Letters to John Colter (1808)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Colter

 

 

I

I see the gold mirror flicker in the wind,
the skirting down of the October colors,
pearled up like diamonds on grass, the frost
has returned again. it sleeps
like cottonwood on the windy ground.
My tongue has caught a starry pendant,
embalmed like bee's wax over all manner of words,
listening to your two-hundred some years now,
notes and notes I arranged into boxed memorials
I am calling in the coyote driven mountains, howling
come home, come home.

II

In those old torrent languages, you wrote
mimicking maps like topographers, or fur-trappers,
the secret trails up and over, like hunters of the winter sun.
Mild mannered and spelling praises with other
magpie misanthropes; I recall
the cuckoo always plans to steal the brightest thing
in the nest; the fire from your hearth bed,
snowy hemmed in your prescription cabin fevers
so absolve the rest, keep the winter manuscript tucked in
with your maroon ink and hawktail feather-pen:
see if you can trespass blindly, meaning:
close those eyes, the horse knows the road;
come home, come home.

III

That opening valley, the emeralds
of high desert envelopes; you saw it first
with a non-native affectation, & then
the gloam descending about the women's sagebrush
(always wearing white, respectfully) amidst
the hoof caroling bison & the antelopes
What about the reservations & the mudslides, John?
the whispers of supper singing cowboy-poets,
meddling in the water fields. The interrogating
and irrigation of cattle, suddenly tethered
to my brewing bucolic mourning. Calling again,
scripted in rock choirs: come home, come home.

IV

My, but how some folks take their extinction
so personally; no open range now, no absent sound,
no tilting at windmills or moose or men, but tucking
into the kind of heavenly portions offered in a sky so big
as could be foraged in those fragrant summer hay meadows,
where we wait for the rushers
no gold here but spring mud & avalanches
of glacial water, they come. Like you, they seek
for the first time ever, a peek at faithful waterspouts
& tilted bends reflecting grand epithets,
soaring upwards, moored into promises you gave me
come home, please, before Christmas. come home.

V

In your expedition letters prophecy, I see without
canyons and further South to Jenny, something else
beyond those tempestuous future sky-scrapers,
those glamor-smudged rodeos hot-shots;
there are elk bugle-boy bands & all the wild songs
buried into the thickets, still here in the shadow
of douglas and juniper, here where the stories
bear their children, like crosses, like velvet-eyed withered cattails,
sprouted like miracles at the foot of Slide Lake,
winding music boxes to the tune or the tattle
of other sleeping Indians, soon now,
take in their feathered stalk dusted for ruin,
and come back to me: come now, come home.

VI

No foreknowledge, killing down the intrusion
tilling new marshes for land, will suffice.
Nowhere else does this life lie as open
as a gift -- Mountains, who crane their necks
like the tucked flight of blue heron birds,
I maybe see one, well a few more
but then again, there are many incorrigible ways
of destroying your carnivore competition
without hogging nests or bear dens;
discouragement for starters, my love
disbelief & dogma garners sinners
again, & I only laugh at it. Those strangers
who don't see nothing beyond the expectant.
Like my own wonderland jack-rabbit
pocket-watch, as if Alice took a tumble
down heck-of-a-hill instead. Please
before winter, come home, come home.

VII

But there are herds in the fall, glimmering
none too small to point to numbers all,
but bigger than the square root of ranches
aspen colonies, single-hearted, fisting
for the Indian paintbrush, for
the nourishing narrative. They all come down
to rest & reserve strength and belly through
the Gros Ventres' pricking winters.
Two hundred and one years ago, you said:
I cut my milk teeth on those arching
elk antlers. I hear it now. So, enough
of your letters, John; so far away you've gone,
Come home, now, c'mon home.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

When you write about historical figures, there are any number of pitfalls you can fall into: you can write an academic set-piece, all in-jokes and clever asides, or you can end up with a bloodless, cliff's notes historical summary. This, on the other end, is something of the flip-side of the picaresque novel, the unseen character of "the one left behind", the one constantly pleading with the main character to come on home. The language and pacing of the piece is excellent, and there is sentiment here as opposed to sentimentality--the emotion, the feeling of loss, the hope for return are all tangible, but never cloying. In short, this is damn fine writing.

[DavidRyan]

Beautifully written. I've become enthralled with the way you mix history into your poems -- make people pay attention to something or someone they might not have otherwise known about. Everything from the title to the ending is perfect.

[Ed Hart]

this one ought to make it into those english lit books that drive 10th graders up the walls, or in this case, out onto the range...