After the fall from innocence, the legend begins. . .

Dearest Reader: I do believe I have let it be known that I am quite obsessed with the Most Fashionable Movie, Legends of the Fall. I will admit that, even though unmentionable lusts run screaming through my head each time I think of Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt is not my primary obsession when it comes to Legends of the Fall. My primary obsession is, of course, Brad Pitt’s character, the tortured and achingly melancholic Tristan Ludlow. I do not lust after Tristan Ludlow, Most Fashionable Reader. Instead, I find in him a kindred spirit — a Soul Brother, if you will. When Tristan Ludlow was young, he fought a bear. Both lived, and both were injured. Legend has it that since Tristan and the bear shared blood, Tristan would have a wildness deep within him until the end of his days. It could be dormant for years, but it would inevitably rise up within him time and time again, crushing everyone in its path, destroying relationships with the swiftness of a sledge-hammer. But it could not be helped, Dear Reader. It could not be helped, because this wildness was a part of Tristan, like a heart, or a set of lungs, or a kidney. This, Most Fashionable Reader, is why I feel connected to Tristan Ludlow. I feel Tristan Ludlow’s pain. I feel it!

For the poem below, I have used the OuLiPo exercise of noun implantation. I have taken One Stab’s last words in Legends of the Fall (for those Most Unfashionable Readers who do not know One Stab, he is the narrator of the Most Fashionable Movie, Legends of the Fall) and extracted the nouns. I have replaced those nouns with nouns from “The Idea of Order in Key West” by Wallace Stevens.

Legend

That motion we buried. The rage,
we dumped. The wind in a deep shadow
in the upper horizon, I remember.
When he was a sound, I thought summer
would never live to be an old song.
I was wrong about that. I was wrong
about many demarcations. It was those
who loved him most who died young.
He was the night they broke
themselves against, however much
he tried to protect them.
But he had his spirit and a long body,
and he saw his voices grow and raise
their own songs. Summer died in the sea
of the popping coral. He was last seen
in the north boats, hunting. His speech
is unmarked, but it does not matter.
He had always lived in the sky, anyway,
somewhere between this atmosphere
and the other. It was a good distance.