Big Drink

Before that me in the Big Mill, dazed, on drugs

watching wood sing in the cradle, building a tree fort,

hanging from a rope, that dog coming up

the path curling along the side of the road, eating blackberries

on a June day about three in the afternoon.

Before that stopped, held up, delayed-something stunning

about how the sea relaxes on a minus tide

sliding a platter of fried abalone past a drunken uncle

I was put in my place and the best I could do

walking down the hill, I know the best trail,

going through the elderberries on Miller's flat

head down watching for the bull, the soft brown fur around his ears

before that I was standing in the river itself.

Let me go back: I was walking a dog through the woods

and plucking at holes in the ground

the rent was due or something, I could no longer delay

but earlier I had taken the poet out there

and she, on her knees, in leafmold

believed what I showed her, this is the wild world,

as the light couldn't fall but insisted to break through:

we rolled a smoke and lay back soft,

all this escaped and found a way out here,

only I know where to find it

on the bear trail I know where it goes up around that knob,

down into the other side, deep and steep

that creek running snowmelt two weeks then easy again, cold.

Before that standing alone Eureka Old Town buzzed

in the fog about midnight gunshots from tweakers

and in the morning silent October duck season shotgun

from way out on the water. Trawlers in the basin.

A fisherman suicidal with love walks toward me,

a poet asking where I get my ideas, the prostitute

wanting to come upstairs, out of the cold, we smoke,

looking out the window, neon buzzed by fog, this old street

runs right off the pier I go to sea. The greatest of all the fishes

are tiniest, blooming behind groundswell then descending

into the swirl of countenance and competition looking always

allowing oneself to sink and be sunk and not climb

back: the ocean, great melt, big drink, big drunk.

We had only to walk: that's all we could do.

I said if I saw a raven meander or a talking dog, that was it,

If I saw the buzzard that flies like a crow

toward that great pile of meat stewing in the sun

where the blue whale came up over the horizon

to beach here and look with his eye

at bikini girls dancing in sunshine

while the ocean itself boomed against the cliff and shook

Trinidad Head still has the rusted moorings

and each morning in summer small businessmen

launch for salmon, out toward the shelf

in sixty fathoms, toiling with the great sea creatures

I sat with the poet in the wind of Usal beach

sand blowing past us as a single boat

circled a bite about a half-mile offshore, beating the whitecaps

and working the lines, it might have been a mirage

she didn't want to be a mother but the sea had impregnated her

while I lay between two logs watching Cassiopiea turn

over between campground alders near the fire

and the mosquitoes were not so bad.

She didn't know about my brother and Big Blue squealing

and the vast lines up in Hotel Gulch full of merchantable sawlogs

most weekday afternoons in those days loading up in the crummy

to go home about four o'clock then a diet of highballs

a diet of raw beefsteak and runny eggs and the balls

of the male deer served on the half-shell, it's no wonder

she turned up ready to give birth but couldn't have a baby

it turned into a poem and crawled inside her

now her long fingers grip the chair arm

but then the wind kept up until sundown and we walked

through the ghost town while all of time opened,

before and behind and around us like small galaxies

the eternal souls of everyone looking for that lost milk.

Before that lost milk under the tan oaks rolling around on acorns,

wobbling down a trail heavy with mint,

drinking tea in the rough dawn in a small town with a drunk

or the Russian mystic walking around the world greeting me

in the Arcata Safeway meat section two in the morning I took him home

one night he gave me a broken watch kept walking

two years later Nakgoon with strange Aleut customs in the Brewery

wanting a drink shows my girl how to tie her shoe in Russian

orthodox missionary style we drove him up past the lights

here and there we smoked a bowl he said

he was on a spirit journey in an out of the Humblodt Hilton,

biggest building between Pelican Bay State Prison

and the Sonoma County line that pink jailhouse

(you hear them shooting hoops if you stand on 4th street

under the window)

where the poet turned up dead, thinking he was Rimbaud

but the world not pregnant enough to keep him

even blessed he was cursed and had to die that way,

strung to his door with a shoelace, papers in hands,

paper hands, a diguise, how he fled the world,

a record, notes on what he thought he had seen,

it was all so surreal but the police weren't, they just got tired

of the 5150s, the danger to public safety,

the gopher crawling on the lawn with an arrow

stuck in his belly like John Wayne wearing a ten gallon hat

the way the west was won: two trains, each a hundred cattle cars

and a coal slide pounding into each other

in a snow barn, killing 500 Chinese

and the next day Reservation types going over the trapped carcasses

looking for booty and flank steak among smoking ties

while the Pinkertons ride over the ridge, you know it's business now,

John D. Rockefeller coming along in the Pullman car,

you can see it all spelled out if you know where to look.

California poppies volunteering in a rock garden.

Before that standing alone in the river a steelhead,

half-dead, coming downstream, into my hands,

I take it home and cook it, not so great, a little soft,

but with lemon it's ok, after all, something out of that sea

that fell into my hands.

Pregnant with ideas an hour and a half after dark

it's now the year two thousand seven they've got it all skinned

like a potato for the stewpot full of roadkill they

make a nice pot of chili for the inmates up at high desert

here try the jack-rabbit souffle-never any trans-fat-

the golden eagle sweeping over the low crest of sage ridges

that radiate from here all the way to Salt Lake City

no outlet

in all this wide country the ancient seas

rest buried in stone

decorated in peculiar markings

that call out from under the sand:

you stand this way with a stone-tipped arrow

or simply pass away in the heat

where the wild horses

plow through old sand

only they can tell where the waterholes are

out of the juniper draws that turn backward

under light snow

and go nowhere.

Stand just this way under the pinon pine with hands outspread

this way under valley live oak, hand open, mouth open,

a diamondback snake flat on the road,

a vast field of alfalfa, California, with a prison

cunningly applied directly to the landscape like a feature

where a million lifers go slowly mad

sinking their sly shivs into each other

as cassiopiea turns

through creekside pines

the sally-ports reached only by arduous travel

over empty sage (a mink in the creek at Alturas, nobody saw

it but me, another near Hyampom, or maybe on the other side,

the poet sat in her underwear near the water

but I was in the right place and saw

its wild movement over the rocks

where the kids play all summer but not today)

Steel bars between all of us and the spheres that sing

toward space, television satellites barely visible

clanging like bells between mountains if you lie quiet

at midnight on Horse Mountain after the bear has rummaged

around in the pantry, close your eyes, dear,

and listen to the oil truck like a ghost howling

out of Willow Creek.

Before that we all had the same stars and I knew no better

than to walk over the edge of California, the actual border

under a scourge of dragonflies

and grasshoppers and the blue godlike tumble of thunder

toward us over the green, no, that's not enough, it's greener,

it's deep green, it's the green of dollarbills wetted and alive,

pregnant, even, blooming out with light from the cloud

eating a strawberry in the ditch I believe I am five years old,

dangerously small but it's better, knowing nothing

except that if someone throws you in,

you have to swim.