Myth is prison, a palace,
truth without fact.
Myth is birth and pleasure, teeth and death,
sharp
shiver of that which is broken.
Myth is patriarchal and worn,
full of
fratricide and rape.
Myth is a garden, makes good television,
memoir,
the
scandal of animals
and
people
coupling
beneath the stars.
Myth is crow eating roadkill and dodging the occasional
cars,
a pile
of guts and bones.
Myth is carrying the body back to the den.
–Close your eyes and count to ten.
1.
“In language, there are always two.”
The Iliad
stolen from Thoreau’s cabin,
the only thing taken
during those years.
Remember, too, The Aenied
(we all have lived
through times of war)
and that passage
a friend said to know well,
“Learn fortitude and toil from me, my son,
Ache of true toil. Good fortune learn from others.”
2.
Ultrasound images of my heart.
That it moves and moves
and then moves again,
plump muscle
shuddering, laboring
to make up for one bad valve.
Spots in the ocean
where nothing lives
and yet there is movement,
water moving.
I stand in the river
fishing and watching an osprey
slide through the air
ten feet above the water.
I hear those wings.
3.
Eleven years of loving
can’t just vanish. I have photographs.
I have facts. “Hapy Birthday
Dady” scribbled on a card.
How easy
to sit at a desk
and not
see the full moon
through
the window.
Roy
Sullivan, Virginia Park Ranger,
struck
by lightning seven times,
kills
himself after being dumped by a lover.
“Present
fears are less than horrible imaginings.”
A friend asks, “Why are you hiding in myth?”
4.
I gather a lock of his hair,
a scrap of T-shirt, a baby tooth,
his tiny spoon, a diaper pin with a blue plastic stork,
the quilted blanket, his first steps,
hands clutching my fingers, the long night
when his fever rose to 104˚,
his split lip at age six when he jumped with outspread
arms, the first shoe, a locket with a toddler photo,
first day of school, first finger painting,
the green cardboard sculpture
like something shaped by Breton, T-ball
games, the flopping trout he squeezed too hard,
his first broken bone, his fear when he felt
my trembling hands trying to tell him
something about the sun.
5.
Trout with a slashed back
where talons tore dorsal flesh
and the flesh slipped
from an osprey’s grip
to a lucky landing
in the creek’s waiting water,
thrashing and calming,
lingering beneath a deep cutbank,
and weeks later,
taking my elk hair caddis
and leaping
completely out of the water.
On the far bank, a muskrat
struggles and does a melodramatic gangster fall
into the creek where it splashes
and sinks. “Rattlesnake,”
my friend says, and I nod
and stare at where the ripple
swirls into the current
and think about sinking bones.
6.
The court acknowledges the petitioner’s long involvement
with
____________’s like and sincerely hopes that the parties
involved
will have the generosity and wisdom to honor that
relationship.
Do not blame the wind
that scatters apple blossoms
ruthlessly. Allow that flowers
desire farewell blessings
before their time has come.
7.
Fishing in the desert creek
a few days after the hearing,
I find bones, steer skulls
with round sockets for horns,
and step near three rattlesnakes,
almost grab a fourth
when climbing a steep bank.
The snakes were sluggish, though,
late spring when the temperatures
in the desert dipped into the thirties
at night. Only one rattled,
and the rain of the previous days
made the fishing terrible, water brown
and swift. I didn’t get a bite
and drove home, bought
a bucket of fried chicken,
and ate in front of the television
his clothes still hanging in a closet.
8.
There is no
end to the hours
when cedars and peaks
scratch the sky’s belly.
No garden,
but sometimes, wildflowers.
Sometimes, fish hold against
the river’s current
then dart with a silvery
flash downstream.
Sometimes, deer
on the other shore
stand still
for a moment,
then hunch toward
their grazing.
9.
A birthday party and he’ll have nothing to do with the
inflatable castles rented and set up on
the lawn, only wants to run all afternoon, playing chase, tag-like game where I
growl and laugh and lumber around the playground, his giggling, both of us
laughing and roaring, and I catch him and he gets away and climbs to the top of
the jungle gym where he looks at me with worry, and I know that the game is on
break, that this is real, and I walk beneath him and he doesn’t pause. He jumps
into my arms, and I catch him.
10.
Ready or not
here I
come—
A feather floats downstream,
the rings of a ripple smooth.
Love is possible. The heron
hunts in the shallows with slow
deliberate steps, startles
from the creek, and rises.
Sunlight warms basalt walls
fields of sage, and Hawthorne
groves, here, where tumble-
weeds rove for home.
* * * * *
Poet Tod Marshall is the author of two collections—
Dare Say (2002) and
The Tangled Line (2009)—as well as editor of a collection of interviews with contemporary poets called
Range of the Possible and an anthology of poems from those poets,
Range of Voices (2005). He lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches at Gonzaga University.
