Running Teeth

I am walking toward the frozen river

down at the end of the block

at three am over squeaking snow

ready to arrive and revel in its metaphors,

its shards and pools

and the last patch of open water.

When an eruption of dogs

from the leafless birches

disperses my easy thoughts,

a chattering of bark! bark! bark!

And just as I think how stupid

they come low at my ankles

bark! bark! bark!

the way some other dogs did this summer

and imprinted a lingering fear

of running teeth.

A blurring rustle of black fur

and I wonder is this what it would be like

to face oncoming wolves
at the edge of town?

And then they pass

still bark! bark! barking!

and disappear up the road to the gun club.

I turn back toward the house,

no aurora tonight only the pink lit clouds

of downtown Fairbanks,

and leave the river to move

underneath itself.

Dog Eulogy

The dog just died.

Ten miles in, among the saxifrage

and the boulders,

a lump of red hair, froth at

the mouth.

The flies already around,

the smell like nothing else.

The morning getting hot

as the sun crept down

the rim of Eagle Creek.

There was no reason for it,

not that we could see.

The dog went to sleep, and woke up

dead.

Mysterious as a fish that walks

from one puddle to another.

It wasn’t a problem so much

as a carcass to be buried now,

wrapped in a nylon tent for a shroud

carried up the slope

into the scree.

Piling granite upon the

dead, first a ring of stones

and then working in

then that point where

one has to be placed directly upon

the body.

Then it is not just an exercise,

it is the taste of bile

on the tongue

the thought of the lungs piled under so many

rocks not able to breath,

it is the first cobble upon

all graves to come.

my own for instance

One last check for breath

before the stone is laid down squarely on

the stomach

then the rest

the plonking sound

of granite on granite.

It made a tidy mound,

a cairn for mouse and

moisture to rearrange

with some orange paintbrush

and dog kibbles for an

offering

to life and death itself.

Oh, maybe there was some other place

than this

for the dog’s soul

to roam to.

But It was a day of blooming paintbrush

in shadeless meadows,

the scent of crushed horsemint.

The sky was blue,

the snowmelt draining

through the spongy alpine meadow

roaring over the rocks.

And I doubt the aspen

leaves anywhere else

twinkle like a

thousand silver mirrors,

the way they do there.

The Letter

I got a letter from someone I didn’t want to hear from

who accused me of things I didn’t want to be accused of.

It seems she’d fround religion and her faith was

like daylight savings; it required her to set the clock back far into

the past to where it intersected with my own memory and caught the two of us there, suspended like ants in amber.

My own path back to that moment was like a twisted copper wire,

it turned back on itself, was thin in places, became knots and webs

circling over itself.

I had no fear of tracing its tangle back to the thing she accused me of,
but something in me arose automatically to her accusation

and I arrived in time at the office of the abortionist.

Nothing of that waiting room hid from me

I looked on that eighteen year old boy, sitting under fluorescent lights

waiting and pretending to focus on a stray Time magazine.

Nothing was happy in me there, no feeling of power or coercion

no sense of getting anything I wanted and she did not

just a penetrating sense of failure and worry

as I waited on the side of the door that led out into the summer sunshine

and she on the other side which led only to its locked rooms.

If her faith, in that moment when she appeared at the door
groggy, defeated, and sad, was with us it was a ghost.

It may have spoken to her, it may have roared in her ear.

I did not hear it and she did not speak of it.

Later, she told me the shaking hand of the old

doctor, his rheumy eyes and cold breath,

had taken not one but all future children from her womb.

Yet now she lives in the suburbs

of Atlanta with

three babies and a bible.

And I remember the little black flowers on her dress,

the tatooed skull on her ankle,

the sunshine on the parking lot that day,

more than I care for her peace of mind. 

Truck

The transmission has been reluctant about

second gear for many years.

The high squeal of the alternator

digs into my brain like a letter opener.

The wipers don’t work where the

windshield is spider-webbed with

cold weather cracks.

The oil pressure reads zero, always.

This vehicle, it is not a symbol of gradual increase—

no slow move into middle age,

middle tax brackets,

middle everything.

It’s just a piece of shit without even

that flogistin of character that would

offset the stress of driving around in it.

A reminder that I have become, mostly, a

swinger of hammers,

curser of building inspectors,

half-assed libertarian carpenter.

What I said I would never be but can’t get it together to not be.

All I need now is the pony tail

and the A.A. schedule.

Keep comin' back, it works.

Delo Sky

Clouds like alabaster

behind them blue, blue, and more blue,

the color of a plastic Delo oil jug.

Knapweed in bloom.

Little purple Russian flowers occupying

town lots and road cuts.

Try not to get the seeds on your shoes!

makes great honey

An old beer can

from before pop tops,

Red Label rusted out,

home to some ants,

covered in yellow pine bark.

A Prince Albert tobacco can

wedged in the fork of a juniper tree,

sixty years years grown around it.

Inside, a mining claim dry as a bone.

The ink faded out but still readable:

John McCloskey 1932

She said I love this town

for the smell of pine in the cold morning air.

The smell is Korpine wood chips

being squeezed of moisture then

pressed into oriented strand board.

Tarantula

In Cachagua before a rain, tarantulas cross the dusty roads

toward the creek bed

and disappear under trailers and sycamore trees.

When the rain comes, the arroyo fills like a garden hose

and flushes summer down the mountains and out to sea,

and what every school boy wonders is this:

do the big spiders ever drown?

In Bend, the first rain washes pine pollen down the streets

in yellow streaks the color of wet sulfur.

It dries in paisley patterns

curlicued around coffee cups

and knapweed flower heads.

In the river that is never dry, silt is unstuck

and shrouds the logs

stranded

beneath the water at the foot of the ghosts of saw mills.

Once, I was caught out in a windstorm east of Dayville.

Miles from the road, I hid under a living fir tree and watched three dead ones

teetering

near the spot where I had stood minutes before

to plant a small orange flag.

I had the urge to run to the flag and listen to the snags creaking in the blast

like a spider running toward the river

like a mother grouse flying at danger

like a curious bear cub running from its mother

then one fell and buried the flag.

I think, yes, I did once see a drowned tarantula,

its wet black body like a hairy starfish in the high flood mark of Cachagua creek.

I wonder how it got past the snapping dogs and BB guns of the trailer park

and whether it was moving toward something

Or away.

Steens

When we left Medford it was nearly a hundred degrees

and we were hungover, packed tight into your little

Toyota, the one that grew sprouts in the

trunk when it rained.

Kip had drawn us a map of hot springs...

here a cottonwood, there a hole in the fence,

look for the steam.

In the driveway, Matt pointed a finger

in the air to where two redtails circled.

The next day we got to Pike Canyon, a hail

was falling

so cold my bones felt like rocks.

We napped in the cave there, shivering in

sleeping bags.

How can it be this cold?

How can my hands not

curl up?

When the weather cleared a little,

we watched from the lip of the cave

as a mountain lion crept

paw to paw to paw to paw

up the other side of the canyon.

The road was like mud soup

skidding along, trying not sink.

The windshield wipers didn’t work

so I leaned out the passenger

side with an

old black

tee shirt for a mop.

The next day the sun came out,

and we hid in our tent on the playa,

listening to wind

rustling the sage.

How can my skin be this dry?

How can my fingers feel like garnet sand

paper ripping itself to shreds?

When the sun hid behind the mountain,

we sat around the hot spring saying nothing

just watching the little bubbles

floating up out of

a boiling red pool

so deep

like the end of a long liquid

hair, rooted way

down

there.

Walking in the mud with backpacks on,

we came to a wide shallow pool

a few skeptical cows

When the footing worsened

and the cold water sent our testicles scrambling

back into themselves,

I don’t remember who yelped first.

Sunset in the Sheepshead,

the long frozen roll of the

Steens,

the world nightly

remade

frozen in fault block

wave.

Steam from a cup of tea,

the moon rising full in the gloaming,

I said, you see those little tiny clouds, they mean more

rain tomorrow and you laughed.

Good for you!

Never one to swallow authority.

The next day, it rained.