The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem THE DOGS OF MONGOLIA

1.

 

Dog pawing the awnings of restaurants in Ulaanbaatar

where the State Department store hawks dog dreams

to businessmen who cast shadows like pit mines

deep enough for dog bodies to fall asleep inside. Oh dog

roped to the old Soviet pillar, roped to an oil drum

full of vodka. Dog roped to a car husk, head stuck

through the radiator & staring at the dead metal flywheel,

mill-wheel. Dog snared by flight, mired in fetal freedom

on a staircase to the first world, feral & chained by fur

to the cracked rib cage of hunger. Three dogs in a garbage pile

near the temple shed. Dog tongue licking the sacred horse skull,

licking the wounded shaman’s hand, the land. Dog head stuck

inside a mayonnaise jar beneath the deep bellow of Asian sky,

stuck to a body beneath a season of ice, stuck to a cup

of goat milk souring on midwinter’s fatal white cloth.

 

2.

 

God, you are an old trick in reverse; pick a horse-head fiddle

backward until scales shed like fur. Run until your hooves

turn to pads and the plateaus of your teeth

peak into canines; run until you run

the hills into camel backs and your four legs

blacken, bloody as the first newborn colt of Spring.

 

On the broken fire escape, dog. In a pile of dogs

on the burnt black factory floor,

dog. Dead in a winter field, frozenblooded, dog.

Blown into myth, howling into the ice wind

from the edge of legend to be born

again from the foggy womb of the hoodoo, dog.

 

3.

 

However the sky falls, we were there, and we were not dogs.

On horseback in the wide-mouthed valley, the immensity

above us, like some lost faith, threatening rain, we passed

dog after dog guarding the hashas and flocks. They chewed

 

sheep into shin bones, chewed the sinew cords

from the ger poles, the legs from wrestling statues—

 

they coughed up prophecy, swallowed the long winter

where gods walk on knees, kept falling asleep

in the wild wind-swept scruff of steppe. Or

 

that part can’t be true—those dogs never slept.

I still see them, in full sprint across the blue khadag of the sky,

their matted fur turning slowly to snow.

SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT [1977]

A golden eagle landing on a midnight Trans Am.

Its big-blocked, American, eight-cylinder thunder

and lead-lined cloud of exhaust fumes mixed

with burning tire tread. That smuggler’s smile fueled

by a bootlegger’s truth: there’s public good detouring

pedantic rules. Kojak with a Kodak, choke and puke,

I got my 10 in the wind, your ass is grass and I’m gonna mow it. 

How vengeance pursued beyond reason’s jurisdiction

cuffs you to failure and ridicule. Ahead, missing bridges

only a desperado’s bravado can cross, roadblocks

evaded through the sanctuary of strangers. A wedding

in search of a bride. That you too can hitchhike from

unsatisfied’s altar when the Bandit arrives in tight jeans

with a ten-gallon lid he only removes for the one thing

he looks for in every pretty woman. And you’ll be free

if you can lose yourself in relentless movement, if you

can see carnations in the carnage of police cruisers

littering the future he cultivates in fame’s name.

THE ONLY HOUSE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The stove doesn’t work. The food is painted

on the refrigerator door. No stairs join

 

the three levels, and the residents flit

between them, colorful, mute birds. Days

 

pass with the click of a switch and no matter

if Baby bathes with his clothes on, or Mother

 

in her fitted purple jacket, heeled shoes,

and with her wild silken hair spends a week

 

face-down on the laundry room floor, or

if when Father goes to work he is really only

 

waiting behind the sunroom to come back home.

There is a birthday party nearly every day,

 

no fear of death or failure, no mortgage

to pay, no money at all. And if the tiny pink

 

phone in the kitchen never rings, and the doors

don’t open, and if the family can’t bend

 

their knees to kneel in the warm square of light

on the plastic-wood floor, they are still

 

ready for you to set the table, snap the garden

fence back into place, position the pink crib

 

next to the blue, fix the girl onto her rocking horse,

and let your hand push the thing until it topples.

HISTORY ISLAND

None of us go there anymore.

It’s a defunct resort

town in winter. The rust-colored sea’s thick waves roll over

sideways, slowly. The boardwalk collapsed

and was hacked into fist-sized chunks—to sell

as pieces of The True Boardwalk, reliquarilly.

The Old Hotel, after the termites ate their fill,

became (and turned the same color as) the potbelly

of dirt on a grave. Still pink, the pink

of a pint of blood in five gallons of water,

the cotton candy wagon’s cotton candy maker spins

not a skein, not an airy thread.

That man with eight-foot stiff-kneed legs is gone, his hat now

a blacked-out lighthouse

at the end of the stubby shorebreak.

A whole generation, or two, came here

in the years between the wars.

It was as if certain things never happened.

The whole island is an under-lit room.

You’re in it, now, we’re all in it now,

and an eight-foot bucksaw

leans, more than a little bowed, cocked, taut

against a wall.

The Amon Line Poetry Award MISHA AND THE GRAVE

Dug out the deep hole

with rock bars and shovels

along the shade tree path

while the herd was in lower

fields, and left the rifle in the truck

because people believed

horses know intentions,

and the ancient Paso Fino,

too sick for the molasses

we dripped on grain and in water,

came and stood over the grave

when it was still morning,

waited there past lunch,

like a blinking statue,

never swatting a fly,

never pawing the fill dirt

mounded above the hole

we had left open to sun

in case that warmth

touched him when he fell.

SEASIDE

I.

 

Summer is a day. The terns swirl

on the wind, letting it toss them

this way and that, then

dive—their bodies arrow

into the shallow waves.

 

 

II.

 

A pair of urns on the mantle

twined with a Japanese floral pattern,

a delicate pink petal—

 

 

III.

 

Each day I listen through closed eyes

to the waves lick the beach,

the sun kaleidoscoping bright shapes

inside my lids. One daughter fills a bucket

with periwinkles, then

empties it into the surf.

One daughter kicks on a towel in the shade

of an enormous umbrella,

dazzled at the movement of the air.

My grandmother came here

fifty-two more summers

after her daughters died. Even now

in the leaning garage

stand their small bicycles.

 

 

IV.

 

This wind. These pressed flowers

falling out of the old hardbound

Robinson Crusoe, Just So Stories—

their weightless drift to table.

This day. This hour. The mossy shingles

by the outdoor shower. This light.

Summer is a day. In my grandmother’s last year,

my mother asked me to take the paper

and wipe as she held the frail woman

above the toilet bowl. Her body had reduced

to sinew, slack. Her cotton pants billowed

around her knees. Her long hair fell

in a thousand wisps around her face,

too fine to be held in the braids the children

still each morning wound around her head.

I had never been asked to minister.

I had hardly touched her in years.

OF SWEAT AND DISTANCE

When I can feel the heat’s weight, I stay sweating as if

this will prove that I work, if not cutting steel

or pushing a cart of hot dogs down the sidewalk

or a broom through an empty elementary school,

 

then at least at being alive. My first choice for cool

is the breeze, and if a trek’s ahead—let’s say

forty furlongs—I choose my own engine,

cooled by beads of brine on my skin and the wind

 

singing in my face while I pedal past traffic.

So far I’ve not been pickled by saline crystals

that barely glint in noontime light.

When I stumble into my neighbors buying fileted trout

 

or a cup of coffee, I avoid the handshake,

apologize through and for my dew,

answer any questions. I lean toward the polite,

though as a body might, I’d prefer a comrade to wrap

 

in the wave of an embrace, an ally to mist with a sea

fighting free of its holding ocean. I believe

that breed of people exists, just a bit rough.

When I meet one, I might see my life as a series of tides, receding

 

now, but rising in the future that will become past.

My sweat will leave a dark patch of moisture, the kind

that allows fallow ground to grow fecund and full without

a mind for tainted or grime, so lush you can’t see the filth.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem AUBADE

They must have been so gentle, the deer—

for me to sleep like that, through the garden’s

ruin. Sometime in the night, maybe,

or just after dawn. The softness of them

bearing the teeth & hooves, the timidness

hiding the improbable hunger. So able to tear

& crush, so able to wreck, each neat row yielding

under unimagined heaviness. And now once more

it’s morning: light still weightless, sky

flat blue, and the moon, the night’s diminished

revenant, abandoned there—hanging

over it all like a question never answered. How

I could be one thing so long and then suddenly

not. What walked so softly through me.

STORY THAT BEGINS AND ENDS WITH BURNING

Help, as usual, arrived too late. In jugs slung across

          the backs of cows, the water sloshed and spit itself out,

the daughter tugging and hustling the animals

          flameward up the hill. By the time she reached it,

the house lay in charring heaps, the trees

        hissing like blown-out wicks. The daughter knew

she should’ve burnt too

          and spent the soot-stained afternoon

watching herself in a reckoning blaze—

          bound up in the curtains, her fingers fretting hot cloth,

holding a melting plastic pail

          twisted like a wrung bird’s neck,

chaining herself up in the dim attic.

          And oh the savage heat of it all—

But let her rest now. Let her lie down in the ash

          and shut her eyes. Let her always wish the house

back to burning—when the portraits still held

          a familiar flaming hand or eye, when smoke rose

into the air like new blooms, when a door,

        smoldering but whole, was still there to be opened.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award FOUR MONTHS AFTER YOU GAVE ME THE GOOSE DOWN COAT

                                                  for Dad

When I pulled the pieces of pine needles
from the pockets of your coat, I pictured
you prebirth (my birth), bundled up in
Appalachia beside a small fire built for one,
two curls falling from beneath Grandpa’s wool hat,
a cigarette in one hand and a hatchet in the other.

Gently guiding the needles along the terrain of my hand,
I think about that hazy photograph: you standing,
straddling the peak of Backbone Mountain,
shirtless with your shorts around your ankles,
hairy bare ass and varsity thigh tan lines
splitting the horizon in half.

I reach deeper—my index finger dredging
the inseam of your down coat—remembering
watching you glide the bench plane along strips of cedar,
sipping beer out of silver cans, quickly dropping flies
into that mason jar we kept the black widow in
(the one we hid from Mom), cutting the heads off
the copperheads in the sandbox, taking out your own stitches,
building decks, building forts, building playgrounds, building.

I’m standing outside on a Friday night, pushing
these pine needles around my palm through sweat
from thought and glass, the smell of a cigarette ending.

Do you remember that time in Austin when it was ninety-
eight degrees after nightfall? The rooftop bar on Sixth Street?
When we staggered through the streets “on business”?
Do you remember the way the sidewalk enveloped the trees?
You tripped on a root and apologized. I was twenty-two
and wanted to hold your hand.