Montana

Adam Henry Carriere

 

I wrote my first western scriptures when I was eight years old,

just after the last snow disappeared from our yard.

They were about the way Tunkasida[1] felt when the sun came up

and winter melted away. In my eight-year-old mind

the west was all clear running waters, bears and otters,

mountains and snow, wind and tall grass. I remember

thinking, cobwebs melt away like the snows, too.

 

Mom had the intuition of a neighborly witch,

her people, long ago from a far

land of song, war, and poetry.

She frittered her youth away in the sub-arctic boreal

forests on the shores of Talkeetna Lake

but she learned a colorful prairie language

and slowly passed it on to me,

just the right metaphors for wondering

whether the winter’s snowfall will feed the rivers

all summer. She could have been a concert pianist

but chose to marry a barnstorming pilot;

like Old Coyote, my auntie, always said,

“the unholy union of John Wayne and Gloria Steinem.”

It just couldn’t last.

 

Dad didn’t say much for a failed hero.

To him, camping on the Gallatin River

was all the conversation he figured I needed.

Dad’s bear deterrent technique

two pan lids banging together at the tent flap

when night rummaging noises began 

made us laugh through our forty winks.

To all sorts of people, he was just a thread

wandering with a fly rod, easily mollified

by rashers of liquor and non-local sugar food.

When he died slow that one year, Mom said,

‘The tango dancer must work

on the intricate figures alone,

but always with a partner in mind.’

I didn’t cry about it ‘til years later,

up at the foot of Mount Jumbo

with a bloodhound named Erdely.

The seasonal scheme only returned to me

by hurting in the daylight.

 

Up Tabexa Wakpa[2] I could walk through

my grandmother’s perfect orchard, listening

to the me-yaws of peacocks beneath the poplars

she planted when her family was young,

or ride once more with grandfather on his combine

through the dust-bitten days of harvest.

The tanks he trained in are now in a museum

or on the lawns of some town square.

 

On our farm you’d find wheat fields burning

in the Montana sun, oats crisping in the summer

heat, Appaloosa horses and a Blackfoot poem or two.

Until drought, then grasshoppers, then Mormon crickets

cleaned us out, and we left the dryland homestead.

 

By the time I was ten I had met Andy Warhol

in a roadside diner, seen Jim Morrison on TV,

hitchhiked with my folks on the L.A. freeways,

took a bus past the Berkeley riots,

and had run naked with a pack of dogs

in some mesa in New Mexico.

 

Less the home, a home, any home

waiting for the bus driver to ask for tickets

we might as well have drawn with Crayola

and stencils, mired as usual in a mess.

Happy birthday. I had nightmares

about goats in the Swan Mountains,

hiking steep trails up the avalanche ravines

of Scratchgravel Hills to collect the plants

the goats ate for our next meal.

Days later, the driver, pretending to read

“Last Drink with Lord Rochester’s Monkey,”

gave us change to money we hadn’t given,

and left us down the road from St. Ignatius,

bedrock, almost home. Mom and Dad

argued in whispers, was it Salish or Kootenai

on the driver’s sleepy breath?

 

Through lineage, I was a stutterer.

When Lois Red Elk, a good earth-walker,

called my name during first day roll,

I couldn’t pronounce it and ran home in tears.

Dad said, ‘Boy, you’re really smart.

You finished school in one day.’

 

The one room schoolhouse up Rosebud Creek,

the sky is truly big. All the kids brought in water,

emptied the slop bucket, or gathered firewood

like Dull Knife showed us before graduation.

During maths, his older lips set down

on the side of my twelve-year-old cheek.

 

When summer came many kisses later,

we walked the paths of the Métis,

who’d settled the South Fork of the Teton River.  

They mined, ranched, or logged

and reverently killed elk and deer.

We felt their radiant map of the world

in the wind, warming our soft faces.

 

Lo, suddenly in our imaginations was born

the smallest attention to beetles, bear scat

and yellow pine needles, the two vegetable gardens,

spans of flower beds, and two apple trees we ate

from between our trembling bodies.

Dull Knife laughed at my writing everything down.

‘We wake the two spirits between us, and you want

some new poem to fall out of rain shadow.’

 

Words made a kind of home I could take with me,

I thought back to him, beyond the reach of electricity

and other conveniences.  This short life, cousin,

brimming over with books, images, landscapes

lost in a big wood not so different from either of us.

 

Two spirits each, man, we’re like a

birthday suit tribe all on our ownsome.

 

I was fourteen, thinking I’d walked

all the noisy soil of miniature horses,

pretending my two spirits were one again,

but Mom knew better. Every corn husk

she tugged free said so. Her old marauding

white tribes cut headstrong lines with iron and blood,

honing fables out of the nameless dead

that knew how language could be lost,

except by nature.

I met two more spirits the same way,

making fun of a new boy on the school bus.

Nobody was sure if he had a name or spoke American

until he finally screamed, ‘I am Real Bird!’ 

and used his fists to re-write my laughing face.

 

Our Music teacher man made us team up.

Real Bird played the school’s one good guitar well

while I warbled as much as sang expressions

I’d stripped out from my Mom’s diary:

 

Walking, in the footsteps of Sakagewa

counting elk

fieldwork as a way to onlook the steady influx

of weeds and other sprawling.

The dandelions and snowberry bushes,

chokecherry and Chinook wind,

the confluence of the Bitterroot…

 

It took almost a year later, but he came

to our cabin during dinner, wanting to read

Mom’s copied verses again. Mom made him eat.

He told me to call him ‘Baucheewuchaitchish’

before he said good-bye without shaking

and rode off into the night on a squeaking bicycle.

A sonic realization of poetic occurrence,

I wrote. Before bed, I drew a picture of him

in the dark. ‘Baucheewuchaitchish,’ I sang.

 

We turned sixteen the same week

we went out for the cross-country team

just to take crazy long showers, our way

of admitting to the other our families

were too broke to buy water heaters.

 

After making us lunch one day,

his step-mom left for work and kept going,

the same day the forest fire turned the sun red

and the sky dark at mid-day.

Maybe midnight made him realize.

He called me from the pay phone down the road

from his place, but didn’t start talking

almost until he’d run out of change. 

 

The Assiniboine-Sioux used to say something

about various textures of snow, sub-zero temperatures

or the smell of cottonwoods, or temper of fires.

I couldn’t remember. Neither could Mom.

She told me, ‘Go be with Real Bird.’

He started crying as soon as he saw our truck.

I brought the quilts Grandmother wove for us\

    to sleep in.

 

Come prom, Real Bird graduated in thought. 

‘Words on paper tell me they’re poems,’ he says.

We set camp between Little Big Horn and Rosebud,

making sure his uncle’s mares had grass and water.

‘No,’ I tell them all, ‘you are words on paper.’

His laugh wandered through the watercolor night.

The earth has all kinds of stories, we agreed;

we need to listen with our eyes and spirit.

‘It’s complicated listening with just our ears,’

    my brother spirit said.

 

An unseen train whistled in the distance,

passing the nearby depot on its appointed journey.

 

Nearly eighteen, I asked Real Bird what he wanted

for his birthday. ‘More wilderness, fewer people!’

I felt his body chanting, its nearness inside.

Passing bears, coyotes, and cows on the dirt road

winding up the canyon to his home. In a flash

that echoes, put to rest by a lumber truck.

Baucheewuchaitchish.

 

I follow the waves of light, like a sonnet

some citizen of this magnificent collapse.

Two whitetail deer graze near the stones.

I’ve learned to avert my eyes and advance

on a diagonal, as Dull Knife intoned.

With pens and painted tongues

I slash at the curtains drawn across our sky

but keep finding need

circle

crescent  

obsidian

 

She always pretended not to notice when I stuttered.

I placed twenty different wildflowers in Mom’s hands

before closing the pine door, fighting icy broadsides

with archipelagos of memory:

“I’m going to adopt beatnik literary forebears.” 

            “OK, Mom.”

She pretended not to notice I never stuttered, saying

‘Baucheewuchaitchish’

I love you, Mom.

Swallowing ground glass.

 

Two spirits, part of them, met fighting

over the dorm TV. Friend Doyle grew up

roaming the low ruckus and high plains,

twenty years riding bucking horses bareback.

His two spirits hadn’t even met, caged

in scenery shy of the Divide - among cacti

and creosote bushes, between low and high

tides, scratched out of chigger-infested fields.

We courted in a bunch of folks’ backseats.

But with our big toes, we once wrote

in the red territory dirt:

 

It’s all about the sounds,

making strawmen come alive.

 

Both in college, but he knew what cohered,

falling somewhere after love, just ahead of beer.

I preferred stillness, but injured when he left,

all the same. Tins on the tent.

 

I evolved from wanting to become a railroad engineer

to wanting to become several hundred-thousand acres

of wilderness called ‘Baucheewuchaitchish’

 

After earning a teaching degree I thought I’d sail

for India but my truck needed fixing

so I looked for temporary work near my parents’

place. That teaching job lasted 20 more years.

I bought a water heater with my first check.

 

I’d grown up in a land of alfalfa farms, dirt bikes

and rattlesnakes, one-gas-station towns, two spirits,

and biggest sky any boy ever dreamed of.

By the time I left, I was pretty good at it.

 

I read it like a French rondelet.

The road to Montana seemed easy going after that.

 

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[1] Great Creator

[2] Frog Creek