated face up in the public pool. We had to give the rest back at a neutral location to the Wetmore boys whose father was going to come after us.

We went after his sons, holding them up with water guns, telling them to get out of the woods during Trick or Treat, beating bats against trees, saying that’s your head, this is our trial, you better bring an army if you come back. They ran to the Middle Eastern twins for help.

44 Blue

Breathing into my mask, stale breath and sweat-cloaked, I duck in the riverbed.

My strategy is hiding, waiting for my brother to pass. I’m layered in sweatshirts, jeans, pairs of socks to soften the blows. My gun weighs down my arm, CO2 tank full, paintballs intact. I listen for wood sounds, for something snapping above me, blue blooming on branches over my head, dripping and pooling with crushed leaves.

I fire back. Blue splatter on my mask. Dull thud on my leg, a coolness on my skin, and I’m reeling back yelling, You got me. The bruise spreads like the whole blue sky when we leave the woods and walk back home, firing at nothing, firing at a lone tree stuck like an axe handle in the middle of a field. My brother unloads his last balls toward me, and I slide behind a tree, feeling the rounds rush without breaking, and yelling, Bastard, you got me, you got me. Where are we on afternoons in Ohio, in these fields with nothing stopping us from killing each other, nothing holding us here, nothing gone yet like the powder from the pill

45 my brother will drag and tell me, You feel nothing, it’s all easy, maybe his head nodding into someplace else.

He leans down and says, Where? Show me where I got you. Let’s see it. Here, I say, right here.

46 Haircut

My mother’s friend lifts my hair and slices it.

She talks about the ways she punishes her sons for lying—cuts more— by whipping one with a belt for saying he brushed his teeth for three minutes when the timer read one and a half minutes. She hurts them if they hurt each other, if they punch an arm or scratch to break skin. She cuts an inch toward my scalp, the silver edges glaring. The robe constricts my throat. I pretend I can’t hear what she is saying, I can’t understand the minor cruelties. She runs the shaver down my neck, buzzing—What do you do? I don’t see any other way to keep them honest—pressing the vibrating blades closer.

47

The Lunch Room

I walked through the crowd of bodies, voices, bad food, and sat with my old neighbor Brandon and his black friends. We didn’t speak although three years earlier Brandon had crossed from his yard into mine through bodies playing tag and asked if he could join. Yeah, he could.

We ran toward each other and reached to touch, the space between us widening. Widening now that we were in junior high and people split into segments, and we didn’t speak unless someone brought up a Gameboy game we both played and we spoke like boys again, laughing and remembering, maybe, then returned to stuffing our mouths with a mush of French fries.

Once, I found Brandon hiding behind a bush. He lifted a finger to his lips. Silent, we waited for someone to find us, let us laugh, run off again.

48 Other Homes

The old man snapped looped leather against the edge of the table after someone spilled a bowl of macaroni, not hitting anyone, but lashing close enough to our flesh and letting out a cackling laugh. A collection of troll dolls filled the mantle-- orange, red, and green hair rising into fires above wrinkled faces and jeweled eyes.

We went back outside and filled water balloons, those expanding spheres of color we heaved at each other when they were heavy enough. At the next house, my brother and I wandered the lawn, tearing leaves from trees and ripping them into pieces, spreading each one into fragments until there was no leaf left, the babysitter’s son following us. When we found dog poop in the grass, we tried to get him to eat it. It tastes good. Try it.

At Jamie Ruby’s house he and his brother punched us in the arm when his mother wasn’t looking, threw me into the pool, and I hovered in that shallow blue, in that boyhood sadness expanding like light through water balloons tossed into the air

49 that burst in shreds of color ripping against skin. When I try to enter these homes again, the old man leaps into the doorway, his dim grin widening, the troll eyes gleaming behind him.

50 Ready or Not

Next door, the kid covers his eyes—One, two, three… The rest of the kids scatter, and I’m thrown back to pounding across the fresh mulch at recess, and I can’t stop. Someone’s after me.

I pause to catch my breath. When I look up Carol’s standing there, lifting her purple shirt, baring her milky stomach, her chest, smooth and not much different than mine except with brighter spots. A hand slaps my back. In high school now they play Carol’s song. The image going around is a rope, a closet—Sixteen, seventeen… I can’t believe it. The lights burn above me.

How strange that someone is gone. People glance at the ground, at each other, whispers simmer, but I’m running again, trying to tag my way out of being it, trying to run from what I’ve seen, the body of a girl, the watery glow —never a woman, never far from here. I slap the air, I slap at anyone. I lean and grasp the mulch, breathe in its bad scent.

I feel my own heart pounding. Ready or not, here I come—the kid next door goes looking for those running, and those who stand alone, only hiding.

51 Measures, Movements

John Miller pins Eddie on the blacktop, holding his head to the rippling-hot darkness.

For weeks, after Mr. McLelland’s monotone lectures on half notes, treble clef, rest, crescendo, we’ve stayed awake by flinging pencils at Eddie, and we get his temper started, and he fumes till the bell rings and he runs. Only this time behind the yellow-faded portables

Eddie hooked a quarter-note toward John, who squared up, ducked the feeble fist, clutched him around the waist, and slammed Eddie’s body so I could hear his skull strike blacktop.

Now, he flails. The rest of us step back and run from the too-quick crescendo, uneven movements, still listening to the quiet after the impact, the measure when what you’ve heard sinks in, the sound of what you did.

And I never want to hear that sound again.

52 When Zach Came Home Last to the house his brother still lives in, he found his brother faded on anything, found his baseball card collection had gone missing, all those plastic compartments containing Mantle, Aaron, DiMaggio, Robinson, the cards he had gathered with his father as a boy. His father showed him which bubblegum packs to seek, which cards were worth holding intact, grinning faces framed with a fade at the edges.

When we met in the woods, he left his father back in the house, and we whipped tree limbs against trees until they snapped, one fragment cracking off and breaking Zach’s nose, his blood tracing long veins in the bark, his nose crooked from the blow. We shot paintball guns at each other, each blue blast splattering our masks and pain filling our legs as we leapt away from the spray with new bruises. When Zach came home last, he fell from his skateboard and shattered every bone in his hand, skin torn on concrete, bone structure shifting beneath, the hand that held the podium for balance when he gave the eulogy at his father’s funeral. When he found out his brother had sold the collection for heroin, he hired a lawyer and said he’d never come back. Knowing now how we can lose and keep losing. Griffey’s rookie smile. Gehrig’s hand-colored swing. The silver glare of his father’s wheelchair.

When we talk now, I can’t tell him to come back. I can’t tell him what remains, or what home means after it scatters like bone sliding beneath skin. When I go to him in DC, New York, we talk about anything besides home. I don’t ask about the fade across the face of the last pitcher he bought, or the red sutures

53 holding the ball together in Feller’s grip. I can hear Zach breathing through his good nostril. Brothers, he says, cracking the metal-bound knuckles in his fingers.

54 Without Winter

55 Sunscreen

In Florida, out on the bay for hours, I passed the bottle of sunscreen to my father, who shook his head—That’s vain. In Zion, Utah, we hiked through corridors of stone, with only our ankles cloaked in the Virgin River, red-orange walls of the Narrows rising. Again, he shook his head. Sunlight left bright pain on our necks. Next Bryce, Moab, Yosemite, great vanities of rock and earth, remaining for centuries after forming, after the rivers carved them. When the doctor put him under the scalpel’s blade and carved layers down the worn skin of his face to reach the cancer, my father paled, passed out. If survival is vanity, I guess I’ll live to see the canyon’s rusted depth stretch out below me, the canyons in a face, my father’s face now healed, and lasting. But it’s cold here. I blow warmth into my hands, gaze in, breathe around. Alone, I shiver and stare at immense valleys the glaciers carved, the glaciers themselves diminishing in the distance.

56 Acrophobia as Narcissism

Stepping toward the sandstone cliff, I kick a few stones into the canyon, hundreds of feet down. Dust swells in clouds that hover over the drop. It’s not the falling, but that much space to fill with oneself, failing to reflect an image of anything human. The French have another term for it. The stones spiral apart in their descent as the red-tail hawk carves down the canyon walls and steadies on an updraft. The river threads rippling stitches down the middle. I keep staring. Branches tremble near the edge.

57 The Cold

Element bearable to no mortal Elizabeth Bishop

The body’s first-known haunting. It pushes the body to push itself, carves the lungs with sharp breath that the heart must warm, tightens skin to bone, clasps the hands with its ghost rippling. It ensures the body doesn’t get too far along in its disuse. In northern Ohio it holds you with a particular grip drawn from Lake Erie and casting its gray wake across the fields and towns, where people huddle into their own breath and hide. It lingers in the throats of deer, keeps them moving across fields. It gives the fields something to survive. It quivers along the jaw. It cups the ears with a palm of caves. It runs a light razor along the neck. It hangs its heavy curtain over light. In wind it gives us something to work against, besides ourselves. It haunts the first-known body of the earth, which we haunt. It fills the palms with a force we can fight, as we chopped firewood and gathered it in the fireplace each evening in the old house. I watched the sparks rise. One settled on my arm. I felt it deepen there.

58 The Kiln

We cut clean slabs of clay from the whole and smacked them on our desks, dripped fingertips of water over them. We palmed the pliable mounds, thumbs digging crude designs, shallow bowls, birds, and horses. We wet them more to flatten the cardinal and start again. Once we’d put it through the kiln’s heat we could only shatter it, or keep the tree intact.

Once we’d finished it and pulled out a misshapen horse, we set it on the shelf among the flowers no longer open to flux. Like the hardened earth, the clay-white shapes

I scrambled over in Utah, stones fired for years in the earth’s heat. Bare trees trembled in their finality. Sagebrush softened in low wind and spread its strong breath. Sweat clung to the back of my neck. I climbed farther through the crafted bowls and crests of the clay landscape. The violence and sureness of the kiln frightened us with its warm hum, till we removed a stone-still lamb, no longer ours to mold in the manifold desire that filled our minds and hands to change the world before it glazed its final shape. We sliced more clay from the huge slab.

59 Nerves and Channels

Through the thick scent and haze of steamed vegetables I watched my stepmother cut carrots, silver edge snapping against the board, and slide the pieces into the stew to simmer with parsley and beef. Her forearms flexed quick hits, blue veins rising with each knife-fall as she leaned toward the counter those evenings. When I held the stew in my mouth, soggy warmth in my cheeks, and didn’t swallow, she said, Why won’t he eat? I wouldn’t eat now that she had filled my father’s bare, wooden house with so much. When my stepmother wakes and leans up in the hospital bed to eat the simple portions of peas and carrots her brown irises rise into white, and she passes out. An all call, nurses rush in and fill the room, and I step into the hallway. The nurses filter out one-by-one. Two scars scale her neck where the bolts went in to fix her spine and dull the pain that throbbed along her arms, her wrists. Certain weaknesses bind us together, the way the spine binds the body, the way I learned to eat by eating her meals. When she wakes she presses the little button for more medication. And the nurse will not give her more medication.

60 Hunger

The smell of hamburgers, barbecue, cut meat flows through the neighborhood, and I crave it the way my friend told me he used to wake at 3AM to the scent of ribs drenched in sauce, meat slipping from bone and filling his mouth, or the steaks he ate before his father died. He gave up meat along with his father. He lay in bed most nights, the taste aching through his body, the music of the stomach, the way the whole body works together when it wants something, a father, back in his wheelchair, rolling into the kitchen and setting steak on the counter.

61 Tattoos

Slow hunting, the hawk lifts from a branch and glides over the hills behind my father’s house. Inside, he talks about his clients again, how their tattoos display the names of their children in black letters etched across their throats. Yet, when he asks them if they have custody, if they see their children, most of them shake their heads, look away, an irony, no, a disconnect. As if they felt enough to feel a name buzz-stain the sensitive neck flesh with a searing permanence— I cannot say anymore. I haven’t felt enough to have a child, much less tattoo my neck. My stepmother says a hawk flew into the window, a percussive smack she mistook for her mother falling out of bed. She watched it writhe on the driveway a while. Soon it was gone. No wing-stain tattooed the glass. I keep thinking of the widespread wings, talons open for a catch, the disconnect of air along its path. I cannot say anymore. I have no tattoos. I’ve heard once you start getting them, you cannot stop, like having kids. We want again and again to leave a mark on the world, its impermanence, the way it marks us, draws us immeasurably into its slow ache. I want my mark on the world more like the whisk of a hawk returning to its distances. Another one carves over the hills for miles, cradling its kill for later, for the nest and hungry young, or just itself.

62 Dim Rivers

My teeth pounded with new braces stretched across them, and I didn’t have a gun. Rain fell as if it would worsen or cease, and pooled in the muck of fallen leaves and mud. The boars gathered along a ridge, began their descent, grunting, hooves sinking until one remained. My jaw throbbed. My brother, in camouflage for the weekend instead of skin-tight punk jeans, his dyed-black hair hidden beneath wool, lifted his shotgun and fired. Rain pattered the glistening hide, the mud-sunk tusk, the gem of wound where the eleven-year-old, our guide, slid her knife and began to remove its insides. I didn’t know what the lungs were, brushed by leaf-rush. I didn’t know what any of it was except the heart when she lifted and dropped it. My whole head hurt. Eleven, I had not seen so much blood trailing off, dim rivers channeling together with water back into earth.

Just now a marmot has slipped back into a cove, another chasing it, mating, perhaps, both of them ecstatic this far from the human world. The mother and child I passed miles back have just arrived, the kid struggling until he sees the marmots and chases them in wonder. His braces flash when he smiles, slick as the cars rounding the wire of road far down, as the snow still cloaking the peaks above us.

63 Yellow Jackets

My brother beat wild mint leaves with a bat. I whipped the tangled depth with a stick, then, stuck, reached to snag weeds by the roots and ripped them till my fist was fertile and full. We chewed some leaves and crushed the rest, our mouths minted, till one wrong blow stirred the yellow jackets from a buried nest, a flood of buzzing filled our shirts, droning pain, crawling across our chests, stings pinching skin like small sharp bruises. We ran from nature and what it does to us.

64 Hiking Alone, Late in the Cenozoic

After two miles I hear the cheered voice of a child stopping to cup a flower while his mother waits ahead. I pass them and walk through flooded meadows lodged with melting snow and mountain run-off through which more color breaks.

Farther, snow rises in patches and I begin to slide. The child’s voice bright in its retreat, a leitmotif behind me.

Untraceable rodents scatter into brush, wild to be forgotten by any boot step. A hummingbird swerves and stutters between branches, writing its nervous message with invisible wings. When I clear the tree line, the valley widens into a sudden depth. The mountains rise around it, where glaciers glisten in their recoil. I sit and eat the little I brought for lunch.

65 The Mountains in Thailand

I found them walking nowhere and I picked them up, three Thai women, and we drove toward the mountains shouldering the distant Montana sky. They gasped at the huge gray riding the horizon, and snapped photographs of flattened prairie grasses, low-rippling lakes, my car drifting along the road in the heavy wind. I asked if they’d seen anything like this, but we couldn’t speak, not much, each syllable a struggle as we moved toward the silence of mountains. We hiked through the haze of rain, their first time, following each ascent through the meadows and glacial valleys and forests. They asked if we were close to the waterfall, where I said we’d turn back. Close, I said. Three miles deep and shivering, we kept going. I wanted to see how far we could make it, wanted to urge their pink, stained sneakers toward the snowline, their laughter and rapid language trailing off through the clutches of evergreen branches till we made it to the lake in freezing wind. Frail icebergs hovered across slate-gray water beneath fog. Mountain goats scaled a distant cliff. The water sent a coolness along my neck. They slept the whole way back to their cabins. When I dropped them off they hurried through their purses and held out Thai money, not for its value, but for its beauty and distance, silhouetted-red ghosts of kings and temples. In my cabin, I listened to fireworks streak skyward and snap. The fourth of July. Kids somewhere ripped dark wicks, leaving a glare behind the eyelids and stray dogs barking at the shattering starlight. I wanted to be in a place where no one knew much about the distances around us, nor wanted to speak,

66 like me, like the women, somewhere sleeping. They said the mountains in Thailand aren’t like this. I marked my place in the map book with the bill. Rocking Chairs with a View of Mountains

From here I can see a mountain range marking the eastern border of the park with jagged ridges and hard arcs that cleft the cloud-line slung low like sheared wool backlit by descending light. We rock back and forth, all in a row facing the window. It’s getting cold, the man three chairs down says to his friend. He’s not looking forward to sleeping in his iceberg room with a space heater. All this history isn’t worth his struggle. And no damn TV. He always falls asleep beneath a TV glow like a wool blanket. His friend offers him a piece of cherry candy. Nothing sweet. He can’t eat sweets. Neither can his wife, whose teeth cost more than his RV, which is running rough, by the way. You spend less staying in hotels. But you don’t stay in places like this. Warm hotels, for God’s sakes. You spend so much for history and this is what you get? He teeters back and forth. The light breaks under the clouds and swells its golden excess carved by the mountains. It hits the glass with a glare that splits into pieces. My space heater is running in a cabin across the village. Evenings, I sit here and watch. The international employees wheel luggage, low-rolling thunder on the hardwood floors. A bride and groom arrive, glowing indulgently, to marry again where they got married a few years ago. A headstrong wind ruptures the reception tent, toppling folding chairs in a chaos of dominoes. The light leans over

67 the cliffs and slips slowly back behind them, bowing away. Oh well, he’d better get up to bed. Long drive tomorrow. Tonight, he’ll shiver. I sit here and watch the light pull back for hours, every day, while the guests lean toward a fire in the lobby. The earth never meant to warm us with its slow turning, while we still rock back and forth, back and forth, pendulum drift over Cenozoic dust. The mountains darken, separate with their peaks. The last light retreats like the wedding gown slipping around a corner.

68 Without Winter

Like the grocery-store man who said All these people are going to regret this heat come summer—waving his hand at anyone— so many mosquitoes they won’t know what to do, and I know, I’m a fisherman, they’re already out over the water— I also need winter, the cold that keeps mosquitoes hunting warmth, larvae and eggs frozen, unable to hatch till spring. They will arrive earlier and plentiful in a scattered descent on my skin while I sit on the porch, each invisible landing I cannot feel until one pierces my leg with a tiny tear and draws a dark pool to the surface and takes what it needs. I need the cold, the deep chill that sends me hunting inside to find my own warm blood and understand my body again, its needs, like a mosquito hovering alone, the one that lands on my arm. I let it gather enough to live, wait, then slap its blood and mine together on my skin.

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