Adam Henry Carrière

Montana or The Beatnik Literary Forebears

 

I wrote my first western scriptures when I was eight years old,

just after the last snow disappeared from our yard.

They were about the way Tunkasida felt when the sun came up

and winter melted away. In my eight-year-old mind

the west was all clear running waters, bears and otters,

mountains and snow, wind and tall grass. I remember

thinking, cobwebs melt away like the snows, too.

 

Mom had the intuition of a neighborly witch,

her people, long ago from a far

land of song, war, and poetry.

She frittered her youth away in the sub-arctic boreal

forests on the shores of Talkeetna Lake

but she learned a colorful prairie language

and slowly passed it on to me,

just the right metaphors for wondering

whether the winter’s snowfall will feed the rivers

all summer. She could have been a concert pianist

but chose to marry a barnstorming pilot;

like Old Coyote, my auntie, always said,

“the unholy union of John Wayne and Gloria Steinem.”

It just couldn’t last.

 

Dad didn’t say much for a failed hero.

To him, camping on the Gallatin River

was all the conversation he figured I needed.

Dad’s bear deterrent technique

two pan lids banging together at the tent flap

when night rummaging noises began

made us laugh through our forty winks.

To all sorts of people, he was just a thread

wandering with a fly rod, easily mollified

by rashers of liquor and non-local sugar food.

When he died slow that one year, Mom said,

‘The tango dancer must work

on the intricate figures alone,

but always with a partner in mind.’

I didn’t cry about it ‘til years later,

up at the foot of Mount Jumbo

with a bloodhound named Erdely.

 

The seasonal scheme only returned to me

by hurting in the daylight.

Up Tabexa Wakpa I could walk through

my grandmother’s perfect orchard, listening

to the me-yaws of peacocks beneath the poplars

she planted when her family was young,

or ride once more with grandfather on his combine

through the dust-bitten days of harvest.

The tanks he trained in are now in a museum

or on the lawns of some town square.

On our farm you’d find wheat fields burning

in the Montana sun, oats crisping in the summer

heat, Appaloosa horses and a Blackfoot poem or two.

Until drought, then grasshoppers, then Mormon crickets

cleaned us out, and we left the dryland homestead.

 

By the time I was ten I had met Andy Warhol

in a roadside diner, seen Jim Morrison on TV,

hitchhiked with my folks on the L.A. freeways,

took a bus past the Berkeley riots,

and had run naked with a pack of dogs

in some mesa in New Mexico.

Less the home, a home, any home

waiting for the bus driver to ask for tickets

we might as well have drawn with Crayola

and stencils, mired as usual in a mess.

Happy birthday. I had nightmares

about goats in the Swan Mountains,

hiking steep trails up the avalanche ravines

of Scratchgravel Hills to collect the plants

the goats ate for our next meal.

Days later, the driver, pretending to read

“Last Drink with Lord Rochester’s Monkey,”

gave us change to money we hadn’t given,

and left us down the road from St. Ignatius,

bedrock, almost home. Mom and Dad

argued in whispers, was it Salish or Kootenai

on the driver’s sleepy breath?

 

Through lineage, I was a stutterer.

When Lois Red Elk, a good earth-walker,

called my name during first day roll,

I couldn’t pronounce it and ran home in tears.

Dad said, ‘Boy, you’re really smart.

You finished school in one day.’

The one room schoolhouse up Rosebud Creek,

the sky is truly big. All the kids brought in water,

emptied the slop bucket, or gathered firewood

like Dull Knife showed us before graduation.

During maths, his older lips set down

on the side of my twelve-year-old cheek.

When summer came many kisses later,

we walked the paths of the Métis,

who’d settled the South Fork of the Teton River.

They mined, ranched, or logged

and reverently killed elk and deer.

We felt their radiant map of the world

in the wind, warming our soft faces.

Lo, suddenly in our imaginations was born

the smallest attention to beetles, bear scat

and yellow pine needles, the two vegetable gardens,

spans of flower beds, and two apple trees we ate

from between our trembling bodies.

Dull Knife laughed at my writing everything down.

‘We wake the two spirits between us, and you want

some new poem to fall out of rain shadow.’

 

Words made a kind of home I could take with me,

I thought back to him, beyond the reach of electricity

and other conveniences. This short life, cousin,

brimming over with books, images, landscapes

lost in a big wood not so different from either of us.

Two spirits each, man, we’re like a birthday

suit tribe all on our ownsome.

I was fourteen, thinking I’d walked

all the noisy soil of miniature horses,

pretending my two spirits were one again,

but Mom knew better. Every corn husk

she tugged free said so. Her old marauding

white tribes cut headstrong lines with iron and blood,

honing fables out of the nameless dead

that knew how language could be lost,

except by nature.

 

I met two more spirits the same way,

making fun of a new boy on the school bus.

Nobody was sure if he had a name or spoke American

until he finally screamed, ‘I am Real Bird!’

and used his fists to re-write my laughing face.

Our Music teacher man made us team up.

Real Bird played the school’s one good guitar well

while I warbled as much as sang expressions

I’d stripped out from my Mom’s diary:

Walking, in the footsteps of Sakagewa

counting elk

fieldwork as a way to onlook the steady influx

of weeds and other sprawling.

The dandelions and snowberry bushes,

chokecherry and Chinook wind,

the confluence of the Bitterroot…

 

It took almost a year later, but he came

to our cabin during dinner, wanting to read

Mom’s copied verses again. Mom made him eat.

He told me to call him ‘Baucheewuchaitchish’

before he said good-bye without shaking

and rode off into the night on a squeaking bicycle.

A sonic realization of poetic occurrence,

I wrote. Before bed, I drew a picture of him

in the dark. ‘Baucheewuchaitchish,’ I sang.

We turned sixteen the same week

we went out for the cross-country team

just to take crazy long showers, our way

of admitting to the other our families

were too broke to buy water heaters.

After making us lunch one day,

his step-mom left for work and kept going,

the same day the forest fire turned the sun red

and the sky dark at mid-day.

Maybe midnight made him realize.

He called me from the pay phone down the road

from his place, but didn’t start talking

almost until he’d run out of change.

The Assiniboine-Sioux used to say something

about various textures of snow, sub-zero temperatures

or the smell of cottonwoods, or temper of fires.

I couldn’t remember. Neither could Mom.

She told me, ‘Go be with Real Bird.’

He started crying as soon as he saw our truck.

I brought the quilts Grandmother wove

for us to sleep in. Come prom,

Real Bird graduated in thought.

‘Words on paper tell me they’re poems,’ he says.

We set camp between Little Big Horn and Rosebud,

making sure his uncle’s mares had grass and water.

‘No,’ I tell them all, ‘you are words on paper.’

His laugh wandered through the watercolor night.

The earth has all kinds of stories, we agreed;

we need to listen with our eyes and spirit.

‘It’s complicated listening with just our ears,’

my brother spirit said.

 

An unseen train whistled in the distance,

passing the nearby depot on its appointed journey.

Nearly eighteen, I asked Real Bird what he wanted

for his birthday. ‘More wilderness, fewer people!’

I felt his body chanting, its nearness inside.

Passing bears, coyotes, and cows on the dirt road

winding up the canyon to his home. In a flash

that echoes, put to rest by a lumber truck.

Baucheewuchaitchish.

 

I follow the waves of light, like a sonnet

some citizen of this magnificent collapse.

Two whitetail deer graze near the stones.

I’ve learned to avert my eyes and advance

on a diagonal, as Dull Knife intoned.

With pens and painted tongues

I slash at the curtains drawn across our sky

but keep finding need in circles,

in crescents of pearl and moondust.

 

She always pretended not to notice when I stuttered.

I placed twenty different wildflowers in Mom’s hands

before closing the pine door, fighting icy broadsides

with archipelagos of memory:

“I’m going to adopt beatnik literary forebears.”

“OK, Mom.”

She pretended not to notice I never stuttered, saying

‘Baucheewuchaitchish’

I love you, Mom.

Swallowing ground glass.

 

Two spirits, part of them, met fighting

over the dorm TV. Friend Kevin grew up

roaming the low ruckus and high plains,

twenty years riding bucking horses bareback.

His two spirits hadn’t even met, caged

in scenery shy of the Divide - among cacti

and creosote bushes, between low and high

tides, scratched out of chigger-infested fields.

We courted in a bunch of folks’ backseats.

But with our big toes, we once wrote

in the red territory dirt:

It’s all about the sounds,

making strawmen come alive.

Both in college, but he knew what cohered,

falling somewhere after love, just ahead of beer.

I preferred stillness, but injured when he left,

all the same. Tins on the tent.

 

I evolved from wanting to become a railroad engineer

to wanting to become several hundred-thousand acres

of wilderness called ‘Baucheewuchaitchish’

After earning a very paperful degree I thought I’d sail

for India but my truck needed fixing

so I looked for temporary work near my parents’

place. That painting job lasted 20 more years.

I bought a water heater with my first check.

I’d grown up in a land of alfalfa farms, dirt bikes

and rattlesnakes, one-gas-station towns, two spirits,

and biggest sky any boy ever dreamed of.

By the time I left, I was pretty good at it.

I read it like a French rondelet.

The road to Montana seemed easy going after that.

 

 

 

DLW Pesavento

The Beats

They were outside, looking inside out,
hipster rabbits in blue jeans
always checking melted pocket watches
and late for their 3 P.M. followed
by Alice through the looking glass
down the bunny hole, daddy o

a cappella be bop and Dion doo wop

prequel black-bereted beatnik charismatics
jazzy hazel-eyed behind dark shades
bristling porcupine-quill goatees up at the mic.
Ginsberg-speaking in tongues
a cunna nundrum sala famadon

catnip, catnap, cool cat, kraaazy kat, man

howling poems in smoke-filled psilocybin
coffeehouse auditoriums of the karmic mind
filled with hip congregations of black-leotarded
stick-figured chicks with thin lips pursed by
talk about Beat being the Cock of the Walk
double entendres thrown from their mouths
like dice coming up snake eyes
turning into domino pips on the gleaming
ivory faces of enraptured zealots
chanting myoho renge kyo mantras, swirling
like eddies in a Ganges river of ears
pulled downstream by ultimate life currents
funneled into vortices of phonemic ecstasy

be bop bongo pop, wowsville, man

smack like Kerouac on Rt.66
sitting vette-shotgun, strung-out on morphemes,
mainlining Main Street America while somnambulist
Cassady, delirious from white-line fever
held the wheel steady and narcoleptic at 96.5

Like, Jack was never on the road, man.
He was the road. You dig?

Straight from the jacket, Jack, like a cracker
jack Cadillac wrapped in Dali mohair
inside a round Dada box
floating above the post WWII mushroom cloud
pushing obscene tsunami towards Fisherman’s Wharf
where Ferlinghetti faced Alcatraz specters
sentenced to float in fog for 30 years
with time off for good behavior

where the killer-crescendo A-bomb spark
fractured the syntax of water and split the ripe
commie watermelon of opiate Mao spilling red
onto San Francisco’s bluesy shore, its seeds
spit out like AK bullets turning into swallowtail
butterflies, mid air, flying towards a sixties sky.

where Snyder felt seismic
premonitions from Turtle Island
7.5 on the Pulitzer scale

where Corso sat, reading Big Table magazine,
sipping from a bowl of alphabet soup
whose letters spelled STRANGELOVE in French

where Lenny violated aural taboos
and broke the 12th commandment:
Thou Shalt Not Swear in Public

where Burroughs waited unaware
cyber-stalkers of the Future would leave
his Naked Lunch dusty and ignored
on the shelves of forgotten bookstores
superseded by internet man hunters
tracking homoero-holograms lasered on virtual
dance-floor gas station bathrooms
finger-triggering high octane pumps
squeezed into hyper drive in dark parks
where packs of immune-deficient werewolves
prowled beneath an 80's moon

where now 40 million forget to reminisce.

 

 

 

Jeffrey M. Wallmann

Open Letter from a Spy Deep in Enemy Territory

Listen, man, because we're brothers, after all,
and we both need help.

I was beat before there was a word for it,

before it was a fad.
We were shoed and shaved now and then. Like, a stubble is

more nonconformist than a beard, man.
And we drank dollaragallon wine and talked about art
and sometimes wrote something, not bad but never published.
I lived in this pad with this crazy chick, and we smelled roses

in the park and played Davis on the low-fi, and made love on

the fold-down. You know, the simple pleasures of the poor.

And lo, an editor with an edition to fill and not enough murders

sends out a feature writer and Sweet Christ!

 

We've got a Movement yet.
And all the unwashed fugitives from loaferdom arid pansy flunk-

outs English 1-A and fakes from Junktown swarm in and

louse up a good thing with cheap publicity. What was a quiet

way of getting by until you learned something
got glorified as a new religion.

Like, it's no use blaming Kerouac and Ginsberg,
or even weirder, praising them, for this notoriety
Better books than theirs came and went unnoticed for decades.

There have always been bohemians around.
Remember Max Bodenheim? Nobody does, nor cares to.
Beat got big not because it's new or different
but because it's the current romantic dream of the squares.
Try suiting up and rush-hour to the office every day for ten years

and see what odd illusions you get about a life of
beards, sweatshirts, and leisure.

Wow. So, okey, for one reason or another you've got our attention.
Which is what you want when you're immature, bursting with ideas,
and barren of experience.
Here it is, the lovely limelight.
Sing your song, do your dance.

Man, what a sad act you cats are pulling off,
cursing your audience.
Enlightenment is what you advertise; squalor and invective

is all you dispence.
You can't make it these days by drawing the mob with a lewd show

then pointing to the plaster saints.
If you mean to come on, you'd better have a new angle
on an old truth.
Because nobody makes it the old way.

What do you advise?

Homosexuality?

Miscegenation?

Dexamil?

 

Even the squares dig that all is not well with this scene.

I don’t mean to offend you,

but like I said, I’m your brother, and you know what bothers me?

I’m way ahead of you cats

and I’m still nowhere.

That’s sad, man, assuming that most of you are really in earnest,

really want to make it, really want to see things better.

All right, I hardly expected you to believe that.

But if pot fails

and sex fails,

and zen in the pocket edition fails,

you just might reconsider the daily scuffle and how to cope with it.

So far the beat view is that there are two choices:

be a hip free brother rag-picker, or

a factory slave office zombie suburbanite.

Well, man, there are other alternatives.

Or couldn’t you, with all your vast integrity, stand to be rich?

Would you sell your Proust and read Mickey Spillane

if you had a few bucks?

Being broke is one way of fighting demon Advertising,

but there’s a better way

 

Buy only what you want.

Or don’t you know what you want?

And please, no crap about prostituting your Art.

You aren’t so warped as to believe you are the last word

in human spirits. Or does your pseudo-hipness rest

on such flimsy narcissism that you can’t spare those hours

before the mirror?

Isn’t it odd

to be writing jazzy poems to life and leaving life to the squares?

If you’re so hip, would your philosophy crumble if you worked?

One of my buddies is beat.

But don’t call him that because he’s old-time at it,

with the natural distaste of aristocracy for the nouveau-pauvre.

He knows nine thousand ways to fix Kraft dinners

and has a gold embossed discount card at the Goodwill.

Unfortunately, he still has a gut to fill

bowels to empty, a brain to entertain.

What I’m saying is that it takes money, even to live badly.

You’ll never get the world to quit work and abolish money,

so wouldn’t it be smarter to beat the system instead of

being beaten?

Sure, you’re out of the old rat-race --

you’re caught in the still older flea race.

But enough.

I don’t mean to say that I’m cool.

But I’ve got that precious ingredient, time.

And something else that never hurts, comfort.

And I’ll get cool

One final thought:

There is no evidence whatsoever

that cutting off his ear

helped Van Gogh paint any better.

 

♥ ♠ ♦ ♣

 

Born on the South Side of Chicago, Adam Henry Carrière received last rites at the age of six, won a swimming pool at the track for his thirteenth birthday, has a master's degree yet no high school diploma, watched the sun rise through Stonehenge, swam with Beluga whales, snorkled with tortoises with Cuba near in sight, seen the Northern Lights, sailed through a typhoon, violated Vietnamese territorial waters, waved machine guns in the City of Rocks, reached 120 miles per hour on Pacific Coast Highway, walked up a Bavarian Alp, written poetry that bought him a car, and had drinks at the Hotel California. He writes from Nevada but dreams between Saxony and Siebenburgen.

 

DLW Pesavento was also raised on Chicago's South Side, instilled with mysticism, nurturing an innately empathetic sense of the wondrous and beautiful. He can be seen along the shores of Lake Michigan, writing poems, and throwing them to the wind. Macabrely yet happily, many end up in Nevada on their way to the rest of the world.

 

Jeffrey M. Wallmann is presently domiciled in Las Vegas. He was not born on the South Side of Chicago. He does drive a Cadillac, though, collects art as well as cats, and has published more than two hundred books under his own name and twenty-two pseudonyms. The pseudonyms recommended by quite a number of attorneys, travel agents, and tax specialists.

 

 

 

Return to DM 75 Menu