Resources
Montana Poet Laureate
Greg Pape's Poetry
FIRST HOUR
Bitterroot Mountains, Montana
Just before dawn a heavy snow is falling
that's been falling for hours. No wind
No sound. I walk so slowly even the coyote
trotting down through lodgepoles along the creek
doesn't see me until she is so close she hits
the wall of my scent, turns in a splash of snow
and doubles her pace back up the slope.
The snow lightens then stops.
I could follow her if I wanted to, the tracks
are so clear. No telling where she might
take me. I look up the trail, an opening
of faint blue light, pines black against the snow,
until the trail turns from sight. My steps slow,
my eyes move side to side, up the slope
and down. I stop to study two sets of tracks,
deer heading up slope, and a spider half
the diameter of a dime steps up from the dark
pit of a hoof print. Its spidery steps are tentative,
weakened as though stunned by the snow.
I lean down over the spider, who stops
at the approach of such a massive shadow,
then steps back into the pit of the deer track.
I go slowly up the trail, step over one
then another until it seems all the spiders
making a home in the pines have been knocked
down. A gusty blue note blows across the snow.
In the fullness of the first hour, grateful
for this life, I go on up the mountain –
blue shadows at the verge of sight.
Greg Pape
from "American Flamingo"
THE RIVER COMES CLOSER
An owl calls across the river.
Another answers farther downstream.
Stars glitter through the branches of pines
and on the back of the river.
He sits still, leaning against a tree.
The river comes a little closer.
Deer come closer.
He hears the riffle upstream
and the one down. Water eddies
and runs susurrous in his mind.
Looking up into the sweeping current of starlight,
fish idle and hold against the flow.
Now, just above his head, a third owl calls –
six blue notes like circles widening on the surface of a pond,
picked up and repeated across the river,
then down away.
The sound goes around, an echo, an eddy
in the dark before dawn.
He listens, slips his hand into the cold river,
turns it over, palm up, to cup the water
to hold stars.
Greg Pape
from "American Flamingo"
PRACTICE
Miami Beach, Florida
Lux et Veritas. Light and Truth. A good motto,
Along with Levavi Oculos, raise your eyes, look up,
lift your spirit.
There is a photo of my mother, a young woman
lying on a beach towel looking up
with such a radiant loving smile, just to recall it
I am fortified.
Take this, sweetheart, she seems to say,
and put it right in there with the big abstractions.
We do battle with truth and each other.
Something, it, escapes us. We love it,
but we don't get it. At least not often enough.
So it goes, we say, and then it doesn't.
Hungry, thinking these thoughts, I stop
at a fast food place on Collins.
I take my burger, fries and Coke, on a red tray,
to a table near the window to sit in the light
and watch.
The steady traffic, the changing light, the old
Beachfront hotels and apartment buildings,
some occupied, some abandoned.
Rooms where the honeymooners honeymooned,
where runaways and the homeless hide.
My mother told me, this used to be known,
back in the forties, as Detroit Beach
because of all the people from Detroit
who vacationed here in the winter.
I sip my Coke and imagine card games
On beach towels, baby oil on sunburned backs.
Levavi Oculos. I look up
to see the reassuring blue of the sky,
and someone flings a rope
from the top of the building.
A man in green fatigues,
A pump gun strapped over his shoulder,
rappels down the face of the building,
stops abruptly next to a closed window,
unshoulders the gun, pumps a shell
into the chamber, smashes the glass
with he gun butt, turns the barrel
into the dark room and fires and fires again.
Someone is dead or about to die, I think,
but before an image of that room
can form in the vacuum after the blasts,
the routine way he reshoulders the gun
tells me this is practice. I am watching
the S.W.A.T. team practice.
He drops down the rope in no great hurry.
I look up in the light.
Another man in green fatigues
drops off the roof, rappels down the rope,
fires two blasts into the room and so on.
Lux et Veritas. Levavi Oculos.
Greg Pape
from "American Flamingo"
BITTERROOT CAR-BODY RIPRAP
When we float the Bitterroot on the home stretch
I love between
Stevensville bridge
and Florence bridge we look forward to these wrecked
banks, this
grave calm and slow current
where big trout rise like lively ghosts.
But whose idea was this to line the banks
of the pristine
river with the damaged
shells of our passage through the tranquilized
fifties, the
cast-off rusting hulks of our
nearsighted hallucinatory transport to and from
the hairy
marches of the sixties?
Who first conceived an end to oxbowing
by cabling
car-bodies against the pure force
of a wandering stream? Was it the pragmatism of lists
and ledgers
penciled and memoed and droned
on the phone until the merely expedient fluoresced
into the surreal?
Or was it the product
of a single vision, some warden who for years
stared at
the wreck of a Studebaker
wedged between rocks, and forming a small eddy,
in the same
spot it had come to rest
after the poor intoxicated driver had broken
through the
guardrail and left the road for good?
Did the idea strike like a trout in slow water –
put these
wrecks to some good use?
One form of erosion against another? This scene
Oscillates
between the accidentally sacramental
and the sinister, between a mass baptism and a drowning.
Look at them with their noses in the river,
these sad
clownish battered metal purely
American products, their broken eyes aswim,
Their fixed
grins full of gravel.
Greg Pape
from "American Flamingo"
AMERICAN FLAMINGO
I know he shot them to know them.
I did not know the eyes of the flamingo
are blue, a deep live blue.
And the tongue is lined with many small
tongues, thirteen, in the sketch
by Audubon, to function as a sieve.
I knew the long rose-pink neck,
the heavy tricolored down-sweeping bill,
the black primaries.
But I did not know the blue eye
drawn so passionately by Audubon
it seems to look out, wary, intense,
from the paper it is printed on.
--what
Is man but his passion?
asked Robert Penn Warren. In the background
of this sketch, tenderly subtitled Old Male,
beneath the over-draping feathered
monument of the body, between the long
flexible neck and the long bony legs
covered with pink platelets of flesh,
Audubon has given us eight postures,
eight stunning movements in the ongoing
dance of the flamingos.
Once at Hialeah in late afternoon,
I watched the satin figures of the jockeys
Perched like bright beetles on the backs
Of horses pounding down the home
stretch, a few crops whipping
the lathering flanks, the loud flat
metallic voice of the announcer fading
as the flamingos, grazing the pond water
at the far end of the infield rose
in a feathery blush, only a few feet
off the ground and flew one long
clipped-winged ritual lap
in the heavy Miami light, a great
slow swirl of grace from the old world
that made tickets falls from hands,
stilled horses, and drew toasts from the stands
as they settled down again
like a rose-colored fog on the pond.
Greg Pape
from "American Flamingo"
STORM PATTERN
On my living room wall hangs a Navajo rug
handwoven by Virginia Yazzie. A Storm Pattern
with a black and white border, through which
the spirit line passes, a design like silhouettes
of mesas on the Colorado Plateau. Within the border
it's red, Ganado red, with black and white
figures, the sacred water bugs, the mountains
and the clouds, and the intersecting lightning bolts
that shoot out from the center to the four corners.
I love to look at it hanging on my wall.
I love to run my fingers over the wool.
Virginia Yazzie raised and tended the sheep
and sheared the wool and spun it by hand,
mixing in a little hair from her goats.
She dyed the wool and she built the loom
on which to weave it. She made up
this variation on the old pattern, and
she took pleasure in the work of her hands.
But there's coal and uranium and maybe oil
on her land, and the government says she
and her family have to move, relocate
is the word they use, to Flagstaff or Winslow
or Tuba City. Think of Virginia Yazzie
with the relocation blues. Imagine her
telling the government she'll never move.
Then remember the water bugs, the mountains,
the clouds, the lightning, the border through which
the spirit line passes, the storm pattern in her eyes.
Greg Pape
from "Storm Pattern"
DON'T WORRY
Don't worry. Just listen.
A bird repeats a four-phrase song
over and over, each phrase a trill
or chirps impossible to imitate.
In the long needles of the ponderosa, wind,
and a different sound of wind
in the shorter needles of pinyon.
And pollen drifting like yellow smoke.
Spray, years ago, blown off the tips
of the waves by an offshore wind.
I rode the waves and felt the spray.
I can still feel it. Don't worry.
A woman cries, then she is still.
She must be listening to the wind, or he voices
in it. Don't Worry. Much is still possible.
A horse whinnies.
Last week the woman next door,
five months pregnant, was riding the new horse.
Spooked by dogs the horse bucked
and threw her. A bird stopped singing.
Then it started again.
She is fine now.
She is ok. Don't worry.
Listen. Water in the pipes of the house.
Wind blowing clouds of yellow pollen from the pines.
Yellow pollen everywhere, on the windows,
in our hair, in our eyes. We can hardly breathe.
Don't worry. This is how the forests begin.
Greg Pape
from "Storm Pattern"
HOLDING THE STONE
You must hold it close to your ear, and
when it speaks to you, you must respond
Richard Hugo
I found it by the Clark Fork
on a high bank above the river
where someone dumped remains
of an old road, broken slabs
of concrete crowding the river stones.
I admit my first thought was throw it,
skip it on the surface going gold
in sunset, dimple the water like
whitefish rising, give it back
to the river that gave it shape and color.
But once in my hand its calm
And luck took hold.
On the bank the dog found
something dead to roll in. She
perked her ears as if to listen,
wagged her tail, shook herself proud
in primal perfume. Her good-luck
demeanor almost won me over,
but still I had to bathe her in the river.
That was years ago, first night
In Missoula, first home, a motel
by the river. Now I have a son.
And I still have the stone. Its color
changes. It goes from brown to gray
to green like the year. I hold it close
to my ear and listen.
Greg Pape
from "Storm Pattern"
TURNING THINGS OVER, ROCK CREEK, MONTANA
One of many witnesses
he watches the passage of the moon
from ridge to ridge above the canyon.
He thinks, light on the water, wind
in the trees, river in the leaves,
leaves in the river, rainbow
in the river, fish in the rainbow, fire
in the fish, soul in the fire, this.
This
air
weighs more, he thinks, in the bottom
of the canyon, on the ridge of night.
Water in the creek coaxes stones toward the river.
Water in his thoughts goes around and around.
Before dawn the wind stops. A single bird
tries a note, and soon the trees
are full of persuasion.
He
walks
a dirt road as the light comes.
Night holds on in pockets in the pines.
He breathes and something takes his breath
and turns his gaze. Light comes
out of the pines riding the big flanks
of moose. Three moose in procession,
profound thoughts he wants to hold
but can't.
His
breath drifts
with air adrift with moose, gone
into the trees, into the pockets of night
in the pines. He's left with the light
of one small idea. Good morning. He walks it
down the road. Good morning, good morning,
and morning bugles like a bull elk and trees
begin to breathe and branch with thought
that stops above his head and points
like antlers up.
Crack
of rock
on rock comes down the canyon.
That light blush on the heart
fades, then fires. Up the slope
and over the scree the bird of his gaze
goes and lights on a bear
digging at the base of a boulder.
The bear rocks the boulder
from side to side, gives it a shove
from the top, offers it up to gravity
as the sun rises and shines
in the eyes of the bear, who looks down
on what? A feast of larvae, ants,
worms exposed in the damp earth, or
an empty hole that attests to hunger?
Along the creek
mist
and shadow linger.
When he looks again the bear
Is gone. He goes on walking,
turning things over in the early light.
Greg Pape
from "Storm Pattern"
