Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

the rack again.
    You want to hear awful things said to you
    and to admit these things are true.
    You want to have unspeakable acts
    committed against your person, things
    nice people don't talk about in classrooms.
    You want to tell everything you know
    on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges,
    on yourself most of all.
    You want to implicate everyone in this!
    Even when it's four o'clock in the morning
    and the lights are burning still—
    those lights that have been burning night and day
    in your eyes and brain for two weeks—
    and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade,
    but she won't turn off the lights that woman
    with the green eyes and little ways about her,
    even then you want to be her gaucho.
    Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say
    as you reach for the empty beaker of water.
    Dance with me, she says again and no mistake.
    She picks this minute to ask you, hombre,
    to get up and dance with her in the nude.
    No, you don't have the strength of a fallen leaf,
    not the strength of a little reed basket
    battered by waves on Lake Titicaca.
    But you bound out of bed
    just the same, amigo, you dance
    across wide open spaces.
    BOBBER
    On the Columbia River near Vantage, Washington, we fished for whitefish in the winter months; my dad, Swede-Mr. Lindgren—and me. They used belly-reels, pencil-length sinkers, red, yellow, or brown flies baited with maggots. They wanted distance and went clear out there to the edge of the riffle. I fished near shore with a quill bobber and a cane pole.
    My dad kept his maggots alive and warm
    under his lower lip. Mr. Lindgren didn't drink.
    I liked him better than my dad for a time.
    He let me steer his car, teased me
    about my name "Junior," and said
    one day I'd grow into a fine man, remember
    all this, and fish with my own son.
    But my dad was right. I mean
    he kept silent and looked into the river,
    worked his tongue, like a thought, behind the bait.
    HIGHWAY 991 FROM CHICO
    The mallard ducks are down
    for the night. They chuckle
    in their sleep and dream of Mexico
    and Honduras. Watercress
    nods in the irrigation ditch
    and the tules slump forward, heavy
    with blackbirds.
    Rice fields float under the moon. Even the wet maple leaves cling to my windshield. I tell you Maryann, I am happy.
    THE COUGAR
    —for John Haines and Keith Wilson
    I stalked a cougar once in a lost box-canyon
    off the Columbia River gorge near the town and river
    of Klickitat. We were loaded for grouse. October,
    gray sky reaching over into Oregon, and beyond,
    all the way to California. None of us had been there,
    to California, but we knew about that place—they had
    restaurants
    that let you fill your plate as many times as you wanted.
    I stalked a cougar that day,
    if stalk is the right word, clumping and scraping along
    upwind of the cougar, smoking cigarettes too,
    one after the other, a nervous, fat, sweating kid
    under the best of circumstances, but that day
    I stalked a cougar..
    And then I was weaving drunk there in the living room,
    fumbling to put it into words, smacked and scattered
    with the memory of it after you two had put your stories,
    black bear stories, out on the table.
    Suddenly I was back in that canyon, in that gone state.
    Something I hadn't thought about for years:
    how I stalked a cougar that day.
    So I told it. Tried to anyway,
    Haines and I pretty drunk now. Wilson listening, listening,
    then saying, You sure it wasn't a bobcat?
    Which I secretly took as a put-down, he from the Southwest,
    poet who had read that night,
    and any fool able to tell a bobcat from a cougar,
    even a drunk writer like me,
    years later, at the smorgasbord, in California.
    Hell. And then the cougar smooth-loped out of the brush right in front of me—God, how big and beautiful he was— jumped onto a rock and turned his head to look at me. To look at me! I looked back, forgetting to shoot. Then he jumped again, ran clear out of my life.
    THE CURRENT
    These fish have no eyes
    these silver fish that come to me in dreams,
    scattering their roe and milt
    in the pockets of my brain.
    But there's one that comes— heavy, scarred, silent like the rest, that simply holds against the current,
    closing its dark mouth against the current, closing and opening as it holds to the current.
    HUNTER
    Half asleep on top of this bleak landscape,
    surrounded by chukkers,
    I crouch behind a pile of rocks and dream
    I embrace my babysitter.
    A few inches from my face
    her cool and youthful eyes stare at me from two