Doty, if I confess I do not love you
            Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies.
                        -James Wright, from “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave”

 

 

[W]hy in the night do boys
………………………………………….drive the dirt skulls of hills?
Why do boys slam doors, kick rocks, jam hands

in torn jacket pockets—
……………………..root for the nothing they know is there?
Why like wingless, sublunary moths do boys gather

in rig-light? In the hard, snapping light
………………………………………………………..of the lone wellhammer rising
to fall, still pulling at the earth’s dark sustenance?

Why through heartache, disarray,
…………………………………………………………………the grief of cigarettes
do boys wear the faces of stones? Why do boys wish to be

and be other than stones? Why do boys
……………………………………………see one beautiful thing and try forever
to forget?

            ***

He swings his leg out before him,
………………………………..tips the off-kilter square of his torso

over that fulcrum,
……………………..and with his good leg catches himself

on the other side.
………….That spatter of pits across his right cheek?

A time-lapse relief map
…………………….of dumbshit moments

and hard-luck months. Of course,
………………………………….the crumbling stone of his chin,

shoulders hunched against
……………………..the bad wind even now

bearing down. Yet for his Pearl Jam t-shirt,
…………………………………………….that bit of boyishness

around his eyes, I’m betting
………….he’s not far north of thirty. Iraq, then?

Methamphetamine? Some of both?
………………………………..I run along the cross sidewalk,

our perpendicular paths soon to intersect—
………………………………………………………in time, at least—

one of his hitching steps falling, perhaps
………….into the ghost of my own. Does he dream

of running? Of being a boy again?
………………………………..Scrambling up the bank

from the brown river and running?
…………………….Or was there never a season

without wounds? Was entry into whichever
…………………………………………..broken world he was handed

the first and deepest harm? Am I,
…………………………………thirty-five and mostly whole,

forgetting myself? Anyway, I am running
……………………………………………………..when I glance at him

and turn away.

***

What he will do,
he decides, is take her all the way out
to where the road forgets itself
and is grass.

So he fires his old man’s GMC
and drives north. First,
the Brewer place,
nothing but windfall boards now,
some absentee rancher’s ornamental longhorns
shitting even in what he knows
were the bedrooms. He wonders—

and why has he never thought of this before?—
why after the bank sale and these years of ruin
is it still called the Brewer place.
Though as he wonders
he hears his father growl, Never-you-
goddamn-mind-about-that. So he doesn’t.
Studies the river instead—
not yet bone dry, but close. Then rising
beneath his wheels, carrying him
that much closer to the dark, the long sweep
of the bunchgrass hills, the fishmouths of stars
dimpling the black water.

He begins to speak to her—
of the dry taste of grass on the air,
of bats swerving for mosquitos
in creek willows and chokecherries,
of the way, he is sure,
the first steel guitar was strung and tuned
to the clatter of tires on a gravel road,
a good gravel road like this, windows down
and the night pouring in.

He tells her of all
the many beautiful things he sees,
of the heaviness of each on his heart. He reaches
for her, as he used to, forgetting

she is bound with twine
and wrapped in a sheet in the pickup bed.

***

Above a dry creek,
beneath a tangle of chokecherries,
the night by the minute
blackening, 

he digs. It takes a long time.
The shovel slips, splinters his hands.
And he is often sick. He wretches
until there is nothing
left, nothing but the milky spill
of moonlight on his boots. Deep within himself

he can feel each cleft and wing,
each grinding of one bone
against another,
as if here in the night
they would rip themselves
from the binding muscle,
the prison of the skin,
and he would be on the earth
as he has on the inside
always been—

he would be two things,
two sad, bewildered selves.

***

I was myself,
………….and some other self,

some boy brave and up from the black river
………………………………..soundless, stepping in the moony night

from shadow to sage
……………………..shadow. Yes, I was the boy

who held in his hard hands
……………………………………………a carton of eggs,

who was ready to haul off
………….and throw, who didn’t even need to throw

because he was anyway sure of her love,
………………………………or some love, or didn’t give a goddamn

about love. Yet I was myself as well—
…………………….fifteen and fatherless, bespectacled, skinny—

an egg sitting like a promise in my palm,
……………………………….like a wish for flight, for unburdening

and broken rest, for that beautiful cowgirl
…………………………………………..to wing her head around

and for once look at me. And which boy
…………crouches now through the bar ditch? Which boy

falls to his knees behind her mother’s Buick
………………………………..gulps at the chill, riverine air

as if drowning? Which boy spins
……………………..and throws at her window

missing every time?
…………..And do both boys weep with me

when I fumble the last egg
…………………….and it splatters between my stupid feet?

Or this morning, which angry boy am I
………….this morning, when we find a half-dozen eggs splattered

down the length of our car? This morning,
…………………………………when my son asks, Who did this, Daddy?

and Why? This light-shot morning
………………………when I say, Probably a bunch of boys

and Because they are boys.
…………..Like certain kinds of rain

the light this morning
……………………..when he claims, though his voice rises

into a question, But I am a boy?

***

He lays her down,
packs the cool earth over her.
As if they might root again and grow,
he plants cracked grass stems
and broken chokecherry branches
in the broken ground. Then rises.

He is still a long time,
still and silent
the better part of an hour, and then he remembers
that night in the bar, before whiskey slid
like a curtain across his eyes,
some scrawny roustabout rattling on
about oil work in Wyoming.
It wouldn’t be horseback work,
but with the old man losing the homeplace
he’s had to take

what he can get. Hours down the road,
stars blurring, river losing itself in another river,
he forgets again,

asks if she’d like to stop,
watch bats wheel above the trees.

***

This is not an apology.
……………………………….This is trying not to turn away.

This is remembering
……………………..we are who we love,

and how fiercely (And who else
…………………………………..can we be? I wonder,

as I march into his room
…………………….for some trivial deed I have deemed wrong

my shame-faced son—
…………………………………..for if I did not love him

with a blood-love hot enough
……………………..to reprimand, to punish, to lose

and gain each day
…………my good self, who, indeed,

would I be?), and so—
…………………………………………………………..say it—

we must not have been so different,
…………………………………………..that terrible boy and I.

We both loved her.

            ***

So I tell myself another story—
…………………………………………….the one about the Meredith woman
who’d years ago lost her mind. How in the rain she ran

along the river
……………………and then cut north at Ragged Point—
some bit of blood-memory

………………………………………………………carrying her home.
How when she knocked,
and my mother opened the door,

…………………………………………….she wrapped her wet arms
around us all. Said, I’ve missed you so.
She hadn’t lived there in forty years.

………………………………………………………..My father’d bought the place
from that woman’s hard-luck son, and then my father’s luck
ran out as well.

………………………………..On her naked, bony shoulders
my just-widowed mother hung a towel, then called the sheriff.
But tell the rest as well,

……………………………………………..the part that needs telling—
how she walks barefoot the river’s rain-slick bank,
how the wind takes and tatters her night dress,

how lightning
……………………………………illumes the shovel of her hips,
how stick-thin and ninety-three her shadow

…………………………………………………………tops the cottonwoods—
how you never saw her there
but all these sad and happy years later

you see her there—
…………………………………………….rain-ravished, thunder-headed, striding
muddy miles and miles.

 

Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing up on the Big Dry, winner of the 2014 GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the 2013 Orion Book Award, and two collections of poems, Notes from the Journey Westward and Killing the Murnion Dogs. Wilkins lives with his wife, son, and daughter in western Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College. You can find him online at http://joewilkins.org.