We humans: Deadwood beauty (and a poem) for the evening.

by Ryland Walker Knight

From the Season One finale, "Sold Under Sin," my favorite moment thus far in the series, among many, involves Jewel and Doc, dancing at The Gem, to the new fucking piano while Al watches on, all the love in the world beaming down over his bar, his world, his dear ones. But it's the exchange between the foreground characters that really tears me apart:

Jewel: Say, "I'm as nimble as a forrest creature."
Doc: You're as nimble --as a forrest creature. [Al racks into focus in the background.]
Jewel: No... say it about yourself.
Doc: I'm. As nimble. As a forrest creature. [Focus racks back as the two laugh.]

Ryland wells up and sighs: We humans.

I didn't think I would share this but to tide us over until I can write out a proper, respectful tribute to the brilliant second season, which I finished last week, I offer a silly poem I wrote upon finishing that last episode, "Boy The Earth Talks To." I say silly because, well, it's a fucking poem about fucking Deadwood. Who am I? Did I really do that? Well, yes. And seriously, this shit is amazing. My friend said, in an email, "Its meaning has, regrettably, been narrowed to refer to the publicized donations of rich douchebags, but philanthropist is the cognate opposite of misanthrope; one who loves humanity." That's David Milch, if you ask me:

I cannot explain my heart
yet I persist across prose and in
the heretofore poesy of land
and, of bondage in trust, to say love
along your broadest passages: may
they yield tidings--vivacious fucking tidings!
For we humans persist amongst one another
as would trees, or dirt, or running water,
along time's cocksucker coarsities. We run
forward, forever, in vain hope planking
aspirations groove into groove eased
with whiskey and with tastings bittersweet
on the whole. We run forward bonded
to our others as is the forrest, as is the land, as is the river,
as are the planks and words we choose to
erect our boundaries and, and, and say our
peoples' union, bursting in flight away to the heavens
however earth-bound we remain.
However earth-bound we remain we run forward.
You allow it, abide it, assuage its wounds and
work angles congruent and variant to shift
yourself in the world to meet it.: you run forward with us.

Prospects of protection wash with waste past
the crosshatch and catch the current. But run.

I see the heart all round in eyes and other
appendages. I see your prospects linger and wash
and fall to embrace earth as well arms as well
technology's arrival. I see arrivals spell and spare too little
for us little in such shadows of promise and blood.
I see cocksuckers everywhere.

Running, bounded in light as in spirit, the
union will grow lofty and tenuous; time folds in
more than out, we forget. But run, and let us live
as we are now, however the path may fucking fork.

Death halts but tomorrow is another day for us alive
and running in the current tidings of time. Less we
believe, less we may remember: the promise does not halt
but persist, across it all, in colors whipped west by wind as much as water.
Or gold, or blood, or vices untold. We abide it all
somehow, here, in the warmth of the breast. Pound
the hardwood and the flesh and the porcelain, too, for we run
and burst ever on, forward, as one to oneself and as one to one
and as one all, cocksuckers everywhere.

More later, as ever, I promise. The fucking blogger photos suck, I know, but I'm too lazy to put up the photobooth ones like I normally do... you can trace the progress, right? You can taste the light, right? Enjoy it, your life. It's short.