the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 475, March 10, 2004
Duane Big Eagle (1946- )
“Why look for the fires
to burn in Western skies? The excoriated symbol of difference was always within
our ken. You didn’t have to look far to find it—an elderly black man who took
pride in the fact that he had shined Huey Long’s and Harry James’ shoes or a
misplaced and wizened Hmong woman who had fought the Communists in Laos for the
French and the CIA and now grew flowers for Cajuns in Louisiana. The story was
ongoing, the players only changing in name.”
—James Lee Burke, Sunset Limited
Wind in pine trees is all he heard. It was the sound
of a creek swirling over rocks, of yawning voids, of all the things he had ever
dreamed he wanted to be since he was a kid.
He closed his eyes and fell back into the
orange-pearled evenings he remembered at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The winds
coming up through the pinions on the Kaibab Plateau and smelling of resin,
burned grass, and red dirt.
“Man, just one more time,” he said to himself. “One
more time…”
An escape, a long walk in the plains and over the
mountains beyond, that’s what he wanted. He’d done it before and believed he
could do it again. He had a family now, responsibilities, he told himself. But
somewhere inside, that didn’t fit. They all seemed like excuses.
He breathed in, taking pleasure in the scent of pine
and the duff under his feet. Again, to be young, he thought, to be able to slip
into the memory of good things. He thought of the forest of tightly spaced
cottonwoods rising to a clearing in the canopy of sycamore and swamp oaks of an
Osage River slough before the government put in the lake. The only pines were
on a rocky rise near the slough that some people called an Indian mound. He’d
climb the mound first because he liked to see the tree that grew directly from
the tip of the conical top of the hill.
Then, he’d make his way back to the cottonwoods,
barely edging through the curtains of narrow cottonwood trunks. They grew so
close in spots, when he stopped and tried to collapse to the mossy ground
below, the tree fingers held him up, kept him from falling. He’d look up those
tiny trunks to the sprigs of leaves that sprouted at the top. The sky fell
through in flecks. And he believed the colors, pale gray trunks, dark green
leaves, ice-blue, and yellow sun were those of paradise.
He sat a moment in the duff, ran his fingers though
the needles, humus, and gritty soil. There was a time he cast his own hand-tied
flies to unseen fish in mountain streams. One time, a brown trout popped out of
a stream, jumped right over his shoulder, snatching a mosquito that had been
buzzing his ear. And he cast the line into the holes and eddies until he found
the rainbow he’d been looking for. Again, the sound of wind in the pines that
climbed up the rocky defile to the crest of a ridge above. He stood in a small
canyon, water rushing around a curve and into a deep pool, where he knew he
could find another big rainbow if he could get his fly to sink fast enough.
Then, he remembered a tiny mountain freshet, a
trickle of water lined with moss and smelling of rosemary and sodden grass. He
could have been 9 or 29; it had always been the same. Duckweed swirled in
eddies at streamside. The sun filtered through the trees and fell on bone-white
stones and tufts of moss and grass. Cool air flowed down the slope and over
him.
A car horn pulled him from the reverie. He looked out
over the new houses being built in the neighborhood and thought of how many of
the copper water lines he had installed. He rubbed his hands on the legs of his
jeans and thought abut what he had to do next. Replace a small pipe with one
that would accommodate the new sprinkler system at the Tyron Point Office
Building, install an industrial water heater at Jackie’s Laundry, and try to
fix the damn sewer trap at Aunt Jennie’s house.
He stood and took a deep breath, what he felt was the
last of the day. He wasn’t a kid anymore, and he wasn’t ever going to do those
things again. He walked out of the little copse of Ponderosas someone like him
had planted once and climbed into his truck.
March
By Philip Miller
Soon
trees
reinvent
themselves,
duckweed
floats
pond
surfaces,
insects
skate
and
slide:
water
strider,
spinning
whirligig,
jet
dervish
of
thin-skinned
water,
diving
beetle,
oars
for
legs:
round
slick
black
back
catches
sun,
before
insect
disappears
beneath
island
of
fresh
green
pond
scum.
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