And, scene!

Ten years ago, approaching my 50th birthday, I was in a rut. Not suffering from writer’s block, just too long moored. I’d written poetry for almost as long as could remember, in whichever country and under whatever circumstances. Writing on a computer if I had one, on scraps of paper if I didn’t, composing lyrics in my head walking to class if there was no napkin or envelope. I called the walking variety “street poems”, and I recommend them: they improve memory, and your words learn their rhythm from your feet, uniquely yours, always idiosyncratic and metrical. But ten years ago I had reached a little backwater of self-image, feeling as though each new piece, instead of stretching my own mythology a little farther into Middle Earth — new landscapes — barely extended beyond middle age. Too lacking in energy to touch even the last boundary.

And so I did something I had never done before, on impulse. I decided to write under a pen name. There was no forethought. Instead, I turned in the chair and caught a glimpse of Lili, our Russian Blue, stretched out on the back of the sofa. Cat and couch. And so it was Kat Couch — although I’ve tended to pronounce the last name Cooch, as in Hoochie Coochie — but less Muddy Waters and more Arthur Quiller-Couch, the Cornish novelist and editor of The Oxford Book Of English Verse (1250–1918). Like my parents, Sir Arthur was a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth Kernow, and devoted to the county.

The pseudonym had an effect, although I can’t say it had any predictable effect. Who was Kat? Was they a she? Twenty? Thirty? Older? Two things happened. I stopped writing first person confessional poetry and began to tell stories. In one, a girl in Las Vegas stares at a reproduction of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, once attributed to Bruegel the Elder, and the subject of poems by W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams. She’s bored; she texts a friend. In other poems a woman tidies the kitchen after her husband leaves on a sales trip; in another, a homicidal country girl takes revenge for social media bullying; parents taking a walk with their young son Dylan lose sight of him when he wanders off in search of a bear. A perplexed mule deer observes a man living on the property come and go from a great “unnecessary” house. And so on. Subjects ranged wide and wildly. And that was good.

Gradually, Kat began to come home again, absorbing the middle-aged male, and accepting him well enough as long as he continued to write about the three-leaf sumac and the black-billed magpies of these foothills. I still defer to her: she has no tolerance for self-indulgence; she wants to spin a good yarn. And if she shows a preoccupation with animal death and, for lack of a better word, “bioempathy,” she at least doesn’t require room and board. And she never eats the last ginger snaps.

Over the past six months or so I’ve posted one hundred and twenty of Kat’s poems. They fall into three sets of forty, and one day soon I’ll publish them in print, in a slipcase edition. Fewer than ten were written this year; some date from that 50th birthday. I’m not inclined to move on from Kat. She may be it for me now. But I do know that the poems here amount to a distinct body of work, and everything from this date will be something else.

I’ve been making videos lately — for introductions and job interviews, and I marvel at my favorite ASMR folk, how generous and expert they seem in their digital skin, in their public personas. In my brief clips I am a slow-witted neanderthal who rarely smiles. I bite the ends off words like cheap cigars; pauses reproduce, begetting ums and ahs. That public persona is as strange now as Kat’s was in 2010, but I plan to get to know it a little better. So I am going back over these poems — I hope near-weekly, if not daily — and recording a video reading of each one, to be posted. Expect an occasional disembodied head, a pair of hands, an Apache pepper plant on the sill, words tumbling from curtains and cactus. Lili, still with us, may show up, demanding an appearance fee, salted crackers, royalties, naming rights.

The Shrine of the Stations of the Cross

If the idea was for us to suffer,
just a little, as he suffered,
they failed.
The day is too good:
a bluebird Saturday in September,
a boy is fixing an old pump,
a silver-haired couple snaps
pictures on the steep steps to the shrine.
A cool breeze visits
from the wild horse mesa;
we have our thermos of gas station coffee,
and our water bottles.

The pain is below:
the small high desert town of San Luis,
where every other child is poor,
and on this sixth day of Sukkot,
the main street is bare,
everyone in his wilderness.

But still, along the way,
on loose dirt the color of leather,
on square sandstone plinths,
remarkable bronzes of Jesus
in that final hour,
enough to counter the children gone,
the closed shop.
So the lesson misses its mark in beauty.
In our homespun, woven in,
someone has stitched freshwater pearls,
irregular pearls our hands finger absently
on the wall of the dry well.

In the crowd, a friend writes,
I feel my loneliness embrace me.

He is waiting to be rescued,
like the old street
with its stubborn murals,
like our own interrupted progress,
confused, doubting,
given up,
occasionally blessed.

When we get to the shrine
there are no graces
but only things.
No salvation but the bees
in the chapel dome, whispering;
the rooks on the whitewash.
No hereafter but the rasp
of heavy timber on the hand
and the iron nail.
Nothing in our loneliness to know,
nothing new, except the tongue
of upslope wind from San Luis,
the mute crowd,
and the view.

Air National Guard

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?” —Kazuo Ishiguro

If you want to be a pilot,
grow up in a small town
where they answer the phone
at the auto parts store
with a loud “Yell-ow!”

And at the hair salon the talk
is neighbors and their little angels:
“When she sleeps we put it up in braids?
It’s got such a beautiful natural wave,
don’t you think?”

The stylists heckle, warming up.
“Hey! You took pictures with my phone!”
“What kind of insulting nickname can I give you?
Wait! Oh, hi Lola.”
“Hello. Hi.”
“How about Lolita? Muffin?”
“Do I look like a bran muffin to you?”
“Oh, you’ve been Muffin for years.
You have the coloring of a bran muffin.”
“It’s better than Lennie. We call Sam Lennie.
From Mice and Men.”
No, Lenny Kravitz! Because of the piercing stuff.”

“Boys, you coming back? We got a perm special.”
I wave it away, the girls from Central laughing.

Lunchtime, we’re on the bypass
by the base parkway,
me and Blake, him with a Double Deluxe
and me just with the fries,
watching a T-41 trying to land
in a cross-wind.
“You could kill yourself in one of those things,”
he gets the words out, chewing,
wiping his chin.
And I say, yes.
Yes. You could.

Fetching Lili’s Ashes

A bill from the urgent care center
in Mesa, Arizona,
is addressed to Lisa Steinhoff,
whoever she was:
no one called Steinhoff lives
on Painted Rock Trail today.
I lean over the console of the truck,
write “Not at this address!”,
and slip it in the outgoing mail.

Ten days ago Saturday
we put our Russian Blue down,
after midnight, bundling her crate
into the Subaru for the long drive,
to the only open vet, far out of town.
I sweet-talked her, our little girl
(though in people years
she was sixty-four, or sixty-five).

But repeating the sad drive again,
leaving the clinic again,
this time in full sun June
I carry the box with her ashes
to the car, gently, like a newborn,
cradling the deep blue bag,
the ribboned sleeve from the crematorium.

I half expected to lift the lid
for her last lesson of dust,
but the box is fastened shut:
Spanish cedar, corners rounded,
joints seamless, sweetly smelling
in the unseasonable heat.

And on the forty-mile route back north
despite myself, knowing she is not her body,
not at this address,
I talk to the cedar box,
warm in the cab of the truck
warm as her head was in the moment before,
her ears then, like old carpet,
ragged with age.

Music Box

A girl in Odessa is holding a candle,
one of those showy candles
topped with a brass carousel
from which hang
a ring of brass stars.
It’s my favorite candle, she says,
because when the heat rises,
the metal spins, the stars dance.
See? It’s already half gone, the
glass cup of candle half empty.

She is trying to remember
the English words for a music box,
but she only knows the Russian.
It’s all she speaks well.
A Russian Ukrainian, waiting for
the bombs.

She blows against the carousel,
unwilling to light it.
She is trying to distract herself,
trying to distract us.
Музыкальная шкатулка, she repeats,
frustrated, and the words
come out of her mouth like silk.
Muzykal’naya shkatulka
A casket? she guesses.
They are caskets that sing a melody.
Caskets that sing a melody.

She fingers the candle.
One day we will light it together,
she says. For now, though.
The present isn’t worth much:
distraction, the need to connect,
so you can drop fear off,
like a child at daycare.
But the future!
when we can light the candle,
and spin the stars on ribbons of heat,
each circus breath a memory:
a casket,
rows of caskets,
each with a melody.

Saddle Ridge

Two boys ride their bikes
from one corner to another across the north field.
The realtor had told us a local church owned the land.
It’ll never be built on, she promised.
And at least for now it hasn’t been: a vacant rag-and-bone lot,
God-made for weekend racing.

The boys are maybe ten…twelve?
They fly off the field too fast to compare.
Nothing in their lives will ever again be this uncomplicated —
the gentle slope of it, the trail rubbed to hardtack,
the blood oath company of boys,
and down the block, a pirate map of streets
with names like Campfire, Horse Soldier, Medicine Man.
Familiar home-ended streets.

Years from now, too many years to see,
when they’re a little worn themselves,
and divorced in one way or another from their deep contentment,
this will seem like saving,
a possible grace.
Mild October, the air whistling and racing,
and their sharp shouting rising
like seagulls on a sunlit sea.

Wind Farm

On Happy Jack Road
the great wind turbines, like apocalyptic herons,
big-beaked birds that eat everything,
even the sky, sweep across the highway.
They stand so close to the shoulder
the shadows of their hungry legs
cut our path to pieces:
swooosh! in front, the road ahead sectioned;
swooop! behind, at the bumper, the past receding,
portioned out to orphan-memories.

But we know better, don’t we?
It’s all oil and gas in Wyoming,
roughnecks and roustabouts, in a state where
most of a town’s treasure is in pumpjacks.
I sit behind a pickup heading out Wind River way,
or to Rawlins, and he has a sticker on the crew cab
that says, Paid for by Oil & Gas.

The wind holds its tongue until the early morning,
when it moans across sagebrush flats,
three days straight, gusting to fifty.
It has tried to tell us, shoring snow,
snorting and kicking dirt like an unbroke pony:
sometimes you can’t tell the difference
between what you are
and what you think you are.

I should know, gripping the wheel of my own truck
on Happy Jack Road,
eight years a homeowner, black coffee on the terrace,
watching the sun in its tight circle.
Yes, you know better, says the Laramie wind.
This was always you,
the past peeling off behind like ropeburn skin,
the blacktop slipping under these spinning tires
like truth.