#244

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Wild Bill Hickok was shot down in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1876, as everyone knows, but not before he was able to shoot down 36 other people himself. Calamity Jane knew him in Deadwood, and was a great admirer of the famed Western gunslinger. He reportedly didn’t have much use for her, but he was killed many years before she died, so when her turn came she asked to be buried next to him, and she was, and he didn't have much to say about it. She died in Deadwood in 1903, there on a visit, likely killed by the too much bad liquor she drank on the train. They lie side by side in some lonely South Dakota cemetery.

They had their day, lived their lives, and they got famous. Eventually it was all over. While they lived they kept thoughts of their deaths at bay. Life was guns and gold, liquor, and a celebrity built on violence, or images of violence. Jane was a member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which publicized the Cowboys and Indians frontier image. That’s all over too. B. here is meditating on death, like he often does, in this case thinking down on the two celebrities in the grave together, realizing he’ll get there soon enough himself. Maybe there’s room enough for a grave up on Boot Hill for him. But that’s kept off the poem’s page. It’s about the two, this kind of haunted vision of them having met in life, meeting their separate ends, one with a bullet, the other with a bottle, and her admiration for Wild Bill such that she wanted her image to linger, ghostlike, in association with his. There is a bizarre kind of pathos about it. Read it as love, you get one thing, but I’m pretty sure B. knows, and I would agree, that it wasn’t about love. It was about celebrity. She was in her 50s, working at washing dishes in some flea-bit South Dakota brothel, still drinking hard, and a pretty unremarkable character if there ever was one. But she had known the great Wild Bill at the height of Deadwood’s violent gold-mad frenzy, and she had a name that we still recognize over a century later, and had travelled as a star in a legendary show. She had had a daggone moment, and didn’t want it to ever pass. So her ghostliness on the way to its fulfillment, she asked to be hooked up with an even greater ghost. It’s all about fame, echoing down the years like that ring in your ears after a gunshot: Still, awful silent, but man, that was loud! That got somebody’s attention! You can call it pathos, or you can call it pathetic, take your pick, but it mattered to her, apparently. It was pretty much all she had left.

It’s a great poem. With B. firing off Dream Songs like bullets out of the revolving barrels of a Gatling gun, he knew the ammo would run out. He pinned his hopes on the ringing it would leave in spectators’ ears. It’s what he was all about. He had to be aware of the pathos of it, too, and that’s what gives this poem its strange, sympathetic, pathetic ring.