Issue 11

Summer 2002

Walt McDonald

Walt McDonald was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force and served as Texas Poet Laureate for 2001. Some of his recent books are All Occasions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), Blessings the Body Gave, and The Flying Dutchman (Ohio State, 1998, 1986), Counting Survivors (Pittsburgh, 1995), Night Landings (Harper & Row, 1989), and After the Noise of Saigon (Massachusetts, 1988). His poems have been in journals including APR, The Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and Poetry.

 

Granddaughters of the Plains

Old women in buckskins posed, cutting up
like Annie Oakley, bifocals off and bold
as Calamity Jane, tongues out.
They poked each other and laughed,

proud they survived sandstorms.
Some came to the plains in wagons,
bouncing babies in more than name.
Some grandparents were Quakers from Ohio;

some, mule skinners, cowboys
who married school marms
and broke the plains with plows.
Some drilled for water, struck oil,

and left flat ranches to children.
A Hundred Wonders, they called themselves
when the club formed forty years ago.
Now, only twenty Granddaughters of the Plains

remain. They changed the name
after too many died. For years,
they counted down, The Ninety-Nine Wonders,
Ninety-Five, not funny by eighty-one,

brittle as beer bottles on the wall,
but like it or not, old grannies,
tough as sand. Some come in wheelchairs
or walkers, better to laugh

about themselves than sit home
watching re-runs of Lucy and Guy Lombardo
on New Year's. They could always cajole
some grandson to drop by with his wife

and camera between parties, good sports
who didn't mind confetti
and a live band strumming cowboy songs
and old gals shouting loud.

Uncle Al after World War Two

My cousin and I found a sack of medals
locked in his attic, green and purple ribbons
on rusty pins. Uncle Al boxed us with his eyes
that scowled Keep out. After Aunt Martha died,
he talked with no one but our mother about the war.

Al hated city cars that tossed dogs out of cars
to starve, the prairie silent at night
except far off, howls he could always hear.
Breathing was all Uncle Al could do for weeks,
pinned down by cancer like a mortar barrage.

He made our mother swear she'd feed the strays,
the herd, scatter his ashes from a plane.
Now, take down the lights Al wired by the corral.
He rigged those light poles years ago,
weeks after World War Two, floodlights for dark

starless nights. Tarred and soaked in creosote,
encased in concrete, they rotted anyway and will fall.
Sell all the bulls and burn the walls of paddocks
they've kicked down, no cows for months, no cows.
Give all the dogs to orphans at the Children's Home.

From the Rockies to Saigon and Back

In the east, I believed, there was wisdom,
mystery. Most, over the curve of the earth,
had been up for hours, growing wiser

while I slept. In the east, they weathered
each day's incredible first hour
while I lay mired in yesterday,

the dark ages. People see further, there,
the world older, spinning always away
from the west. Before Saigon fell,

I flew there on a jet from the States,
flying west, the odd back way
to Asia, touched down at dawn

outside a city almost dark. Tracers
and mortars flashed like lightning
in Rocky Mountain skies. In the east,

far from my wife and babies,
what did I learn? That nights are brief
before sunrise, dangerous as day,

that stars through rockets’ smoke
are dim as Denver smog, that only mercy
lets us rest and rise again.

A Mile of Mountain Above It

Give us granite, a mile-tall stack of rocks.
Block out horizons, surround us.
Here, at 8,000', astound us. We turn,

and everywhere we stare are cliffs,
granite and a thousand minerals
harder than gold. Who cares about silica

and shale, pale horizontal lines
in mountains--those thin, white,
brittle strips of shellfish

crushed under tons of rock, real rock.
Shale puts money in no one's purse,
not worth the time to mine it,

chalky cartilage stone-crushed
by a mile of mountain above it.
But shale, under all those massive cliffs,

takes snow and runoff, ice
crunched and pulverized--even shale
bears the weight of the world until it ends.

© Walt McDonald

 

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