The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo Page A

rings the local chime
he will be olive sometime like a slave.
     
    Screams implied by eyes of winded eagles
and wind are searing future in the stone.
The cliff peels off in years of preaching water
and the cliff remains. The saint is red
to know how many teeth are in the foam,
the latent fame of either river bed
where trout are betting that the saint is brown.
     
    Flakes of eagle eggshells bomb the chapel
and the village ears of sanctuary dumb.
In a steaming room, behind a stack
of sandbagged books, the saint retreats
where idols catch a fever from his frown.
The saint is counting clicks of eagle love.
The river jumps to nail a meaty wren.
     
    And April girls enlarge through layers
of snow water, twitching fish and weeds
and memories of afternoons with gills.
If a real saint says that he could never
see a fiend, tell that saint to be here,
throat in hand, any Friday noon—
delirious eagles breed to tease the river. *
     
    I don’t even understand that one anymore. Once I did, though, or I wouldn’t have published it. (I have a smattering of integrity, thank you.) Note how definite the voice is. How strong the command to the self tries to be. How the poem urges the man in it to accept reality in all its cruelty and diffuseness. And I even took a private pride in the difficulty of the poem. I wasn’t afraid of anything. No, sir. You don’t understand my poems? Screw off, Jack. But in real life, be my friend. Like me. Like me.
    I went to Cerignola far more often than to Foggia. It was smaller but closer. All restaurants were off-limits in Italy during the war, and there were few places to go in Cerignola. The Red Cross, of course, but they didn’t have swing records. When I went to Cerignola, I usually got drunk in a little make-shift bar. The girl who waited tables was short, stocky, and stacked. The love-starved G.I.s watched her as she brought the spumante to the tables. They taught her to whip her hand along her hip as if she were a cowboy making a fast draw. Every time she did it, pointed her finger at us and depressed her thumb hammer, the soldiers howled.
    The bar had a band, trumpet, accordion, and drums. The trumpeter’s best number was “Stardust,” and he played it often while the G.I.s rolled their eyes and exclaimed. I sat alone and drank spumante , listened to the music, watched the girl’s ripe behind bulge her dress, and wondered what the raucous enlisted men would think if they knew how self-conscious I was. Not because I was the only officer there, but because I was too timid to approach a woman and feared a lifetime of sexual deprivation. I laughed when I knew it was expected and made a point now and then of the attraction I felt for the girl. I could not have had her even if she had consented, but I wanted her and I could let the world know that.
     
     
    My first time in the Cerignola area had been from August 1944 through March 1945. It was April when I saw it again, April 1964. The countryside was green with grain and the weather pleasantly warm. Cerignola seemed bigger. A nice-looking hotel operated next to the building that had been the local Red Cross. A door or two from the hotel was where the bar had been, with the finger-pistol-packing mamma mia waitress. I wasn’t sure now which door it was. Shops open for business. People of all ages were in the streets. No children begged us for cigarettes or candy or offered their sisters for sale. The streets seemed unusually wide, and I noticed iron grillwork on balconies of recent apartment buildings.
    Foreigners seldom visit Cerignola, and we were curiosities. I got into a discussion with some young men and suddenly realized we were circled by at least a hundred onlookers. “Who,” I shouted involuntarily in English, “are all these people?” and they moved off slowly as if they understood from the volume of my voice that I didn’t want my every word a public matter. A comic-looking old man stared at my wife, his lower lip quivering as if he