Duende

A poem for my uncle

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

I typically don’t share poems here, but I’m offering one today as a teaser for tomorrow’s essay about Montana. Thanks to Rattle for publishing this poem fifteen years ago. I was also honored to present it at AWP as part of a cowboy poetry panel. My uncle has always been a logger, never a cowboy, so I chuckled a bit at being included in that group. But I suppose some of those Western tropes overlap.

Also a reminder that our first book club will meet on Thursday, August 10, from 7:30-9:00 p.m., EST. We’ll be reading Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, which is available at Amazon or Bookshop. Even if you have never been an academic, I hope you’ll join us! Please use this link to join the conversation. Passcode is DxB3u8.

Duende

The duende will not appear without the possibility of death, without knowing he can haunt death’s house, without the certainty of shaking those branches we all carry that do not bring, can never bring, consolation.

—Federico García Lorca

Once shot with a 7mm—mistaken for a bear—

my uncle nearly bled to death, slamming through potholes

in the hunter’s front seat as the bug splattered

windshield grew dark, his shattered leg

jiggling like mud. It was a slow fading out,

numbness thick in his ears, belly slack

with the absence of fear. They caught him in time,

pinning the bone back as he came around

to the ache of it all. The red wool coat still hangs

by the door, blasted apart at the hem, where it once

brushed his jeans. He fingers the threads sometimes

before lacing his boots, the twinge in his thigh

still pricking his mind, the thought a bright stain

on a vast plain of snow.