Left Hand Canyon

By William Matthews 1942–1997 William Matthews

for Richard Hugo

The Rev. Royal Filkin preaches

tomorrow on why we are sad.

Brethren, Montana’s a landscape

requiring faith: the visible

government arrives in trucks,

if you live out far enough.

If you live in town, the government’s

gone, on errands, in trucks.

Let citizens go to meetings,

I’ll stay home. I hate a parade.

By the time you get the trout

up through the tiny triangular

holes in the Coors cans, they’re so

small you have to throw them back.

Glum miles we go

to Grandmother’s house.

The earth out here doesn’t bear us

up so much as it keeps us out,

an old trick of the beautiful.

Remember what Chief Left Hand said?

Never mind. Everything else

was taken from him,

let’s leave his grief alone.

My Eastern friends ask me

how I like it in the West,

or God’s country, as it’s sometimes

called, though God, like a slumlord,

lives in the suburbs: Heaven.

And I don’t live “in the West”;

I live in this canyon among a few

other houses and abandoned

mines, vaccinations that didn’t take.

Source: Rising and Falling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1979)

Biography

William Matthews's poetry has earned him a reputation as a master of well-turned phrases, wise sayings, and rich metaphors. Much of Matthews's poetry explores the themes of life cycles, the passage of time, and the nature of human consciousness. In another type of poem, he focuses on his particular enthusiasms: jazz music, basketball, and his children. His early writing was free-form and epigrammatic. As his career has . . .

Continue reading this biography