Nonbeing can never be,
being can never not be.
—Bhagavad Gita
Halt! That’s all. Musket ball separates
British officer from his mount, and soul.
I halt two centuries later.
Chalmette Battlefield, New Orleans.
“Halt” their last command, his redcoats
Stood where I stand, fired on
By “The Dirty Shirts,” Americans.
Disciplined Brits, they took it like gentlemen,
Were shot, at attention, until another officer
Left his own troop to give the remnants
An order to do something else, quick time.
I face the Rodriquez Canal, hit by a volley
Of kid-yells on the Choctaw and Free Black
End of the rampart, Old Hickory the other end.
I’d like to hold the road a little while,
No agenda, the rest of my life to accomplish it.
All is gone—all that makes no (but used to make a)
difference—the clothes, the books, the music,
and I, hovelled in a 20 foot camper, an even smaller mind.
We give away or sell cheap what we hope
will make us clean. We even move away.
I gave a life away. Now there’s only
my truck. My small camper. My nightly fire.
Now I cross borders, stop at welcome centers,
Grab brochures. Do I stay in this state
A couple of weeks to check out the Pow Wow
Or go south to hang out a day or two
At Willa Cather’s house in Red Cloud?
View New Orleans, Vieux Carré, a month
Of death and jazz, or Santa Fe, to stay
Among the bronzed artists, books, cafes?
So many towns to claim, so many battles!
The nameless voice behind the MRI
Says, Not so fast, old traveller.
Report: “The patient has multilevel findings.
L4-L5 disc degeneration…
Osteophyte complex extending into
Posterior disc… second osteophyte…
Pressure…thecal sac…Arthropathy…
L5-S1 disc degeneration….”
My spine’s as crusty as my social skills.
I limp. I am halt.
I’m getting a little scared
That streets of towns I’m stranger to will close,
Wood trails will grow over—stenosis of brambles.
And one eye’s going out (congenital),
A bad crossing in the retina.
But I can live this life with a blind spot.
Even should it spread, I think I’d make
A better blind tourist than a crippled one.
There is no place or thing I ache to see.
It’s not the seeing but the being there.
Pure being in pure Thereness,
Wherever There finds me here and now:
Billy the Kid’s cell or grave; the street
In Clovis where Buddy Holly took a break.
I sit beneath the chair in Deadwood, where
Wild Bill Hickok sat as Jack McCall
(“Crooked Nose Jack”) shot him from behind.
The chair’s encased in glass upon the wall.
I stood where Meriwether Lewis began
His trek; I stood where Meriwether Lewis died,
Hundreds of miles in distance from each other,
And yet the two were one, the way I felt.
I stood at Jefferson Rock where Jefferson stood—
Made it up o.k., the back, the leg—
And stared where Jefferson stared, below, where
The Shenandoah and Potomac meet
To form the whole out-west in Jefferson’s mind.
I lost my footing more in my descent.
It’s as though when I luck on a place, the place
Has been waiting for me.
The spirits silence me.
Of course there are names—Jesse James,
Bob Ford, Laura Ingalls Wilder, J. E. B. Stuart,
Geronimo, Elvis—hundreds posted:
who stood here, who walked there. I read
Them, but it’s the there and here that matter.
I’ve read some saints who think such enstasy,
Such loss of world and being purely here
Might be the active presence of God. Maybe.
I’ll take the presence of Lost Bird any day,
Buried just outside the mass grave
Of her blood kin Lakota at Wounded Knee.
I didn’t have to see it. Get me there,
Guide me up the hill from down below
In the creek bed where her mother was killed
And had scooped some earth and lay on top
The infant, and four days later, in frozen ground
They found the baby girl under her mother.
Lost Bird. The little thing was alive.
Tell me the story and then walk away,
Leave me there a while with the child.
I didn’t have to see Mark Twain’s house
In Hannibal nor the one in Hartford.
But I was there; I stood there.
I stand in rooms until others leave
(It drives guided groups nuts for me
To hang back, and they have to wait).
I hate guided groups. I left the tour
In New Orleans Museum of Art when
Two loud couples discussed the painting
Of Andrew Jackson, “Also known as Stonewall,”
One blustery husband said. I wanted to shoot him.
I’d gone with Lauren to the house
where Degas lived when he was here.
And when the group left the room where
He slept and painted, I held back and breathed
Him in. I stood on the two-foot
Square patch of original flooring and felt
The difference between Degas’ floor and the newer.
I don’t see art as a connoisseur,
But in my mind’s eye smell the sweat
Or coal fire, feel the hands of the maker, know
The final stopped hustle of his stepping back,
His body relaxing for the first time in weeks,
To say, “I cannot do any more than this.”
It’s plain as a pikestaff: Tell me what you’re seeing
And I see, then let me be. But
I must walk in the place, feel
Original ground or floor beneath my feet.
It’s like some subcutaneous knowing that rises
To my skin, inside and outside one mind,
One world of being, whole and timeless as air.
01 / 01 / 1891,
Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Reservation,
290 Sioux, plus or minus,
Mostly Bigfoot’s band who came surrendering.
After slaughter they lay four days because
Of the blizzard, were gathered up (some
Hauled back from 3 miles away, managing
To run that far before exhaustion caught
Up to them as did the soldiers who fired
At close range to finish them off). More babies.
The hardened corpses were thrown into the pit
With its cleanly cut sides in frozen ground.
They rest in the place where Hotchkiss guns were placed.
As prayer, people leave ribbon, rags,
Apple; those with forethought: sage, or flowers—
Mostly plastic, but a thought. The Lakota
Woman I was with suggested I leave
Tobacco, which I did, a 17 cent
Cigarette opened to the breeze,
And the tobacco was, my friend told me, accepted.
Below the hill, where slaughter was complete,
There stands a stand worked by a man in his 40s,
A woman, and an old man, a father or grandfather.
All day, they sort and string and sell their beads.
I picked up a pebble the size of a pencil eraser,
And knowing how sacred the ground there is—
As is the ground everywhere, I guess,
But especially there, so much blood, so many
Poverties—I asked the guy in charge
If I might have the rock to send to a friend
Who collects rocks from friends of hers who travel.
The man turned to the old man, the oldest
Of us all, and though the old man surely
Must have heard me, the man put the question,
“Can he have this?” The old man hung his half-done
String of beads up, held the rock; open
Hand, closed fist, then open again
And said something I did not understand
In Lakota and gave it back to him, not me.
The man handed it to me, saying, “He
Said, ‘Yes. It is from this ground but has
No spirit power, since it is not round.’”
I gave the guy a fiver, which he accepted
And presented to the old man who for the first time
Looked me in the eye. Then he nodded,
A nod that was both greeting and goodbye.
Museums, art galleries, graves, battle fields
Or natural woods where nothing special happened
Except life and death and endless resurrection.
All of them give me something there
Unmolested by dualities like
Past / present, good / bad, body / soul—
A kind of being that for once seems whole.
Well, maybe it’s like Casey says. A fellow ain’t got a
soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul,
the one big soul that belongs to everybody
— The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (movie)
Jackson said that when this field went silent,
The fog and smoke lifting, 2,000 redcoats
Broken and blasted from grape shot and musket,
And the wounded beginning to rise, stagger—
Here, here, there, there, here:
Jackson said it looked like the Resurrection,
The dead of the ages emerging from their graves.
And they’re here still where I stand still.
I’ll leave myself here too, as I left
Myself elsewhere on the road for you.
We all lose hair and skin. All day
We take a little of someone’s DNA
Home or to the next monument.
We lose 40,000 skin cells a day.
They rise to the surface, hold
Us together, die, then fly.
And because they flake from us like dust dots
Off Pigpen and drift, we pass them on to others.
You occupy me, I occupy your kin,
Friends, or friends of friends, strangers.
You picked me up when your arm brushed the counter
At the liquor store or pharmacy last night.
You dropped me on your table when you chastised
Your kid for a D. I’m in bed with you and your lover.
With more than skin and hair we gift each other.
There are 10 times more bacteria
In and on you than cells you claim as you.
Something in the air, St. Louis, I coughed
On the slanted, carpeted rest atop the Gateway Arch.
Whoever touched that, pressed their breast there
To see the West, lay on me and took me somewhere
As they rode the rattling tram down to the world.
Did you sneeze at the top? Within a few minutes—30
In a space of, say, the cabin of a 747—
Everyone’s touched by the spray, a kind of relay
Passing ourselves to lives we touch outside.
Sweat contains urea. We’re pissing through the skin.
Then we touch. In the arch, I breathed
Deeply between coughs, breathed in
The kids on honeymoon, and outside,
The arch as background, I held the Japanese
Family’s camera, both hands taking on their oils,
Skin, and breath as I took their picture
Then shook hands with the father in the sun.
I’ve left me in Nebraska and gathered you
In Memphis, Harper’s Ferry, Old Mesilla.
You pass me on as I pass you on the road.
I cannot die as long as you live,
I cannot stop as long as you move.
Body is dust to dust, and dust to molecule,
Element, atom, energy. All is energy.
All things made hold energy of maker.
So somehow else I am the arch itself,
That tugboat I hear on my flank upriver,
The grain on the barges it pushes, and the barge.
I think we share spirit as equally
As body through the nine gates of the body.
Even with degenerating civility,
Living as alone as I can afford,
I and you take in each other’s selves.
The look in the eye of the clerk who hates his work
Is in our lives forever, remembered or not.
Here I give you the whispered voice
Of the woman at Wounded Knee.
Take from her the fiery peace I found.
From me to you, the boy I met in Nashville,
Young man at previous week’s open mic.
He found me as I packed, journeyman
Blacksmith, wanted to be a songwriting farrier.
I gave him a CD, invited him
To my showcase the following week. He said
He had to work that day, 40 miles
One way, so he doubted he could make it.
When I got up to do my set that night,
I saw him from the stage, all cleaned up.
After, he told me he had something for me,
As if being there (80 miles round trip!)
Were not gift enough for an old loner.
We walked out to his truck. He reached in,
Drew himself out bearing a horse shoe
He’d made for me. All the sweat,
And fire, and clanging, and yet
Those rough hands presented the shoe so
Gently, you’d have thought it the rarest butterfly.
My album, his horse shoe; my horse shoe, his album,
Both signed. Thereby we traded names as well.
Whoever you are, holding me now in hand
—Walt Whitman
I left my life (lives!) to be alone alone.
Now crippled, a bad eye, and alone
These years and roads, I know it can’t be done.
Choctaw, Free Black, coyote, caterpillar,
Samuel, Billy, Lauren, raccoon coming
Just to the edge of the fire’s light, you
In the Gateway Arch and you not in the arch,
Woman, rain, rock, pebble, boy:
As you read this, you are my eyes.
I hear your hearing me, your steps my steps,
As mine are yours on your journey, for you
Do take my journey, I yours, your life on the road.
Our one journey is the one whereby
What we need is found in what we find.
You take the highway of your lover’s back
And off-road to the neck. You tour the heart.
You stand on the overlook of your child’s crib,
Your child, a sleeping village in the valley below.
We’re one, with and on the Plains of Chalmette.
Another officer, call him Captain Whim, leaves
His troops of starlings, sun, cloud-shadow, grass,
And orders me, and you in me, to move,
To advance—haltingly—but advance
Back to our truck, our camper, our shared fire.
© 2018. The Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University.
All work copyright of their respective authors.