one ugly motherfucker

-for Jim Harrison

geese call as they pass overhead
and maybe you are drifting with them
in that overweight cloud of your own weathered hide
lost in the dark river that time has etched
where wolves missing teeth circle their own tails
and you slump dead at your desk
killed by the only thing that kills a writer
death

horses come galloping
draped in headless rattlesnakes
and bearing polished stones
retrieved from the dust of riverbeds
high in the dead mountains
or are these stones from the mountains of dead rivers
whose murmurs can still be heard
between the gusts of wind

the winds of those places
are either too hot or too cold
they carry too many voices from the past
the voices speaking to you have now ceased
and you in your turn join that cadre of voices
spoken to others of your kin
or are they mine

i never knew you
but i’ve always known you
something deeper than blood entwines us
all the poets i know are suicides
some are just too frightened to realize it
but you were wise in some ways
knowing you had yet to pay your penance

and when the last coin was demanded
you –still living– were left to haunt your dead wife
until the walls of the rooms came down on your head
and toppled the cold pencil from your curled fingers

you thundered down on the floorboards
and all the wine and whiskey you ever drank
spilled from the cavity of your ursine mouth
silent now

your left eye freed from its body
healed at last and turned to glass
spun round and round
before fixing its gaze outside a window
on those starry hosts seen between a woman’s legs
wondrously dangling
from the boughs of an overgrown apple tree