Richard Hugo

Hardly a ghost left to talk with. The slavs moved on or changed their names to something green. Greeks gave up old dishes and slid into repose. Runs of salmon thin and thin until a ripple in October might mean carp. Huge mills bang and smoke. Day hangs thick with commerce and my favorite home, always overgrown with roses, collapsed like moral advice. Tugs still pound against the outtide pour but real, running on some definite fuel. I can’t dream anything, not some lovely woman murdered in a shack, not saw mills going broke, not even wild wine and a landslide though I knew both well. The blood still begs direction home. This river points the way north to the blood, the blue stars certain in their swing, their fix. I pass the backwash where the cattails still lean north, familiar grebes pop up, the windchill is the same. And it comes back with the odor of the river, some way I know the lonely sources of despair break down from too much love. No matter how this water fragments in the reeds, it rejoins the river and the bright bay north receives it all, new salmon on their way to open ocean, the easy tub returned.

Not my hands but green across you now. Green tons hold you down, and ten bass curve teasing in your hair. Summer slime will pile deep on your breast. Four months of ice will keep you firm. I hope each spring to find you tangled in those pads pulled not quite loose by the spillway pour, stars in dead reflection off your teeth. Lie there lily still. The spillway’s closed. Two feet down most lakes are common gray. This lake is dark from the black blue Mission range climbing sky like music dying Indians once wailed. On ocean beaches, mystery fish are offered to the moon. Your jaws go blue. Your hands start waving every wind. Wave to the ocean where we crushed a mile of foam. We still love there in thundering foam and love. Whales fall in love with gulls and tide reclaims the Dolly skeletons gone with a blast of aching horns to China. Landlocked in Montana here the end is limited by light, the final note will trail off at the farthest point we see, already faded, lover, where you bloat. All girls should be nicer. Arrows rain above us in the Indian wind. My future should be full of windy gems, my past will stop this roaring in my dreams. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. But the arrows sing: no way to float her up. The dead sink from dead weight. The Mission range turns this water black late afternoons. One boy slapped the other. Hard. The slapped boy talked until his dignity dissolved, screamed a single ‘stop’ and went down sobbing in the company pond. I swam for him all night. My only suit got wet and factory hands went home. No one cared the coward disappeared. Morning then: cold music I had never heard. Loners like work best on second shift. No one liked our product and the factory closed. Off south, the bison multiply so fast a slaughter’s mandatory every spring and every spring the creeks get fat and Kicking Horse fills up. My hope is vague. The far blur of your bones in May may be nourished by the snow. The spillway’s open and you spill out into weather, lover down the bright canal and mother, irrigating crops dead Indians forgot to plant. I’m sailing west with arrows to dissolving foam where waves strand naked Dollys. Their eyes are white as oriental mountains and their tongues are teasing oil from whales.

The dim boy claps because the others clap. The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands. Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A. Union Station, ’46, sweating through last night. The dim boy claps because the others clap. Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat. Isn’t it wrong to be or not be spastic? Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. I’m laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream by a savage father and I’m ashamed to look. The dim boy claps because the others clap. The score is always close, the rally always short. I’ve left more wreckage than a quake. Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. The afflicted never cheer in unison. Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked. The dim boy claps because the others clap.

You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss you had was years ago. You walk these streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives. Only churches are kept up. The jail turned 70 this year. The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he’s done. The principal supporting business now is rage. Hatred of the various grays the mountain sends, hatred of the mill, The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls who leave each year for Butte. One good restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out. The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines, a dance floor built on springs— all memory resolves itself in gaze, in panoramic green you know the cattle eat or two stacks high above the town, two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse for fifty years that won’t fall finally down. Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat so accurate, the church bell simply seems a pure announcement: ring and no one comes? Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium and scorn sufficient to support a town, not just Philipsburg, but towns of towering blondes, good jazz and booze the world will never let you have until the town you came from dies inside? Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty when the jail was built, still laughs although his lips collapse. Someday soon, he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up. You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself. The car that brought you here still runs. The money you buy lunch with, no matter where it’s mined, is silver and the girl who serves your food is slender and her red hair lights the wall.