The Poetry of Robert Hill Long, Part 1

The Work of the Bow

From its pigskin quiver I lifted the arrow
to nock against the bowstring until
it feathered my cheek, then aimed an arc
toward the slaughterhouse across the field.
I was nine and at war, waist-deep in flames
of broomstraw. Chinese soldiers dying in waves,
I imagined, sounded like the faint cries
coming out of that cinderblock drabness.

Grandmother touched my neck and I let fly:
the metal shaft a shiny splinter in the blue
and vanishing. Let that one go, she said,
and steered me back to the apple-littered yard
to face the black panther target. Grandfather
had painted it specially for my visit
and left out this bow, as big as I was.
He was sorry: he had to stay in his studio
to finish a very large Destruction of Babylon.

I shot holes in the panther until dark.
Grandmother pasted up her newspaper
--four pages weekly, county-wide--
and made calls about who got elected Master
at the Love Valley Grange, who led the last
preaching hour at Union Grove Methodist.
Saturday it rained: the ham-red clay road
too slippery for the Studebaker to ferry me
to the matinee. I moped. Grandfather's books,

I griped, were thick and full of preaching.
Grandmother tossed me a slim green suede
Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Read it
aloud, she ordered, or else peel windfalls
for tonight's pie. The poem was long
and difficult to say: whenever I looked up,
it was still raining. She shoved the pie
into the oven. Now, she said, Let's try John Donne.

In the study's rain-darkened cool she declaimed
the Valediction Forbidding Mourning.
Vale meant farewell; diction was words.
Poems, she said, are the goodbyes we say
to ourselves when we know no one is listening.
I tried to make my nodding look like Yes,
but the room kept darkening; the sofa grew soft.
At the picture window, dogwoods shook in wet gusts.
Poems last, she said. But her voice slipped
into the sound of pages turning, farther, fainter,
into the one enclosing sound, rain in darkness.

Twenty years later when she died I felt
the bow's 50-pound pull sting my cheek red
and the arrow a hiss, a splinter going, gone.
I stepped up to the coffin, dogwood flowers
in my pocket. Was tempted to scatter them
across the gleaming wood, but didn't.
On the flight back to Colorado I dug into
my jacket to pay for a whiskey and pulled out
white petals--crumpled, still wet.

Love what dies, she meant, better than what
can kill. Hard work, to learn the lasting sounds
of human goodbye, to memorize the valediction
for no one: an elegy is aimed at one listener
who dies out of hearing. Deep in the broomstraw,
murmuring to himself alone, the boy
crams his whole power into one arrow
and releases it. Behind him, following
the arrow's flight, his whitehaired target.

Dead Horse Point

A thousand feet above the Colorado we sat
in a shallow arroyo of redrock and sand,
drinking a bottle of ruby shiraz
that gave off the high smell of a horse
ridden hard through miles of darkening sage.
Last light vanished off your red hair
like flame off a live coal: I wanted
to warm my hands in it but held back,
touched you only in passing the wine.
You tried one name after another
for what was just beginning to push
your belly outward. None of your names
lit and no others came to me: swifts
shuttled overhead through a violet chill.
Red mesas to the east went gray, night
rose to the brim of the river canyon.
We were left moon-whitened sand
to light us out of the arroyo to the tent.
Ten years have gone dark since that night
and I have enough darkness behind me
to know we had no language to name
what was about to become of us.
A child, we say. It was a country
taking shape in us, redrock and sage
and swifts and canyon light taken in,
compressed: blood, bone and breath.
That country looks out through the eyes
of our son and sees us dying to come back.
Its white water runs through his laughter,
its sage and dark wine is his sweat.
As he grows that country grows wider
and darker: when he leaves, it will be
a step away in any direction. Each white
hair I lose ends up threaded into
a swift's nest there, each trace of skin
you rub off against me falls into
moon sand where no one else will walk.
So much still to be weathered, scarred,
levelled and scattered: erosion
is strong as love, and longer than memory.
At Dead Horse Point I wanted the red
and the white dust of us to be so mixed
together that dying means I go where
you can close your eyes and find me
drinking wine by a fire, waiting
to warm my hands in your hair.
Where all we know about love is the brief
red cactus flower closing up for the night--
closing faster because we touched it.

A Colder Blue

The robin egg lay on the breakfast table
     between me and Seth
who'd found it: a slight glow in the grass

that had made him kneel and order me
     "Save it."
Eggs fail, I was explaining:

Jays steal them, parent birds get killed,
     you can't allow
an abandoned egg to lie all night

in a cold house and ask it to live.
     The blue shell turned
a colder blue while I gestured at it.

Seth twisted a paper napkin around the egg,
     arms stiffening,
mouth set, as if everything he didn't want

to hear me say was in this egg, articulate,
     helpless, and the strain
of holding it, not letting it fall and break,

was shooting up his arms into his face,
     stretching it,
clenching it as it was at birth

eight years ago: blue with original pain.
     Out of words,
I smoothed his hair, cupped the back of his head.

My hands urged tears but he held back.
     He slid the egg
and its flimsy wrap into my breast pocket:

"Don't make it die," he said.
     I shook my head--
"Just don't make it die," he said.

Burn This

No match, no candle,
you flip a light switch
and the body rides in
to a room of flames.
When the incinerator
cools, they hand you
an urn, cinders
clean as rock salt:
ghost-weight of what
it was to lift you--
mother-bloody,
stunned by delivery
room light--so close
my breath made
your eyelids ripple.
My old weight will spread
through your arms and chest
then: hard to stand,
hard to breathe in.
That weight is migratory
and one day lifts off,
like birds. You'll feel
light enough to see
where the ash is scattered
--garden, river, wind--
no longer matters:
what is not ash
remains in reach
anywhere you close
your eyes. I want
your eyes open
the moment my last self
fits your hands
as your first fit mine.
Where the once of your birth,
the once of my death,
balance in our
likeness of hands.

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