How Lonely the Dead Must Be
The last line of James Wright’s poem
“I Am a Sioux Brave, He Said in Minneapolis”
woke me up this morning.
I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark,
wondering if he finished that poem
in that city, where I lived,
in a big white white house on a corner.
One winter night, having left a library,
walking in the enclosure of a bridge
over the Mississippi, from the West Bank
to the East, I met Harold Stetson,
an indigenous person, with whom I shared
a jug of wine, on a stone bench
outside the enclosure, a jug
that, as it passed between us, fell
and splintered on the stone ground.
His brother had recently been clubbed
to death by cops on the West Bank’s
Seven Corners, he said, on the stone bench.
On the East Bank, we sat across a table
in Dinkytown’s Valli Pizza. Then
up in my room, he slept with his dark coat
as a blanket in the easy chair
by the window. The next morning
my roommate, Bill Smith and I, in Bill’s
car, watched him walk up a few steps
and through a door into a house
in South Minneapolis. I only saw Harold
once after that, with a few books
in his arms, going into Sandy’s,
a coffee shop, as I was going out.
It was on University Avenue,
across from the campus. It probably
wasn’t there when James Wright
was in Minneapolis. Harold and I
exchanged a few words.
But that night on the bridge, only he
and I were in the enclosure, then
on the bench, the jug
a bridge between his world and mine.
Peter Mladinic has published three books of poems: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington, all with the Lea County Museum Press. His fourth book of poems, Knives on a Table is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications. His most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.