Betting on the Night - Poems by Dennis Held

He polkas a two-step flop out the boxcar door
of the four o'clock freight from Butte
and Bill, the yard bull, says watch your step
so he does, all the way into town, careful

to tramp down the puddle ice that barks
like a circus seal. Across one rail, eyes
wide open, an orange and black tabby
sliced in two, still surprised at the light.

But Vince knows he can't save anybody,
least of all himself. Hell's already too full
of heroes. There's one now: a doughboy
who's only lobbing a snowball, not

a grenade, stranded on a pedestal before
the county courthouse that rings four-thirty.
Smudges of woodsmoke usher in the dusk.
He pulls down his watchcap over an ear

and sets out west for color, where two yellow
hills succumb to the slow-moving ploy
of a deeper huckleberry light, where
outside of town a long field of solemn

grain stacks drift off, set loose
like cattle seen running in fever dreams.
If he's not careful, he'll be gone as soon
as the sun, and the moon's already up,

betting on the night.

Finally, for winter's sake, he had come
to trust the undiluted cold, to absorb the many
intricate and particular pains of gray ice,

but now this changling wind---"chinook"---
that strips the hides from snowbanks and sends
the pale light everywhere shimmering.

Tough-minded song sparrows gloat
in vaporous trills above stray hounds that run
the tracksides, growl and tussle over

bones and gristle of doe and fawn.
Vince shivers, works a trick of light to help
shuck off the regular tug toward the sure,

laborious weight of loss that courses
through the damp air that is just now dense
with the unqualified love of decay.

III

Someone will name a child for him today.

He scrabbles along a scalloped jawbone
of ice that juts deep into the clotted river.
He follows. Back toward town, the grain

elevator's gunmetal blue rhymes with the sky.
Even the church steeple is pointless, domed
as any bullet: Fog brings down the cross.
A packet of geese cobbles over, pushing a klaxon
lament as they head for the mountains that break
in whitecaps, churlish waves braiding away
to the scar of horizon, the only seam, only border
of this tossed-off land. The pigeons assemble

for stray chaff, and night sets up its final picnic:
tablecloth of stars, one bright tea cup.

From the moraines of Wisconsin to the Idaho Rockies, Dennis Held writes about America. His poems find their roots, like the poems of Richard Hugo and Ray Carver, deep in the organic soil of physical detail.
---Dorianne Laux

Held's poems are so full of keenly heard sounds, sharply observed sights, sly and sympathetic humor, and enjoyed experience that it is easy to fall in love with them. Maybe that explains the bare-breasted beauty languidly, tantalizingly dozing (in a chapel? an art museum?) on the cover. At any rate, the poems are actually about fishing, relaxing with the Packers on TV or a bottle of bourbon, remembering burning the trash outdoors, skipping church of a Sunday, and imagining the glaciers creating the Northwest. They include celebrations of weeds, the poets scrotum, and childish abandon; a fantasia about some cats who haunt a grain elevator; a perfectly envisioned moment of self-pity ("Before Fire"); a serious parody that turns the justified bitterness in a Richard Hugo poem into philosophical amusement; a tribute to Fred Flintstone; and a couple glimpses of Van Gogh riding the rails and stalking the landscape of Montana. Set in Wisconsin and Montana, they are poems of the Northwest, gusts of sweet, cold, enlivening air.
---Ray Olson, Booklist

Dennis Held's stories take him from the Midwest to the mountains of Montana, and a few places that aren't on any map but his own. (In two poems, Vincent Van Gogh is seen wandering the railyards of Missoula, and hitchhiking along the Swan Range of the Rocky Mountains.) In a wide range of voices, in language that's familiar yet altogether original, Betting on the Night offers a glimpse of an illuminated world, transformed by an uncompromising imagination that reveals the transcendent moments hidden away within our daily lives.

Dennis Held's distinctive style combines psychic intensity, a love of language, a sharp-eyed appreciation of physical beauty, and a readiness to play. He writes poems about the ordinary---loneliness, joy, boredom---poems that are fresh, energetic, zany and good-hearted. Betting on the Night is like a memorable road trip with its stories, interesting characters, and songs that open you up to feeling and insight.
---Greg Pape