All of my relations flow west:
their teeth taken, their bones reset.

If I could I would return to Wenaha and Joseph.
Follow the Grande Ronde until it meets
the Snake which cut Hell's Canyon;

meet the men who demarcated it a boundary between
Washington and Idaho

before it veers west, into the future,
slows behind dams, and enters the Columbia

where modern day fish climb ladders like painters,
get electro-shocked like patients, and are counted in the local census.

They are modern day fish-people-fish:
we drop them from planes like bombs, can them
like Boeing workers.

We grew out west like a salmon nation, then a logging nation.
And now we are no nation at all.

The sound of running water
haunts me in the middle of the day.

And at night in the air conditioning
as my mouth dries and my throat dries
I dream about rivers. There are still salmon

in the tails of these pools. And steelhead.
There are rainbows and bull trout.

Cedar down by the rivers. And alder.
Where there are old scars on old fish.

Where wilderness wants nothing to do with us
our tongues like the tongues of cows.

All of my relations flow west
and if I could I would return home to the harsh light of Spring
on the winter wheat. Hawks on the wires.
Snow receding up in the mountains that rise in steppes.

Rivers in this country flood and change.
Trees fall and turkey roam the stubble wheat.

I love a slowly dying country, my family
has gone away—I turn in a circle and have turned so many times
I am surrounded on all sides by water.

Old Nebraska men have grown used
to being the cartographic dot
between Omaha and Denver,

feeling out the weight of 1,776 miles
to Boston and San Francisco
on each arm like an eagle

casting off from a cottonwood top,
grown used to being a landmark
the world just flies over,

allowing women to pick up the slack
when they find it difficult to talk
about themselves or others,

everyone assuming their children
are dreadfully unhappy praying
in rickety, stale pews,

grown used to keeping it steady on
the sidewalk, one foot in a past
they remember incorrectly,

one foot in a future their aspirations
will never quite fulfill, their bright
eyes filling with snow.

Pour half a Hefeweizen into a glass.
Swirl your little finger like an oar.
This works up the yeast like a bronze
snow globe, dawn dust dancing.
Add the other half, drink. Have another.
Read Dostoevsky sitting up. Inhale
Open the window to breeze that's real.
Read Solzhenitsyn lying down. Exhale
Carry glass through kitchen in Kubrick
slow motion, crack your toes for effect.
Smoke outside under open sky.
Think of today's workout with Kina,
her eyes of aquatic worlds,
the 4 x 6 screens on the treadmill,
cable news networks selling Tehran invasion,
Larry King interviewing a Texas sheriff
who swears he saw a UFO, two maybe.
Look at the stars, sigh at their stillness.
Fear of fire has you pee on your cigar stub.
Stroll the shadowed yard, mountain lion
fear has your chin on your shoulder.
But like you've always done, love the night.
Go back inside, breathe the smell of your life.
Brush teeth, remember mother's voice, its softness.
Crawl into bed slowly. If not tonight, pray soon.
Die into a dream only dead legends deserve.
You're almost there.

          Teniers the Younger, “Boors Carousing”

Two of them sit as they've been told,
one stands dead center, pretending.
The three have each their pipes, long tubes
of whitened clay they pull at, we can guess,
for their pleasure and their pain.
A fourth man takes this chance to piss,
his back and shoulders hunched
against the worst kinds of surprise.

Teniers the Younger puts right the way
men brace their necks against ill winds
since the world of standing men began.
A fifth man has disappeared, up canvas left.
a broken piece of crockery follows him
out the door. Emptiness abides in all
the pipe bowls, in the emptied dishes,
in the emptying lines of the painting
Teniers has fixed before us.

The spaces men can never quite fill up,
Or find excuse for emptying, are what
Delineate this painting by Teniers,
such studies as an artist practices
if he's to be past master at
if he's the quiet constancy of loss
that makes the little gains men make so full.

Here at the Hanover Baptist Church,
where there is no make up
or dancing, or dates with boys,
or even skirts cut above
the unshaven caps of our knees,

Here, of all places, they give us flowers,
gathered in a quilting woman’s arms
from her garden at first light.

They give us flowers,
cut and plunged in the vase
on the altar table
where they spurt
like liquid streams
of blushing, arching sex.

Flowers shaped like the sex
we keep tucked away
in our white cotton underwear

Flowers that bend back
and offer their faces,
That bend back and offer
their entire length of long, supple stem

To the Earth
To the sky

To our own greedy fingers

Vinyl and rubber and cardboard
are turning to pale dust,

a mildewy air of time gone
memories eroding
places passed
never to be visited again.

But the late November wind
feels so much like it always did.

This is 1996 wind.

A dozen old cars
a hundred old rooms
everything boxed and laden.

Riding in the back of a
wagonload of memories,

the child so light
so immediate
so patient in her own time
so long six,

only just now
turning seven.