The Low Passions

to say about that. That’s all I ever knew

  to say about my sisters: There’s two of em.

  I bet I coulda stomached a brother better.

  Even when I was a little grommet I wanted

  a brother, so I practiced on this pet lizard I had.

  He was one of them color-changers that could

  change his skin to blend in with whatever’s

  below him. I named him Tony and took him

  around with me. Showed him how to do

  whatever I was doin. Talked to him and tried

  to explain things. I remember wearin tie-dyed shirts

  and puttin Tony on my shoulder so I could

  watch him change. One day I had him on the back

  of my hand while I was hot-wheelin down the street

  and he jumped off and I ran right over him.

  What do you say about somethin like that?

  Afterwards he was so flat he looked like one of them

  outlines of a lizard in a coloring book. No blood

  or nothin, like nothin was in him. I’ll be damned

  if I know what else to say about that.

  I don’t even know why I told you about it.

  Would you believe me if I said I never got over it?

  Never got over the fact that when he died

  he was the color of my hand?

  OLD CHURCH

  Haunted so we didn’t follow him

  inside. Posing at a broken window

  he thumbed the dusty pages, preaching

  like our dad. Between passages

  he puffed his cheeks and wormed

  his fat tongue between forked fingers.

  This is what your mom worships,

  he said. We never told him to stop,

  just started chucking rocks from the fence.

  First at the shards of stained glass

  gummed in the frame like shark teeth.

  Then at him. Then at him harder,

  his face popping up between our fire

  like a self-winding jack-in-the-box.

  The bad throw that connected

  ricocheted so we didn’t see, just heard

  our cousin scream. We froze, bracing

  for darkness to burst out the door

  and roar toward us. But it didn’t.

  The heavy hinges creaked and Josh

  stumbled out holding his lowered head,

  pleading for help. At ten years old

  I was ready for rage, even death,

  even ghosts. But not this: his blond hair

  bright with blood, his moan.

  MOORCROFT

  You gave me a ride when I was lost

  in Wyoming. Took me to your home.

  Showed me your gun collection

  you had to go shoulder-deep through

  the clothes in the closet to reach.

  They were old and unloaded, you told me,

  and you didn’t shoot them anymore,

  just oiled them and kept them perfectly

  clean. I was careful not to flinch

  as I watched the double-barrel raise

  and train on my face. The tooth hole

  you flashed in the grin after.

  The spasm in your hands as you swung

  the gun and pointed it at yourself

  to show evenness. You told me

  about doing five years for murder,

  asked if I would’ve done anything

  different, finding a grown man

  raping my six-year-old niece.

  I wouldn’t change it, you said.

  I wouldn’t take it back. You patted

  your heart with your hand.

  Family is family, you whispered,

  as you brought me clean sheets for my bed.

  LIVING WITH THE ACCIDENT

  There was little you couldn’t do.

  With the purple stump of your thumb

  you pinned a pencil against

  the knuckle lumps, forming enough grip

  to sketch her portrait from memory,

  or from the photo you kept hid

  in your hatband. You worked the ranches

  like before. Rode horses. Knotted

  ropes. Shuffled when you dealt.

  You let me ball old newsprint

  for the fire, but you did everything else.

  Gutted the fish. Stuffed the belly

  with berries and butter and smoked it

  by rotating a willow stick.

  And when you folded your hands

  to whisper the words over the meal,

  nothing folded, but what kind of world

  would this be if that mattered?

  Your cheeks filled and flickered

  as you chewed. The embers bedded down

  and the clouds born out of them

  twisted through the cottonwoods.

  You never told me her name.

  That could jinx it, you said.

  If I find her again it aint gonna be

  as a detective. You could even roll

  your own cigarettes, but you couldn’t

  roll the striker on a Bic.

  I flicked it alive for you. Your palms

  pulled my hand toward your lips.

  FIRE

  There was a time when we didn’t know

  how to make it. A long time. We ate animals

  burned alive in forest fires. Developed a taste

  for rare, for medium. Collected embers

  and kept them going for generations, firewatchers

  in caves danker than prehistory. We roasted

  mastodons. Designed skewers, ovens, steam pits.

  Invented broiling. Slept with rocks

  for the well-held heat. By the time we learned

  how to urge smoke from sticks there was nothing

  left to do we hadn’t already done. We cooked

  the same, slept near it the same. The difference

  was control. Control kept us going. We smelted

  iron blooms in bloomeries. Hammered slag.

  Fullered blood gutters to keep the longsword light.

  We branded rams—horn, loin, rack, and flank:

  Crazy K, Lazy 3, Half-Diamond Flying Double T.

  We seared ears off sows to hear if the witches

  would scream. They didn’t. But the children did

  as they crawled away from their napalmed feet.

  We made zippos, lifeboats, strike anywheres—

  no more bow drill or piston or plow, no socket

  fit between the teeth, no calloused hands, no ash

  in throats, no 9-volt woke with steel wool—

  the flameless, the catalytic, the everlasting.

  POLAROID

  A loose flap of skin passes just below

  his eye. Bruises ride the bridge of my nose.

  The dark ropes of handprints grip

  both our necks. Our fresh buzzcuts

  lumpy with goose eggs. It’s easy to forget

  we were trying to kill each other.

  Or at least I was. But what I wonder now

  is why our father shot the photo before

  he bandaged the hole where the nail

  went in, stuffed my raw mouth with gauze.

  We stand side by side against the garage,

  eyes focused just beyond the lens,

  each pointing at what we did to the other.

  LILLIAN

  Tarkio, Missouri

  Don’t worry about your shoes:

  there’s nothing you can track

  in the door I aint killed before.

  Never had a lock till the freeway

  came through. Suddenly a gun’s missing

  from my pickup, tools from the shed.

  Go ahead, open the blinds.

  Those are apples on the north end,

  grapes on the west, tomatoes

  out back and corn beyond that.

  Goat milk sells as pet food

  but people know to d
rink it.

  I gotta laugh to have you crash here—

  been trying to get rid of men

  altogether. If you were an inch taller

  I’d have left you on the side

  of the road. Got this double bolt

  the same summer they laid

  that freeway. Not trying to lock you in,

  just making sure the rest stay out.

  Don’t worry, I never had to kill

  nobody. Wanted to kill plenty,

  thought about killing even more,

  and now with my stuff going missing

  in the night—makes me feel crazy,

  but the only crazy thing I ever done

  was get hitched in Hawaii once.

  And Vegas another once.

  I figured it was love and I’d worry

  about the rest later. Well, the rest

  showed up. Now I keep busy

  with the plants and animals.

  SHORT BED

  Clausen parks the short bed

  a hundred yards offshore, locks

  the doors and takes the key with him

  for no reason he can think of.

  Crunches back across the bay to the snow-

  sculpted pines on the point, rubbing

  his hands together as he walks,

  from time to time blowing into them.

  Each year in Fargo, men put money

  on which day the ice will buckle

  under the weight and another truck

  will join the sunken junkyard

  piled however high on the rust-powdered

  lake bottom. The younger men

  choose their days based on weather,

  average temperatures, and what’s supposedly

  blowing down from Crookston.

  The icefishers gauge their days

  by the holes they drill, the relative thickness

  they go through. And year after year

  Clausen puts his money on May 17th,

  and each year he loses, the truck

  never lasting past April. He stands

  among the great norways

  on the shore, the shards of pink bark

  flaked off for the routes of squirrels,

  misted down onto the snow

  like pale blood, nose-blown. He glances

  over his shoulder at the truck,

  the eye-burning clarity of hard angles

  amplified by the drawn sheet

  of the frozen lake. He faces the hill

  and blinks away the afterimage.

  BETWEEN BOULDERS

  Not the last flicker going out, but the wrap

  of risen wind on charred wood in the dark.

  Not the abandoned copper mine with broken

  windows at dawn, but my hand taking a bronze

  plumbing pipe to the river. Not the dog’s velvet

  belly, burst open and spilling wet maggots

  on the train tracks, but the tiny pliable femur bone

  of a mouse found inside there. We say I feel

  so alone, and we mean we don’t know how

  to communicate. We say The dog is dead

  and we mean we aren’t listening anymore.

  In the growing light I carry my pipe

  to the river. I pack it with stolen tobacco.

  I hide between boulders. I have no filter,

  no friend meeting me. I light it and suck

  and my own wind wraps what is inside there.

  COUSIN JOSH GOES OFF ON FOOD STAMPS

  Fargo, North Dakota

  First thing is, I got as much right to get my food stamps

  as the next man. Second thing is, what I make of em

  is my own Han Solo. State aint got no right

  comin around sniffin halfway up my ass, tryin to catch

  some little whiff of a goddamn infringement.

  If I wanna fetch my breakfast with em, fine,

  let a cowboy fry his bacon. If I wanna sell em for cash

  or trade em for dope, that’s my own Han Solo.

  You think I’m gettin rich outta this?

  You think I’m puttin some greenbacks away someplace?

  Saint me somebody if I’m flush in more than bellybutton lint.

  And anyways I’m only sellin em to veterans.

  That’s the third thing. A lotta vets can’t even get

  no food stamps, and you mind tellin me why?

  You think them boys went off and lost a leg

  in Iraq or some other ass crack of the planet

  just to come back home to trade me a dime sack

  and some percocet? What? So they can hobble

  their broke ass down to Deals Only and garner themselves

  with nothin but a stone cold bite of somethin to eat?

  You tell me. Me, I don’t even wanna guess.

  And the other thing is, what’s the difference

  if I got two-three a them food cards?

  Who am I hurtin? I’m askin you—who am I hurtin?

  And I know right off what you’re gonna lay on me.

  You think I’m reachin in and stealin them tax dollars

  right out your own privately owned ass crack.

  But the thing is, I aint got your goddamn tax dollars.

  Where you think all them sorry-ass one-legged vets

  is comin back from? Disneyland?

  War aint the Lord’s plan, I can tell you that much.

  Course, neither is food stamps. Lord’s got two hands

  and he aint askin for handouts with neither of em.

  And you can bet your whole hard-on

  he aint givin em away neither. That’s why I stopped

  prayin. Lord aint givin and Lord aint takin.

  Lord’s reachin out same way a tree reaches.

  Real slow and easy. Sorta callin you in

  without callin, cept maybe with the wind.

  And your job’s as simple as goin to him, cause you’re lost

  and you know it. And that’s the same shake

  them vets was expectin to get when they come back

  one-legged, but they didn’t get that, did they?

  No they didn’t. Got percocet. And they’ll be dosin that shit

  till the day they’re dead. What’s that old sayin?

  Send me home in my casket. Well, tell you what,

  the minute I’ve gone and dropped off dead

  and been laid to rest, you got my god’s honest say-so

  to bust open my casket and stick a straw

  up my ass and suck and see if you find any flavors

  that taste just even a little bit like your goddamn tax dollars.

  CLAUSEN’S DOG

  We float the rubber lifeboat down the cul-de-sacs,

  through the backyards of prefabs and ramblers

  where the tops of small trees beckon like oil-

  blackened hands. We’re looking for animals.

  Dogs and cats and other pets left behind

  because leaving them behind was the rule

  during the evacuation. For hours there’s nothing.

  Silence and the sculling of a plastic paddle.

  The far-off gas station sunken past the pumps.

  The hundred-year flood covering everything

  three feet deep. When we find Clausen’s dog

  it’s not where we were told to look. Not curled

  on his roof, not barking from the glassless window

  of his attic. When we find Clausen’s dog it’s tied

  to a cinderblock with a choke-chain leash,

  an earflap lapping softly at the surface.

  The chain cinches down through loose neck

  flesh to visible bone, a minnow hovers

  in the eyehole. When we find Clausen’s dog

  the colorless fur clumps like a stubble of bunchgrass

  receding from the furrowed plains of the ribcage.

  The bobbing sidemeat nibbled by perch.

  Chunks glau
med away by turtles.

  When we find Clausen’s dog the bone-paws drag

  the bottom like lures, jerking forward

  on the same wrist-hinge as the living paws

  of a sleeping dog, whimpering, trying to run

  inside a dream.

  CHECKING FOR TICKS

  Before I strip off my clothes I stoke

  the fire with oak so the light will last.

  I start with my arms, fingers running

  the scar carved by the bunk bed’s lip.

  Chest. Pits. The belly where surgeons

  tempered my hernia, my mother rocking

  in the emergency wing, praying

  without words. Balls. Taint. Inner thigh.

  I trace the shin where the bone broke

  and growth plate popped out of place,

  my brother lifting me to the Taurus

  and gunning to Fargo Medical. The heel.

  Eight grooves between the toes.

  I close my eyes and do the next part

  by feel, contorting to reach my back:

  the blades, the ribs, the small, the hips.

  I scan my scalp where the concussion’s lump

  still stands, those two nights my dad

  stayed awake with me, my head in his lap,

  a frozen ham held against the hill

  in my hair. Cowlick. Widow’s peak.

  Finally I find one hooked near my ear.

  When I rip it free some of me comes away

  with it: a crooked circle of translucent

  skin larger than the tick itself.

  I lean forward and blow it into flames.

  LYLE CLEARS MY THROAT

  Boone County, Kentucky

  Fair warning: I gotta roll my mother

  every half hour or so to curb bedsores,

  but I wanna hear this story. Just keep

  it down cause she’s asleep and I need

  the door cracked to hear her heart.

  Well, not her heart. The monitor is what

  I listen to. It’s been a year this June.

  I come upstairs and found her on the floor,

  drove her to local before they coptered us

  to the U. Let me roll her quick and you

  can start your travelogue, which I’m dying

  to hear. Where we’re at now, she can’t lift

  her own arm, but if you lift it to start with

  she can ease it back down real slow,

  controlling the speed and choosing

  where it lands, you know? They got her

  on a food tube and all that, machines

  tracking her heart and lungs, the works.