74 Friendship poems

What’s the matter with you today sed John you and Jan fighting? On no I said it’s not that it’s a letter I got that’s bothering me. Must be from the govament or the insurance, I can understand that. No, John, it’s not them this time it’s from a friend. Did he die or summin? You aint sed a decent word all morning I might as well be working by myself and let you set on the nailkeg unrolling barbwore Oh dammit, John, it’s just a letter that pissed me off, I said. It’s from a writer who saw something I wrote about coyotes killing sheep and he wrote saying that never happens. He sez what? sez John. He said there’s no documented evidence that a coyote ever killed a sheep unless it was rabid, I said. And he said my story was a lie and should never have been written. He’s a writer? sez John. What does he write about? Oh, he writes novels, I said. Books about cowboys and Indians and the California mountains. He sez that sed John did he? You know most chickens I known of is layers and most folks I known is liars and most of them don’t know the different but that don’t get in the way of their opinions. It was a preacher got his first call to come to our town back home his first sermon that everbody showed up to hear was how all people is good it aint no such of a thing as a bad person he wasn’t in town half a year before Travis Newberry knocked up his daughter in the eighth grade and he was twenty-four by then. He’d started preaching late after giving up on farming and owning a grocery store must of been too late he run out of words after bout a year we had to elect him to office to give him something to do. First thing he voted no taxes and no pay raises to schoolteachers so they all known he’d be a good one mebbe governor some day had to move him out of the parsonage and into a house where he had to pay rent like real people so they found him a place out on the end of town where they could be alone with that pregnant girl they took out of school. It was skunks out there a mama and four babies and his wife and that girl sez oh they’re purdy let them alone we like them so he did by the time she had her baby they’d killed all their chickens the Easter ducks and the cats it was mice and skunks running all over that place they couldn’t live there no more so he run for state office they sent that girl off to Christian school we never heard of her again and tried to raise the baby boy but couldn’t do that neither. He got elected to the campaign of no taxes and close down the schools cause he blamed it all on Travis Newberry hanging around the jr-high parking lot and moved to the state capital to live and before they could rent that house again they had to set out traps for two months and rat poison sed they got twenty-four skunks but nobody counted the mice it was awful took a year for the smells to go off and it wasn’t no hippies back then to rent it to they had to wait it out so he run for Warshington office six years later and put the boy in the orphanage up for adoption he might of been a scandal but he didn’t get elected they made him a judge instead after that and he’s rich still there and being so famous he don’t pay no rent the state gave him a house and a car and a maid but that still don’t mean he known one damn thing about people or skunks or mice or preaching or farming or running a grocery store. I seen it with my own eyes a coyote running through a herd of sheep and killed nine lambs just to do it and we set up five nights in our pickups waiting for him until he come back and he killed four more before we shot him and that’s nothing to what Allen Dalley out to Summit lost that one year when they say coyotes got half his lamb crop that’s just a bunch of bullshit because he done one thing don’t mean he knows nothing about anothern and if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about you tell him to just keep his mouth closed or run for office that’s what it’s there for so why don’t you forget about it and you can forget him too for now let’s get to work cause all this is real not something in a book and has to be got done for sure not just by thinking about it and if you don’t get that frown put in a drawer this is gone be a long day of work

We sat in the neon light on a cool evening of a summer day drinking beer and eating salad. You told me your story similar to those of many others: All your savings are gone, the managers, the secretaries, the supervisors, the police in charge of passports all having received a handsome share. Now you have nothing left there, your color TV and refrigerator were sold to get the cash for the plane ticket. “But I was lucky,” you assured me. “Many people have spent fortunes and still cannot leave the country.” “What are you going to do here? Don’t think this is a place where you can make a fortune by snapping fingers. Starting poor, we have to labor for every dollar. It is a place where money can hire the devil to make bean curd and your growth is measured by financial figures. There is no way for us to get beyond a social security number.” “Anything, I would do anything, as long as I can make a living. At least, I am free here and don’t hate others. Do you know what I wanted when I was back there? I always imagined how to get a gun so I could shoot all the bastards. That country is not a place to live— I would rather die than go back.” We stopped to watch seagulls. An airplane was writing the word FUN in the distant sky. I wish I had left the same way, but I brought with me all my belongings, even my army mug and a bunch of old letters.

for Jackson Allen My friend wears my scarf at his waist I give him moonstones He gives me shell & seaweeds He comes from a distant city & I meet him We will plant eggplants & celery together He weaves me cloth Many have brought the gifts I use for his pleasure silk, & green hills & heron the color of dawn My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind He backlights my dreams He has built altars beside my bed I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember his name, or my own.

You love your friend, so you fly across the country to see her. Your friend is grieving. When you look at her, you see that something’s missing. You look again. She seems all there: reading glasses, sarcasm, leather pumps. What did you expect? Ruins? Demeter without arms in the British Museum? Your friend says she believes there’s more pain than beauty in the world. When Persephone was taken, Demeter damned the world for half the year. The other half remained warm and bountiful; the Greeks loved symmetry. On the plane, the man next to you read a geometry book, the lesson on finding the circumference of a circle. On circumference: you can calculate the way around if you know the way across. You try across with your friend. You try around. I don’t believe in an afterlife, she says.But after K. died, I thought I might go after her.

I know my friend is going, though she still sits there across from me in the restaurant, and leans over the table to dip her bread in the oil on my plate; I know how thick her hair used to be, and what it takes for her to discard her man’s cap partway through our meal, to look straight at the young waiter and smile when he asks how we are liking it. She eats as though starving—chicken, dolmata, the buttery flakes of filo— and what’s killing her eats, too. I watch her lift a glistening black olive and peel the meat from the pit, watch her fine long fingers, and her face, puffy from medication. She lowers her eyes to the food, pretending not to know what I know. She’s going. And we go on eating.

What will be served for our reception in the devastation? Finger food, of course and white wine, something printed on the napkins. We were not children together but we are now. Every bird knows only two notes constantly rearranged. That’s called forever so we wear pajamas to the practice funeral, buckeroos to the end. We make paper hats of headlines and float them away. My home made of smoke, tiny spider made of punctuation, my favorite poem is cinder scratched into a sidewalk. My friend’s becoming the simplest man, he sees a lesson in everything, in missing his train, in his son hollering from the first branch, Dad, guess where I am. I was with him for my first magpies, governmental and acting like hell. And the new nickel with Washington hard to recognize. We’d driven by a Rabbit flattened by an upset truck, jars of Miracle Whip broken over the toll road in heavy snow. We watched an old lady eat a hot dog in a bun with a knife and fork. A few emeralds winged off a fruit leaf. What happens when your head splits open and the bird flies out, its two notes deranged? You got better, I got better, wildflowers rimmed the crater, glitter glitter glitter. We knew someone whose father died then we knew ourselves. Astronomer, gladiator, thief, a tombstone salesman. All our vacations went to the sea that breathed two times a day without a machine. We got in trouble with a raft doing what we promised not to. Further out to be brought further back. There’s my friend in his squashed hat trying to determine if a dot is a living thing and do no harm. He’s having trouble remembering street names but there’s still plenty of Thoreau. All that a human is made of is gold, very very little gold.

for M.H. Friend, remember how you showed us beasts love beauty? We were wading in your lake with bluegills and you said, Be careful, you will lose your beauty marks To their little jaws. We were a delicacy. From us they purchased The darkest part of the skin, only what contrasts on us. And it was more than a pinch or sting, It’s a sensation of hunger That makes us spring off the bottom and swim out deep And safe. “No blue stripes on cheeks; no red on fins; Old individual’s belly coppery red or brassy.” As others see you, I think these indicate, Who would have you all one shade then wouldn’t have you. At your full table later, over muskellunge and lemon, We read in the book the fish that liked us Has certain maxillaries “wholly wanting.” Your gourmet bluegill: It lives in the eye of the beholder, it swims the vitreous Humor, would eat even your blind spot! But we think we can paddle out there until all Goes dark, and we are wholly desirable, and too much.

in memory, 1929-2004 We choose a cheap hotel because they’re serving drinks. We drink. I hear him tell a tale or two: he thinks that so-and-so’s a sleaze; and then there was the time that Milosz phoned, oh please. Another gin with lime? I want to say that once, I saw him dressed in leather, leaning on a fence inside a bar. Rather, walking to the N, I gush about his books; he gives his change to men who’ve lost their homes and looks: how like him, I’ve been told. Our day together done, I hug him in the cold. And then the train is gone.

A fourth was needed so one of the three Invited a friend and I came along as a spare In case a chair was empty since I could fill In as easily as I could shout out a rhyme. As the jive flowed like the River Jordan And Joshua and his trumpets sounded the alarm The winning cards slam damned on the table And I laughed along with morning noon and night. My three big brothers: bold smart handsome. One slim as a stick of dynamite, the second solid As a line backer and the third crazy enough To fight them both if they let it roll beyond talk. Treated me like a child even after I had my first. The three of them (ace king and a wild card) Improbably born within four years as if Daddy And Momma were trying to break a record Or win a bet about how many diapers a woman Could change in a single day without cursing The hand God had dealt her; the odds were even Until I came along years later to tell their story.

for Brandon Goacher I. Let me speak with expressive hesitation & a feeling for interment why even lineate what isn’t broken by music let me speak with inextricable reluctance. I want to tear the heart from refused convalescence & feed it those long fronds of river bed grass. I want to tear the heart out of style & put it between utter thrall & the infancy of all things impure. Torn out, a flame thickens between us as if not right now we’ll be ripped from this life or each other a white lie not a little more tender than quick. Inextricable reluctance to die or even leave youth culture ever. What a stupid feeling. Do you think it isn’t true? The very existence of flame throwers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves ‘You know I want to set those people over there on fire but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.’ Someone puts their arms around you in the cold. There’s an al- most disquieting closeness as gossamer clots & becomes an impasto derivative of some newly visible interdependence. Flame throwers then are just a description of prevailing ideology, relics, the life of the party, a soul flirts by burning that name for itself up in jonesing that comes at the end of desire? Well I wouldn’t know about that. A little goat. Why would it nuzzle dreamily up the way I nuzzle dreamily up to my knees. In the ‘fatal position’ as my nephew used to call it estranged from play waiting on the fox hunt. Oh baby it beats up my lips the somatic effects of contriving a psychic blockade against death with the contours of your face & healing in constant eclipse where all things inextricably broken by music make the basic rhythmic unit go something like this — I don’t want to loose you. I don’t want to be empty, clever hold & keep you.I was lost to you to start with still I keep on coming back. Do you think you’ll keep on coming back to me forever?That’s the meaning of our life together baby.