Three for Tom Merwin

June 30th, 1756, Col. Cresap and his party had another skirmish with the savages. He had not forgotten the lamented sleeper [Thomas Cresap, Jr., killed in the earlier “skirmish”] on Savage Mountain; he enlisted another company of volunteers, taking with him his two surviving sons Daniel and Michael and a gigantic negro servant, belonging to him.

This time they advanced into the wilderness as far as a mountain, a mile west of Grantsville. There, they met the Indians; a fight took place and the negro Goliath was slain, and the mountain has been “Negro Mountain” ever since.

—Mrs. Mary Louise Cresap Stevenson (descendant of Colonel Thomas Cresap, Sr.) from a paper read at the Eluathan Scofield Reunion Columbus, Ohio, 1901.

The summit of Negro Mountain, in the Alleghenies, is the highest point in Pennsylvania.

1. Upstate—

ugly weather, dear friend, and hillslousy with poets. Little wonderyou decamped! Compareor contrast the imaginations in whichI became a priest!We’re all innovative, they said.Play your horns in the shadow, I thought,roll your horns through the light. I couldhave made a list of the “best”songs as longas myarm.Whatdo you expectme to doaboutyou? Ithought.Or orderwas best itself—there’sthe other idea, bigboy in the population. Careful,careless, eitherone. Little did I knowthat I was lucky by my nature and that there’s a rangeto luck that’s even wider and wilderand luckier.Let’s cookthe books, brotherman—deathcould be,possibly, justas various.

2. Uptown

acting the fool over death’s from a different scale or vernacular. Tsk-tskingpermission, the green man arches his brow. Fire over on the West Side, saya Hundred and Seventh Street, and you and Gus and Ellen and I watched,looking in—as it were—from Broadway. In the shower of sparks kindness is easyto call in or limit—watch for me by firelight, darling. It’strue but it’s a fact, something I knew about. Only onetruck. The colored man has integrity. We’d haunted the river,earlier in the day, and observed its surface. Ellensaid fire was the worst, meaning of her fears. In my mood,goodwill suffered anger, like two dogs—the fire, we always knew,was what would really judge you.Like it or not, it’s as though certainty had just been part of the evening’scrowd—too hot for poems, the scene was ghastlyquiet. Taxicabs whizzed by behind us—have mercy, darling!—on the bigroad and then we four did the ghost-walk, we burned shoe leather, likethe colored poet had said, up Broadway itself—it’s divided there of course, northand south lanes on either side of a green sward, a veritable DixieDrive, but that’s stretching. Still, some folks say that a fire won’t steal in. What’s the adequate response? How long have we got, the same folkswanted to know, to change the poem’s direction? There are reasonsfor anything. The fire’s close, darling, always. I’m the truckand the flame both, said the colored poet, notthe water, neither the river northe riverside of anything. Death’s justlike money in the bank.

3. Downtown?

Unsure of what question to ask when we—Ellensitting between us—were at the bar at Peter McManus’s. Big fellow’d comeinto the subway car, you said, punching the windows ‘tilthey broke, girlfriend or wife or it might have even been his sister holding on to hisback, riding him down the aisle, as it were, yelling Stop. Maybe it’swhat sees you before you could possibly see or even sense it sizing you up? Thatis, to what do you belong? It’s always coming down the road, coming along in thecorridor. Forget it, you said, like it wasn’t even there. Not unlike a vèvè, saidthe colored poet. Mid-Atlantic States on the television. One...