The Homestead Act
Over the horizon
comes the blush of light and emptiness.
Sixteen schooners spit mud from their wheels
as opportunity releases the stitches
between land and sea.
It is morning.
It is to be born.
It is to shoulder the weight of your body.
1862.
With the precision of a machine
the Indians become the unconscious.
From St. Joe to South Pass is the belly.
We've entered it.
Riffraff and voyageurs
leaking from Europe
like spirits touching their toe to the dead.
Roll wheel. March to the body.
Raise up the flag.
Photo: "Patterson Pass" by Tim Goodman
Listen to The Homestead Act
Life
Listening to Joni Mitchell while driving up the New York State Thruway
on the way to Woodstock, December 2005...
I wonder if that old magazine knows what it’s like to be still dreaming of
hippie girls after all these years of toil—
if it has glossies of the ghosts that keep battling for the seat next to me,
each insisting we’ll build our cabin in the woods...plant the healing herbs!
I wonder if that old Life has a file for our darker shades—
the shadows of bare trees forking across the fields like scripture
while our monkeys danced (I can still see them crunching in the blue snow,
their paws held against the moonlight to guide its magic into us...
like the midwife’s glorious slap returning).
I wonder if Life knew then what was truly inside the mountain goddess—
her growing realization of loss even as she sang
the rivers of an alternate nation,
her eerie, peripatetic voice filling the morning cabins
and luring the scantily-clad back from their winter fields—
turning them again into cold monkeys lumbering, their eyes on fire.
Photo: "Branches" by Rody Luton
Listen to Life
Venerate The Plow
A woodcut from Jefferson's time promotes
the moral edification that comes from farming.
It shows a man harnessed behind a team of oxen
and gripping the long hard extension of himself.
Behind him stands a woman, delighted—
cradling a sheath from some past harvest
and wearing a halo of stars.
Jefferson had great faith in this occupation.
Two hundred years later, American men still do,
as they struggle to feel their God inside.
If Jefferson were alive, he'd have trouble finding the earth,
buried as it is under our vain operations,
but the fields are still here, in every face we meet,
in every exhausted body still connected to the firmament.
Photo: "Wonder Valley" by Tim Goodman
Listen to Venerate the Plow
The Scout
Statue of an Indian Brave, Kansas City, 1936
In bronze you sit,
safe now from the obsessions of decline,
your pony beneath you,
your hand held to your head,
you gaze exhausted
at the city that has risen against the plain,
as if this earth,
in unfaithful partnership,
had pulled a pistol.
After decades of that quick surprise,
there is no longer any need
to worry about oblivion—
what you once were has shattered through an eye
and come to this:
still, obdurate,
the trees at your pony's flank whisking softly...
Photo: "Near Meteor Crater, AZ" by Tim Goodman
The Scout
Innocence
In 1963 on the west side of Omaha
an oil drum painted like a flag stood
guard at the edge of our neighborhood—
down where 98th met Happy Avenue
and the city segued into a fertile plain.
Hanging from it was a golden spigot
and every afternoon, hordes of us, raised
on Spock and Suess, would drink until
satiated, then return to our unfenced yards
that ran together like the blood of aliens
in a democratic land—play Kick the Can,
Slinky, Frisbee...John F. Kennedy was just
finishing his term, and by the time we got it,
those other doctors would have a cure for
cancer. Naturally, it didn't work that way—
the dark surfaced as the seasons changed,
and the girl next door grew hinged to the
entire world, not just the cherry visions of
transitory wealth. But thinking back, I can't
help but wonder if that lack of knowledge
was a prerequisite for wisdom, knowing now
that the bottomless tank was not bottomless
at all, but akin to the long drive you take
when you first receive your license—
mile after mile of statuesque trees
lining the highway, leading you to believe
that in this car, at least, heaven exists...
that by the time you get to wherever it is
you're going, you'll be old enough to manage,
old enough to live minus lightning...old
enough to blur the distinctions between a
dark complicated world, and the one you love.
Photo: "Near Panoche" by Tim Goodman
Listen to Innocence
Tonic Minor
Cycling the north coast I think of the birth of cool
as a blue jay follows me, darting and dipping like Miles.
This sound is not ours alone. The trumpet in the darkened
club, dense with grief, with revelation, rises out of the blood
of all Earth's creatures, out of the light that sinks into every
frantic eye. I know this bird is not sorrow, I know this bird
is not grief, but the dark clouds suckling the hills are almost
the breast that fills the baby...nearly the waves that slow the
backbeat to make the human swoon. I am riding north to
escape this body, to encourage wind in its persistent desire
to change us. I am riding bird and I am alone, like the giant
onstage whose eyes glaze to increase the miles, who welcomes
shocks from the road, a sudden lightning, because birds can
sense when the earth is about to give, its symbols will hush,
when the sister mysteries will blow out the final note we love.
Photo: "South of Port Orford" by Tim Goodman
Listen to Tonic Minor
The Ghost
It wasn't just fear
that lured the ghost,
provoked him to lay on hands,
re-voice the sounds of birth.
but also this undertow
inside the body,
the memory of loving people
best when pulled under...
when impaled on their anchor,
a deep-sea hunting for the
sea-horse our water-born bones
still dream to ride.
Photo: "Water 2" by Rody Luton
Listen to The Ghost
Bodhisattva West
Go ahead,
ask me if I care about
the filthy town they came to,
my great grandfather, again a butcher,
my great grandmother ashamed
of her pierced ears.
Clear across the continent,
I sit on a mountaintop
following my breath
and eyeing the vast Pacific.
Ask me if I care
that this breath first hitchhiked
across the Atlantic
inside two Polish teenagers.
What does it have to do with
this mountain laurel,
my body next to it,
dissolving,
that breath ready to leap again?
Photo: "Crescent City" by Tim Goodman
Listen to Bodhisattva West
Beyond Merchandise
Outside my window shopping carts go by filled with
the recycled goods I often cling to—drug addicts, drunks,
psychotics pushing their bottles and cans up this rancid block
that passes for a highway, their damn wheels rattling like
squeaky hips, all night and day. Naturally if I go out to talk
to them—stare into their eyes—what I get is battlefield,
a land of severed limbs trying to regroup while this deadbeat
inside my head sings the blues that would turn into carols
if those limbs ever did fit back together—mine and theirs—
amid the exhale of putrefaction, which would be the smell
of the Lord's body too...if He were every really found.
photo: "Point Pinole" by Rody Luton
Listen to Beyond Merchandise
Casa Junipero
At 5 AM I tiptoe out of my room to the small wooden desk
under the dim light beneath the hotel stairs to find Pablo’s things—
a jar full of uncooked rice and beans, a drained coffee cup,
a half-eaten boleto, a bag of rags. He’s the night maid, and fills
his buckets, mops till dawn, listening to Dylan and Dion on
his tiny radio, their bold lyrics softened by the Spanish tongue.
When he finds me, he smiles, touches the back of my hand as
the roof-rooster crows, then speaks, though I do not understand.
I know our work to each other appears grim, but we do share
this miracle of bone—are both attempting to levitate the Indian,
this impulse to sing with the bells of the Parroquia that mill us
into the soft bread the august Padre will slip between our teeth.
Photo: "Morocco" by Rody Luton