Of Richard Hugo

What he said was burned out, dead, sits

kitty-corner to the closed down grocery

like a pill box from his war—concrete block

with slits of glass the size of gun ports

and Oly blinking from a neon sign.

Inside’s the half-dark of a thousand

local taverns, each one a smoky

testimony of life gone bad

beneath cathedral trees.

I smile my hello

and hold forth awkwardly with two facts—

that I admire their brews (It’s the water)

and fish myself with homemade lures,

like the man I’m seeking, who had a way

with many kinds of bait and seldom

returned home without a good one.

I buy the house a round

but no one knows him even vaguely

as fisherman, poet, or from Boeing

or the war or about any fire here ever

or if this one’s the old joint

just redone in olive drab and mirrors.

A full beard grins amiably wide

spreading arms for a Jonah-like fish;

a pair of bibbed overalls brings hands

together in prayer, changes

to a fake choke hold, then taps his glass,

eyebrows raised, for a refill

and maybe a game of something.

After cards and pool, they leave two pots

ahead, which comes to a large fist of singles

they don’t feel like carrying except

to remind them of this too-many-

questions, pipe-smoking kid.

I sit down solo at a small wood table,

a rough map upside down of the land,

shellac dark the surface for hemlock and fir

and here and there, much deeper,

peak-like gouges of snow, the primer,

and a covey of pools where tree stumps rot

and trout grow big from road kill flies—

but try as I do I can’t find his initials.

No, Hugo’s fire warms no memory here

though the county’s seen plenty

and a gas station down the road blew up

last year without “rhyme or reason.”

Is anyone lying?  The place lives on

and so, in a way, its loss.

He wrote two poems about this bar,

a man of the area, I’m still convinced,

shadowed and shadowing with each cast.