Wiman - Once in the West

ONE SUNGONE NOON Mad sand and the sungone noon stinging me back to me my mind fields my hands shields BACK Goof the noon no one knows back of the house back of the shed back of God with his everair assurances and iron injunctions: sing a little nonce curse for the curse of consciousness coming on you like a rash: little boy lifting little mountains from the trash to stare down the angry eons in the oil eyes of the horny toad. Goof the noon gone too soon like the house and shed, like the boy in whom you sit, your back to the back of the old commode, where a few flowers flower out of all the years of shit. TELL ME If the courts are asphalt and the nets chain-link; if its a herculean feat to fuck unseen at the Sonic; if a slick piglet leaps from a childs yelp amid a roar of beer and such ugly incorrigibles as Clack and Skoot, Messrs. Butt and Derryberry chalk their scores and hawk their spit all afternoon in the laughteryawn of the bull smelling stalls; if, as the sky grains again and the grounds in every mouth, someone homeward turns a pick-up aboil with birddogs and someone skyward syrups Durn tell me: can it be tragedy? BIG COUNTRY One answers cancer on a slow boil in the bones of a woman who sleeps five feet from the wide-screen rape-screams of a woman her granddaughter, motherless, fourteen, mainlines. Its Christmas in Abilene, baked shanks and blackeyes cloying the double-wide, kerosene splashing over an actor acting terrified of death. Enter the pug.

It sniffs the rinsed vomit tub, halfheartedly humps Uncle Brunsons un-broken-in boot, spills in and out of Oras happily distracted hands, then quicklicks awake the raving raging woman he was bought from the mall to mollify. Enter the woman into the woman raving raging at the pug ogred over her, razormusic, and the smell of something burning. NATIVE At sixteen, sixteen miles from Abilene (Trent, to be exact), hellbent on being not this, not that, I drove a steamroller smack-dab over a fat black snake. Up surged a cheer from men so cheerless cheers were grunts, squints, whisker twitches it would take a lunatic acuity to see. I saw the fat black snake smashed flat as the asphalt flattening under all ten tons of me, flat as the landscape I could see no end of, flat as the affect of distant killing vigilance it would take a native to know was love. CALCULUS A soul extrapolated from the bodys need needs a body of loss: is that, then, what we were given in that back seat, sweat soaked, skin habited heaven of days when rapture was pure beginning and sinning praise? ONE One raised goats; one raced around barrels (bareback to teach me); one liked it most at midnight on the pole-vaulting mat (or did she feign that to reach me?); one, muddy-buttocked, chigger-bit, bit me.

Tank-topped I rode the rock-n-roll of my T-topped Trans-Am down the drag of that drag town in which, Im told, one raised four children on her own; one fiended wine; one roused her roustabout boyfriend from her best friends bed; and one, who laughing slapping leapt up nude as dawn, her backside fossiled in the lakeside, died. KEYNOTE I had a dream of Elks, antlerless but arousable all the same, before whom I proclaimed the Void and its paradoxical intoxicating joy, infinities of fields our very natures commanded us to cross, the Sisyphean satisfaction of a landscape adequate to loss and as I spoke inspired farther and farther afield from my notes I saw James Wesson whiten to intact ash big-boned Joe Sloane shrivelcrippled tight as tumbleweed I saw wren-souled Mary Flynn die again in Buzzs eyes I saw I saw like a huge claw time tear through the iron armory and the baseball fields the slush-puppy stand the little pier at Towle Park Pond until I stood strangered before the living staring Godfearing men who knew me when. RUST Mamie Thrailkill, 18941990 A hammer a fathers forever behind or a Dust Bowl woodpecker high in pines? Blue purl and milkfeel of a child taking shape, or child-sized tumor taking over? She sits in the timestorm times turned into, shinedying in her easy chair. Love is there: handmade houseshoes and a cairn of yarn; a Bible thumbed to nearly nothing; the percolators way of holding and withholding every inmost stare and state. And hate: purple-kerchiefed, stupid-toothed, a Stuckeys Aunt Jemima stalls her grin above a red cut of melon; on the sideboard a lean late husband hatchets through a half-dozen grainy days. Shy birdbride, fourteen, all night you hide under the bed divining sighs, each iron squeak.

Sweet Christ! how much itch and last sass must a middle-aged man with one mean mule and a patch of pissed-on dirt endure? Not much, not much. Is nothing pure? Is it the souls treason to think so? Is it natures to wink so on the birdhouse hinges and the chain-links until the brain breaks upon a paingleaned God too meaningful to mean? I just went to bed, she said of her sons sons deaths just days apart from slapcheek, from brain fever, from the virus of us. And art? When the rocking stops. A sense of being henceforth always after. A hungry angry mule crying its dumb ton of rust. LESS Silas, say less than silence.

In a dawn lost to all but me, be, Silas, beyond the hay bale harboring kittens no one now has the heart to kill; and touching nothing touch my head so we can be alive together, Silas, as together we are dead. MUSIC MAYBE Too many elegies elevating sadness to a kind of sad religion: one wants in the end just once to befriend ones own loneliness, to make of the ache of inwardness something, music maybe, or even just believing in it, and summer, and the long room alone where the child chances on a bee banging against the glass like an attack of happiness. BLACK DIAMOND For a couple of winters during my childhood my family went on skiing trips with another family from the small town where we lived. The youngest child, Jeff, was a daredevil, and he and I spent our days together and became close. He was seven or so, I was five or six years older. Several years later, after I had left town, Jeff climbed to the top of the raftered coliseum, perhaps to survey the scene below, perhaps to play a joke.

In any event he slipped and fell two hundred feet to his death. And ever after rafters would speak to me of falling: a childs voice calling How bout a bit a birdseed Birdman? while the chairlift chugs and jolts us up the snow of New Mexico so that downward soundward we might fly. Seven years old. When heaven fears its secrets will be told it tells them to the least and the lost of us: Headfirst and howling (so they said) something that will not stop echoing in my head, he slips from the topmost most-banned beam of Snyder Coliseum downward soundward to the lightswirled world that even in my heart is hard. There are eyes, there are hands there are lives so otherlit so freed of the need to mean that to elegize is obscene. Trickster, little broken jokester, with your contempt for years and your disdain for gravity your highwire haywire feats your pockets packed with sweets go Birdboy go faster through the snow faster down the untracked black diamond demanding someone let there be someone winged enough to catch you.