Joe
Joe lived in a cabin
outside of Mount Vernon, Washington,
a place his uncle built for hunting.
I visited him there once or twice,
on my way somewhere else.
There was no water, no electricity,
just a woodstove and black windows,
and his things: a suit of armor
into which he had pounded hundreds of nails,
a jar with a cat skull and cat bones
that he had labeled with a strip of tape
like the old-world naturalists—
FELUNUS EXTINCTUS.
He had a few books on chemistry,
medieval history, alchemy,
a biography of Alistair Crowley.
And he had a little wooden statue
of the weeping Buddha.
It was such a forlorn place to live,
dark, in the woods, off the road on a dirt drive—
he said, “I don’t fit with people.”
And it’s true, he never did.
Even as a kid he was wild,
eyes on fire with something—
up in his attic room one time,
he and his brother, Jerry, and I
were hanging out doing nothing
on a rainy Sunday, parents away
downstairs somewhere, and Joe ran out
and came back with his father’s shotgun,
loaded, and pointed it at Jerry’s head,
pulled back the hammer—
Jerry just sat there, smiling, a kid
maybe four years old, unknowing,
and then Joe pulled the trigger—
click, and nothing happened.
It was a miracle, really.
We were in slow motion, then,
blue gun barrel, warped windows,
then came back up to speed—
Jerry was crying, and the parents appeared,
my mother grabbed me by the arm
and swept me away.
I ran into Joe years later.
He’d just gotten out of the Navy.
He’d had a good run, he said:
a small ship, hosting dignitaries, parties,
and all the drugs he took, he said,
should have killed him, he should be dead.
But the angels came down and said,
enough…you’ve done enough,
and we can’t protect you from here—
“The rest,” he said, “I can’t tell you.
I don’t want to scare you.”
He drifted back to the northwest,
took some classes at the college,
and began living alone in his cabin there
under the big trees
with his armor and his cat and his Buddha.
The last time I saw him, he said,
“Hey, man, can you help me?
I sort of banged up my truck.
It’s just down the road, there
could you could give me a lift
so I can get my tool box
and tie a rope around it
so kids won’t mess around with it?”
I drove him down the road,
and we came to his truck at a curve,
and what I saw—
the front end was smashed in,
the steering wheel was punched back
through the driver’s seat,
the battery in the passenger seat,
broken glass, buckled doors—
I looked at him and said,
“How did you survive this?”
There wasn’t a scratch on him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just lucky, I guess.”
We got his tool box,
tied a rope around the truck,
and I took him back to his cabin,
dropped him off, and drove away.
I avoided him after that
because I could see he was lucky, sure,
but guys with luck like that come out clean,
and leave wreckage as they go,
and it’s not their fault,
they’re just always in the eye of a storm,
so you have to beware—the force of nature.
The Hearers
they hear it constantly
a low rumbling
like a truck going by
and it drives them mad
no answer to what it is
industry electromagnetic pulse
plates of the earth grinding away
and she hears it too
I hear it
can’t you hear it?
it won’t stop
it’s like a nightmare
and we can’t wake up
she says it’s making her crazy
can’t wake up
can’t wake up
I say
look at your hands
Thoughts of a Hanged Man
I’ll never be cold again
I’ll never feel hate again
I’ll never be hungry again
I’ll never feel fear again
I’ll never know pain again
I’ll never have nightmares again
I’ll never experience shame again
I’ll never regret again
I’ll never choose badly again
I’ll never wait in line again
I’ll never
The Grave
Raymond Carver has a beautiful grave
with a big granite stone with his words on it.
That’s pretty solid, man—
your words etched in stone.
And he’s got a granite bench you can sit on
and look at his grave and his words
or out over the graveyard at the sea.
Actually it’s the Straight of Juan de Fuca,
which I think of as his
because he wrote about it in his poetry.
I picked out where I’d like to be buried—
Lake View Cemetary
between Denise Levertov and Bruce Lee.
That’s how you’d find me—
someone would say, yeah, he’s right over there
between the poet and the philosopher.
And someone might ask, so what was he?
There probably won’t be a bench.
You’ll just have to stand there
or sit on the ground. Come on, get real close.
Maybe there will be words on the stone.
I don’t know, and maybe when you look up
you’ll see something you’d say is mine
because I wrote about it and claimed it with words.
Maybe not. It’s not really up to me to decide.
by Douglas Cole
Douglas Cole has had work in The Chicago Quarterly Review, Red Rock Review, and Midwest Quarterly. More work is available online in The Adirondack Review, Salt River Review, and Avatar Review, as well as recorded stories in Bound Off and The Baltimore Review. He has published two collections of poetry, “Western Dream,” through Finishing Line Press, “Interstate,” through Night Ballet Press, as well as a novella, “Ghost,” through Blue Cubicle Press. He received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry; the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House; and First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway. He was recently the featured poet in Poetry Quarterly. He is currently faculty at Seattle Central College.
