G. E. Murray

Pure veins of bogus blue-blood and such fancy hungers ~ In the end no surprise of reports of you dying younger than your gods ~ Kicked back in the classic toilet scene ~ With a spike in your arm and twelve large in pocket ~ Thanks to a lucky day scamming the dumb Social Services folks ~ It’s a human thing, pants at your ankles, leaving unclean ~ Because life’s road is only one night in a bad motel ~ Harry, you could play basketball in your bare feet, and win ~ You could name all the provinces of Canada ~ And simultaneously scour the Social Register ~ For the names of those sad and silly girls you wanted to get right ~ You relished autumn leaves and ignited inglorious schemes ~ Deconstructing the idea of prep-school Friday sunsets ~ In lavish October, stealing among faculty hors d’oeuvres and sherry ~ All the while creating your own hooligan oeuvre ~ With your others off to Yale, Colgate, Brown ~ Night after night, alone in L.A. ~ Seeking better quotas, vistas, cushion, heroin ~ And that last tricky exit to the Santa Monica Freeway ~ In one more borrowed car with one more borrowed fiction ~ Oh yes, you must have been laughing ~ And spitting back at the boldface of Pacific wind ~ Cruising the left coast on sheer gall ~ But mostly, at 3 a.m. , in the local playground, Harry ~ You played solitary ball ~ And dreamed of final seconds in a distant game ~ You drove to the sacred bucket with a fury ~ Slick crossover dribble, and then burst to the pull-up jumper ~ No harm, no foul, nothing but net. ~ But all alone, in the heart of West Hollywood, Harry, ~ You jerk, you bricked the last shot.

According to local belief, Squaw Island—which is situated in the midst of the Niagara River near Buffalo, New York—was home for a band of prostitutes who serviced workers from the Erie Canal, circa 1840. Today, Squaw Island is a municipal refuse dump for the city of Buffalo. 1 Slime burlap on timbers riverside, yea More captive berths to consider: boundaries Set by familar propositions Of comfort and flatbottom mud. We men Haul up some miracle of a ditch To what’s called Squaw Island. And such remains the canalman’s trade At last. Harsh ways, we tell you, Woman, your eyes and rapture averted To the long boats pulled in tandem To your door. How could we see then How it was always us alone— Unknown stations in need of poor launch? 2 If they could sing or even listen A little, we’d be lost deep in the pitch And rumble of real lives, primed To unload a pledge or two of return. One day, under the shadow of hawks, We locked in the long grass As if slugs. The aftermath was quick Parting, forever maybe, then back To our stories of the packet boat Whacking through tangle reeds And the stoop-backed Irish turning mythic In this, a speechless country, Almost mysterious as perfume itself. 3 Captivated at Little Falls, gone clean By Weedsport, pressing toward Those vainglorious times up in Lowertown Where we’d stroll the day, liquor In hand, waiting a turn at the Locks. It should be allowed as how girls Were not forgotten, either. Sure In any faint light setting off-island, You see the hair’s worn from their legs By woolen trousers. Odd why Such standard gossip keeps us Huddled around cigar smoke and fun, Ever shuffling, ready again to move soon. 4 After miles of stumps and clear-cut skies, More stumps. And the deadly matter Of building country in the calm of summer Burdens like a search for much worse. Thinking through a warm afternoon rain, Thinking of getting there, downwater Toward neglect for glory’s sake And other never-lasting bounty, A blessing, it seems, becomes this— All passages so unworldly hot As to be bitter, our own massive bones Sweating. O Motherly touch and need, What have we to do with thee? 5 Just nervous, and the skirtless brides Seem just the same. At the taking Of shore, there’s care for the prize Portraiture of a girl at sixteen in your vest, Driving you mad, and on. It’s a gravity In the blood, unchangeable as the waif You are, a dwarf among dwarfs, no force. They tell you they understand. So half The time so drunk as to see, you wear Your life like a bandanna. That’s all Nobody’s business. That’s all the secret There is. But to any woman’s edges, Rubbed soft as landscape, you are less. 6 Kissing that last sure drop of sweat From a heavy lip, tongues wag easy In this good composted land Amid mire and flesh, a threat of snow. We rise from a hut born To game and holiday, knowing barely Ourselves. None of us escape The terrible progress we make Suffering yet another pleasure. Sad, say, the ways we loved like stones— No courting dance, no feathers Or gesture. But then nobody asked For more than favors or strange luck. 7 They watch for clouds. Any muster Could ruin business, however damp Already the shining caves that bristle Like pearl in moonlight. Beneath their belts The sources of circumstance and invention Turn nightfall to a wash. Lacking A westerly push toward Erie, the hide Tingles for a pressure, a sign, If only the whine of a full day’s water Lost to Niagara. In fair time, The swell might thicken and warm As soup in the casual hands Of a visitor aging to unwelcome weathers. 8 So it’s Buffalo: gutspill and sideshow, Crusade of rascals swaggering Up Front Street. Lovey, it all passes forth— The heart’s infirmities, our grinding Labors .... Who hasn’t spent a life Making civilization right and not Gone wrong? Soon there’ll be other empires, Then farther west, further refinements Of the breed. We conclude here, A rainy frontier, end of a pity. What’s more? Ah, dreaming, we’d scheme of strangers Above our sorry place, wise builders erecting Able love some hundred years hence! 9 Like a hatch of horseflies streaming Into gray light, we’ve grown free to cross The flushing river on abundant piping Of sludge. Where’s the barrelhouse, The waste of laughter and bile that releases? Instead there’s a world piled on bedrock, A history failing its horizons, Properties of muck increased by modern Wealth. We’re where the lost bodies Of unshared spheres intertwine As a distant rescue from style and form, From tales left squalid in the telling: Now just a vigilance, faith’s fallen banner ....

1. Morning of Crystal This is the deathless body, and this the land’s blood … and here the wine-laced sky over Iowa resembles a heavenly parfait. In one more day Des Moines will be diapered by first snow. A young girl, barely real, glazes the sidewalk with a stupid look. Iowa in winter always dumbfounds the love in us. Before long, nothing opposes the weight and resolution of this sky, this wilderness of earth hardening. When heaviness strikes like a clock glowing incandescently, the season opens to itself, as if a familiar stunt in a traveling show, a fabulation only a touched young girl can devise for any new world. Des Moines. November 1973 2. Cooking the Cold

for Richard Hugo You hear the roadhouse before you see it, Its four-beat country tunes Amplified like surf through the woods, Silencing bullfrog and red-tailed hawk, Setting beards of moss dancing On dim, indeterminate trees That border two-lane blacktop. Docked tonight, you reveal the badge Of the farmer, that blanched expanse of skin Where cap shades face, babyhood Pallor above the sun-blackened jaw Bulging uneasy with a concrete grin And some inevitable need to weep. Don’t you think we live and breathe In the meantime, in lockstep With dawn, sunset, brawling dawn? Even now, you await secrets worse Than the few known ways a seized sky Will come to survive your pity. But on another far field, celebrated For its arrivals and evictions, you learn To be beautiful, never leading A sensible life, playing ball in the early dark, Fighting for a taste of the sweet spot, In this uncut land, this straight-edged air. Whadya want to know that isn’t yet a mystery Somewhere, a confidential stumble, heat Lightning, a first-rate backseat turndown? So it is that later you track high above Familiar tamarack and ash, beginning The next inaccuracy alone, and again, Remembering that everything east of you Has already happened, on the same cold ground, In a swarm of time, finally spiked home To your surprise, nails flung to the air. And us all thumbs to the hot hammer-licks You hear from the roadhouse before you see it.

Aluminum sky. Only November Leaks into early frost Like a ruptured jug Of gas. I’d rather hold Onto this road with pliers Than have another face of you Frisk my heart. Cool hands, The touch of every moon Is crucial and incomplete As a sponge bath. Leaving A backbone of lights Behind me, a blinking string Of pelts in fox country, I long to slice through Connecticut’s middle, marbled And pink as medium-rare beef. I dream you.

One marriage, three children, the usual hero-to-hump tale of jobs in alternating altitudes, stories of unrequited joy. Fresh identities, dramas unseen. Too much of dawn going dark, making for a rich meal of dread, when contemplating love above the brim. You also should talk about dealings with heavy weather and one-night agonies, as if descending permanently into a single distinction. It boils to skin and plain whim, or any fabrication sufficient to implicate the act. Just then, something glimpsed from a taxi careening through Paris, afterimages of a lost father’s face becomes a tree in the park, tall, rustling with allusions, or was it simply cool air stealing across your face— that isolation again?

Love While nothing satisfies, not morning’s Bleary mirror or the slick embrace at hand, Consider our mutual jewel an untouching, a pouring Into sweet emptied arms called worth and habit. Hey, you there, change of mind, eh? So, it is these comic-book poses that promise Softer years, quite bearable as amnesia or sex. Sex Tough talkers, their brain-pans fried black From a constant heat, turn out swell On the boulevard strolling in evening wear. Appearances being unavoidable As the urge to keep tuned, even stars Seems to itch for more, for a squeeze Of all our drizzling nothings, save time. Time Leaning out from this wayside planet, You witness another life blown like glass Without pattern or fatuous secret, Yet a limited edition of uncertain radius. Presume then to be home, a part dismantled By continuity; some guiding light Phasing on and off like an unoriginal religion. Religion Get far up and hard in the hole Between dead of winter skies and beyond Limits of ourselves documented by precinct, Greeted cordially by scandal. Too soon Allegiance becomes resistance and otherwise; Meanwhile, after a holy pinch in the ass You are often saved and, perhaps, in love.

1. In the land of milk and cream delivered early and daily, and always in glass bottles, we care about good grooming and, of course, news of slurs and curs ... Can it really be that home becomes a place to be stranded? “I don’t see a single storm cloud anywhere in the sky, but I can sure smell rain,” out on the edge of Crawfordsville, Indiana, where the answers and questions become identical as evil twins. 2. Basketball ghosts bounce and sweat again in that second-floor gym in the middle of July— that never-to-be-forgotten home of the first-ever Boys State Championship. Rusty jump shots and long-ago corner hooks rim out in a stream of dusted sunlight. “Just to play the game, don’t you know, you know, no matter how much the sacrifice ... ” How searing afternoon’s vagueness now, dreamed in a daylong haze of headache pills downed at the General Lew Wallace Motor Lodge: how the arc of the ball rises to echoes of split-jump cheers in lubricated air, when phantom bodies strive and leap and go prostrate to that squeak of rubber on polished wood— in a game of shirts and skins. 3. You can only wonder how Ezra Pound dissected his time here, among tractors and proctors and temples of antebellum style, as he cooed sweet Greek in the ear of his secular Madonna ... Just now, two pigeons greet first daylight on the Green of Wabash College. Something to be said for being scandalized silly, and in more than one language when life becomes holier than the Crusades. And what’s more—didactic passions eventually drive you insane, thinks young EP, so what? Sew buttons, ha! And make it new always ... and always leave the door cracked open, a light on, and one foot on the floor. 4. “The meatloaf here’s not very good,” warns waitress Lucy, a pretty girl with a tooth missing. Indifferently, day proceeds utterly. Off Country Road X-10, out by Carcus Creek, driving past Minnie Betts’s florist shop and what’s left of the old city jail, you figure each small detail adds glory to any story. “Relax,” says Elton Bidwell, the county’s dead-buzzard collector, “I’ll take care of us all when we com’ on home.” 5. The town goes dark in a killer storm. Collective forgetting and forgiving occurs. But safety comes in many forms. In this vast black you get to thinking about giddy joys and little sorrows, the curse of full employment at minimum wage, and those conspicuous professors— their bowties and braces speaking to the ages and marking moments of learned unworthiness. Maybe, it’s vacuum-packed fear in a stage-managed town. Time to guess what’s behind each tiny crime and local leer, at once rancorous and baffling. Strangers need not apply. A few lights click on at the Shortstop Grille. These cruel weathers turn asphalt slick. The old intramurals begin again. 6. Early Sunday morning and a drunken Elton Bidwell is strung like a scarecrow on his front porch swing, deposited by Grand Wizards from the Odd Fellows Lodge bar late last night—reminder to those devoted folks heading up Church Street with songbooks in hand, that home sure proves just another place to be stranded.

Days of the ferret, a sweet fever. Someone is walking through the sun With my tongue on a leash. Say “Ahhh.” Thank goodness, It’s not diabetes or the Bolivian Rot. This morning I am a cross Between lefthandedness And pointblank rage. The sun leaks like soft ice. The infection deepens . . . My eyes dissolve In a closet of heat. I become 4,000 Yellow flowers, chirruping. O the cliché of a trek into the bowels of China. O the night that zings like a harpsichord factory! O gorgeous sun limping in the frozen dusk. O candy wrappers stacked like bricks! Snow growls on my roof. The infection deepens . . . A day on fire Placing real rabbits Where my mouth should be. I am several kinds of tigers. I am a confectionary treat. This fever fills my sleeves With pearls of honey drops. Am I too strange to bleed? I’m behind myself With a knife and fork, Revolving on a skewer. I am wild with grief As greasy children Reach deep into my fever To scoop out their revenge In double-dips . . . Come off it, kids. Next week, I’ll be raining On the iron road to Malta And perfect health, melting Like sugar in the mouth of the Orinoco.