Butte, America

A Love Story

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Wild Blood

The M & M in Butte, one time bastion
of the workin' class, now home to Keno,
poker, smokers and dopers. No limits here. 
Ordered a T-bone—rare—an' double shot. 
Ready for the evening floor show, by God.
 
Old redheaded blister behind the grill, done
some cookin' in her time. Worked since silver
claimed her "da" in thirty-four. Best hasher
in Walkerville—a looker to boot. Been harder 
on the lads than them Central High nuns.

She's a fixture here—cigarette machine—
to young lions prowlin' in black leather. Cranked up
and circlin' the phone. Growlin' fer more crystal
from dark shades, middle aged drunks pimpin' 
powdered credit in slick polyester turtle necks.

Watched an old vet, D-Day alcoholic, wearin' bibs,
baggy socks, romeo slippers. Cornered on his pass
to the john by a Nam fatigued rummy. Panhandler 
these days. Weavin' an' workin' an ol' hero fer beer
er change—still gamblin' jungle luck an' still losin'.

High signed the bartender, but a red-faced Finn, 
heart big as his head, grinned my money silent, waved
fer a round. Said sons of Butte—hard rock miners—
had paid their dues. Couldn't lose mine dust, black lung
er regret, till they steamed at The Helsinki Bar.

Indian cowboy, elbowed up—near broke, heavy lidded,
on a runner. Trophy buckled rancher's ten year old 
kid counted coup on his cuff, handed him paper 
an' pen. Warrior fingers sketched a saddlebronc rider 
suspended in midair buck. Signed it "Twister—W. Brown."

Reminded me of a story My Old Man told me—
Charlie Russell passing time in The Mint. Thumb nailed
critters from a ball of clay. Drank his pay. Usually
set 'em free as a whiskey rush. Pounded some flat as last 
night's beer—given mood er the place of the ears.

Here's a go! Butte America! The M & M Bar!
To Kid Russell and W. Brown! Toast the lady, 
who stayed! My Old Man, who left! To the Vets!
To the Lex! All around! Set 'em up fer everyone
born of wild blood! Be they dead er alive er both! 

---

I wrote the above poem after spending a couple weeks in Butte the winter of ‘79-’80. The exact dates escape me. A good friend and neighbor was siding houses and needed a hand. I (of course) needed money, and we’d done a couple houses. It was a good gig: I liked the guy I was working with, my costs were covered, the pay was cash under the table, and all the drugs and booze I could handle. It was a fun time, and looking back I see that it was the last gasp of my endlessly spoiled youth, that Peter Pan land many of us Boomers occupied in our twenties. By March of 1980 the Milwaukee Road declared bankruptcy and the town I’d known all my life began a slow death. My lovely wife and I bailed in hopes of pursuing a film education at Montana State University. We were unable to get a student loan, so we spent the next six months stuck in Bozeman eddy trying to drown. The phone rang inside my hungover semi-consciousness, and when I finally picked it up, a friend told me one of our pals had died in a car wreck . . . too much fun that really wasn’t much fun at all.

Those were the times. Everything was changing around me. And of course Butte knew all about change. At one time it was equivalent to Denver and Seattle, the San Francisco of the northwest. It went from a gold camp to a silver town where eventually copious amounts of copper made it the “richest hill on Earth!” Thousands of miners from all over the world came to work the mines. Then in 1955 they opened the Berkley Pit which is now the largest superfund site in the country. The mines gave out in the ‘70s and the Pit closed shop in 1983. Once one of the greatest cities in the west, Butte went from over 100,000 people to around 25,000. The expansion of the pit mine literally ate up neighborhoods. Much of Butte has disappeared and only exists in stories, memories. In that regard it is a metaphor for life, and maybe that’s why I am more attracted to it each year, each visit, as I see more changes, and remember the places and people who’ve gone on ahead. Butte’s story is a story of thousands of stories, many lost in time. Writers try to capture and imagine those stories. “The gods only know” what a poet will do.

Exposure

Some days you wonder
what the hell is the point
in writing or reading
poetry? Why pay any attention
at all to the silly-ass dalliance
of self proclaimed prosodists
who proselytize their peculiarity of 
wit in fitful flourishes—
idiosyncratic imagery?

And you're not talking shut-in 
harlequin parlor poets here or 
hard-handed horseshoein' balladeers.
No siree, you've been reading 
the Best American Poetry 
of the year or 
this year, and you fear
any goddamn year it's most likely the same:
predominately impotent noise—
with the exception of a dozen or so
tried and true voices, half of whom have entered
the silence. 
                  Don't act surprised. You knew 
you wouldn't find some lady blue muse
walking the dark morning streets of Butte 
up the hill toward the bus depot  
in a wind chill of 40 below
after her Rambler broke down on Harrison.
No, not that poem, not in this anthology. 
She couldn't die of exposure 
in the alley behind Charlie's New Deal Bar, 
huddled against the back door.

This is 2004. Today's poets are packing
cell phones and words like: 
fractious,
nubbly,
revenant,
privet,
omnicompetent,
mnemonic,
and festoon.
Your frozen, Butte anti-muse has to be 
an addict, a loner, an obvious loser (maybe 
a prostitute) deserving no ode there, 
no literary mantle of romantic 
grace, no place in the academy of letters  
or the poesy grand-canon. What she
inspires (or composts) maybe 
is one of those nostalgic, 
oh-woe-is-me, borderline-sentimental poems 
you won't find in a prestigious  journal
or dig up in a respected tome 
of contemporary poetry. 

It's a poem that probes harshness, 
the dark, predictable loss; it plods along 
like an alcohol buzz, dazed by days, 
uncertainty and time: what it can't explain—
the cold storm, the weak heart, the coming 
night rain. 
                 Your muse walks you through
mud, blood, dog shit, and dentures
soaking in a glass on the dresser.
She asks you to care about something,
someone, wants you to slip on the mask
and imagine yourself your rival;
the familiar stranger you fear. 
Who but you can identify the “best”
American poems frozen and framed in
any collection? 

Remember the teenage
lovers in the dime store photo booth 
mugging for the flash and giggling 
behind the curtain? They emerged
shyly, hands clasped; then grabbed, screamed 
and laughed at their glossy black and white 
keepsake strip of four snapshots for a buck: 
first up, it's the cross-eyed twins; 
next, two goofy, toothy grins; 
then dualing fish-faces, puckered cheeks and lips; 
and on the bottom, one form 
(a little bit blurry and over exposed) 
the artwork they came here to compose—
skin fused in an open mouthed kiss.

---

---

I inherited my fascination with Butte from my dad who was born and lived there till he was 4 years old and never moved far away, returning as often as he could. His parents arrived in Butte in 1916 from Ireland, a pivotal year in Irish and World history. My dad was born in ‘17 which was a pivotal year in Butte. It saw the greatest underground mining disaster in history at the Granite Mountain and Speculator mines followed by the murder of International Workers of the World leader Frank Little. The irony of the disaster was that the fire in the mines that killed 168 men began because the mine was working on improving conditions for the miners underground. A cable that they were lowering into the mine broke loose and plummeted to the bottom, filling the shaft. Coated with an oiled paper for insulation, the cable that was destined to bring electric light and better circulation was ignited by a miner’s lamp and set the shaft on fire. In the months following, Frank Little, IWW activist, had returned to Butte to push once again for miners’ rights. The companies and the government had stifled and settled the labor dispute of 1914 with the help of troops and the unresolved bombing of Union Hall. Many miners died and the strike was ended. The IWW’s push to unionize in Butte was strongest between 1908 and 1911, but they continued to speak out on behalf of all workers. Little’s lynching and dragging murder in August of that year put an end to the IWW in Butte and the west on the whole.

---

Ghost Town
	—for Bridgett Delia Joyce Gibbons

You want to drive Excelsior to see the real Butte,
hang a left on Montana,
take in Mercury, Iron, Platinum & Silver

on your way up the hill to Walkerville.
Walk to the Granite Mountain Mine Memorial, 
touch the head frame, read your Uncle 

Tommy Joyce's name carved there, 
one of one hundred sixty-two immigrant 
miners who died in the Speculator Mine

Disaster one month (to the day)
before your father was born
(in that third floor flat, corner

of Montana & Quartz) into your 
grandmother's burning grief—guilt
finally turns cold as stone.

Is a child born to a ghost 
more or less a man? That young 
Bridgett, your grandmother, watched

(for a month) from her window 
the daily funerals at the First Presbyterian
Church, kept keening & packing 

your grandfather's lunch pail
for his graveyard shift underground.
She'd lie in bed & listen for the sound

of the sirens heading up the hill, 
hold her rosary, her dead brother's photograph
& the child (Vincent) twisting inside—

already ready for a drink. None of it 
matters now. All of them gone, where they 
belong: in the fallen brick & plaster of abandoned

buildings; the vacant sound of no traffic on Park or 
Broadway; & wind that chases, pushes, teases 
your hat down empty alleys past rusted garbage cans.

---

I am heading to Butte this weekend to work with Montana’s 2024 Poetry Out Loud Champion, Molly Ogan. She will be going to Washington D.C. later this month to recite poems with 50+ other reciters. She is the fourth champion from Butte in the last 19 years. Memorizing poetry on the page and reciting it on stage takes us back to the origins of poetry, the troubadours, the oral art form. I enjoy both the visual and the oral aspects of poetry, and have committed a number of my own poems to memory. To know a poem by heart is not only committing it to memory but having an emotional, heartfelt, connection to the poem. I feel that way about many poems, especially those composed by those poets with a musical ear. and I want to share one by my good friend Ed Lahey, a Butte poet, who most of us Montana poets of my generation referred to as the defacto Poet Laureate of Montana long before Montana started naming poet laureates in 2005. Ed passed away in 2011. The following video is a reading of the poem (I didn’t have any luck linking the recitation which is on the Montana Arts Council’s Facebook page and Youtube channel).

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Gimp O'Leary's Iron Works by Ed Lahey

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So I’ll go to Butte, work with and encourage Molly to have a grand time representing Montana in her recitations, and know all of Butte and the state are with her, and know the ghost of Ed Lahey has her back. After that I’ll drive up to the memorial where my uncle Tommy died, through Walkerville, and then walk the downtown, go up to the college. And as usual, I’ll plan once again to come back and spend a week or more at the Archives, take the tours, visit the folks I still know there, swear I’m going to make time to spend more time in Butte. The same promise I make every year. But when I drive away and head back home, I never leave it behind. So much of my relationship to Butte is in my mind, my memory, the stories I’ve heard and read. I remember in the early eighties I was there with two other guys on a pack and move when I worked for Blair Transfer & Storage. One of the guys was from back east. He’d landed in Missoula for awhile because he was broke. He’d worked as a mover back in New York and figured he could find a job as a lumper and driver wherever he showed up as he was touring the west. When we drove into Butte I thought he was going to lose his shit. He didn’t like the look of the place, all the old, decaying brick buildings up on the hill where we were staying at the Capri Motel. He wanted to get the Hell out of there, said it looked like “fucking Newark!” Figured he’d get mugged before he got out of there.

Butte might not appeal to everyone which is fine with most people from Butte. As Ed Lahey wrote in his poem “A Letter to the Editor”— "Instead of 'I like it' / someone said / the Chamber of Commerce slogan / should have read, / 'Butte is my town, / let's face it' / which I couldn't. //"

Ed left Butte in the ‘90s and moved to Missoula where he’d attended the university years before. His daughter lived there, and there was little left for him in Butte but ghosts and a history of pain. We became friends. I admired his poetry and oratory skills. And at some point in our story-swapping we discovered he and my dad were born on the same date in July in Butte. That and being Irish and alcoholic made him a stand in for my father who’d died a year or so before I met Ed. He encouraged me to trust my own voice and be thankful that I had something, some place, some people, some politics to write about: advice Leslie Fiedler had given to him thirty years earlier. I cherished that piece of wisdom the way I cherished our friendship. So, following Ed’s suggestion, I will conclude this tale with the title poem of my first full-length book, “Connemara Moonshine,” a poem written a short time after “Wild Blood” back when “educated poets” informed me that they weren’t really poems and maybe I should try my hand at prose. Those “poets” weren’t from Butte. Neither am I, but I carry a little bit of it inside. So, raise a glass to Butte! Slainte! I hope you make it there soon.

---

Connemara Moonshine

The worn luggage 
	of my Irish ancestors
	sits in the darkest chamber of my heart, 
stacked dusty, unhinged
	but never unpacked,
and when I listen
alone, 
	holding my breath, 
	I hear whispers calling
from trunk to glen:
			uprisings, 
	green as the Twelve Bens and cool 
as moonshine on Lake Connemara
	March evenings when no one knows. 

My grandfather said his daily prayers
	in Gaelic, away from the church.	
	His fingers worked the rosary 
	beads he hung above his bed, 
just over his head, 
	blood lucky as an ocean of ale.
				Adrift 
in my shanty ship of fool dreams,
	blue drunk on a frozen sea,
	this legacy of liquid terror 
				and pride
	is stuck between absolute zero and steam,
	tears cold in my burning veins.
				Insane 
messengers of impending doom,
	bottles of Bushmills, 
	smooth as gasoline, comfort 
	the combustible marriage between
Jesus and the devil 
		Himself in my mind. 

	If the bottle’s half full, 
			I’m only half empty 
	but know my rage will go wrong. 

So I’ll drink 
	till ice ignites the song 
	burning hotter than the fires 
	of Hell in my gut and cry,
For the love of Jesus H. Sufferin’ 
	Christ! What the fuck am I supposed to do?

	Just one more time 
	I’ll try to hide 
	like a leprechaun circus bear.
(Do you suppose he’s happy
	behind the bars
	tipping bottles and dancing
in clothes?) 
	I must dry the blind Madonna’s eyes,
	pack my bags for Butte and go, 
	decide to be my mother’s son 
	and know
my father’s moon will rise 
			once more
	St. Patrick’s Day.