Phenomenal Farewell

From the embrasure of their evergreen fellows

deciduous cottonwoods and aspens—

a Montana cast of thousands—more like hundreds—maybe tens—

call loud attention to themselves, wedging in Douglas fir, poking around

and slipping through cedar and pine, their yellows

clapping, their reds a cheer, all their leaves hallooing,

the desperate trees themselves about to bound

from the stage of autumn into tiers of October sun.

            Wait a minute: nothing so fanciful teaches

truth. Things are not what they seem

if what they seem overreaches

so much. Actually, they’re not applauding

back at us or pushing fir aside, they’re done,

that’s all—

I mean the leaves. What we’re seeing, hearing, lauding

is the end of one more season in our heads, another curtain call

for minds over-kindled by vivid sunbeams.

It just so happens that they most wear well

in show-stopping glory, dry-leaf phenomenal farewell.

Moral: Don’t exaggerate, unless absolutely convenient. Or unless you’re into fables.

Otherwise, speak plain...like:

Goodbye is—goodbye.

Anecdote on a Poem, and Considerations Thereof

Anecdote On A Poem, and Considerations Thereof

by Jesse Bier

A pair of senior Montana parents, while in Portland, Oregon, happened to buy my first book of poetry, Don’t tell Me Trees Don’t Talk, which their adult son opened to a poem called, “Montana Young.” He read it and wept—not torrentially, they report, but noticeably. And unashamedly. Later on, after reading the book entire, he thought “Montana Young” held up as the best poem in the collection. Well, we all say, of course—after such initial and personal impact. It’s a good poem or it wouldn’t be in the book, but there are better ones (the longer title poem, for instance, and the short “Somebody’s Grandmother, Somebody’s Grandfather”) according to the now thoroughly objective and disinvolved author, who has his own emotional favorites but can rise to soften judgment when put to it. Still, tomfoolery aside (not his real name), there is something special in the instance of a grown man’s sudden and unabashed reaction to a poem of particular significance to him—and, I believe, to many other out-of-state Montanans.

            

It is a poem of dangerously hackneyed subject matter—leaving home—and indeed that cliché interrupted my writing of it a number of times. But the fact is, Montana leave-taking is especially poignant because of what the land and upbringing in it powerfully and uniquely mean to those young people who have to go elsewhere for a living, that leaving a kind of early death for them. It turns out that what was otherwise a general literary threat, treating such a usual subject, was a means to connect with the longer, emotionally fraught immigrant and emigrant American experience, one that Montana especially connects with, coming clear in the second half of the poem. As a matter of fact, while I was searching for a rhyme in the last lines, it was this developing theme of the poem itself that rendered “bereft” for the youngster, not their parents at the very end. For it is indeed the young, departing generations, leaving beloved land as well as family, who are double losers, not their Montana-rooted mother and father. The poem found itself, transcending the cliché of subject, growing organically and emotionally—not willfully or artfully for me. It came to its own governing conclusion, deserving its tears, literal or otherwise, from native readers who happen upon it. In which case, it is their poem, not mine anymore. 

Montana Young

Montana Young

            Our children grow, leave, and don’t come back.

Somewhere else they go. It’s the stupid lack

of labor. Shouldn’t say “stupid”: I meant that fate

is inept and misspoke my feeling. In their teens and twenties

they leave at a steady rate

because here is no state of plenty,

only woods and uplands and rivers and lakes

each one has had to lovingly forsake.

They’re not seeking fame,

but they go all the same.

They say, “We have to make our living.”

Maybe they’re back for ten days of summer or at Thanksgiving—

a pittance of return.

Mothers and fathers seethe and churn

in the hollow solitude they leave

behind, the next worse thing to grieving.

            They’re very like ancestors out of the past

Leaving natal land, to cast

themselves in a different, almost foreign place. French or Finn,

Irish, German, Norwegian—these young are doubly kin

to their own grandfathers. Why come this far in time and space

to run again the same—yes, stupid—race?

            And so our boy is in Ohio or Nebraska, far from the Flathead,

And our girls watch streams of Chicago or San Diego traffic instead

Of the Bitterroot or Yellowstone.

And we—you and I—are alone.

And mine and my neighbor’s son and daughter,

Far from the Skalkaho, Lolo’s summit, or the Clearwater,

Feel even more bereft

than those they left.