Issue 14

Spring 2003

Walt McDonald

Walt McDonald was born in 1934 in Texas. In addition to serving as an Air Force pilot and teaching at the Air Force Academy, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1966. He is the author of twenty collections of poems, including Climbing the Divide (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Great Lonely Places of the Plains (Texas Tech University Press, 2003, poems paired with color photos by Texas State Photographer Wyman Meinzer); All Occasions (2000); Whatever the Wind Delivers: Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest (1999; with archival photos selected by Janet Neugebauer from Tech's Southwest Collection), which won a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame; Blessings the Body Gave (1998); Counting Survivors (1995); Where Skies Are Not Cloudy (1993); All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems (with photographs selected by Janet Neugebauer; 1992); Night Landings (1989); After the Noise of Saigon (1988); Rafting the Brazos (1988); and The Flying Dutchman (1987). He has also published a book of fiction, A Band of Brothers: Stories from Vietnam (1989).

Mr. McDonald has published more than 2,200 poems in journals including American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, First Things, Journal of the American Medical Association, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Among his many honors are six awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, including the Lon Tinkle Memorial Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a Career (2000), and four Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. In August 2000, Walt McDonald was appointed the Texas State Poet Laureate for the year beginning November 1, 2000 and ending October 31, 2001.

Walt is also featured on the Academy of American Poets National Poetry Map.

 

Doesn't the Wind Out There Drive You Wild?

Dust roars by and batters us for hours,
ends up in Dallas, Shreveport, who knows where.
Dirt was New Mexico yesterday

or Yuma, west winds a caravan of sand.
Plains farmers' plows go down, deep down
and peel clods big as the heads of cows,

covering soil with clods, glossy ruts
to make the west wind burble, stop slicing rows
like knives. Cattle caught in the fields

turn west and face it down, solid as barns,
not budged by blows to their muzzles.
Bulls snort and grind teeth side to side

for hours until the wind dies down.
Even in blizzards they graze,
their eyes don't even blink.

Montana Deer at Dawn

Between snowshoe months and spring bikinis,
we had our pick of the litter--log cabin
in the pines, rock path without bear scat

or snakes. Five glaciers within ten miles,
more ice than all of Texas in decades.
We breathed heady air and read the signs,

Here there be grizzlies, don't hike alone.
Above the cirrus, the moon was a ten-watt bulb
ice blue. Whatever watched us in dark

knew what we were, waddled off or crouched
in the forest. At dawn, we saw Montana deer
slip past the window. After baths so cold we froze,

we toweled each other off and shivered back to bed,
toes and tingling noses like honeymoon
decades ago. All week after hikes, we rocked

on the deck until midnight, taking turns
with binoculars in silence, watching peaks fade,
the moon and stars, that dark Montana sky.

After Fierce Blizzards

English muffins and milk,
oatmeal and berry pies.
My wife bakes magic in a cabin
two miles high in the Rockies,

snow-packed meadows and fog.
Elk graze the golf course
and lawns in West Glacier,
calves on the way in a month.

Last night the cabin shook,
blizzard so fierce glass rattled
and ashes swirled. Bears miles away
stuffed their cubs back into caves.

Our children sleep in distant cities,
almost time to wake their own
for school. Now, clouds float past
treetops so sharp clouds snag

and we're bundled up outside,
sipping coffee and rocking,
staring at snow-packed granite
and a thousand miles of pines.

The Well on Uncle Oscar's Ranch

We found Uncle Oscar's sword from Japan
and jars of teeth. Oscar was a marine in the war,
raised goats and lambs, big man with a grudge
against coyotes and bobcats. He needed no dogs

to track down cougars he spotted at a thousand yards.
We saw his knives and tomahawk, buffalo heads
on the wall. His granddaddy claimed the ranch
before the last pitched-battle on the plains,

dug a well before barbed wire. In that deep well,
we dropped down more than buckets--pennies
and broken compasses for luck, rocks
to hear the splash. We dared each other to spit

and all cousins did, needing no blood oath
to keep secrets. Uncle Oscar taught us how to rope
for hours in a saddle, how salt water heals the hands,
rope burns when we forgot our gloves.

we marveled how hard our muscles were by August,
hauling buckets of water from the well
to Aunt Emma's kitchen, to horse troughs
twice a day and all five Saturday baths. Once,

when we let the buckets drop and sink to the bottom,
when we cranked both buckets up, bumping
and splashing, one dripped slimy moss like hair
a hundred years old, plastered to bits of rock or bone.

© Walt McDonald

 

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