Richard Hugo
Letter to Goldbarth from Big Fork
Dear Albert: This is a wholesome town, really. Cherries grow
big here and all summer a charming theatre puts on
worthy productions. It is Montana at its best, lake
next to town, lovely mountains close by, and independent
people, friendly, generous, always a discernible touch
of the amateur I like. Nothing slick. Montana is
the rest of America 50 years back. Old barber shops
you walk into and don't have to wait. Barbers who take
a long time cutting your hair to make sure they get in all
the latest gossip. Bars where the owner buys every fifth round,
and you buy one for him now and then. Albert, I love it
despite what some think here reading my poems. The forlorn towns
just hanging on take me back to the 30's where most poems
come from, the warm meaningful gestures we make, the warm ways
we search each other for help in a bewildering world,
a world so terrifyingly big we settle for small
ones here we can control. There's a bitter side, too, a mean
suspicion of anything new, of anyone different
or bright. I hate that. I hate feeling as I become well
known that I'm marked: poet, beware. He has insight.
I don't like being tagged negative because I write hurt
as if my inner life on the page is some outer truth,
when it is only my view, not the last word. When it is
not the world photoed and analysed, only one felt.
I like best of all in Montana how people who've had
nothing from the beginning, never expected a thing,
accept cruelty, weather and man, as normal and who have felt
the bitter strokes of life's gratuitous lash (oh, poets
catch that one), are cheerful, receptive and kind to the end.
So for all their suspicion and distrust of me, they are
my women, my men. And I, who came from the seacoast,
who love the salmon, the damp air of Seattle, finally
have come to call this home. That means, when I say it, I lived
here forever and I knew it first time I saw it nine
years ago. Albert, Big Fork brings out the mountain in me.
And trout help, too. Just now, a stranger drove by and waved.
And I waved back my best wave, Albert. I shouted at him
"hello," and it came back doubled by hills. At you too. Dick.
Richard Hugo, Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo, W.W. Norton & Company, 1984.