I'll Say it Again...

A panel of poets in this provincial capital recently declared that there is no definition of poetry.  They went on to elaborate: you just know the stuff when you hear it.  They further insulted those who have made poetry not only a study but have taught its various structures; they named themselves natural poets; like the unicorn, rare.

I've heard that declaration many times, usually from a wannabe.  The sad fact is, the panel missed the big point: cap-P Poetry occurs anywhere, in any medium - yeah, back to "what is fiction" - but communicating it requires skill. 

Back home, I was fired with the ambition to write.   Instead, I wimped out and ate dinner, selecting a Poetic movie for later, and the capitalized P is intentional.  I wanted to Wallow in Beauty, to be Ravished by Color, to be Carried Away by Emotion - the way a poem can be.  I own hundreds of titles and wound up with The Last Unicorn for its use of myth.  Here’s a list of those I almost watched.  

The Bear (great demonstration of Less is More.  blows me away)
The Black  Stallion (ditto.  the first 40 minutes of Francis Ford Coppola’s version)
Babette’s Feast (elegant wit)
The Earrings of Madame de... (ironic love story, pretty costumes)
Fantastic Planet  (fantasy as metaphor)
Illuminata (comes close, and it's fun)
The Last Unicorn (myth translated to now)
Siegfried (you can't improve on a genuine myth)
Tango (the dance sequences are the plot)
Smoke Signals (poetic familial and filial love)
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury; enough said)

You can’t argue with this list; there’s more bare-bones beauty and elegance and eloquence in each of these titles than are dreamed of in Hollywood’s contemporary philosophy.  What makes them work?  Apart from good characters, interesting situations, subtle comments on the Human Condition, etc. 

Well, ta-dah! I think I've discovered why they’re poetic, fellow word-slaves.  The thing that makes these films and some few poems and an occasional painting Poetic - drum-roll, please - is an individual, uncopied, unfeigned original point of view.  Like my very first Creative Writing teacher said and I often forget: a voice. 

Here is Chapter Nineteen of Dead on Dutcher's Mountain. It's the one with the skeletons.

NINETEEN

It was a gray day, just right for an interment.  The masses of flowers surrounding the muddy-looking pit, the cloying presence of their sprayed-on scent, the woolly rivers of ground fog near the cemetery and the overcast sky cooperated in a grisly conspiracy to depress.  Whomever.

McCoy, in uniform and with a black arm band, appreciated the sky’s effort, but Brian appeared to fully participate in its mood, standing beside the sheriff at a remove from the others and talking to himself through the entire service.  McCoy was tolerably sure the man didn’t know he was speaking.  As the minister finished his assurances of eternal life Brian murmured, “...so many would turn out.  How did they learn?  Hillary, of course, is doing a splendid job of distracting Karen.  Brick, Hillary.  Good stock of course.”  He pulled a face.  “Jesus, I’m thinking like my bigoted ass of a father.”  He dropped the first clods onto the bronze casket and stepped back for the workmen, as did McCoy.  “Worth the expense, bronze.”

Karen approached with Hillary; McCoy turned them toward the car with a gesture, shaking his head.  “Thank you,” Brian began, but stopped speaking when his voice faltered.  He turned to the minister instead.  “Thank you,” he repeated, and shook the man’s hand.  He took in a deep breath and turned back to McCoy. 

“Thank you, McCoy.” 

Hillary, Karen and the minister took the graveled path toward the car, small black figures on a big gray landscape.  McCoy handed Brian a small buff envelope.  “These were Gail’s, Bri, her jewelry.”

“Thank you.”  Brian fiddled with a corner of the envelope.  “I think it’s finally sinking in, McCoy.  Sorry if I repeat myself.  I don’t suppose the pendant is in here.  No, you told me you didn’t find it.”

Grief lay on Brian heavy as a stone.  “Can I do something. To help?” McCoy asked, “Drive Hillary and Karen home?  You could probably use time alone.”

“Yes.  Thanks.”  Then he asked, “Christ, McCoy, don’t other husbands live through this?  Don’t they survive, and feel things?  I feel nothing.  I might as well be a stone.”

“Yes,” McCoy answered.  “The answer is yes, Brian, and you will too.  You hurt so much your brain won’t let you feel any more pain, is all.”  He wanted to hug the man like a bear and pat his back like a baby.  He would have, except Brian looked ready to collapse at the first touch.

“I have to understand, McCoy.  Maybe if I go back to that cave, or see where that trap was.”

“It’s a crime scene, Brian.  You can’t.”  He led him to the wall surrounding the family plot and sat with him, overlooking the fog, the long valley and the enormous redwoods beyond.  He removed the black armband.  After a while he told the hovering funeral director to tend to the man.  When he caught up with Hillary and Karen, the girl was weepy and needful.  He took them home and installed them beside Brian’s fire pit with cocoa and tea.  By that time he had a load of frustration too big to take back to the office; he drove up the Smith River gorge to the mine.  The river rumbled, white and toothed with stones.  Clouds with bellies like sculpted marble rode the hills.

“This the place?” he asked Gunderson later, panting and sweating despite the clouds.  They had been climbing swiftly toward the top of the old landslide since he drove in.  They were not a quarter-mile from the cave. 

“Just about.  We both could see whoever was up here from the kitchen window.”

“Both you and your wife saw someone?”

“A silhouette, yeah.  VenLoo was already missing, not at the plant, but his car’s in the carport.  So I was on the horn for you when you drove up.”

“Thanks again.”

They turned toward the installation far below.  There were trucks and earth movers and outbuildings like an elaborate tabletop photography setup, great swatches of scored earth, the lethal slide at their left, and Gordon’s house to the right with the office building farther on.  There was a clear line of sight to Gordon’s windows.  McCoy’s hand automatically went to the back of his neck.

Gunderson said, “No footprints of course, not on this duff.  But I’ll show you the culverts as long as we’re at the slide.”  He moved toward the landslide and McCoy followed, grateful to be walking downhill, still testy, still depressed about Brian, and perversely looking for prints on pine needles and rotting leaves. 

From the top, the slide was a domed slump carried downward from a crescent of fissured soil and stone.  Stretched along its uncertain, crumbing brink a meadow curled upward toward forest.  They avoided the meadow and were hidden by the woods, quiet and watching for Voerst.  No sound; no man; only grass.  From within the woods it made a crisp border of gold against the dark blue of the southern mountains.  And, momentarily, so did the glittering end of a culvert.

“Wait,” McCoy hissed.  Warily he scanned the meadow, the woods; abandoned secrecy and trotted toward the pipe.  It disappeared as he approached.  He backtracked, relocated it, saw others, approached.  He had to crane his neck even to get a glimpse.

Gunderson joined him.  “See what I mean?” he asked.  “After ten years of erosion, they’re just now emerging.”

“You say they’re perforated?”

“Right, holes on each side.  Like a soaker hose for a garden.”

McCoy backed along the crumbling lip, checked the view with every step, and sent occasional clods over the lip or into shallow lateral fissures.  The end of the pipes lay on granite, a just-visible ledge.  The farther he got from the center of the crescent, the harder it was to see them.  He crossed to the other end.  Same thing.  And of course they were invisible from below, hidden by the hump of the slide and the new growth along its top.  Only from dead-center, or the edge of the slide itself, were the culverts visible, and then only if you looked for them.

“I don’t get it,” McCoy said, abandoning quiet. “It’s as if the bastards knew they’d stay hidden.”

Gunderson watched the sheriff’s puzzlement with smug pleasure.  “Yeah, they knew,” he claimed.  “But you’re not a geologist, so it doesn’t make sense to you.”  He began a lecture.  “See, we’re standing on lateritic soil, it’s unconsolidated mostly stone trash, and it’s bedded on a hard sill.  A sill is an intrusion formed by another sort of rock while it’s hot and plastic.  In this case, the sill is slick, granite it looks like, worn right through by that creek and natural erosion from wind and rain.  A long time ago, maybe before the last glaciation; see where it’s continued across the gap to that hill over there?  It makes a bench like the one down there, where the slide sort of pushes out.”  McCoy realized that Gunderson was no longer gloating, but was enjoying himself.  The man liked geology; he actually found it interesting. 

“Now look at the slide, then the depth of the crescent it made,” Gunderson went on.  “Must be close to fifty feet.  The last horizontal sixteen yards of the old forest was dumped over the slope and onto the entry to the old mine.  All it took to create it, if you knew about the slippery top of the sill, was flooding the laterite right off it from sixteen yards back.  From here.”  He pointed to his boots.  “Looked like an act of God, after the first couple of winter rains.”

McCoy shook his head, awed by the scope of the perverse planning, the work to install those pierced, leaking pipes.  “Because this is where the slick rock stopped eroding.  Simple,” he said.  “The geology’s just like old man Zuber said, then.”  He paused, taking it in. “Fifty-four people buried.  Maybe fifty-seven, if you count the missing bodies.  Only where’d the water come from?”

“Probably the cave.”

McCoy swiveled sharply to look uphill, feeling silly.  “I would have thought of that,” he claimed.

“I’m sure you would have, officer,” Gunderson crooned.

They returned to the forest and got quiet again to follow the grid of depressions--culverts--around trees and right to the azaleas, certain of where it would lead.  Twice they lost it.  Both times they bickered about direction, cast back and forth, finally relied on dead reckoning and rediscovered it.  They forgot whomever the Gundersons had sighted.  They inevitably entered the cave.

Dim as the light had been outside, the cave was darker.  McCoy’s flashlight--again he felt silly--was in his car.  “Wait,” he ordered.

But Gunderson continued into the blackness.  “I can see fine, McCoy,” he called.

There was a sort of a path, a depression just visible in the light spill; the soil cover for the main culvert.  McCoy followed it with his foot, stumbled as it dropped into utter darkness-- “Damn!” --and water splashed into his boot.  “There’s a pool, all right.”

Faintly, “I heard the splash,” Gunderson called.  “There’s a bench this side of the adit.  Runs ten or maybe twelve yards before it peters out.  Must be the old lake shore.”

“I’m going the other way,” McCoy called.

“I’ll come with you.”

McCoy regained the ledge and, dragging the sole of his boot along its rim, he followed the shore.  The bench broadened and lowered; the echoes said the wall was away to the left, and the room was large.  Darkness made him nervy; he kept an anxious eye over his shoulder to watch the entry.  Foolish, because it kept him partially blind, but at least he could see Gunderson’s groping silhouette.  The man seemed hesitant. 

“You okay, Gunderson?”

“I forgot.  That bastard carved up my hand in a mine, and now I get jittery in the dark.”

“Want me to wait for you?”

Without testiness, with maybe a little nervous quiver, “No, that’s all right.”

McCoy warmed to that quiver.  “You can wait outside,” he offered.

“No.”

McCoy continued his exploration, making it just a little louder for Gunderson’s sake.  Gradually another light flirted into his peripheral vision; it traveled across the water on a rippled trail.  McCoy turned to look and saw a wedge of filtered daylight.  Maybe the lake was supplied from over there.  He could circle the hill outside and see whether it was a creek bed.  Maybe seasonal.  “Think that’s how the water got in?” he called.
Gunderson’s voice was near; he must have hurried.  “It’s possible, or maybe it came from a spring.”

McCoy resumed searching out the limits of the pond.  From time to time Gunderson used his cigarette lighter, but it quickly sputtered out and never helped.  The ground was even and dry, the walls invisible.  The new light from across the pond helped, if you focused away from it. 

Then it disappeared.  McCoy stopped.  Gunderson’s breath came from right beside him. 

 “We must be in another room,” Gunderson said.  He was patently frightened now, sweating and stinking, barely able to talk.

“Or in a niche,” McCoy said automatically, although his contrariness had gone.  Gunderson was being helpful, he had been right about the grid and the culvert, and single-handed he had proved the ancient, fatal sabotage against the mine.  He was also forcing himself to take each step in this cave.  McCoy sympathized with the man’s fear and wanted to ease it.  Trouble was, the pitch-black, the only occasional echoes, all the stories he read as a boy about caves and bats, had him half-spooked too.  He said, “I feel like Tom and Huck waiting for Injun Joe.  Let’s find the wall and follow it.  Something solid.”

After the dual glimmers of daylight, the darkness had recouped the space with double impact.  Four steps.  Nine.  The place must be huge. 

Gunderson said, “I shouldn’t have left Jess alone, now that VenLoo recognizes me.”

Three more steps.  McCoy said, “Well, if Voerst--sorry, VenLoo--isn’t up here, he’s bound to be busy filling those ore trucks.  I wouldn’t worry.”

Another pair of shuffling steps.  “You’re probably right, McCoy.  It’s just my nerves.”

“Wish we could see where...”

Something clattered against McCoy’s foot, then something else.  He stretched his arms.  Emptiness, except for the flannel of Gunderson’s shirt.  McCoy’s nerves shrilled.  Abruptly panicky, shaky, he knelt to feel the ground.  There was no stone, no rocky bench.  What he touched felt like a rough, bulbous stick.  Gunderson’s cigarette lighter came on, and this time it illumined the space in front of them.

“Christ!”  McCoy jerked and stood up.  He had found a cache of human bones. 

It was too much.  Too God-damned much.  Buckles, watches, rings, even a metal cigarette case, gleamed from chalky pelvises and rib cages.  Four empty eye sockets regard the men, two gold-filled grins greeted them.  Obscene.  Stupid.  The filthy joke of a really obnoxious God. 

Gunderson’s light went out.  He fled, pulling at McCoy’s arm like a child.  Pounding toward the light of the entry, splashing in the pool, their noisy footfalls covered a sussuration from beyond the cave.  It grew louder; it became sound. 

They halted, panting, to hear it over their heartbeats.  The sound grew to angry speech, creeping with difficulty through the narrow slit in the mountain, then bouncing from a dozen rock faces.  All McCoy could tell, running again, stumbling in Gunderson’s terrified grip, was that two men argued.  Then a muffled explosion stopped the indistinguishable words.

It was a gun shot.  Even from within this cave, this tomb, McCoy could tell. 

Again the men stopped running.   Silence, except for Gunderson’s sobbing breath.  The disgust at the grinning skeletons augmented McCoy’s dreary, cynical sense of truth and he knew perfectly the identity of the victim outside.  No sound.  Well, there was one sound, a sort of gagged whimper.  It lasted only a minute or two.  When it stopped, Gunderson was hysterical and yelling.  He yelled a long time before McCoy, gentle as love, got him out of the cave to face what was waiting.

Brian lay shot through the lung and paralyzed, but conscious.  He clutched a broken chain so tightly it wasn’t worth the bother to open his hand.  McCoy’s guess was that the slime on the ground would be semen.