The road ascended by degrees, among ponderosa pine. A highway marker declared him to be entering Shoshone County, whose state university, still a hundred miles away, would be the site of his reading. The road approach to Shoshone County, which appeared to constitute a modest rise, was proclaimed by its marker to stand at seven thousand feet above sea level.
He swung round a turn and encountered an orange MEN WORKING sign. Just beyond it stood a young flagman, about college age. He had on a Day-Glo vest over a poncho and a yellow hard hat from which his long blond hair protruded.
“Five minutes,” the boy said when Smart rolled his window down a crack. He kept staring at Smart, holding up a red hand-sign that said STOP, shielding his eyes from the restored sunlight.
“Are you William Smart?” he asked the poet finally.
“Bless you, son,” said Smart. “Yes, that’s me.”
“They had your picture in the cafeteria yesterday.” The young man kept on gawking stupidly. “I read your poem. We had to read one in class last year.”
“Good for you. Which one?”
“Umm,” said the young man. “Not sure.”
“You don’t remember it?”
“It went like … it had like fields in it. Like roads in it?”
“Right,” Smart said. “I have a few like that.” He was quite ready to see the funny side. “How appropriate, since we’re on a road at this very moment. And there are fields out there.” He cleared his throat to keep his temper. “Do you go to Shoshone?”
“They had your picture in the cafeteria yesterday,” the youth said.
“Think it’s still there?” Smart asked.
“Huh?” A distant siren had sounded. The youth reversed his sign so that it read SLOW. He seemed to be pondering an answer as Smart rolled up his window and drove on, passing workmen along the shoulders, their rollers and asphalt trucks.
A poem with fucking roads in it, Smart thought, cackling. A field in it! Of course they were little morons at Shoshone State, he reflected. But pretty kids, grandchildren of Mormon ranchers and Basques and Cornish miners. The cafeteria sold pasties. It was adorned with his picture that week because he was on his way to read there.
He turned the radio on and found himself within range of the college transmitter. There was a nice flute piece by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. When it was finished the announce^ who had apparently struggled in speech course to overcome some palatal impediment, declared, “Together we can make cystic fibrosis history.” Smart turned it off.
But one couldn’t blame the kids. The faculty were incompetent and corrupt. Enraged ex-nuns, paroled terrorists of the left and right, senile former state legislators. But to whom, he wondered, did he owe his own inclusion in the sacred syllabus? So that the very yokels at the crossroads were provided the exultation of forgetting his field and road poems.
And what, Smart wondered, would they do with their lives up there once they’d duly read and forgotten? Manage Kmarts? Incinerate nuclear waste? Clerk for the Fish and Game? Ranching was for millionaires now, the mines and forests were objects of speculation. But how beautiful it had once been, he thought, the morning light, the trout rising at dusk. It was his land, he had worked it, his people had gone west with handcarts on the Oregon Trail, though they had settled farther along, closer to the ocean. In his day, a lumberman, a miner; worked his heart out, proud of his body’s strength, hating his bosses, loving his fellow workers, swearing by the union. The boys ten years older than Smart had gone into the war against Hitler. Smart had joined up, signed on with the navy when the judge required it, after he and his friends had been caught stealing Forest Service equipment. The alternative was the State School for Boys, an institution so dreaded and fearsome that only the meanest and craziest got themselves sent back. No Shoshone State to go to then, where regional poetry was learned and forgotten.
Passing an alder grove with his windows down, he was startled to catch for a moment the robotic bleating of a backhoe. The sound made him pull off the road.
The grove was deserted. The prairie wind carried a weight of silence and he realized suddenly that the sounds were those of a mockingbird. It must have listened for days to a road crew’s machines and incorporated the backhoe into its repertoire.
It was impossible for him then not to poetize. And it was impossible for him not to think: How the Russians would have loved such a poem once. Nature and machine in literal harmony, labor and wilderness under the broad sky. The fact was that, these days, Smart was not nearly as welcome over there as he had once been. Time was, his appearances had filled hockey rinks; he had gone drinking with Yevtushenko. Perhaps they thought, the new bunch, that he had been a little tight with the old crowd, a little too accommodating of the cultural command, the official poetasters and their masters. He had seen it as working against the Cold War He had never thought of his work as political; he had assumed people there had genuinely liked what he did and would continue to do so.
It even seemed that the end of the Cold War had undermined his status in the United States, his credentials as rebel. As though people were less interested as the dangers waned. Then he had had his campus problems. Harassment. Absurdity.
Back in the cat, he thought for a while of the Bird and the Backhoe. Of course there was a poem there. But so Russian, so Soviet, so much uplift and muscularity. Was it really worth doing? Someone somewhere had said of Rilke that if he had cut his chin shaving in the morning he would have bled poetry. Smart had once secretly thought that was equally true of himself.
They make me feel like cheering,
These fish, mere fish, at the cost of such voyaging, such heroism, such wild adventure
Fulfilling a purpose that was never their own.
The mighty merciless will that made Leviathan
Made them, sent them to sea, willed them unending strife.
He supposed that was hardly Rilke. He might have made a middle-level Soviet poet or the equivalent of one. Or else, he thought, he might after all be better than that. Starting out, his model had been Thomas McGrath, another poet from his part of the country. And as for the salmon poem — if he could only bring it back, it might be improved, honed into something worthy of its conception, the wonderful moment that had inspired it. In any case, he thought, except for fragments it seemed to be gone. But the excitement of the recollected poem, what seemed to him its possibilities, stirred a swelling of angina pain in his breast.
…in order that there be fish, that there be something rather than nothing
In the appointed place.
To serve that inscrutable disposition,
Welcome them home now, with carnivore cries
Life’s champions
Let them teem and die.
To survive and teem and die is glory.
God’s will be done.
It would probably, he thought, be well to take the God pan out.
There had not been that many visitors to the monument that afternoon. Fewer than a dozen in all, enough to constitute two groups. They would pass through the gate to park headquarters and tickets from Phyllis Stowe and, if they chose to, they might file into the little auditorium to watch a film on western North America during the early Cenozoic Era and the formation of volcanic structures. Watching it, Rowan had to muster all the goodwill of which she was capable — a thoroughly boring film and not even specific to that particular site. At least three other parks with volcanic configurations to display used it.