Eratosphere - Reintroducing Dave Mason

Here's David's most recent biography, written refreshingly in first person:

"I was born in Bellingham, Washington, though both my parents were Coloradoans, my father's family going back four generations in the mountain state. Both parents were professionals--my father a naval officer who became a pediatrician, then a psychiatrist after he had left our family, my mother a psychology professor. We were an utterly outdoorsy family, and after my older brother inspired me by spending two years traveling around the world, I had my own adventures in Alaska, Britain and Spain. I later lived in Greece and have also lived in many parts of the U.S. My older brother, Doug, died mountain climbing in 1979, and my younger brother has continued to climb and pursue athletics, despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. He's now a sort of poster boy for the Enbrel miracle drug.

A slow learner, I struggled to write virtually all my adult life, having some success with fiction at first, then becoming more obsessed with poetry. My first book, The Buried Houses, was chosen by Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell as co-winner of the Nicholas Roeich Prize and published by Story Line Press (1991). Jarman and I then edited Rebel Angels together, with a lot of input from Gioia and McDowell. That book appeared in 1996, the same year as The Country I Remember, the title poem of which had won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. It would be eight years before my new collection, Arrivals, appeared from Story Line. Meanwhile I edited (with John Frederick Nims) the 4th edition of the poetry textbook Western Wind and (with Gioia and Schoerke) two more massive anthologies: Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Arts of Poetry, both published by McGraw-Hill in 2004. A new edition of Western Wind done entirely by me is due out in the spring of 2005.

I worked odd jobs, most of them manual labor, until I was 35, when I started teaching English at Moorhead State University in Minnesota (1989-1998). That job was very, very good for me in terms of friends and colleagues I met, but after twenty years away from the west I was starting to feel the desperate need for more dramatic topography (or, you might say, drama of a different sort) and took a job at my alma mater, The Colorado College, where I teach the ancients and the moderns, as well as come classes in Creative Writing, which turns out to be more challenging than I suspected. My wife, Annie, and I live in the mountain town of Woodland Park, about 15 miles west of Colorado Springs."

Dave neglects to mention The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, his wonderful collection of criticism from Story Line. Wilbur praised it for the deep humanity of its insight and its unusual comprehensibility in a field where gibberish is so celebrated. And here are three substantial poems from Arrivals, a collection which should be required reading for all Spherians:

NEW ZEALAND LETTER

For Anne Stevenson and Peter Lucas

“Nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of the earth.” -Charles Darwin

This morning, groggy and a bit footsore
from another tramp in these New Zealand hills,
I write to you, Anne and Peter, in Wales
or Durham, no doubt hoofing it yourselves—
or Anne with Mozart at her fingertips,
Peter tracking Darwin across the page.
Just now the sun slipped under laden clouds,
lighting a forest that, from where I sit,
could be some alternate Seattle, made
by an artist fond of hobbits and Maori lore,
exotic but expected like the sky
two nights ago: Orion on his back,
and at the opposite end what Bishop called
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross.

Out here
in Queenstown’s alps I’m slightly less at sea.
Two weeks ago, in a Northland port of call
that battened down its hatches while a squall
unsteadied solid earth like a tipped canoe,
I lay for hours awake on Hospital Hill
in a rented room, my Anne asleep beside me.
The continent of home, familiar, firm,
was far away. I felt, as Freud might say,
that oceanic, vague, religious sense,
my confirmation of insignificance,
and wondered with my hearing aids turned off
how thought would swim if I were totally deaf,
if wind and sails, wails, whales, and even Wales,
were all the same descending sonar ping,
an undersea sensation. I thought of friends
like you who sound these depths without the bends.

Forgive this letter from a wanderer.
My mind panning, a fluid Steadicam,
I’ve moved (with Annie) out of that bed
and that original, subversive storm,
afoot, entrained, by bus, in a small plane
I feared a gale would dash like a beer can
against a mountain’s wall of woods—in short
like Willie Nelson “On the road again,”
albeit in this tenuous sea-land,
the haven of environmentalists.
Forgive the sound of this, my sounding out
locations you have yet to see or hear,
and let me tender my small vision here.

Begin with the region’s young geology,
the accident of islands that still rise
and spiral into zig-zag mountain ranges,
glaciers long and white as wizards’ beards,
cold rivers, silt green or so transparent
they flow like breezes blowing over stones.
Now fill in lichens, mosses, undergrowth
of silver fern and berry-laden shrubs,
the eerie forest of the podocarp,
its leafless branches choked by hanging moss,
rare stands of rimu pine, the nikau palm,
sheep meadows scoured by European gorse—
alpine, tropical and imported plants
tossed on the rumps and hummocks of the land
right down to the shoreline birds, the dotterels,
whimbrels, bar-tailed godwits, white-faced heron
lording like headwaiters at low tide,
the shags and oystercatchers, penguins, grebes.
And here the albatross alights at last,
world traveler folding its weary wings.
Inland, white-backed magpies and pokeko birds
dot meadows, while in woods the begging wekas
pester walkers. Others I need hearing aids
to catch: fantails, bellbirds, twitching finches
chatter in humid shade, guarding their eggs
from possums or the poisons humans spray.

Which brings me around at last to swelling towns
like Auckland, Napier, Christchurch, Wellington,
the tourist hustle, some of it rough as guts,
where Poms and Yanks, Pakehas of all stripes,
mix with Maori and new wave immigrants,
fractious and varied as the forest birds.
It’s like Creation’s proud Cloudcuckooland
but earthbound, addled by bungy-jumping youth.
Each permanent or momentary claim
asserts a version of this land and sea
so freshly robbed of its virginity,
where moko hoons mark turf, spray-painting walls,
or clash like rugby teams in free-for-alls.
The spillage of spoiled empires everywhere
rumbles ashore like the redundant surf.

Yet the never-far-off sea still models change
like that wind I started with, to rearrange
Aoteroa, land of the white cloud.
Darwin hated it and only stayed
a week, bound for the sedentary life
that would explore as no one else had done
currents in all species known to the sun.
And terminal cases on every kind of pill
in every weather out on Hospital Hill
can try to see the earth for what it is,
not as the perfect dream that always dies,
the Promised Land promoted in brochures,
but as the sort of matter that endures
by changing. Some of its forms we recognize;
others astonish—the inarticulate
we try to voice before it is too late,
this metamorphic world, tidal and worn,
rooted, adrift, alive, and dying to be born.

MR. LOUDEN AND THE ANTELOPE

Mr. Louden was my father’s ranching friend
whose pick-up sprouted rust from summer hail.
It didn’t bother him. He had one arm,
and a tucked in sleeve, and drove us toward the end
of his fence line, passing piñon and chaparral.
Forty years. By now he’s bought the farm.

I can still hear him chuckling: No, there ain’t
nothing funnier than a one-armed man
driving while he tries to swat horseflies.
I never heard him utter a complaint.
He could have been weathered sandstone, deadpan
when his empty sleeve flapped out in the breeze.

He released the wheel to point as antelope,
like dolphins of the desert that were playing
in our dusty wake, surfaced alongside us
and in one fleet formation climbed the slope
ahead, and over it. They left us saying
little and were far too fast to guide us.

Where were we headed in that battered truck,
my father, old Mr. Louden, and I?
And was it the hail-pocked wreck that I recall?
Now forty-six, I can’t believe my luck,
to have seen those agile creatures chasing by—
unless, of course, I only dreamed it all.

Though I can’t prove it’s true, I saw them go
out of sight like figures out of a myth.
They left us gaping in their kicked up dust,
our own dust settling like summer snow,
while Mr. Louden laughed, conjuring with
his only arm, mage of the blooming rust.

THE COLLECTOR’S TALE

When it was over I sat down last night,
shaken, and quite afraid I’d lost my mind.
The objects I have loved surrounded me
like friends in such composed society
they almost rid the atmosphere of fright.
I collected them, perhaps, as one inclined
to suffer other people stoically.

That’s why, when I found Foley at my door—
not my shop, but here at my private home,
the smell of bourbon for his calling card—
I sighed and let him in without a word.
I’d only met the man two months before
and found his taste as tacky as they come,
his Indian ethic perfectly absurd.

The auction house in St. Paul where we met
was full that day of cherry furniture.
I still can’t tell you why he’d chosen me
to lecture all about his Cherokee
obsessions, but I listened—that I regret.
My patience with a stranger’s geniture
compelled him to describe his family tree.

He told me of his youth in Oklahoma,
his white father who steered clear of the Rez,
a grandma native healer who knew herbs
for every illness. Nothing like the ‘burbs,
I guess. He learned to tell a real toma-
hawk from a handsaw, or lift his half-mad gaze
and “entertain” you with some acid barbs.

So he collected Indian artifacts,
the sort that sell for thousands in New York.
Beadwork, war shirts, arrowheads, shards of clay
beloved by dealers down in Santa Fe.
He lived to corner strangers, read them tracts
of his invention on the careful work
he would preserve and pridefully display.

Foley roamed the Great Plains in his van,
his thin hair tied back in a ponytail,
and people learned that he was smart enough
to deal. He made a living off this stuff,
became a more authenticated man.
But when he drank he would begin to rail
against the white world’s trivializing fluff.

Last night when he came in, reeking of smoke
and liquor, gesticulating madly
as if we’d both returned from the same bar,
I heard him out a while, the drunken bore,
endured his leaning up against my oak
credenza there, until at last I gladly
offered him a drink and a kitchen chair.

I still see him, round as a medicine ball
with a three-day beard, wearing his ripped jeans
and ratty, unlaced Nikes without socks.
I see him searching through two empty packs
and casting them aside despite my scowl,
opening a third, lighting up—he careens
into my kitchen, leaving boozy tracks.

I offered brandy. He didn’t mind the brand
or that I served it in a water glass.
He drank with simple greed, making no show
of thanks, and I could see he wouldn’t go.
He told me nothing happened as he planned,
how he left Rasher’s tiny shop a mess.
I killed him, Foley said. You got to know.

*

You know the place. Grand Avenue. The Great
White Way they built over my people’s bones
after the western forts made stealing safe.
Safe for that fucking moneyed generation
F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to write about—
and here was Rasher, selling off such crap
no self-respecting dealer’d waste his time.

I heard he had good beadwork, Chippewa,
but when I went in all I saw was junk.
I’m thinking, Christ, the neighbors here must love him,
the one dusty-shuttered place on the block
and inside, counters filled with silver plate
so tarnished Mother wouldn’t touch it, irons
with fraying cords and heaps of magazines.

He had the jawbone of a buffalo
from South Dakota, an old Enfield rifle,
a horn chair (or a cut-rate replica),
German Bible, a blue-eyed Jesus framed
in bottlecaps—I mean he had everything
but paint-by-number sunsets, so much junk
I bet he hadn’t made a sale in years.

You got to know this guy—skinny bald head
and both his hands twisted from arthritis.
I wouldn’t give his place a second look
except I heard so much about this beadwork.
He leads me to a case in the back room.
I take a look. The stuff is fucking new,
pure Disneyland, not even off the Rez.

Foley’s glass was empty; I poured him more
to buy time while I thought of some excuse
to get him out of here. If homicide
indeed were his odd tale’s conclusion, I’d
rather let him pass out on my floor,
then dash upstairs and telephone the police.
I wouldn’t mind if “fucking” Foley fried.

It’s crap, he said. I tell this slimy coot
he doesn’t know an Indian from a dog.
I can’t believe I drove five hundred miles
to handle sentimental tourist crap.
He rolled himself upright in my kitchen chair
and looked at me with such complete disdain
that I imagined Mr. Rasher’s stare.

I knew the man. We dealers somehow sense
who we trust and who the characters are.
I looked at my inebriated guest
and saw the fool-as-warrior on a quest
for the authentic, final recompense
that would rub out, in endless, private war,
all but his own image of the best.

Pretty quick I see I hurt his feelings.
He gets all proud on me and walks around
pointing at this and that,
a World’s Fair pin, a Maris autograph,
and then he takes me to a dark wood cupboard
and spins the combination on the lock
and shows me what’s inside. The old man

shows me his motherfucking pride and joy.
I look inside his cupboard and it’s there
all right—a black man’s head with eyes sewn shut—
I mean this fucker’s real, all dried and stuffed,
a metal ashtray planted in the skull.
I look and it’s like the old man’s nodding,
Yeah, yeah, you prick, now tell me this is nothing.

He’s looking at me looking at this head,
telling me he found it in a house
just up the street. Some dead white guy’s estate
here in the liberal north allowed this coot
whatever his twisted little hands could take,
and then he hoards it away for special guests.
I didn’t say a thing. I just walked out.

Now Foley filled his glass, drinking it down.
His irises caught fire as he lit up.
I sat across from him and wiped my palms
but inside I was setting off alarms
as if I should alert this sleeping town
that murder lived inside it. I could stop
the story now, I thought, but nothing calms

a killer when he knows he must confess,
and Foley’d chosen me to hear the worst.
Weird, he said, looking straight at me beyond
his burning cigarette. I got so mad.
Like all I thought of was a hundred shelves
collecting dust in Rasher’s shop, and how
a dead man’s head lay at the center of it.

I had to get a drink. Some yuppie bar
that charged a fortune for its cheapest bourbon.
I’m in there while the sun sets on the street
and people drop in after leaving work.
I look at all these happy people there—
laughing, anyway; maybe they aren’t happy—
the well-dressed women tossing back their hair,

the men who loosen their designer ties
and sip their single malts—living on bones
of other people, right?
And two blocks down the street, in Rasher’s shop,
a head where someone flicked his ashes once,
because of course a darky can’t be human,
and someone’s family kept that darky’s head.

These genteel people with their decent souls
must have been embarrassed finding it,
and Rasher got it for a fucking song
and even he could never sell the thing.
No, he showed it to me just to get me,
just to prove I hadn’t seen it all.
Well, he was right, I hadn’t seen it all.

I didn’t know the worst that people do
could be collected like a beaded bag,
bad medicine or good, we keep the stuff
and let it molder in our precious cases.
Some fucker cared just how he dried that head
and stitched the skin and cut the hole in the top—
big medicine for a man who liked cigars.

It’s just another piece of history,
human, like a slave yoke or a scalping knife,
and maybe I was drunk on yuppie booze,
but I knew some things had to be destroyed.
Hell, I could hardly walk, but I walked back,
knocked on Rasher’s door until he opened,
pushed him aside like a bag of raked-up leaves.

Maybe I was shouting, I don’t know.
I heard him shouting at my back, and then
he came around between me and the case,
a little twisted guy with yellow teeth
telling me he’d call the fucking cops.
I found the jawbone of that buffalo.
I mean I must have picked it up somewhere,

maybe to break the lock, but I swung hard
and hit that old fucker upside the head
and he went down so easy I was shocked.
He lay there moaning in a spreading pool
I stepped around. I broke that old jawbone
prizing the lock, but it snapped free, and I
snatched out the gruesome head.

I got it to my van all right, and then
went back to check on Rasher. He was dead.
For a while I tried to set his shop in fire
to see the heaps of garbage in it burn,
but you’d need gasoline to get it going
and besides, I couldn’t burn away the thought
of that weird thing I took from there tonight.

It’s out there, Foley said. I’m parked outside
a few blocks down—I couldn’t find your house.
I knew you’d listen to me if I came.
I knew you’d never try to turn me in.
You want to see it? No? I didn’t either,
and now I’ll never lose that goddamned head,
even if I bury it and drive away.

*

By now the bluster’d left his shrinking frame
and I thought he would vomit in my glass,
but Foley had saved strength enough to stand,
while I let go of everything I’d planned—
the telephone, police and bitter fame
that might wash over my quiet life and pass
away at some inaudible command.

I thought of all the dead things in my shop.
No object I put up was poorly made.
Nothing of mine was inhumane, although
I felt death in a kind of undertow
pulling my life away. Make it stop,
I thought, as if poor Foley had betrayed
our best ideals. Of course I let him go.

The truth is, now he’s left I feel relieved.
I locked the door behind him, but his smell
has lingered in my hallway all these hours.
I’ve mopped the floor, washed up, moved pots of flowers
to places that he touched. If I believed,
I would say Foley had emerged from hell.
I ask for help, but the silent house demurs.