Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

remaining
    wildflowers. There's a question in those eyes
    I can't answer. Who is to judge these things?
    But deep under my winter underwear,
    my blood stirs.
    Suddenly, her hand rises in alarm—
    the geese are streaming off their river island,
    rising, rising up this gorge.
    I move the safety. The body gathers, leans to its work.
    Believe in the fingers.
    Believe in the nerves.
    Believe in THIS.
    TRYING TO SLEEP LATE ON A SATURDAY MORNING IN NOVEMBER
    In the living room Walter Cronkite
    prepares us for the moon shot.
    We are approaching
    the third and final phase, this
    is the last exercise.
    I settle down,
    far down into the covers.
    My son is wearing his space helmet.
    I see him move down the long airless corridor,
    his iron boots dragging.
    My own feet grow cold.
    I dream of yellow-jackets and near
    frostbite, two hazards
    facing the whitefish fishermen
    on Satus Creek.
    But there is something moving
    there in the frozen reeds,
    something on its side that is
    slowly filling with water.
    I turn onto my back.
    All of me is lifting at once,
    as if it were impossible to drown.
    LOUISE
    In the trailer next to this one
    a woman picks at a child named Louise.
    Didn't I tell you, Dummy, to keep this door closed?
    Jesus, it's winter!
    You want to pay the electric bill?
    Wipe your feet, for Christ's sake!
    Louise, what am I going to do with you?
    Oh, what am I going to do with you, Louise?
    the woman sings from morning to night.
    Today the woman and child are out
    hanging up wash.
    Say hello to this man, the woman says
    to Louise. Louise!
    This is Louise, the woman says
    and gives Louise a jerk.
    Cat's got her tongue, the woman says.
    But Louise has pins in her mouth,
    wet clothes in her arms. She pulls
    the line down, holds the line
    with her neck
    as she slings the shirt
    over the line and lets go—
    the shirt filling out, flapping
    over her head. She ducks
    and jumps back—jumps back
    from this near human shape.
    POEM FOR KARL WALLENDA, AERIALIST SUPREME
    When you were little, wind tailed you
    all over Magdeburg. In Vienna wind looked for you
    in first one courtyard then another.
    It overturned fountains, it made your hair stand on end.
    In Prague wind accompanied serious young couples
    just starting families. But you made their breaths catch,
    those ladies in long white dresses,
    the men with their moustaches and high collars.
    It waited in the cuffs of your sleeves
    when you bowed to the Emperor Haile Selassie.
    It was there when you shook hands
    with the democratic King of the Belgians.
    Wind rolled mangoes and garbage sacks down the streets of
    Nairobi. You saw wind pursuing zebras across the Serengeti Plain. Wind joined you as you stepped off the eaves of suburban houses in Sarasota, Florida. It made little noises in trees at every crossroads town, every circus stop. You remarked on it all your life, how it could come from nowhere, how it stirred the puffy faces of the hydrangeas below hotel room balconies while you drew on your big Havana and watched the smoke stream south, always south, toward Puerto Rico and the Torrid Zone. That morning, 74 years old and 10 stories up, midway between hotel and hotel, a promotional stunt on the first day of spring, that wind which has been everywhere with you comes in from the Caribbean to throw itself once and for all into your arms, like a young lover! Your hair stands on end.
    You try to crouch, to reach for wire.
    Later, men come along to clean up
    and to take down the wire. They take down the wire
    where you spent your life. Imagine that: wire.
    108 RAYMOND CARVER
    DESCHUTES RIVER
    This sky, for instance:
    closed, gray,
    but it has stopped snowing
    so that is something. I am
    so cold I cannot bend
    my fingers.
    Walking down to the river this morning
    we surprised a badger
    tearing a rabbit.
    Badger had a bloody nose,
    blood on its snout up to its sharp eyes:
    prowess is not to be confused
    with grace.
    Later, eight mallard ducks fly over
    without looking down. On the river
    Frank Sandmeyer trolls, trolls
    for steelhead. He has fished
    this river for years
    but February is the best month
    he says.
    Snarled, mittenless,
    I handle a maze of nylon.
    Far away—
    another man is raising my children,
    bedding my wife bedding my wife.
    FOREVER
    Drifting outside in a pall of smoke, I follow a snail's streaked path down the garden to the garden's stone wall. Alone at last I squat on my heels, see
    what needs to be done, and suddenly affix myself to the damp stone. I begin to look