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This Night and Others like It

Round like wagon wheels out of Columbus, the moon rose orange and massive over the plains, Comanche moon, moon of ten thousand years of people huddled and wondering, drawing models of the moon. So many pictographs, crescents and round bellies, arrowheads and antelopes and bears. Anything killable, ready to be skinned and lived in, eaten or worn--buffalo, deer, woolly mammoths, the shaggy shawls of wolves and necklaces of teeth. In 1880, my great-greats wobbled down from Ohio, following signs of coyotes and God's own book of stars. Wolves sniffed their cows at night, red eyes flashing in campfires. This warped and split-wood wheel is all we own, their clock and trunk of treasures burned to ashed, fire they survived without albums, not even a family Bible. The moon's a huge white ball pockmarked over Lubbock. My good friend Duke walked there and a dozen others, lifted rocks and practiced golf swings, leaving a flag, a moon rover with dented piano-wire tires. When Great-grandmother climbed down on this dirt, Lubbock was nothing, not even shacks, only buffalo grass and a canyon where they watered the cattle by cliffs with pictographs, and pitched their tent, night coming on, coyotes howling at an orange moon bulging into a thousand miles of stars. The most recent of Walt McDonald's sixteen collections of poems are The Digs in Escondido Canyon (Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1991), All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems, with Janet M. Neugebauer (Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1992), Where Skies Are Not Cloudy (Univ. of North Texas Press, 1993), Counting Survivors (Pittsburgh, 1995), and Blessings the Body Gave (Ohio State, 1998). He has published poems in many journals, including American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Antioch Review, Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, The Journal, Kenyon Review, The, Midwest Quarterly, The Nation, New Criterion, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. He has also published a book of short fiction. McDonald's books have won four Texas Institute of Letters awards, the George Elliston Poetry Prize, the Juniper Prize, three National Cowboy Hall of Fame Western Heritage awards, and the Ohio State University Press/Journal Award. McDonald has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1984, 1989), and was Texas Professor of the Year in 1992. He teaches at Texas Tech University and lives in Lubbock. LETTING DOWN MY BUCKET ON THE PLAINS When I was a boy growing up in Texas, I didn't want to write, but to fly. I came to poetry late, as an Air Force pilot. After some of my friends went off to Vietnam and one was shot down, then another, I felt a need to say something to them, or about them. I could talk to their wives or widows; but I turned to poems when nothing else worked. My first stumbling attempts were like letters to the dead, or to someone unable to hear. When my first book was published---mainly war poems--Donald Justice asked, "Where's Texas in your poems, Walt?" I didn't know; I had never thought about it. But I started looking around and, sure enough, I began to feel the call of that wild, native West Texas--which I knew better than I knew Iowa, better than Colorado, better than Vietnam. For years, I had not considered this world to be my home. But when I let down my bucket in a plains region doomed to dry up, I found all sorts of images for poems, even if I could live to write for forty years in that suddenly fabulous desert. …