VI. The Sinking River at Stevensport

Closing your eyes, you can see 

What nobody ever saw:  

It is midnight, past midnight,  

The figure just visible  

In the moonless, dew-laden dark 

Where river empties into  

River, and the water makes  

No sound, or a sound like time, 

Which stands still now on the bank. 

He, too, stands still on the bank, 

Late-summer night wind whipping 

The white linen of his coat-  

For, yes, he always did have  

A sense of style in such things.  

Behind him, the white car shines 

Under what starlight there is.  

He stares at what stars there are 

And remembers—or does he?- 

The flowered dress he bought you 

And raised above your waist here 

So you could straddle his lap. 

Does he think of the river  

Lit at Louisville, where some- 

Thing he can hardly admit  

To himself happened?—happened 

To you, though you both agreed 

It was the best thing to do. . . . 

Does he speak aloud now to  

No one? Does he say a name? 

Does he say your name before  

He walks into the river?  

Or does he just walk away?  

You must believe both stories  

Till the world makes up its mind. 

Either way, the white car shines 

As dawn fights the water, and

 -—All this behind your closed eyes—— 

That wide water seems to hold 

The dead in their element.  

- Joe Bolton, from "The Last Nostalgia"

"Autumn Fugue" by Joe Bolton

I remember how the silver leaves fell down,
Extravagantly, as if in prefigured spirals,
From the fig tree you couldn’t keep alive,
And how, when you’d sat watching for a while
That lovely dying, then turned your face to me,
Your face seemed the same silver of the leaves.

It had to do partially, I suppose,
With the light--how the brief and intense dusk
Along 14th Street gathered in the canopy
Of chestnuts choked with vine, filtering
In through the three windows of your white room
To make a luminous lake in which we swam.

Looking all that autumn for a holier way
Of talking about things, you found yourself
Hardly able, at last, to speak at all;
And so, for long moments, no word would pass
Between us, when we had only to listen
To the quarter-hourly noise from a nearby church.

There was something greater to the sadness
Than simply the going away of your lover,
Or even our own past failure at love.
What sadness there was carried with it the weight
Of something intensely formal, and which would not
Be overcome by anything so commonplace

As a gesture shared between the two of us.
And so, as the light faltered and the leaves fell down,
I’d light a cigarette and sip my drink,
And you’d arrange your body at the window
Like some unfinished portrait of yourself. . . .
If there is nothing between a man and a woman

Except the light by which they see each other,
And a past in which they appear continually smaller,
And a future that seems already to have acquired
The irrevocability of the past,
It seems important, nevertheless, to acknowledge
Their brief victory: the surviving it.

- Joe Bolton, from The Last Nostalgia

"The Story" by Joe Bolton

If it rained tonight
I’d lie down
For a thousand years.

—As if nothing had happened;
As if the story
Wouldn’t tell itself forever:

No more mother, no remembered loves, and my pulse
Purified, the only sound
As I lowered myself into the depths…

But the bells are ringing up the hill,
Punishing bells,
Recounting all the arguments against me.

If I’ve created the story of my life,
Why not now the story
Of not having ever lived at all?

Maybe then there wouldn’t be this burden
Of what was lost
Almost before it had arrived.

Maybe then there wouldn’t be this weight
Of what is
And what I can feel myself already losing.

"The Story" by Joe Bolton

After the life is lived
And the world is what it is,
There is only the story:

At Stevensport, the Sinking, River
Empties into the Ohio,
And the Ohio widens.

Or does the story perhaps precede
The living of it, as the new day
Seems to depend on the cock’s cry?

And do the dead and the unborn occupy
The same dimensionless dimension,
Or are they simply where they seem to be?

It would be easy enough to say
What happened, could you only
Bring yourself to:
______________A girl—
No, a young woman—who has lived her life
With old-time parents on a farm
On what the Indians once called the Dark
And Bloody Ground, and who
Has a perhaps somewhat imprudent appetite
For things sensual, falls in love.
His speech and dress and manner
Are slightly strange to her at first, but she

Is taken with the simultaneous
Inward frailty and successful outward gesture
With which he lives in the world, of which
He seems already to have seen much.

In the summer of your first and one great love,
Stars flared nightly in the architecture of sky,
And the world opened up beneath that sky.
The scenes flash and fade now like summer starfall:
Parked in his white car down some dark road;
Driving to Owensboro and Bowling Green; dancing
In a little dive in Tell City, Indiana...
You see yourself—that self—like the portraits
Of those who, no longer living, live
In the flash and fade of a moment torn from time.

*

Once, the city lured her.
Once, watching the lights
Of Louisville come slowly on in summer dusk,
She thought ... what?
That this would last forever? —Or even
Outlast forever?
______________Later,
Going there to undo
What the two of you had done,
You saw how dirty-gray the city was,
As morning began and the poorer people rose
To the day’s indecencies,
And you saw you were suddenly one of them . . .
When it was over, you had to have him
Stop the car so you could throw up,
Then hugged yourself all the way home.

And she never caught sight of him again.

And so are left to remember the summer nights
When, half-drunk in your daddy’s truck or his white car,
You’d take the hills and turns on Rough River Road
At seventy, just to feel your insides rise.
And laugh for surviving it, and look for shooting stars.

The white car was all that was left of him.
No body, or note, was ever discovered.
—Only the white car, shining in September dawn,
Beside the Sinking River at Stevensport . . .
And which circumstances have, of course,
Led to speculation:
______________that he got you
Into trouble and couldn’t stand himself for it;
That you, never good, drove him. to it;
That he only wanted to make it look
As if he were dead, and is living it up
In Chicago or Indianapolis or some such place.

The rumors, unverified, multiply,
While the people you grew up with
Marry, buy farms, go bankrupt, get divorced,
And move off to the city, looking for work.

The night is starless, utterly still.

You are careful not to let these pieces
Of a narrative cohere
Into anything that might explain too much.

For you, who live in the world,
Must let the world
Remain ambiguous.

And it just wouldn’t be right
To blame a drowned boy
For not floating up bloated,

Or not leaving a note,
Or perhaps not even
Drowning himself at all.

-from "Breckinridge County Suite"

"Hard Country" by Joe Bolton

"It is, even now, a hard country to live in.

Full summer is invisible fire under cypresses
Dying of thirst,
And you think of the dog days it got too hot
To do much else but sit and sweat
And watch the ground bake till it cracked.

Or, wintering, it could be the New World:
The empty duskward distances
And killing promise of mow.
You still remember the night it fell to fifteen below.
You were sitting at the kitchen table,
Ten years old,
A blanket on your lap and a bowl
Of snow cream in front of you.
Your mother was stoking the stove.
You saw, through the window, the west field
Silvered with snow and starlight. Saw
The figure of your father crossing the field,
And the load he carried curled in his arms:
A calf that had picked a bad night for being born.
He brought it in to warm by the stove,
Red ice of afterbirth melting into pools
And the poor thing’s ears already frozen off.

Now, in autumn, walking the long mile
Back from the empty mailbox,
You can see the place, what’s left of it:
Two Plymouths and a ‘34 Ford
Squat rusting, wheelless, home
To broken tools and rotten clothes, mice.
Gray barns and outbuildings lean graying.
And the white house is white
Only in memory,
For the photographs, too, have faded.
Back of the smokehouse, from limp fur, the skull
Of an eaten raccoon grins skyward.
You wonder if there was ever any glory to be had here,
And if not, then why, for two hundred years,
Anybody has bothered....

A hard country to live in, yes,
But not a hard country in which to find
A place to drown oneself.
You think of water, of the names
Of water: Sinking River. Rough River Lake,
South Fork of the Panther.
And all of it flowing Ohioward, Gulfward.

For water everywhere rages to be with other water;
Or, held isolate in ponds, in the hoofprint
Of the thousand-pound heifer after rain,
Reflects the utter emptiness of sky.

And water is as empty as sky, only
Easier to fall into,
Heavier to breathe."

"The Return" by Joe Bolton

And when, finally, you found your way back,
It seemed you barely recognized the place—
Or rather, the place barely recognized you.
. . .
But visiting friends, their faces both the same
And not the same, you realized how the loss
Of a common language could undo the world:

How the sky over each landscape contained
The blueprints of a city that might rise
When all your generation had gone away,

And how lovers were, in the end, reduced
To the sounds of names, the flesh utterly forgotten.
And it seemed then that you'd come all this way

Only to pass unnoticed through the place,
Driving fast down dangerous, familiar roads
Like a shadow you had cast years before.

"Tropical Watercolor: Sarasota"

Summer sings not far away, and we both know
The errors we've made. The sloped shoulders
Of those palms in the middle distance
Darken; the palms stand solitary as guards.

Summer sings, and against those walls
The late May light has sweetened, the palms
Sigh a little, fronds swaying in the breeze,
Making a sad watercolor of the square.

A mackerel sky frames the square, the square
We dreamed failed us in this place we'd come to
To find ourselves again as in a mirror.
Love, this is the square that failed.

I broke myself trying to make myself strong
For you. Dusk gilds white buildings, and smoke
From my cigarette floats toward the stars
That aren't there yet, the stars we used to desire.

They are a vast absence, reminding me
I don't believe in anything anymore except
The difficulty of everything for men and women.
Your remembered ghost is the ghost of my grandmother

Walking here endlessly in a black dress,
Shadow lost among the shadows of palms
On this square that failed, blocks from the sea.
I have run out of life, for what?

I have run out of life from the repetition
Of our moving only from mirror to mirror,
Catching our reflections in shop windows
And finding them less real than mannequins.

- by Joe Bolton, from "The Last Nostalgia"

"One World" by Joe Bolton

I have a photograph:
It is the green of a Kentucky summer,
A few skinny sycamores
Gone white with afternoon light,
A shadowed dirt road
Curving off who knows where in the distance.
You are leaning against a blue fence,
Legs tan and hair bleached a little from the sun,
My T-shirt tenting your breast.
Years later and a thousand miles removed.
A waiter named Rico lifts his sad eyebrows.
I nod.
I've been drinking at this crummy bar
In the spring dusk of Florida,
Watching the cars go by
With their headlights just on,
Hearing a siren wail.
I don't remember how it was
We came to live in cities.
But I think that somewhere this evening
A man has checked into a cheap motel
And shot himself in the head.
His driver's license and an empty bottle
Laid on the bedside table
For explanation.
Maybe he had a photograph
He couldn't reconcile his life with anymore
And wondered, at the end,
What he had come here hoping to find.
Soon enough now,
I'll be either drunk or out of money.
And there will be nothing to do
But walk back home in the first dark.
I can see on the television
It’s cold where you are,
And the sky is failing all across America.
Why were you smiling
That afternoon so long ago?
I can only think we must have been happy.
Somehow that helps.
We are still here, after all,
And it is the same world.

-from "The Last Nostalgia"

"Laguna Beach Breakdown" by Joe Bolton

You had come searching for a second chance,
But trying to break through, merely broke down,
Until at last any sense of purpose
Seemed nothing more than something else to lose.
You let it go and, seeing no reason to mourn
What you could no longer name, kept silence
Under the vast vacuum of heaven
Someone had nailed stars up to to hold in place.
You were hoping maybe a change of season
Might help, but there was none. You woke at dawn
Shuddering in the indifferent embrace
Of your own arms, unable to turn or return,
Dreaming of drowning, neutral as a seaweed in the war
The sea continually waged against the shore.

-from "The Last Nostalgia"

"The Starlessness of the Fortieth Year" by Joe Bolton

"Maybe it's OK after all if you
Never write the great novel or make love
To the tan, oiled movie star in Rio.

Stretched out under an ordinary mauve
Sky, you count the stars that couldn't care less
About you. Blinded by their own cold light,

They've wheeled these forty years above your loss
And are little consolation tonight.
Even grand failures were beyond your reach:

Those heartbreak letters written and burned,
That Jewish girl who rode your hand so deep
Into orgasm she could not return.

What night requires, the singing dawn gives back,
Trustworthy as your inevitable heart attack."

- Joe Bolton, from "Bad Sonnets"

"Smoke and Gold: Cedar Key, 1988" by Joe Bolton

When a moon rises to moor the evening star,
The Gulf swells, making the distance to Texas
Irrevocable. . . .
                          There are ships out there
That say goodbye repeatedly in your sleep,
Ships that never arrived
Where someone might still stand waiting
On the far shore.

                          Meanwhile,
There is the magic Floridian hour
When the sea flashes with sunset,
When the sky becomes almost
Tangible in its painterliness, and memory
Rolls loaded dice across the waves. . . .

Still, in the soft metallic resonance of twilight,
The closest thing you have left to a soul
Is the smoke from your cigarette drifting out the window
Of a hotel room, number nine, and what little
You can remember of the little love you made.

And at night here there’s nothing to do
But lie down beside your lost self
And the lost selves of others you have lost . . .

—As the dark ghosts of ships
Sound their goodbyes, never arriving
                                                    at the far shore.

- Joe Bolton, from The Last Nostalgia

"The New Gods" by Joe Bolton

And then, for a long time, nothing happened.
The citizens slept in the sleeping cities
And rose at dawn and worked and loved and slept.
Nobody knew just how long this would last.

It happened because it wanted to happen.
Young, sculptural, the gods rose in the cities.
Lush, sexual, they shone as the citizens slept.
Lovely, they filled the screens but couldn’t last.

It happened because it had to happen.
Moving sleepless through the sleepless cities,
Filling the dreams of citizens who slept,
They too just wanted to sleep at the last.

Not from the snow-marbled heights of mountains,
Not from the deep blue rivers the snow made,
Not from the sweet blue nowhere of the sky,

But from the scented gloss of magazines,
From New York, Houston, and L.A., they came--
To become immortal, and then to die.

– Joe Bolton, from “The Last Nostalgia”

"The Prototypical Ghosts" by Joe Bolton

The west field, wasted, seems day by day to recede
From the warped kitchen window where you stand in steam,
Your hand gone limp as the rag that won’t drop from it.
Like wom-out records, your frail parents, aging

Even when you were born, in their dotage
Seem more and more the prototypical ghosts
Of themselves, as if fifty years of food
From the same gray land had turned them gray as the land.

They hardly make a sound now, unless it is
To rasp a vague complaint, half remember a year
That has forgotten them, or tap against the table
Some object that’s outlasted its significance.

– Joe Bolton, from “The Last Nostalgia”

"Lament on New Year’s Day" by Joe Bolton

I used to stroll untroubled down the variegated street,
The street I knew as I knew my own mind,
Where everything was real and without novelty.
And giving myself away to the depths of things,
I was gone.

Later, I doubled back down that same street,
Perhaps hoping to find the past lurking
In that wound of a room we'd shared
In the house on the corner.
And it was as if nothing had happened
In the years since her leaving.

Still, they don't come back, the great days,
The cries clarified with distance,
The fragrant lining of a patent leather shoe
Already beautiful beyond its function.

There was a precise moment towards dusk
When the window of a certain room was ringed with light,
And the dark walnut of an antique desk proclaimed
That those who were able to save themselves
Would be twice reimbursed tomorrow for their suffering.

Now, a V-shape of migrating geese
Or bombers on a practice mission
Freezes in mid-flight and turns to blue ash
In the sky above 1986.

- Joe Bolton, from “The Last Nostalgia”

Lost Winter Seascape with Figures

"Once there was a world you could 

Hold in the palm of your hand,

And upon which the snow was 

Always just starting to fall--

World of a city that lay  

By a body of water  

Where people gathered to watch 

Ships set sail for other worlds.  

And high over the city  

At the edge of the water,  

Stood a great woman of stone 

Whose name no one remembers.  

Once there was a world you could 

Hold in the palm of your hand, 

And, by turning it over,  

Make the first soft snow swirl down  

On the lit houses of those  

Whose name no one remembers, 

But who, it seems now, must have 

Loved one another greatly.  

Why else would they have taken 

The trouble to put her there--

Stone woman who stood waiting 

For ships that never came back?"

- Joe Bolton, from 'American Variations'

"Prelude: Late Twentieth-Century Piece"

And after pain, the calm—dark records on dark shelves:
Some notion of romance we never got over,
Some sweet past theme we kept trying to recover,
Some concept of ourselves as more than our lost selves.

If we cannot be lovers, we will be players,
Throttling sharp-dressed and muscled, guns in our pockets
For good luck, through the new cities of the tropics--
Deco, palm, flamingo, blues and greens in layers.

This is the dead end of the end of the dead day.
Starlit, remembering what we outlived, we lie
Watching old films of us sweep the ceiling: the sigh
Of flesh on flesh, the cut, and the turning away.

- by Joe Bolton, from "The Last Nostalgia"

"The Parthenon at Nashville" by Joe Bolton

Late December noon, near freezing—
Maple and sweetgum bare, but the grass green yet
In sunlight, and warmth of light wearing away
At the frail scythe's-edge of ice
Around the pond. On her lunch hour,
Parked in his car, they tossed the last
Of their sandwiches to ducks that bobbed and fussed
In the smaller oval of water not frozen over.
They were beyond being
In love, but not quite ready
To look past the end of the affair.
Across the water, reflected in the water,
Risen stone:
Columns swelling with light,
The stylized figures restored
To the frieze- an order
Called into question
By the troubled surface of the pond.
They remember wondering
What happened to the ducks
Come autumn. Now they know: nothing.
And now a solitary jogger pushes his breath
Past them, as the traffic continues
Out on West End.
They sense that something
Needs to be done or said—
Anything but this feeling of themselves
As figures held in the motion
Of some lost moment.
And yet they can't seem to move, to speak,
Maybe thinking they won't have this clarity
Again for a long time, maybe amazed
At the distance from which they see themselves:
Luminous, hardly human,
And already half in love with the beautiful ruins.

-Joe Bolton, from The Last Nostalgia

"Summer's Lament" by Joe Bolton

Now summer's gone, those long days of summer.
The light's still warm, but there's nobody down by the river.
Is this all there is? There has to be more.

Bronzing our bodies like gods beside the water,
We watched the blue-green world through Wayfarers.
Everything happened that's supposed to happen in summer.

A last dark chord dies in my dark guitar,
But I can't let go of what's already over.
Is this all there is? There has to be more.

Remember how we'd drive down by the river,
Risking the bodies we loved into the water?
And our luck held. Our luck held all summer.

We could not drown. We couldn't push the fever
Far enough; it rose, but broke in the water.
Is this all there is? There has to be more.

In the sky's white text, I read the cities of winter:
A world we did not ask for, and a future.
Now this page is all that's left of summer.
Is this all there is? There has to be more.

-from The Last Nostalgia

"The Circumstances" by Joe Bolton

If strength is love, then we weren't strong enough,
But if strength is letting love go, we were.
Men among men, we couldn't trust each other.
With women, it was ourselves we couldn't trust.

It had to do with houses and with cars,
With what had to be done and with money.
We wound up loving money like a country
In a country we loved like women, its stars

Transposed from flag to night sky, its lithe palms
Lonely beyond all hope of consolation.
Night after night, the festive repetition
Of food and drink, of music and new films...

--It failed us, finally, or else we failed it.
We never brought the long quarrel with our fathers
To a close, and so never saw our daughters
Until they'd drifted away like money spent.

It rained then. And suddenly the faces
Of our wives were older, our faces were old,
The screens went blank, the light dimmed, and the cold
Came to stay for good in our white houses.

Dying, what we remembered of our lives
Was nothing more or less than simply talking
About nothing in particular, walking
Nowhere down dark streets with other men's wives.

-from The Last Nostalgia

"The Seasons: A Quartet" by Joe Bolton

I

Come late autumn, I'll wear black leather again,
My gray felt boots make a sound like the perfect crime
As I pass along the deserted avenue
Some Sunday evening, admiring the dried-up fountains.

I think the trees will be left harsh and bare
As Donatello's Mary Magdalene:
Their branches thorns, their leaves fallen hair. And you?
You'll know it's finally a fine line

We walk between the last fall and the next,
And a faith without foundation by which we survive
Such seasons as these. Look at the washed-out sky,
At the stars competing with streetlamps, then look for me:

I'll be the stranger slouching on the corner,
His face lit by a dying match. I'll be
Everything you've tried not to remember,
But which is reflected in the half-light of your eyes.


II

Is this the Russian snow Napoleon's legions
Bloodied with their feet before they fell?
No, just sundown in Paducah, Kentucky,
Day's last shallow breath shading to a faint rose

The soft white other side of the river.
I seem to remember turning away, once,
From this same balcony with its twisted railing
Dense as a frozen black gum, to see you

Still sewn up in your warm dream, till my breath
Frosted the glass over. Now, as tugboats slice
Their way through the ice on the Ohio again,
I think the Belle of Louisville has gone down

To winter in New Orleans, and I wonder
About the why and wherefore of your departure.
It's cold out here, and this feeble light won't last
The time it will take me to drink it a silent toast.


III

So the rain falls., and the garden grows full
Of itself, fruits and flowers like brushstrokes
Against the lush dark backdrop of the woods.
Somewhere in the woods a stream is playing

Lightly as some old desire turned inward,
And somewhere in the stream a single sunfish
Lets its fiat side break the pane of water
At an isolate oval of light in the dense cathedral.

All is desire: hushed lull before the storm,
Rain like scythes through the fields, scattered birds
Breaking into song to find one another,
The coming dark's duet of moon and star.

Five summers ago, I watched a woman
Wander into the garden at dusk, select
A tomato, and close her eyes as the juice fell
Like something utterly pure onto her breasts.


IV

What Pasternak called "Unforgetting September"
Ripens as always, and Tchaikovsky's Hunting Party,
Lured too far into the forest by the red fox,
Is lost forever. I am listening

To the String Quartet No.1in D Major
With its heartbreaking second movement Tolstoy
Wept through in Moscow in 1871.
(Tchaikovsky got the theme from a gardener.)

I can remember as well as September does,
And what music remains inside of me
Is muted over with memory, strains sad
As the seed that spills from the withered okra plants.

The best days of summer are the days of summer gone:
Something cooking, a wash of light on the water...
The music dies, and what I hold is the world.
One leaf falling would break the spell. It falls.

-from"The Last Nostalgia"