There’s a book by Richard Hugo I’ve bought 4 times now. One of his collected works of poems, bought, read, and pressed onto anyone I could convince to take it. There was some early desperation to claim a sense of place and understand Montana, and now, stumbling upon it again in a second hand store in Boston I picked up yet another copy. The city names jumping off the page with a burning nostalgia unfit for someone who is not even from there. But so it goes, that place got its hooks into me.
The nature of anthologies in my opinion is that you never finish them and maybe hardly start them. They are meant to be leafed through and consumed in fits and starts. Especially poetry anthologies, where each line is so dense with meaning. So it felt like fate to open to the page describing a familiar place a 10 minute walk from home. I remember the first time I visited the bar and was told to read Mr. Hugo’s poem, finding it immeasurably pleasing how little the place had changed according to his description. And I wrote about it myself, many months later, though it doesn’t really compare to his version.
I originally published this with the below video, which I thought captured a sense of the uncanny I felt on that day I hiked Marshall
The Milltown Union Bar by Richard Hugo (1973) You could love here, not the lovely goat in plexiglass nor the elk shot in the middle of a joke, but honest drunks, crossed swords above the bar, three men hung in the bad painting, others riding off on the phony green horizon. The owner, fresh from orphan wars, loves too but bad as you. He keeps improving things but can’t cut the bodies down. You need never leave. Money or a story brings you booze. The elk is grinning and the goat says go so tenderly you hear him through the glass. If you weep deer heads weep. Sing and the orphanage announces plans for your release. A train goes by and ditches jump. You were nothing going in and now you kiss your hand. When mills shut down, when the worst drunk says finally I’m stone, three men still hang painted badly from a leafless tree, you one of them, brains tied behind you back, swinging for your sin. Or you swing with goats and elk. Doors of orphanages finally swing out and here you open in.
Untitled by Boshai, sometime in 2021 I met a man with a glass eye named Stu, at the Moose Lodge down the street, which used to be a bar, and still is I suppose - filled with the electric rattle of a slot machine and the tap tap of the child's feet against the bar. And they said no dogs allowed, in big green letters that suggest some recent calamity. I begin to ask the question, but the barkeep waves me off and tells me to throw my coin into the open mouth of the dead Elk on the wall. And I was walking yesterday up the mountain touched by change - who used to be a sentinel, then a ski hill, who for several years now lost her snow. And the trees are crisscrossed with degrading cable, where the fire road became cat track became bike path, and the rich ones take their horses or their six thousand dollar machines. And where I walked in my sandals slowly up to the bald head and saw a line of butts cantering down the other side. A line of Elk, just three and massive, confusingly un-deerish in their way that those rarer animals always make you second guess yourself. Was that owl really there? That paw print from a bear? And I tell it to Stu, who looked at me with his mismatched eyes and said "There's more in those hills than Elk, little miss" and took a long drought of his domestic beer. A thousand yard stare, a cough to clear the smoke, and an eerie walk home. And I can't shake the feeling of the fleeting animal shapes in the dark, but what is it about a streetlight that just enforces night?
boshai 