The Sound

by David Mason

  beloved by dealers down in Santa Fe.

  He lived to corner strangers, read them tracts

  of his invention on the careful work

  he would preserve and pridefully display.

  Foley roamed the Great Plains in his van,

  his thin hair tied back in a ponytail,

  and people learned that he was smart enough

  to deal. He made a living off this stuff,

  became a more authenticated man.

  But when he drank he would begin to rail

  against the white world’s trivializing fluff.

  Last night when he came in, reeking of smoke

  and liquor, gesticulating madly

  as if we’d both returned from the same bar,

  I heard him out a while, the drunken bore,

  endured his leaning up against my oak

  credenza there, until at last I gladly

  offered him a drink and a kitchen chair.

  I still see him, round as a medicine ball

  with a three-day beard, wearing his ripped jeans

  and ratty, unlaced Nikes without socks.

  I see him searching through two empty packs

  and casting them aside despite my scowl,

  opening a third, lighting up—he careens

  into my kitchen, leaving boozy tracks.

  I offered brandy. He didn’t mind the brand

  or that I served it in a water glass.

  He drank with simple greed, making no show

  of thanks, and I could see he wouldn’t go.

  He told me nothing happened as he planned,

  how he left Rasher’s tiny shop a mess.

  I killed him, Foley said. You got to know.

  You know the place. Grand Avenue. The Great

  White Way they built over my people’s bones

  after the western forts made stealing safe.

  Safe for that fucking moneyed generation

  F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to write about—

  and here was Rasher, selling off such crap

  no self-respecting dealer’d waste his time.

  I heard he had good beadwork, Chippewa,

  but when I went in all I saw was junk.

  I’m thinking, Christ, the neighbors here must love him,

  the one dusty-shuttered place on the block

  and inside, counters filled with silver plate

  so tarnished nobody would touch it, irons

  with fraying cords and heaps of magazines.

  He had the jawbone of a buffalo

  from South Dakota, an old Enfield rifle,

  a horn chair (or a cut-rate replica),

  German Bible, a blue-eyed Jesus framed

  in bottle caps—I mean he had everything

  but paint-by-number sunsets, so much junk

  I bet he hadn’t made a sale in years.

  You got to know this guy—skinny bald head

  and both his hands twisted from arthritis.

  I wouldn’t give his place a second look

  except I heard so much about this beadwork.

  He leads me to a case in the back room.

  I take a look. The stuff is fucking new,

  pure Disneyland, not even off the Rez.

  Foley’s glass was empty; I poured him more

  to buy time while I thought of some excuse

  to get him out of here. If homicide

  indeed were his odd tale’s conclusion, I’d

  rather let him pass out on my floor,

  then dash upstairs and telephone the police.

  I wouldn’t mind if “fucking” Foley fried.

  It’s crap, he said. I tell this slimy coot

  he doesn’t know an Indian from a dog.

  I can’t believe I drove five hundred miles

  to handle sentimental tourist crap.

  He rolled himself upright in my kitchen chair

  and looked at me with such complete disdain

  that I imagined Mr. Rasher’s stare.

  I knew the man. We dealers somehow sense

  who we trust and who the characters are.

  I looked at my inebriated guest

  and saw the fool-as-warrior on a quest

  for the authentic, final recompense

  that would rub out, in endless, private war,

  all but his own image of the best.

  Pretty quick I see I hurt his feelings.

  He gets all proud on me and walks around

  pointing at this and that,

  a World’s Fair pin, a Maris autograph,

  and then he takes me to a dark wood cupboard

  and spins the combination on the lock

  and shows me what’s inside. The old man

  shows me his motherfucking pride and joy.

  I look inside his cupboard and it’s there

  all right—a black man’s head with eyes sewn shut—

  I mean this fucker’s real, all dried and stuffed,

  a metal ashtray planted in the skull.

  I look and it’s like the old man’s nodding,

  Yeah, yeah, you prick, now tell me this is nothing.

  He’s looking at me looking at this head,

  telling me he found it in a house

  just up the street. Some dead white guy’s estate

  here in the liberal north allowed this coot

  whatever his twisted little hands could take,

  and then he hoards it away for special guests.

  I didn’t say a thing. I just walked out.

  Now Foley filled his glass, drinking it down.

  His irises caught fire as he lit up.

  I sat across from him and wiped my palms

  but inside I was setting off alarms

  as if I should alert this sleeping town

  that murder lived inside it. I could stop

  the story now, I thought, but nothing calms

  a killer when he knows he must confess,

  and Foley’d chosen me to hear the worst.

  Weird, he said, looking straight at me beyond

  his burning cigarette. I got so mad.

  Like all I thought of was a hundred shelves

  collecting dust in Rasher’s shop, and how

  a dead man’s head lay at the center of it.

  I had to get a drink. Some yuppie bar

  that charged a fortune for its cheapest bourbon.

  I’m in there while the sun sets on the street

  and people drop in after leaving work.

  I look at all these happy people there—

  laughing, anyway; maybe they aren’t happy—

  the well-dressed women tossing back their hair,

  the men who loosen their designer ties

  and sip their single malts—living on bones

  of other people, right?

  And two blocks down the street, in Rasher’s shop,

  a head where someone flicked his ashes once,

  because of course a darky can’t be human,

  and someone’s family kept that darky’s head.

  These genteel people with their decent souls

  must have been embarrassed finding it,

  and Rasher got it for a fucking song

  and even he could never sell the thing.

  No, he showed it to me just to get me,

  just to prove I hadn’t seen it all.

  Well, he was right, I hadn’t seen it all.

  I didn’t know the worst that people do

  could be collected like a beaded bag,

  bad medicine or good, we keep the stuff

  and let it molder in our precious cases.

  Some fucker cared just how he dried that head

  and stitched the skin and cut the hole in the top—

  big medicine for a man who liked cigars.

  It’s just another piece of history,

  human, like a slave yoke or a scalping knife,

  and maybe I was drunk on yuppie booze,


  but I knew some things had to be destroyed.

  Hell, I could hardly walk, but I walked back,

  knocked on Rasher’s door until he opened,

  pushed him aside like a bag of raked-up leaves.

  Maybe I was shouting, I don’t know.

  I heard him shouting at my back, and then

  he came around between me and the case,

  a little twisted guy with yellow teeth

  telling me he’d call the fucking cops.

  I found the jawbone of that buffalo.

  I mean I must have picked it up somewhere,

  maybe to break the lock, but I swung hard

  and hit that old fucker upside the head

  and he went down so easy I was shocked.

  He lay there moaning in a spreading pool

  I stepped around. I broke that old jawbone

  prizing the lock, but it snapped free, and I

  snatched out the gruesome head.

  I got it to my van all right, and then

  went back to check on Rasher. He was dead.

  For a while I tried to set his shop on fire

  to see the heaps of garbage in it burn,

  but you’d need gasoline to get it going

  and besides, I couldn’t burn away the thought

  of that weird thing I took from there tonight.

  It’s out there, Foley said. I’m parked outside

  a few blocks down—I couldn’t find your house.

  I knew you’d listen to me if I came.

  I knew you’d never try to turn me in.

  You want to see it? No? I didn’t either,

  and now I’ll never lose that goddamned head,

  even if I bury it and drive away.

  By now the bluster’d left his shrinking frame

  and I thought he would vomit in my glass,

  but Foley had saved strength enough to stand,

  while I let go of everything I’d planned—

  the telephone, police, and bitter fame

  that might wash over my quiet life and pass

  away at some inaudible command.

  I thought of all the dead things in my shop.

  No object I put up was poorly made.

  Nothing of mine was inhumane, although

  I felt death in a kind of undertow

  pulling my life away. Make it stop,

  I thought, as if poor Foley had betrayed

  our best ideals. Of course I let him go.

  The truth is, now he’s left I feel relieved.

  I locked the door behind him, but his smell

  has lingered in my hallway all these hours.

  I’ve mopped the floor, washed up, moved pots of flowers

  to places that he touched. If I believed,

  I would say Foley had emerged from hell.

  I ask for help, but the silent house demurs.

  IN THE BORROWED HOUSE

  While flowerbeds have gone to seed,

  a book you didn’t plan to read

  offers the unexpected phrase

  that occupies your minds for days.

  You write with someone else’s pen

  of someone else’s life. And when

  light’s absence leans across the town,

  you lay another body down.

  ADAM SPEAKS

  When I was clay there was so much to feel: symmetries of sunlight

  traced within the feather and the leaf, pale secretions

  trailing from shells, the clammy hands of fog touching my body.

  My first uncurling into day was built from muted fires

  below, and I began to grow distinct, bone, nail and hair,

  muscled, akimbo, awkward as the fawn I later named.

  There was a sea inside my flesh—I tensed to hold it in,

  but found it was the whisper of the moon calling to me.

  You who are thinking of me then, remember I tore my self

  out of myself, bellowing like thunder. When I saw birds

  I thought they were the love of God, and wailed at how they flew above me.

  BALLADE AT 3 A.M.

  A Dunkin’ Donuts denizen,

  Phil diagrammed conspiracies

  in which the country had a plan,

  contrived by top authorities,

  to generate our mass malaise.

  When I would ask him why or how,

  suspicion flickered in his eyes.

  I don’t know where he’s living now.

  Jake had the presidential grin,

  describing all the Saigon whores

  who sold their wares to a bored Marine.

  Due to his unexplained disease

  he lived on federal subsidies,

  though late at night he would avow

  his fate was fixed by a hiring freeze.

  I don’t know where he’s living now.

  The bullet piercing Marvin’s spleen

  was not a North Vietnamese

  but friendly fire from an M16.

  He wasn’t even overseas

  and bore no combat memories

  that might explain the way his brow

  twitched as if he had DTs.

  I don’t know where he’s living now.

  Lost in the disco Seventies,

  I met them briefly, anyhow,

  and went on to my girlfriend’s place.

  I don’t know where they’re living now.

  THE LOST HOUSE

  A neighbor girl went with me near the creek,

  entered the new house they were building there

  with studs half-covered. Alone in summer dark,

  we sat together on the plywood floor.

  The sky way I contrived it, my right hand

  slipped insinuatingly beneath her blouse

  in new maneuvers, further than I planned.

  I thought we floated in that almost-house.

  Afraid of what might happen, or just afraid,

  I stopped. She stood and brushed the sawdust off.

  Fifteen that summer, we knew we could have strayed.

  Now, if I saw it in a photograph,

  I couldn’t tell you where that new house stood.

  One night the timbered hillside thundered down

  like a dozen freight trains, crashing in a flood

  that splintered walls and made the owners run.

  By then I had been married and divorced.

  The girl I reached for in unfinished walls

  had moved away as if by nature’s course.

  The house was gone. Under quiet hills

  The creek had cut new banks, left silt in bars

  now sprouting alder scrub. No one would know,

  cruising the dead-end road beneath the stars,

  how we had trespassed there so long ago.

  MR. LOUDEN AND THE ANTELOPE

  Mr. Louden was my father’s ranching friend

  whose pickup sprouted rust from summer hail.

  It didn’t bother him. He had one arm,

  and a tucked-in sleeve, and drove us toward the end

  of his fence line, passing piñon and chaparral.

  Forty years. By now he’s bought the farm.

  I can still hear him chuckling: No, there ain’t

  nothing funnier than a one-armed man

  driving while he tries to swat horseflies.

  I never heard him utter a complaint.

  He could have been weathered sandstone, deadpan

  when his empty sleeve flapped out in the breeze.

  He released the wheel to point as antelope,

  like dolphins of the desert that were playing

  in our dusty wake, surfaced alongside us

  and in one fleet formation climbed the slope

  ahead, and over it. They left us saying

  little and were far too fast to guide us.

  Where were we headed in that battered truck,

  my father, old Mr. Louden, and I?

  And was it the hail-pocked wr
eck that I recall?

  Now forty-eight, I can’t believe my luck,

  to have seen those agile creatures chasing by—

  unless, of course, I only dreamed it all.

  Though I can’t prove it’s true, I saw them go

  out of sight like figures out of a myth.

  They left us gasping in their kicked-up dust,

  our own dust settling like summer snow,

  while Mr. Louden laughed, conjuring with

  his only arm, mage of the blooming rust.

  A MEANING MADE OF TREES

  From a phrase by Seamus Heaney

  This bedroom high in the old house,

  its roof pitched steeply overhead,

  traps the lake water sounds, afloat

  on what it holds: liquid lapping.

  I could lie here half the day long,

  hearing rain wrung out of the sky,

  windows open, so the outer

  breath and green of the world get in.

  The alder’s scabbed, serrated leaves

  that will fail later in the fall

  fulfill themselves, a waterfall

  steeped in the greening chlorophyll.

  That stir of limbs against the roof

  must be the native Douglas fir—

  a winter friend because it keeps

  the housebound memory evergreen.

  Most of all the cedar rises,

  huge and straight, the hulking host

  and omphalos of my dream world,

  its rootedness a kind of triumph.

  WINTER 1963

  As my father turned the car into the drive

  and we were home from our rare trip to church,

  a man’s voice speaking from the radio

  caused us to linger there, engine running.

  Just so, the voice with its calm cadences

  lingered by woods where snow fell downily.

  Though only eight, I thought I understood

  the words to fit our snowless January,

  and that the man, whose name was Robert Frost

  (like rime I saw that morning on the lawn),

  had died in Boston, which was far away.

  Who knows where I went next, with all the woods