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Overview
The day after their wedding, Tom and Sharyn Sexton set off on the more than 4,500-mile journey from Massachusetts to Alaska. Now, more than fifty years later, Tom Sexton is retracing those steps through his exceptional poetry. He describes the communities they passed through and ruminates on the changes, good and bad, that have taken place in the decades since. He still finds hope in the country and draws transformative hope from the land that connects all of us.
Appropriate for a journey that moves from east to west, the Sexton’s real-life voyage is embedded in the imaginary journey of the ancient Chinese poet, Li Bai, from Broad Pass to Polychrome Pass in the Alaska Range.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602233652 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2018 |
| Series: | The Alaska Literary Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 60 |
| File size: | 320 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Driving North
Snowy Egret Rising
On the night Li Bai tried to embrace the moon in its fullness on the surface of the Yangtze River,
blossoms scented the air, and beyond the moon pale stars powdered the sky. That faint shiver of white near the surface was a dolphin rising.
I carry a book of his poems whenever I travel,
poems that touch the heart like a gentle snow.
Look, over there in that marsh, a snowy egret rising.
By the St. Croix River
Do you remember that October afternoon when we were walking
by the St. Croix River, pausing at pool after empty pool, you
wondering how it must have been when river herring, countless
as the stars, were in every pool and shallow, how we walked on
in silence until, like ancient travelers on the Silk Road, we
came upon a tree, heavy with yellow apples, how I'd been going on
about Yeats's silver apples of the moon,
his golden apples of the sun,
how you reached up and plucked one that we devoured to its core,
how we walked on, almost holding hands, almost young lovers again,
wet behind the ears, about to drive north, glancing at our wedding bands.
Wachusett Reservoir
A blacksnake road broken cloud quarter moon shining
into the reservoir like a torch held by a ghost searching
for something left behind when the water began to rise
erasing four towns from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
sound of a snipe two more towns to go tonight.
Maids in Yellow
The radio promised a warm spring day with forsythia beginning to open.
We were looking down from our room at a group of hotel maids in yellow waiting to dash across the street.
Taxis sent wave after wave across the sidewalk to the stoop where they'd taken shelter. The rain was biblical.
I imagined them floating across the street,
butterflies in a soft spring breeze before landing on the other side, maids once again, a bit of magical thinking to comfort us, like a chocolate wrapped in gold foil placed by a maid on your pillow.
Lake Utopia
A warm spring breeze from the lake is moving the curtains in the bedroom of a couple watching the light-kissed mainsail of a sloop from their bed.
Classical then jazz fills the room.
They lift small cups of wild-civet coffee to their lips. "A hint of citrus," he says.
"This must be paradise," she sighs.
A local barista arrives a little after dawn every Sunday morning with their weekly order.
They leave her tip and the key in the mailbox.
If they see her pedaling along, they wave.
When it's raining, her bike's tires sound just like Buddy Rich's brushes on their gravel.
West of Rousses Point, New York
In one of those otherwise forgettable small towns a place where other people happen to be born,
a place where there are no sidewalks to roll up,
a place that proclaims it was the birthplace of a minor leaguer who almost made it to the majors,
a man holding a small American flag is sitting in an Adirondack chair and waving to passing cars,
even to the men wearing orange jumpsuits,
men looking out of a van with bars on its windows,
even to the woman in her beamer checking her cell.
Glen Nevis, Ontario
From a window in a former abbey, now an inn,
I watched mourners, mostly white-haired women and a few old men, led by a piper playing
"Amazing Grace," as they left the Catholic church.
Worn down by age and toil, their backs curving like the letter C in surname after surname on the gravestones I read the day before,
taking note that my clan, McLeod, is there.
Slowly, taking fierce step after fierce step,
they moved as one toward the waiting grave,
a dark-skinned priest walking slowly behind.
"The young move away," the innkeeper said.
While shovels filled the grave, the piper played again, softly now, like gently falling rain.
Superior Pulp, LLC
An acrid plume of steam shaped like a child's bonnet rose into the early-morning sky
over the last mill in a town by a tannin-colored river.
Its main street a punch-drunk fighter
with most of his teeth knocked out.
Here a Lexus costs more than a house.
The pawn shop's sign reads "jewelry and guns."
No one was out for a morning run.
At 9:00 a.m. only the bowling alley's bar was open.
I needed a boilermaker and, perhaps, a smoke.
"That mill's the smell of money," the bartender said,
"if the Chinese owners shut her down, we're dead.
I look for that plume every single day.
When tourists like you stop by, we hold a parade."
Near Wawa, Ontario
On a trail through a stand of hemlock,
roots rising from thin soil like sea serpents making their way to Lake Superior,
a trail I hoped led to a clearing where years ago an Ojibway elder filled my hands with blueberries from his coffee can,
I was looking for kindling to start a fire.
We devoured his gift in our leaking tent.
I tell myself the '60s are long gone. Thoreau and Longfellow gather dust on a shelf.
That eagle overhead is probably a drone,
but when I reach a clearing that seems familiar,
I find a sea of small pink flowers beginning to open. "I have more than enough," he said.
Elderly Couple Having Breakfast at a Truck Stop
She asks the waitress for water and begins to divide the pills I watched her take from her purse.
Six are lined up before her, even more before him.
I recognize one: a low dose of rat poison to keep his heart in rhythm. He pushes the one-a-day vitamin away and breaks off a piece from the unbuttered toast she ordered from the senior's menu to go with their tea.
She opens two packets of artificial sweetener and begins to pour while he watches a truck driver at another table waving a piece of bacon like a baton at the trucker with him who's pouring maple syrup on his pancakes. He chews his toast. When she notices them,
she says to him in a loud voice, "They'll be dead in a year,"
but he's already on the road, windows down, moving away.
In Praise of Surgeons
When he finished telling my wife that her heart might be out of her body for a while, if necessary, while they replaced her valve, the same wife reading a book as I write, he glanced at me and asked if I had any questions.
Imagining her cold beneath a sheet,
I mumbled, "Where do you get your valves?"
He smiled slightly then said, "We don't get them from Smithfield Packing. Your wife's valve came from a pig that was raised to save her life or someone else's.
If you don't have any other questions,
I'll see you both early tomorrow morning,"
as if we were going out for bacon and eggs.
Crossing the Prairies
Driving west, we came this way fifty years ago when we were young and invincible,
singing Johnny Horton's "North to Alaska"
as we drove deep into the star-crowded night in a Volkswagen bus with four bald tires and a spare with its sidewall cracked,
back on the road at dawn running on caffeine.
Now we both bear fresh scars from a surgeon's knife. Your heart no longer inviolate.
A long scar like a scimitar on my neck.
I watch your face when a voice on the radio says, "My fields are beyond green with only the slightest rot from rain, I'll harvest in a week."
On both sides of the road, the land is as flat as a griddle. You could watch your dog run away for a month as the old saw goes. We drink it in:
slight wind moving ripe grain, the endless sky,
wires sagging between poles, a red-tailed hawk.
"Beyond green," you say, "beyond green," then smile.
Yellow-Headed Blackbirds at Dusk
At dusk, on the puffy tip of every cattail in a small Saskatchewan marsh,
bird after bird glows like the gold on a newlywed's finger. The cattails barely moved beneath their weight.
We'd been sniping at each other all day,
small things, over time love's narrowing.
How beautiful they were, those small birds whose song's a rusty gate. Our hearts swung open.
The Man Behind the Wheel, Fort Nelson, B.C.
A man about my age drives past the once fashionable Fort Nelson Hotel three times while I drink a cup of bad coffee by the restaurant's front window.
Fewer and fewer people stay here on their way to Alaska now that the road's been fully paved.
His Pontiac Parisienne, its suede roof peeling,
must have been his dream car when he was a teen,
when his '50s flattop looked cool not foolish.
On every pass, he slows down to look at the hotel as if he's hoping to see the girl he didn't marry or his younger self coming through the door.
"His mother raised him in a converted chicken coop,"
a woman sitting near me says to no one in particular.
I ask for a refill, wave when he drives by once again.
Alaska Highway Lodge, 1966
Four days north of Dawson Creek on a road that was always dusty or slippery as a greased pig,
we paid eight dollars Canadian for two omelets made with powdered eggs and powered milk with homemade toast, white or brown,
a feast we devoured while we waited to see if the lodge's mechanic could weld the hinge on our VW's door that wouldn't stay closed.
The waitress said, "There's nothing he can't do,
nothing once he picks up his welder's torch."
Outside his shop, a boneyard of tailpipes and radiators that looked like the shields of a defeated army. Sparks flew around his head.
Was there really a pet wolf chained out back?
House Sparrows at Glennallen, Alaska
Like passengers who fell asleep on a cross-country bus and woke from a dream of a warm welcome only to find themselves in a cold and snowy landscape, they huddle together, puffed up, shivering on a small patch of snowless ground beneath the heat vent of the only store that's open in a town half a continent from their home.
They're the buff color of those old scuffed leather suitcases that people once kept in closets for their long dreamed of vacation.
A few chirps, then silence once again.
Under Heaven's River
A few years back when I was artist-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, I spent almost two weeks at the cabin where the famous naturalist Adolph Murie lived while he studied the Tolkat River wolves who had a den not far from the cabin. I arrived early in June with my manual typewriter and enough food for my stay. I was looking forward to the solitude even though I knew the North Fork cabin was just off the road, a road that runs the length of the park. I wasn't expecting wilderness, but I was expecting solitude.
The morning after I arrived, busses started going by, busses that travel the park road all summer. I could see faces pressed to every window. The road is usually closed to private vehicles. I also wasn't prepared for the arrival of guests from a "wilderness" lodge at the end of the road who had a catered lunch not far from the cabin several times while I was there. Their bus is allowed to use the road.
In the cabin, I was surrounded by books of other Alaskan writers, including the work of two Fairbanks poets, John Morgan and Peggy Shumaker, who had been in residence before me, and I had the poems of both Li Bai and Wang Wei with me for company, two poets I return to again and again, poets who touched the very heart of nature before it was tamed. After all, I was there to write, solitude or not.
After several days of throwing away drafts, I decided to have Li Bai wake up at dawn in Broad Pass just outside the park after a night of heavy drinking to begin a summer of wandering. My goal was to find a way to send him home. The following eight-line poems, the line length used in the Chinese lu-shih, a form used by Li Bai, were begun during my stay.
I didn't see any wolves or bears on my long walks while I was staying at the cabin; however, on my last night there I was invited to read at one of the lodges close to the end of the road at Kantishna, a former mining camp. The road over Polychrome Pass, just beyond the cabin when you're headed west, is narrow, steep, and winding. I managed a white-knuckle drive over the pass one morning. I have acrophobia, so I was reluctant to try it again. It was decided that someone else, a young woman who was a park intern, would do the driving that night. Night in Alaska in June is a long twilight. I didn't complain. She was very good company, and I didn't have to look at the edge of the road where it dropped off. Something you have to do when you're driving.
On our ride back to the cabin around midnight, we met a brown bear the size of a Hummer. It was ambling down the road in front of us, moving about five miles per hour, and we were moving about two. Every once in a while, it would stop, look at us, and then continue on. It appeared to be smiling. After twenty minutes or so, it decided it had enough of us so it left the road and watched us go by. It still visits me in my dreams.
The following poems are my attempt to bring Li Bai home. My thanks to the staff at Denali National Park for making my stay possible.
Li Bai Wakes in Broad Pass
He woke beside a swift glacial stream below mountains rising from still brown foothills,
foothills as drab as a worn boot. His head hurt.
How much wine had he drunk the night before?
Where were his new friends who said his poems dimmed the moon and made the dawn blush?
They called him a Banished Immortal, so he'd be fine even though his tongue had turned to sand.
Li Bai and the Magpie
"How is your family?" Li Bai asked the magpie who had been following him since he woke.
"Fine and thank you for asking," the magpie replied,
then he flew off and returned with western clothing to replace Li Bai's torn gown. "You'll blend in wearing these, and my wife will quickly mend your gown with feathers she's been saving for just such a task.
Walk toward the tallest mountain and you'll be safe."
Magpie's Wife
She mended Li Bai's gown with feathers and a little fur from a snowshoe hare then hid it in an old nest of grass and sticks they had abandoned years ago.
Magpie decided to follow Li Bai's progress from one river valley to another to keep his new friend company.
"He has a beautiful voice, he could almost be one of us if he could fly, and he doesn't need lightning to start a fire," he told his wife. "I really like his style."
Li Bai Meets a Brown Bear
When Li Bai saw the bear ahead of him on the tundra,
he was speechless, dumbstruck, and he'd seen bears when he wandered Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.
When the bear turned its massive head to look at him,
Li Bai quickly composed a poem in its honor,
a poem about the bear's generous nature and courage.
When the bear paused to listen, Li Bai also paused,
then he rolled his shoulders side to side like the bear.
The Brown Bear
He decided to follow Li Bai while he wandered from valley to valley, fishing in every stream,
catching a few grayling, and digging up roots.
Perhaps he felt a kinship with another old man.
He felt sad when he heard Li Bai chanting.
One night, he left a lake trout by his campfire.
Not even a poet could survive on grayling.
But the chattering magpie who was always at Li Bai's side got on his nerves so he left, but he didn't go far.
Trapper
Would he ever find a familiar stream, one that would take him home even if this was a dream, Li Bai wondered.
Walking a gravel bar, he looked up to see a man wearing the head of a wolf for a hat coming his way.
"I'm a recreational trapper," the man said to Li Bai.
"I set my traps just outside the park every winter."
Li Bai didn't say a word so the trapper continued on.
Attached to its own head, the wolf's tail moved as if it were alive.
Li Bai Arrives at Wonder Lake
He looked at the great snow-covered mountain beyond the lake for a long time before something in the shallows caught his eye.
"I've stood on Denali's summit in both summer and winter,"
the man beside him bragged. He was certain that Li Bai was just another Chinese tourist who had come to see Denali,
one who had wandered away from his group to get a better look.
"You should honor it with your absence, a mountain as great as the one before us needs its privacy," Li Bai whispered in his ear.
Almost Fall
When Li Bai left Wonder Lake, he was deep in thought.
He had arrived in spring and now it was almost fall.
His old bones ached and he missed his friends.
Below new snow on the mountains, the tundra was just beginning to turn red, reminding him of the hint of rouge on a beautiful courtesan's cheek.
When the moon rose, he cast a long shadow.
Even magpie felt his sadness and for once was silent.
The North Fork Wolves
Li Bai reached the North Fork of the Tolkat River just as the wolves, three young males and a female,
appeared at the mouth of their den and began to sing their pleasure at the full moon's rising, their pleasure at being alive. Li Bai listened and when the wolves fell silent for a moment, he answered their song with his own, both songs rising and falling as one.
The wolves have all been killed as I write these lines.
Li Bai Discovers Adolph Murie's Cabin
How have I missed this small cabin close to the road,
he thought? Once inside, he found my stack of books and those left by writers who had been there before me.
He also discovered my wine. Someone must be studying for his civil service exam hoping to attract the Emperor's eye,
he must have thought when he saw my copy of the Analects.
When he finished the wine, he left a note on my typewriter that read: Study the poems of Li Bai and find a better wine.
Excerpted from "Li Bai Rides a Celestial Dolphin Home"
by .
Copyright © 2018 University of Alaska Press.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS.
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