Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Ground Zero

• 60 Ground Zero 1. We met on an evening in July in one of the old taverns of this town, two poets, unable to write, newly arrived, hunted and haunted. For me, the escape. For you, the return. You said you would show me the Olympic Peninsula. The road was overgrown. In the headlights of your car I cleared the trees. The cabin was vandalized, gutted, the twenty-six oddshaped windows opening onto the Strait, the Sound, Canada, and all the northern sky shot out. The sink, the pump, the stoves, even the doors, stolen. You wandered around, then out to the deck, seeming to forget me in the debris. Victoria, the only human light, shimmered on the foreign shore. I heard the groan of a fishing boat below the bluff, a strange cry from the woods, like a woman, your ex-wife, the children. We lay on a narrow mattress in the loft, amidst bullet shells, beer cans, mold and glass, the cold, hard bed of delinquent teenagers. The moon was a broken boat through the bullet-shattered skylight. We told each other. First words. I said one night stand. You said ground zero. I said I lost my children, my lover. • 61 You said submarine, fucking vandals. I said kids with no place to go, kids forbidden to love. You said holocaust. Apocalypse. I pulled you over on me. The volcano erupted. The world turned to ash. I cried love cannot be gutted. The moon, the stars, the giant trees watched through a bullet hole. 2. You moved in, installed sink, stoves, water pump. Sixty oddshaped windows. You sat here pissed as the eagle that stared from the bluff, the grease pen numbers on the glass around your brooding head like kabbalah, some secret military code. When I visited, I felt a vandal. When I left you cried deserted. Betrayed. In November I moved in. Sheetrock. Yellow paint named Sunlight. My white dog, Moonlight. I said I’d stay until the place became a landscape in my dreams. By moon’s light through the bullet hole I began to write. Your words: The Duckabush. The Dosewallips. The Hamma Hamma. It snowed in December. You followed Coyote’s tracks to the log where he slept. A trapper came on the deep path. He had Coyote. He gave you his card. He boasted he’d get the rest. He hinted that for money he could get them for you. You were not easy to love. You couldn’t speak. Your tongue was cut out. I left, screaming down the interstate, avoiding the road over the mountains • 62 to my old, equally beautiful, home. You wrote me. One Trident submarine equals two thousand and forty Hiroshimas. In the cities I was weighted with cedar, an inland sea, like provisions carried on my back. Friends I’d always respected said they couldn’t live without culture. I was weighted with the culture of eagle, coyote, people like weather, like stars, functions of nature, not human will, money, concrete. 3. I came back to study the language of gulls, the stories they scream to each other as they fly off their sanctuary, Protection Island. You pulled me up the stairs. Beyond your head I watched the moon through the bullet hole. You said six layers of mountains from the road, you said rivers without end. You quoted Rilke’s Neptune of the blood and his terrible trident. You said Trident Submarine. You said zero. I came back to stare back at Eagle, to cut, carry, and chop our firewood, to piss in the tall fern, to defecate in the first little house you ever built. I came back and broke my habit at last of the electric typewriter. I came back to our cruel and grinding poverty, never enough kerosene, gasoline, postage, paper or pens. We quit filling the propane. It is so cold in our house the little food on our shelves is naturally iced. • 63 I came back to listen to the woods, gull squawk and moan dance of cedar, fir and alder, the high scream of wind through the mouth of Haro, Rosario, Deception Pass where the ships disappear on the inward passage. I came back to listen to your breath as you sleep beside me. Poet. Your words. Puma. Ish. Milosz. The children who once lived here. 4. You weighted me with your poems, like provisions. I...