It was always Jesus or Roy Rogers I wanted to be
because I knew then what I know now.
If Jesus Christ had been born a smooth shaven Hollywood Cowboy
he would have been Roy.

I had the idea of a partial incarnation of Christ
called “The King of the Cowboys”
not knowing the role had been filled 5000 years ago
by Lord Krishna.
If you had a 78 RPM of Dale Evans and Roy Rogers singing “Ave Maria”
and the broken arm of the record player swept back
over and over from the end to the beginning like the broken arm of God
while your heart rose into pine trees shuddering with prayer,

then you understand me.

I shook hands with Roy and Dale
at the Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo
as they rode around the arena on Trigger and Buttermilk
greeting every child that came down to them.

It was like touching the feet of a plaster Madonna in San Antonio, Texas
that cries real tears.

two

Years later I decided to become one
of the adolescent preachers who used to tour the South
healing people so they barked like dogs
up and down the aisles of cinder block churches.
These churches have baptismals made of tin,
4–5 feet deep where working people are immersed in water
like the Bible says to do,
not just sprinkled like the rich say.
Afterwards we become useful Christian citizens
such as plumbers or insurance salesmen.
Baptismals are sometimes hidden until needed by blackboards
behind the pulpit where the preacher writes words like ”The Pope” or “The Jews”
during his sermon
and later makes a heavy chalk X across them
pressing so hard on the chalk stick
that sometimes it breaks or flies out of his hand.

I fell into a baptismal and nearly drowned in there
pretending I was Jesus.

I remember my Mother’s arm around me in the church
whispering in my left ear
while the preacher walked in his sleep down narrow hallways
of the Bible.
The preacher was named Brother Prentice Potter
and he made his living driving short haul truck.
I remember his arms swollen with muscle from unloading boxes of fruit
forbidden to the poor
but high on his left shoulder under the long sleeve shirt
and covered again by a cotton T
was a tattoo nobody was supposed to know about
of a red heart broken into pieces jagged as teeth.

What hair Brother Potter had was thin and curly and stuck to his skull
with sweat.
I worried I might look like him some day.
Now that I do
my right hand reaches back through all this time
to shake hands with him
to touch him high on his upper arm.

I remember him preaching about the end of the world
while my Mother whispered how good it would be
for the world to end while we sat there in church.

I looked around at walls and ceiling
built quickly as the world was out of cheap materials
and saw Jesus Christ riding out of the sky on a palomino stallion
breaking down rooftops like a Santa Claus on fire
waving his sword of many colors
with the blood of the rich splashed on his cheeks
with their blood up to the thighs of his horse
and his eyes like the wheat fields of his enemies burning!

It sounded good to me.


three

I used to take the red ball point pen out of my Mother’s purse
she kept for correcting errors
and I’d draw nail holes in the palms of my hands
and on my feet.
If I could stimulate a nose bleed at that time
real blood could be substituted for ink.
Then I’d lay out in the sun thinking how hot hell must be
and pretend I was hanging on the cross.

The earth would fall away from me
and I’d be flying on the cross among stars.
The cross was for me a fighter plane or dive bomber
and I was the lone pilot 30 seconds over Tokyo.

There was a certain tree I’d climb in full of faith
whose limbs were perfect for a crucifixion.
With my fingers braided in knots of imagined agony
and all around me crows and catbirds laughing like Pharisees
in the streets of Jerusalem
I would stand in heat and breathing wind.

The state bird of Texas is the mockingbird.
I imagined them clustered around my all seeing eyes
pecking me sightless
while I looked within at the face of God.

In Texas the crucifixion of Jesus Christ
and Sherman’s march to the sea are current events.

The tree was a willow and looked like a woman
bent over at the waist brushing down her long hair.
Being in that tree was like loving a woman
though I didn’t know it at the time.

Letting go of the body while keeping a grip on the limbs
I would fly upwards on the cross into temples of space.
I would be with stars like wildflowers nobody knows the names of.


four

Years ago in San Antonio, Texas I found a crucifix
of Jesus laughing.
He wore a crown of thorns like a sombrero
and even with his circus tears and all that Mexican blood
he was happy
because he knew then what I know now:

All wounds
even bullet holes in our hands and feet
are only flesh wounds.

I was a sleep walker then and I still am.
I didn’t know I cried in my sleep
wandering around my parent’s house looking for home.
Even years later sleeping in cars and abandoned houses
and once in a drainage ditch outside Wheeling, West Virginia
when the moon was raised against me like a sickle sword

I was crying and didn’t know it.

There were nights I was so cold I prayed for death
which seems extreme to me now.
Because I lived, I learned to embrace the cold and make love
to loneliness.

Where I live now
clouds come down over houses and fog squats in pear orchards.
If I walk in that fog I may hear laughter and not know whose.
I may hear children crying or men shouting at their wives.

When the wind blows through the River Gorge where I live
it can sound like laughter.
It can sound like men weeping together under a bridge.

The Columbia is loud with salmon backed against dams
ground up in generators and boat locks.
In my heart there is a river
and in my heart there are wheels and gears and millions of eyes.
But there is also Joy powerful as weeping that I cannot defend myself
against.
Joy comes over me and I collapse under it.
Then I kneel down and admit to myself and to you

I know nothing.

Sometimes I wander at night and stare over this curve of earth
asking for home.
Sometimes I go down through layers of terror
into a hole narrow as a scream.
It might be a birth canal.
It might be the wound in Jesus’ side or a hallway leading to a throne

and sometimes at night I feel I am swimming in this river
moving through the body of someone who has no name.
I am feeling in the dark for the spreading and the joining of waters
at the source.
I pray She will become small enough to be loved by me
and that in my hands her breasts will be the domes of a temple on fire.


five

In 1969 I decided to shake the dust of Houston, Texas off my feet
and walk into the wilderness near Huntsville
where the prison moon assaults the weary lost at night.

But I didn’t know how to live out there and I still don’t.

I had knelt by streams of blood and drunk my fill
of all this world has to offer.
It is the taste of blood that holds us to this world.
That is what I believed.
I had drunk the blood of suburban neighborhoods in Houston
at 3 in the morning when the only ones outside
were me and cars that leaked oil.
I had drunk the blood of streets in the Montrose area of Houston
where middle-aged beatniks, artists and religious fanatics lived.
Sometimes I slept in a Chevy with the Virgin of Guadalupe
standing on the dashboard

and the backseat covered with cigarette burns and knife holes.
I was a mummy wrapped in the bandages of who I had become
and I was crying.

I had one friend always drugged with amphetamines and Jesus
His name was Daniel and he drove a 63 Porche inherited from his father
with the original tires.
Rusted out and dented he’d drive down Montrose Blvd
dragging his muffler in the street and sending sparks into the trees.

Daniel wore orthopedic shoes without the laces
so the tongues flapped as he walked.
These shoes had been expensive.
They talked to him and they listened like no one else ever will again.
The faster he walked the faster the tongues flapped
and the more information they would give to him.
So he was always walking fast as he could until the shoes
that talked in tongues would start to sing.

Once I found him standing completely still in his kitchen.
He said he’d been there for days
but I had seen him drive up half hour before.
He said the shoes wanted him to know how it felt
to be a shoreline carried day by day into the Gulf.
The shoes began to talk to him even though he wasn’t moving.
They began to sing to him like two black women
washing dishes at a sink.

“Jesus will still be alive long after you’re dead!”

The truth of that hit both of us hard.
Jesus will still be alive long after I’m dead.
Selah
Think about it.

I think about death now.
I get up in the morning and the skin of my face
hangs like wet sheets from back yard lines.
My skull is a hilltop being logged to clearcut.
The years strip us bare and lay us etherized upon a table.
The years they are the hands of surgeons.
They cut us open and force back ribs to expose more and more of
the heart.

Now I look in the eyes of old friends and see burned churches,
houses of God broken into and set alight.
Jesus will still be alive long after we’re dead.
The soul is coiled in a body like a mouse who sleeps in the skull of a dog.
The cities are stacked bones in a trench of blood!
But the green heart is undefiled.

God wears sideburns and has acne on the back of his neck.
God smokes cigarettes in the cool of the evening
and wipes his hands on the crotch of his jeans.
The heart is a river where I kneel in shadows of a willow tree
praying to the god of water:

Carry me. Carry my family.
Lift our shadows from us or make them wings.


six

Between 1970 and 1972 I was always alone.
Everybody I knew was tangled up in sex like mudcats in fine nets
of fire
but I wouldn’t even touch myself down there unless I was holding
a soapy rag!
At that time if you looked anything like Jesus
then girls you didn’t know would ride up on bicycles and ask you home.

I looked a lot like Jesus.
I had the hair, the beard, and the feet.
I spent a lot of time looking up at the heavens as if
I’d just been hit on the head with a rock or shit on by invisible birds.

There was a girl called “Meadow Star”
who asked me to see a quilt her grandma made.
She looked like Mary Magdalene
and my grandma made quilts too so I went.
On the way she told me she was a dancer
and I thought she meant ballet or jazz
but when we got to her house there were g-strings on the kitchen table
made out of buckskin and crow feathers.
Someone had drawn her naked on the dining room wall and written the words
Ascension to Virginity over the top of it.

The quilt was spread across her bed like a field of tulips
in southeast Iowa as seen from a prop plane.
But to me that quilt was a desert where I had come to fast
and be tempted.
I drew a circle in that desert with my fingertip and stepped inside it.
Inside the circle was a spring of clear water.
Outside were tongues of fire jutting out of rocks.

There had been a night ten years before
when my Father didn’t want to go to church on Sunday night.
He wanted to stay home and watch acrobats from Hong Kong
on the Ed Sullivan Show.
My Mother stepped between my Father and me
drew a line across the linoleum floor with the toe of her low heeled shoe.
“All those who are for the Lord,” she said, “step across that line.
As for me and mine, we will serve the Lord!”

I had just seen Walt Disney’s version of “The Alamo”
starring Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen.
Colonel Travis had drawn a line in the dust with the tip of his sword
like my Mother did with the toe of her shoe.

Inside us is someone who never stops laughing.
To know this is to be in danger of losing everything.
That night I went to church with my Mother and 20 years passed
before I held my Father in my arms and let him cry.
It was the first of many times he poured salt into my desert shoulders
and every tear was a sacrifice and every tear was a lie.

Glad now I left that quilt undisturbed.
Glad I left that virgin un-ascended.
Glad I don’t have children scattered across Texas
who would be the same age now that I was then.

Who if I met them by accident on a bus ride to the Gulf
when the moon was a curved tooth rotting in heat haze
when the coastal plains of salt grass and oil derricks were chewed in headlights
and swallowed by the dark.

Who if I met my children for the first time with the shoreline coming closer
closing around us the olive colored arms of a mother dressed for church
who is also the Gulf of Mexico
with waves of green fire phosphorous and shallow water shark.

Who if I asked those children that were never born but have faces
never born but have names that come against suddenly at night
like birds exploding from a branch while I walk in my rich fog.

Who if I asked those children about their father
they would look at me with eyes of my grandmother
come back across Brazos with her face spread wide as a delta fan.
They would look at me and say

“I never knew you.”


seven

If I could tell how smoking dope in an apartment hallway
with all the doors closed inward could lead to jobs selling life insurance
it might be a deterrent to the kids I do have.
I’m a paper hanger now and good at the trade.
Call me at 386-3773 in Hood River, Oregon if you need any work done.

I once papered a bathroom for an old man named Jim Root
whose desolation was hidden by a joke
the way a clear cut is hidden from the highway by a fringe of trees.
He wore a Blazer’s cap and had a wife with a hump on her back
the size of a half grown cat.
When the time came to pay me he said

“You know Adolf Hitler was a paper hanger too.”

I said I didn’t know that, and I still don’t!
I don’t know anything now but sometimes I pretend.
In the middle of long explanations I will remember the words of wisdom
that came to me in two fortune cookies
at Bonnie’s Red Dragon China Cafe, in Fairfield, Iowa:

A worm gnawing in a tree is not heard. Neither should you be.

In a lifetime only 100 words are worth saying. If you must speak
let them hear only the river.

I left those words slippped between the loose seams of red flocked wallpaper
three booths back from the window
where the naugahyde seats are patched with duct tape.
Look for them and you will find that what I say is true.

When pain comes a man will face it or turn to the river.
He will swell up with silence like a woman with child
and he will sing like the river
mud in his throat, salmon leaping from his eyes.
We still drink from the river
though it carries bloated cattle on its back that pile up against dams
with all electricity released into water.

I believe that every one of us will crack
along lines predestined by the intelligence of the heart.
The heart will come to harm and it will heal itself.
But spread over many years or all at once like an ax blow
the heart will be broken by a force it no longer cares to resist.
Then every dam will collapse at once and there will be flooding
on the land!
Flakes of burning sky will fall on backs of children
setting light to 300 layers of skin going back seven generations!
Our bones will rattle!
The fillings in our teeth will rattle like seeds in a sacred gourd!

I look across years that curve gently back to a single point of laughter
from which all this world has come!
I have followed myself through a thousand streets curved as a rattler’s back
and I have arrived at this chair by this window near the Oregon border
with all the big trees coming down and the last owls hooting!
Everything I need to know I can see from here.

Inside my face is a skull that is always laughing!
It shines through my skin like the stalking moon.
There is death in life and life inside of death.
The dead move easily through the marrow of the living
like sleepwalkers through apartment hallways.

When our bones are hollow
wind blows through them the songs of a Cherokee flute.
I have to see through my own eyes and blow through my own bones
a song holy and immersed in the blood of the earth.
I have to let my voice go up like sparks into the trees.
Go down in the secret heart and walk through caverns to the core
of fire!

This is what my shoes have told me and I believe them.