Here is a poem from the collection:
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Ars Vitae
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for Ted Leeson
All I’ve said – I made it up, including the Things
that Really Happened.
Outside my
window now, above the autumn pond I’ve conjured,
two dapper
kingfishers start to flit as I dream them,
and in morning
fog the trees of October show bright because just now I’ve imagined
a sun so sharp
it could make you bleed.
Once –think of the number! –
seven lithe
otters led me and my brother
downstream as
we two fished the mighty Missouri.
That’s a memory of Montana,
which is “not
a place,” as I’m reminded by a favorite western writer,
“but the name of a place.” There are dogs I’ve treasured, quick
and lost, and
horses and songs, and people, living and gone, although in fact
they may only be
concocted from a life full of talk.
And yet whatever
I’ve talked
about is fact. It must be true
or else I only
had some maps, I had no place. Nor
did I know
old woodsmen
or their stories, to choose an
example, but only read
a book or
two. I had nothing. I never knew
a soul, a
thing. I made up the eagle I saw
today as he stooped to the neck
of a Canada
goose. I made up the goose, which
collapsed at the river’s edge,
which I also
devised. She fell close by, as
dead
as if I’d shot her myself as I paddled. I intended to stop and watch that
eagle,
whose tail
still showed dark stripes, which means I’d made him into a young one:
I’d stop with
an eye to beholding another dive
from a
blighted elm that leaned at what I’d construed as just the proper angle.
But I kept on
moving northward, fabricating the umber and mauve
leaves that
floated upriver, counter to reason,
beside my
gliding wisp of canoe. I invented
the leaves so I could conceive
that backwash
of eddy, and feel it move me – like
many of my visions,
including
those of Things that Really Happened –
as if my up
were down, and my progress that fluent, easy, at least for moments.
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