Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

Tentmaking

45 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g t e n t m a k i n g Bill Pettway came to visit the other night, and there were four walls of water pouring down into a square cistern where he was showing me how our lives are one volume in constant revision, language being always altered, and how revisions overlap and duplicate each other, as some revisions I was bringing were already being made. Then the realization in the dream that Pettway was dead. He died suddenly several years ago heaving lumber into the back of a truck. My memories of him go back to kindergarten when he did the most daring criminal act anyone ever considered. He threw scissors off the balcony where some of us were doing art down into the area where the rest of us were. I imagine he remembers doing that in the place he comes to my dreams from. Now the maroon squares of the kindergarten floor come clear, where cots were put out for our afternoon naps. And this: I slept longer and deeper than anyone, and the wonder is they let me. • • • 46 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g Each afternoon to wake and be the only cot there in the big room. Maybe the janitor would still be carrying and stacking the canvas cots in the hall, or maybe he had finished and gone. That aloneness stays inside me like an afternoon. Like summer turning night and lightning bugs, their beauty floating my height in a hollow of black locust, oak, and hickory, some higher in the branches. The point is not to put them in a jar where they clump and quit winking and next morning smell of exhausted phosphor. Leave the lovers of scintillae in the air they love, gracing distance with their dance. Pettway was telling me that every moment contains the dead, and they are not dead, but doing this revision with us. And that I should get my revisions out quicker. I was keeping them in my mind too long. At the end he began speaking a Borneo dialect, which appeared in script to the side, Oolek bineng weresak, not that exactly but similar. And the next night new Ohio poems by James Wright came, a canoe seen from above, the line of its motion in the river behind it briefly. Wright and Bly were helping me teach a poetry class. Pettway was there • • • 47 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g with his mouth open in an O. His nickname through highschool was Puss. He dated Jean Carter, whose pale and freckled redheaded body kindled my desire for women early on the bank of Chickamauga Lake lying under the full moon pouring its wrinkling waterpath to us. Then the freckling on her legs became a vine design one could somehow drink and slake desire for those legs, for a time. Time and time words build their contradiction. Call it tentmaking; one twists rope; another carves wooden pegs; someone weaves; there is a man stitching and one tearing cloth. Reprobate and righteous, loyal and dis; provoker, provoked. We cannot help but do this we are. This is, and even if we could see the purpose, still no one’s faith would increase. Every act is praise, no matter. I know a man who was standing in a long line for a movie with a huge amount of coins in his pockets, hundreds of nickels, dimes, quarters, pennies. He suddenly spills all to the sidewalk and changes everything: stiff and separate people bend and gather, helping, laughing, stealing. They throw handfuls into the grassy medians of the parking lot; saying becomes rolling coinage. • • • 48 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g We are nothing but some seeing that includes those who have died: desire and collective editing: a wooden truckload, this river of roots where a golden-legged lover builds a tent of cover and her body over me. We talk inside this word-wet hearing-fog we breathe. ...