Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

affection, while her fingers rummage
    the endless string of entrails.
    These considerations aside,
    after all those years of adventure in the Far East,
    I am in love with these hands, but
    I'm cold beyond imagining.
    WES HARDIN: FROM A PHOTOGRAPH
    Turning through a collection
    of old photographs I come to a picture of the outlaw,
    Wes Hardin, dead. He is a big, moustached man
    in a black suitcoat on his back over a boardfloor
    in Amarillo, Texas. His head is turned at the camera
    and his face seems bruised, the hair
    jarred loose. A bullet has entered his skull
    from behind coming out a little hole
    over his right eye.
    Nothing so funny about that
    but three shabby men in overalls stand grinning
    a few feet away. They are all holding rifles
    and that one at the end has on what must be
    the outlaw's hat. Several other bullets are dotted
    here and there under the fancy white shirt
    the deceased is wearing —in a manner of speaking—
    but what makes me stare is this large dark bullethole
    through the slender, delicate-looking
    right hand.
    MARRIAGE
    In our cabin we eat breaded oysters and fries
    with lemon cookies for dessert, as the marriage
    of Kitty and Levin unfolds on Public TV.
    The man in the trailer up the hill, our neighbor,
    has just gotten out of jail again.
    This morning he drove into the yard with his wife
    in a big yellow car, radio blaring.
    His wife turned off the radio while he parked,
    and together they walked slowly
    to their trailer without saying anything.
    It was early morning, birds were out
    Later, he propped open the door
    with a chair to let in spring air and light.
    It's Easter Sunday night, and Kitty and Levin are married at last It's enough to bring tears to the eyes, that marriage and all the lives it touched. We go on eating oysters, watching television, remarking on the fine clothes and amazing grace of the people caught up in this story, some of them straining under the pressures of adultery, separation from loved ones, and the destruction they must know lies in store just after the next cruel turn of circumstance, and then the next.
    A dog barks. I get up to check the door. Behind the curtains are trailers and a muddy parking area with cars. The moon sails west as I watch, armed to the teeth, hunting for my children. My neighbor, liquored up now, starts his big car, races
    the engine, and heads out again, filled with confidence. The radio wails, beats something out. When he has gone there are only the little ponds of silver water that shiver and can't understand their being here.
    THE OTHER LIFE
    Now for the other life. The one without mistakes.
    — LOU LIPSITZ
    My wife is in the other half of this mobile home
    making a case against me.
    I can hear her pen scratch, scratch.
    Now and then she stops to weep,
    then— scratch, scratch.
    The frost is going out of the ground. The man who owns this unit tells me, Don't leave your car here. My wife goes on writing and weeping, weeping and writing in our new kitchen.
    THE MAILMAN AS CANCER PATIENT
    Hanging around the house each day the mailman never smiles; he tires easily, is losing weight, that's all; they'll hold the job-besides, he needed a rest He will not hear it discussed
    As he walks the empty rooms, he
    thinks of crazy things
    like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey,
    shaking hands with Franklin D. Roosevelt
    at Grand Coulee Dam,
    New Year's Eve parties he liked best;
    enough things to fill a book
    he tells his wife, who
    also thinks crazy things
    yet keeps on working.
    But sometimes at night
    the mailman dreams he rises from his bed
    puts on his clothes and goes
    out, trembling with joy...
    He hates those dreams
    for when he wakes
    there's nothing left; it is
    as if he'd never been
    anywhere, never done anything;
    there is just the room,
    the early morning without sun,
    the sound of a doorknob
    turning slowly.
    POEM FOR HEMINGWAY &W.G WILLIAMS
    3 fat trout hang
    in the still pool below the new
    steel bridge. two friends
    come slowly up the track.
    one of them, ex-heavyweight,
    wears an old hunting cap.
    he wants to kill, that is catch & eat,
    the fish, the other,
    medical man, he knows the chances
    of that, he thinks it fine
    that they should simply hang there
    always in the clear water.
    the two keep going but they
    discuss it as they disappear
    into the fading trees & fields & light,
    upstream.
    TORTURE
    —for Stephen Dobyns
    You are falling in love again. This time
    it is a South American general's daughter.
    You want to be stretched on