Your Second Marriage
The instant she spoke you knew it was coming.
When she wanted you to meet him,
it was a long freight train
laid out across a distant prairie sky.
You knew something was coming.
She fucked you suddenly on Monday.
The train stretched over yellowing grain.
A black horizon on a fair weather day.
She white hot fucked you Monday.
Burned your past. Left a cone of ash.
A black horizon in a robin egg sky.
A broken doll, you shivered in wet grass.
Burned your past. Left a cone of ash.
You swear there were holes in the road.
Clasp whiskey flasks on damp knolls.
Refuse to admit how relieved you are.
You swear there were tolls on the road.
As soon as she spoke you saw the end.
Accept now that you have been set free.
When a mile-long train brakes,
it’s one boxcar,
then the next.
Pita Mahken Falls, Glacier National Park
Cave, was she
you when you
drank from her
dreams?
A bored teen,
I climbed down
iron oxide shale
to a river where
I stumbled upon
your silence.
An adult, I fell
in love with an
idea of lore
before rock,
river, larch,
lost their
stories to fear
and greed.
Today, I, an old
man, ask rusty
rock and crystal
water to share
their stories from
a time not yet
despoiled,
nor forgotten.
Cave,
I believe you
were her shelter,
out of the weather.
Here at her
becoming.
Tell me,
through what
shapes, like
Thetis, did
her procession
of desires shift?
Did she leave
split, sloughed
skin on rough
gravel like a
rattlesnake?
Do you know
the one with
which she would
become familiar?
Out of the bright
sun in a forgotten
pocket, I was too
young then to
hear glacier water
tell stone
how to melt, and
why we flow.
Ask the Wind
On Piikani land north of Highway 2
between Browning and East Glacier
it was blue or green, a mobile home
on a fragment of overthrust fault.
Every year winter snow buried it.
There were a few lodgepole pines.
There were one or two tepees in summer.
There was always the wind.
It was a faded mobile home.
It was a house. It was painted.
It was yellow or brown, maybe
dirt red close to the earth.
It was north of Highway 2
between Browning and the mountains.
It was a wood frame house or a mobile home.
It could’ve been a different house.
A different mobile home every year.
I drove by it east and west.
I drove by it a hundred times
going west or east. I swear.
Now I long to knock on the silent door
between Browning and the mountains.
Press the wind to lift my shame.
To learn what was clear was never here.
I say trust the weathered house.
I say trust the faded mobile home.
Dread 1960
The land was vast and treeless.
The land was hard kernel, winter wheat.
A man crouched in a Beetle.
The man was wan and worn.
The man was unshaven.
The man was unmarried.
The man clutched the wheel of his Beetle.
The man was doing it one more time.
The man had packed the car
with six bundles of orange tinted
newspapers, signature color
of the Great Falls Leader,
the Tribune’s evening edition.
It was mid-afternoon.
The sun would soon set.
It was mid-afternoon.
He would be home before dark.
It was fog like wool.
It was rain like vengeance.
It was a day so clear,
The Rockies so near
it could make a body cry.
It was blinding, wind driven snow.
It was the cold no car heater can beat.
It was 247 miles; round trip.
It was six days a week.
It was only one radio station.
It was Cut Bank; last stop.
It was collection day.
The man in the Beetle
took a nickel for each
dime paper I sold.
He was supposed to take three cents.
He told himself we wouldn’t know.
He said we couldn’t miss
what we never had.
Two pennies here,
two pennies there.
The man knew it wasn’t fair,
but it made him feel square.
Gerald Wagoner is the author of When Nothing Wild Remains (Broadstone Books) and A Month of Someday (Indolent Books). His childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Montana where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. With a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, he pursued the art of sculpture, and left the Northwest to study with Richard Stankiewicz. After earning an MFA in sculpture from SUNY Albany, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1982. In New York Gerald exhibited regularly, then taught Art and English for the NYC Department of Education until 2017, at which time he choose to pursue the art of poetry.
Image: hickoryrecord.com
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