Rain on the River

Selected Poems and Short Prose

Jim Dodge

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780802138965
• eBook ISBN: 9780802198280
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Chapbooks, musings, poetry, and prose by a folklorist with a "wonderful imagination, eye for detail and command of language" ( Publishers Weekly).
 
While Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, his first and abiding passion is poetry. After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and only reading to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, as well as occasional broadsides and, since 1987, a Winter Solstice poem or story, most given as gifts to friends.
 
Rain on the River contains his work collected here for the first time, as well as three dozen previously unpublished poems. Dodge's verse and short prose offer the same pleasures as his fiction—a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel, all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace. "Jim's words are his gift to the world. His life is his art; his words are merely tokens of appreciation. Reading the poems and short prose . . . makes me happy to be alive. . . . Mine's a happiness born from the revelation that 'money and food and poetry [are] ways to live, not reasons," as Jim puts it" ( Sacramento News & Review).

New Poems
Short Prose

The Banker

His smile is like a cold toilet seat.
He shakes my hand as if he’s found it
floating two weeks dead in a slough.
I tell him I need money.
Tons of it.
I want to buy a new Lamborghini,
load it with absinthe and opium,
and hit the trail out of these rainy hills
for a few years in Paris.
I try to explain
I’m at that point in my artistic development
where I require a long period
of opulent reflection.

The banker rifles my wallet.
Examines my mouth.
Chuckles when I offer 20 Miltonic sonnets
as security on the loan.
Now he’s shaking his head, my confidence,
my hand good-bye. “Wait,” I plead,
“I have debts and dreams
my present cash flow can’t possibly sustain.”
“Sorry,” he mumbles, “nothing I can do,”
and staples some papers
in a way that makes me feel
he’d rather nail my tongue to an ant hill.
I stare at him in disbelief.

And under the righteous scathing of my gaze
the banker begins to change form.
First, he becomes a plate of cold french fries
drenched in crankcase oil.

Then a black spot
on a page of Genesis.
Finally, a dung beetle,
rolling little balls of shit
across a desk bigger than my kitchen.

Yet even as I follow these morbid transformations
I never lose sight of his bloated face,
the green, handled skin
shining like rotten meat.

But then his other faces
open to mine:
father, lover, young man, child–
our shared human history
folding us into one.
And only that stops me
from beating him senseless
with a sock full of pennies.

The Real Last Words of Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid you can’t hide out
inside yourself forever.
Beautiful
twisted killer,
shoot a man dead for looking at him wrong,
even a couple of women some said,
in cold twisted blood
as if the flat burning path of a bullet
straightened anything out.

Sheriff Pat Garrett gunned Billy down
on the dark porch of a bordertown cabin
where Billy, knife in hand,
had gone outside to slice a steak
from a hanging slab of venison,
leaving his lady for the night
asleep inside.

Garrett calling his name just before he pulled the trigger–
“Billy”–
calling him softly.

In the book Garrett wrote about it
he claimed Billy’s last words were “¿Quien es”
(“Who is it?”)
though he privately told his drinking buddies
the real last words of Billy the Kid
were “Ah, shit!”
but the Sheriff hadn’t wanted to offend
genteel readers.
“Billy.”
Called his name softly out of the darkness

then blew him away.

The knife clattering on the porch.
The heavy, glazed mass of the deer meat
swaying in the cool night air.
The woman inside beginning to scream.

The Moving Part of Motion

The last of the high plains drifters
canters his palomino through the Montana grain fields,
shockwave ripples undulating in his trampled wake.
The sun burns like magnesium;
the moon like a knot of pitch.
Every movement in the motion he makes
hurts his fractured cheekbone
and the broken hand he holds against his chest.
Pistol-whipped and stomped by the

psycho Sheriff of Cheyenne

and his Deputies of Derangement,
the drifter, in a thoughtful mood, drifts west-northwest,
where he loosely reckons Missoula is,
thinking it may be time to settle down and marry,
maybe have some kids.
But for now he’s simply glad
he made it out of Wyoming alive,
and that his destination is stationary.

How About

FOR JASON STOCKLEY DODGE

All day, relentless,
Jason, just turned six,
captures me in play:

How about if I’m Jean-Luc Picard
Commander of the starship Enterprise
and you’re Q,
that mischievous guy who knows everything
and just sort of popped out of a black hole;
and a bunch of Cardassians and maybe some

space monsters

have locked on to us with a tractor-beam
and are pulling us into a gamma transducer
that’s robbing our power–
oh no, our shields are down to 60%!–
and let me tell you
our butts are in trouble,
so how about this time-just once-
can we set our phasers on KILL?

Or how about

I’m Rin-Tin-Tin
and I’m running through the woods

and how about

you’re a bad guy,
a real mean criminal,
and you go hide behind that fir tree
and you shoot Rinty when he runs by
and Rinty rolls and rolls down this hill like

he’s dead,

and just lies there,
very, very, very still,
but the thing is

you missed,
Rinty is faking, he fooled you,
and when you walk over
Rinty attacks Rar-rar-rarrrrrr!
and you try to shoot him
but Rinty crunches your arm
so you shoot yourself instead and stagger around
until you just fall over deader than a doorknob.

How about that?

Or how about

you’re just walking along dah-de-dah
and you see these two little dinosaurs
caught in this basketball net
so you call 911–
and I am Rescue 911–

and I send a fire truck with a ladder and Fireman

Bob driving with his dog Chief on the back,

plus I send an ambulance,
and I better send another fire truck,
and Fireman Bob rescues the little dinosaurs
and rushes them to the hospital with the siren on–

and how about you’re the doctor

but you’ve never operated on baby dinosaurs before
so I have to show you how
and I fix up their spinal cords and their little hearts
and they’re OK now; they’re gonna be fine . . .

Until I want to yell

HOLD IT! STOP!

How about

if I’m Lothario the Magnificent,
an alchemist magician,
and I can focus my wild imagination so powerfully
I’m able to condense all the women I’ve ever loved
into one?

And how about I can imagine with such passionate

clarity

that she is real, right here and now, completely,

and how about if

you’re just a little kid, fast asleep,
dreaming of the starship Enterprise
gliding deeper into deepest space
toward who knows what unimaginable adventures
and illuminated moments of being–
so fast asleep not even a Klingon laser strike

could wake you–

and she smiles and whispers,

“You and me, sweetheart–

how about it?”

Necessary Angels

1952

When I was seven years old
I whispered into my belt buckle,
A secret radio:
“Dragon 4 Starcruiser calling Base,
Dragon 4 Starcruiser calling Base ...”
And I remember that splurge of joy
When a voice on the other end
Responded rich and clear,
“Come in, Captain Jimmy, come in . . .”

1990
“Return to Base, Captain Jimmy.
Do you read me?
You’re about to leave the screen.
Come back, Captain Jimmy!
Return to Base!
Oh, Captain Jimmy,
You dumb shit.”

Prayer Bones

Bone is just a sound you make in your throat,
a shaped breath, a word,
till you touch
the smooth massive skull of a feral boar
or balance a pelican’s
almost weightless wing bone
across the palm of your hand.

The blood and roots
that bind us to a place
remain sheer romance,
a grand abstraction,
till you slip the quivering heart from a deer
and fry it for breakfast.
Till you pick chanterelles,
or munch baby carrots
as you thin the rows.
We kill to nourish ourselves
on the light released in death,
for we only know what enters us
through these diaphanous membranes
we call our bodies, these whirls
of wind, rain, mineral, and light.

My mind was an idea about itself
till I found the skull of our mule, Red,
beside a fern-shrouded spring
deep in a tan oak thicket
where he had fallen or laid down to die
almost two years earlier.
The constant rush of spring water
has stripped his skull to a dazzling white,
startling among all that green,
the clear water swirling in the brain cavity,
pouring through the sinuses and eye sockets.

After a meandering sluice down the long ravine
the spring water joins the Wheatfield Fork of the Gualala,
then the main...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes and Acknowledgments
• Selected Poems and Short Prose
• New Poems and Short Prose