Rain On The River. Jim Dodge

      

      Jim Dodge

      

      Selected Poems and Short Prose

       for

       Victoria Stockley Dodge

      covivant for over thirty years, the last seven as wife; nerve of my soul, love of my life

      Contents

       Notes and Acknowledgments

      Selected Poems and Short Prose

      Learning to Talk

      The Cookie Jar

      Things Thought Through

      On Balance

      Decomposition

      Psycho Ecology

      Life of the Spirit

      Aweigh

      Tao-to-Tao

      To Be

      Practice, Practice, Practice

      Wisdom and Happiness

      Red Sails

      Squall & Commotion

      Slow Learner

      Bathing Joe

      Mahogany China

      The First Cut Is the Deepest

      Waiting for Houdini to Come Up

      The Countessa

      Venison Stew

      Winter Song

      On Humor: On Mating Donkeys and Onions

      Watering the Garden on the Hottest Day of the Summer

      Palms to the Moon

      A Firmer Grasp of the Obvious

      The Work of Art

      Steelhead Fishing, Smith River, January

      The Third Bank of the River

      Green Side Up

      One Thing After Another

      Unnatural Selections: A Meditation upon Witnessing a Bullfrog Fucking a Rock

      Fishing Devil’s Hole at the Peak of Spring

      Getting After It

      How to Catch the Biggest Fish

      Hard Work

      There It Is

      Knowing When to Stop

      Vacation Expenses

      Basic Precepts and Avuncular Advice for Young Men

      Killing

      Death and Dying

      New Poems and Short Prose

      The Banker

      The Real Last Words of Billy the Kid

      The Moving Part of Motion

      How About

      Necessary Angels

      Prayer Bones

      Magic and Beauty

      Day Moon

      Karma Bird

      The Tunnel

      Hagerty Wrecks Another Company Truck

      Obsession

      Love Find

      Flux

      Thanks for the Dance

      The Stone

      Woman in a Room Full of Rubber Numbers

      Reason to Live

      Scratch

      Salvage

      An Epithalamium for Victoria

      Falling into Place

      Play-By-Play

      Job Application

      The Mouth of the River

      The Prior and Subsequent Heavens

      Old Growth

      Three Ways to Get the Carrot on the Stick

      Eurydice Ascending

      The Drought of ’76

      True Account of the Saucer People

      About Time

      Smithereens

      Jack o’ Hearts Shopping Mortmart

      Holy Shit

       Notes and Acknowledgments

      With few exceptions, the selected work in this volume appeared in limited edition letterpress broadsides, cards, and chapbooks published by Jerry Reddan’s Tangram Press in Berkeley, California, who also designed this volume. I’ve worked almost exclusively with Jerry for two decades, always with a sense of privilege, delight, and gratitude.

      The first group of poems in this book, from “Learning to Talk” through “Bathing Joe,” constitutes annual Winter Solstice cards mailed to friends and colleagues, and also includes a few broadsides and occasional verse.

      The poems from “Mahogany China” through “A Firmer Grasp of the Obvious” are selected from Palms to the Moon, a loose group of love poems published in 1987 in an edition limited to 100 copies and given away to friends and fellow practitioners.

      Bait & Ice, a small gathering of poems on fishing, philosophy, and nature, was released in 1991 in an edition of 175, and includes the poems from “The Work of Art” through “Fishing Devil’s Hole at the Peak of Spring.”

      The final chapbook from which work for this volume was drawn (“Getting After It” through “Death and Dying”) is Piss-Fir Willie Poems, a suite of persona poems offered as an homage to the vernacular of Pacific northcoast working people, particularly loggers, restoration workers, commercial fishers, ranchers, and those, like my father, in the building trades. I tried to capture the idiom–the diction, cadence, phrasing–as well as that combination of aesthetics, attitude, and turn-of-mind that constitutes cultural style. To my sense of it, I was successful enough that I can’t honestly claim the poems as my own. Whatever virtues of language, wit, or wisdom the reader might find, praise should accrue to the speakers from whom I borrowed; any liabilities, alas, are likely mine. Piss-Fir Willie Poems was published by Tangram in 1998 in an edition of 200 copies.

      Before 1980, I also published two other chapbooks– da Vaca in a Vanishing Geography and (with Robert Funt) Sollla Sollew–but because these Mad River Press productions were published anonymously and pointedly anti-copyright, I haven’t included that work.

      New poems, written or substantially revised in the past decade, make up roughly the second half of this volume.

      A few of the new and selected works have appeared in other books and journals:

      A version of “Green Side Up” was first published in Dalmo’ma VI: Working the Woods, Working the Sea (Empty Bowl, 1986) under the title “Treeplanting in the Rain.” The poem, under the latter title, was also published in Paperwork (Harbour 1991) and Propriety and Possibilities (Harrish Press, 1996).

      “Aweigh”