Tate James - Riding the Earthboy 40

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY JAMES WELCH

The Heansong of Charging Elk
Killing Custer
The Indian Lawyer
Fools Crow
The Death of Jim Loney
Winter in the Blood

for Lois

Introduction

James Welchs first and only book of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40, has passed that most exacting of tests, Time. Thirty-three years have passed since its initial publication, and it reads as fresh and new as if it had been published yesterday. Its strong measured rhythms, recurrent imagery, and lyrical precisionall these qualities mix together to produce a book of poems so singular and timeless it is no wonder the book is being reissued now in a time when last years books are already out of print. It is simply too beautiful to forget.

Given the consistency of the narrators voice, the book reads almost as if it were one long poem. The speakers love and constant regard for nature, even when it may precipitate his doom, is the prevailing spirit that runs through the book. The threat of death, or at the very least, destitution, is presented in the same stoic tone as an appreciation of a young girls beauty. The general sadness may be that of a young man, but there is a wisdom here that seems to have been inherited from the earth.

There is hope, there is always hope. And that comes mostly in the belief in tradition, traditions that refuse to die even in the face of grim poverty and with exposure to corrupting influences.

Celebrate. The days are grim.

These are the tensions struggling within the poems.

To stay alive this way, its hard.

Moon, snakes, snow, horses, bars, hawks, all these and so much more come back to haunt us until a peculiar magic settles over the landscape again and again. Poverty is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Loss of belief is. And throughout this book the speaker may be tempted by despair, but he never really succumbs, or at least not for long.

James Welch never returned to poetry after this moving first book. In 1974, Harper & Row published his first novel, Winter in the Blood, an instant classic that has remained in print ever since. Through the eyes of one intelligent young man we experience the reality of reservation lifethe cattle-ranching, family, the binges, the women, the shattered heritage. It is the same world that occupies Welchs poetry, but the sustained plot and deeper characterizations allowed him to enlarge his story and fill in the thousands of details that would break our hearts. Welch needed the full canvas for the stories he was going to tell over the next thirty years. As much as I would like to imagine the poems he might have written, I will always be grateful for the books he did write. The very last, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, stands on the very top tier of American fiction ever written, and who can ask for more than that.

But poetry says things that nothing else can. It snares the edges of the unspeakable. It grazes dreams. It stands with feet in several worlds. It says two or three things at once, and then denies them all in favor of silence.

His sins were numerous, this wrong man.
Buttes were good to listen from. With thunderhands
his father shaped the dust, circled
fire, tumbled up the wind to make a fool.
Now the fool is dead. His bones go back
so scarred in time, the buttes are young to look
for signs that say a man could love his fate,
that winter in the blood is one sad thing.

This is that magnificent dance of language that cannot be translated into prose. Each element is perfectly clear, and, yet, together they form a kind of kaleidoscope, rotating, moving, through endless possibilities. Only real poets can achieve this perfect balance. James Welch will always be one of those real poets.

KNIVES

Magic Fox

They shook the green leaves down,
those men that rattled
in their sleep. Truth became
a nightmare to their fox.
He turned their horses into fish,
or was it horses strung
like fish, or fish like fish
hung naked in the wind?

Stars fell upon their catch.
A girl, not yet twenty-four
but blonde as morning birds, began
a dance that drew the men in
green around her skirts.
In dust her magic jangled memories
of dawn, till fox and grief
turned nightmare in their sleep.

And this: fish not fish but stars
that fell into their dreams.

Verifying the Dead

We tore the green tree down
searching for my bones.
A coyote drove the day back
half a step until we killed
both him and it. Our knives
became a bed for quick things.
Its him all right
I heard old Nine Pipe say.
As we turned away,
a woman blue as night
stepped from my bundle,
rubbed her hips and sang
of a country like this far off.

Song for the Season

It was September,
September fourth I think
the night his light went out
in the great bedroom
on the lake. Moontime
seared the junipers
rimming the great house.

September and the mountain ash
was stopped quite cold,
its spindly bole going dead
as though the fingers
of the quite dead man
had pinched a vital nerve.

Think of it. The man had done
so much and now, even
the trees would fold
and wither at his icy touch.

His small boat, tied securely
to the dock, fiddled out
across the lake its dirge.

Too late, he found, that for the great
as well as for the weak,
the wrong instruments ease you out
and the coming on of autumn.

Dreaming Winter

Dont ask me if these knives are real.
I could paint a king or show a map
the way hometo go like this:
wobble me back to a tigers dream,
a dream of knives and bones too common
to be exposed. My secrets are ignored.

Here comes the man I love. His coat is wet
and his face is falling like the leaves,
tobacco stains on his Polish teeth.
I could tell jokes about himone up
for the man who brags a lot, laughs
a little and hangs his name on the nearest knob.
Dont ask me. I know its only hunger.

I saw that kingthe one my sister knew
but was allergic to. Her face ran until
his eyes became the white of several winters.
Snow on his bed told him that the silky tears
were uniformly mad and all the money in the world
couldnt bring him to a tragic end. Shame
or fortune tricked me to his table, shattered
my one standing lie with new kinds of fame.

Have mercy on me, Lord. Really. If I should die
before I wake, take me to that place I just heard
banging in my ears. Dont ask me. Let me join
the other kings, the ones who trade their knives
for a sack of keys. Let me open any door,
stand winter still and drown in a common dream.

Toward Dawn

Today I search for a name.
Not too long, they said,
nor short. A deer crashes
in the wood. A skunk
swaggers to the distant creek.
There is a moment, I think,
when the eyes speak
and speak of a world too much.
Such a moment, a life.

Blue Like Death

You see, the problem is
no more for the road. Moon fails

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