Now down in Sonora, Pinacate country, build a fire of Ocotillo, broken twigs and bits of ironwood, in an open ring of lava: rake some coals aside (and if you’re smart) to windward, keep the other half ablaze for heat and light.

Set Drum’s fourteen-inch dutch oven with three legs across the embers.

Now put in the strips of bacon.

In another pan have all the vegetables cleaned up and peeled and sliced.

Cut the beef shank meat up small and set the bone aside.

Throw in the beef shank meat,

And stir it while it fries hot,

lots of ash and sizzle—singe your brow—

Like Locke says almost burn it—then add water from the jeep can—

add, the little bag of herbs—cook it all five minutes more—and then throw in the pan of all the rest.

Cover it up with big hot lid all heavy, sit and wait, or drink budweiser beer.

And also mix the dumpling mix aside, some water in some bisquick,

finally drop that off the spoon into the stew.

And let it cook ten minutes more

and lift the black pot off the fire

to set aside another good ten minutes,

Dish it up and eat it with a spoon, sitting on a poncho in the dark.

13.XII.1964

SATHER

old Norwegian by me on the bus,

“travel makes you big”

night ride through Redding,

Red Bluff, north;

“those forests on Snoqualmie Pass

just like the streams and woods

where I grew up—”

an island in the North Atlantic,

Everett at age nineteen

a sailor on a schooner, 1912,

those

loftiest mountains,

how things change.

“I used to like this country—

now I think I’ll live in France”

all my kids grown up.

was a fireman on a coaler,

a logger full of snoose,

a dried out Scandinavian

fisherman’s son gone off to

the Northwest,

name is Sather.

“means ‘mountain summer pasture’

like they have in Norway—it’s a

common name—”

where we take our cow

& up Queets Basin country,

that year, 1964,

was still in August,

ten feet under

snow.

29.X.1964

FOR THE BOY WHO WAS
DODGER POINT LOOKOUT
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

[On a backpacking trip with my first wife in the
Olympic mountains, having crossed over from the
Dosewallips drainage, descended to and forded the
Elwha and the Goldie, and climbed again
to the high country. Hiking alone down the Elwha
from Queets basin, these years later, brings it
back.]

The thin blue smoke of our campfire

down in the grassy, flowery,

heather meadow

two miles from your perch.

The snowmelt pond, and Alison,

half-stoopt bathing like

Swan Maiden, lovely naked,

ringed with Alpine fir and

gleaming snowy peaks. We

had come miles without trails,

you had been long alone.

We talked for half an hour up

there above the foaming creeks

and forest valleys, in our

world of snow and flowers.

I don’t know where she is now;

I never asked your name.

In this burning, muddy, lying,

blood-drenched world