Machado, Bly, and Carver All Visit Pine Valley, Utah, Together, 14 December 2018

Body was never a boyish body that could leap

Three stairs at a time, that could leap at all, at

Any time. For some dreamy reason, body thought

Of this and of Antonio Machado’s Abel Martin

Lamenting his own quixotic sense of time,

And thus of Iron John Bly’s translation of same,

Bly’s weird obsession with the boy-haunted,

Father-missing grown man, and then, of course,

Carver, finally sober but dying of cancer, writing

Of the consolation of a kind he found in Machado

And Machado’s Abel, which he probably read

In Bly’s en face edition. Body sat in a car seat

Parked in the snow, doors flung open to the cold

Mountain air, forever-moving sedentary soul.

Bly was still alive, somewhere, his own body

Now ninety-two, still avoiding the real katabasis

That comes for girls as well as boys and must

Eventually come for him, too. Carver understood

Better, being more tortured, being fatherless

In Bly’s mythic sense, what Machado’s old Abel 

Meant, addressing his own swift, able-bodied,

Interior young self. Or maybe he didn’t. Body

Listened attentively to the wind picking hymns

Of nothing much out of nothing in the ponderosas.

This wasn’t about the exact content, the semantics,

The thoughts, or even the gender dynamics

Of those three poets, embodied, those men.

No, what was remembering them was the sense

Of mysterious descent from poem to poem,

Like the meltwater stair-stepping down these rocks

In the thin, near-solstice sun. Machado’s composition,

Ghosted by dozens, if not millions, of previous

Voices, including the actual Cervantes. Then Bly

In workmanlike, middle-class American, masculine

English translating those remains. Carver, anguished,

Composing what would only be posthumously 

Published, turf cutting his ell-square pitkin to pull

Machado’s revenants in to talk to him. Body

Was half dozing in the light, however cold,

But all their ghosts came, hungry, to him,

Whispering. We are not the haints of humans,

Left to trouble flesh. We are the translucent seeds

Of new and living microbes in the waters melting

From death to death, the future, the fresh.