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Home Burial

Page 3

by Michael McGriff


  triangulating the west side

  of our property, that brass tangle,

  that shot glass full of eels.

  I want Tarkovsky

  to show them the apocalypse

  in a pitcher of milk.

  The summer’s out there

  crashing through its own trees,

  breaking its spine.

  The wheat growing near our fence

  turns to long, ordinary grass.

  If you looked into my eyes right now

  you’d see the gray drone

  of Ocean Avenue

  and the white sails

  the dead hoist.

  You’d see the landscape

  spinning like a compass needle

  above the dirt of a new grave.

  You’d see a group of men

  huddled around a fire

  discussing what they’ll buy

  with the checkbook they found

  in an abandoned tract house—

  the smoke rising into the air

  as if something significant

  were about to happen,

  as if the day isn’t being ground

  to a fine powder

  by the gears of an elegant pepper mill

  resting on the glassy black table

  of this new century.

  Above the Earth

  The volunteer firemen take turns

  tapping the stone chimney

  on the dead man’s farmhouse

  with crowbars and flashlights.

  They’ve determined the only way

  to remove the body: topple the chimney,

  cut a hole in the second story,

  borrow Peterson’s crane for the rest.

  They’ll need tow straps and come-alongs.

  They’ll need to lower him

  to a flatbed truck, then ratchet him down

  beneath a blue tarp.

  They’ll do the best they can.

  The obituary won’t mention

  his collection of state fair thimbles

  or glass hummingbirds,

  or how the crane swung his five hundred pounds

  out over his own land

  where the grasses stood tall

  then bent toward the river

  as sparks fell from the jaws of the cows

  chewing the evening

  down to its bright roots.

  Drinking at the Rusted Oyster

  Whitecaps in the harbor,

  the color of a dead cow’s eye

  the moment it breaks its orbit

  from the skull.

  Trollers buck against their moorings,

  and the afternoon has a voice

  like a woodshed full of dead lawn chairs,

  a voice like my mother’s nail polish

  and my father’s lottery tickets.

  All the tired arguments are wind-ripped

  from the bones of salt,

  and we enter those arguments.

  I’m terrified of old acquaintances.

  I’m eating Angels on Horseback.

  I’m drinking a glass of light.

  The Residence of the Night

  It’s always night inside the whales—

  even when they heave themselves

  onto the shore

  where they death-hiss, wheeze,

  and balloon with gas—

  even when we dynamite them

  back into the night.

  The night inside a barn owl’s wing-hush

  is the handshake

  of a secret order.

  It’s inside the way

  we pass one another

  at the grocery store,

  the feed lot, the way

  we lower our wet ropes

  into each other.

  It’s night inside the peacocks,

  whose cries cut through us

  like the prow of a ship

  whose cauldrons of whale oil

  shine their darkness up

  to the floating ribs of the moon.

  It’s in the way we tend

  to the churches of our skulls,

  where the night swings

  its smoking chains

  and arranges its candles.

  The tractor, of course,

  is filled with it.

  It won’t start

  until you summon

  the lampblack

  in the river of your blood,

  where the sturgeon

  are decimal points

  moving upstream

  zero by zero.

  The Book of Hours

  The first time I handled a snake

  I picked up what I mistook

  for a husk of shed skin.

  I lifted it high

  into the barn’s dust-tipped heat.

  The hay bales trembled

  as I pressed my lips

  to its hinge of light,

  the eternal mathematics

  of its living head.

  Don’t Explain

  Don’t explain the black donkeys in the desert

  or the sound of water beneath me

  when I stopped to watch them.

  Don’t explain the night, its rifled dark,

  the moon spinning through its chamber.

  Don’t explain the wounded alphabet

  dragging itself through the groves of ash.

  When George died, twelve dusty hours

  were filled with the noise of a horse

  rubbing its side against the old barn,

  the lighting rod’s glass globe

  shifting from white to green.

  George Hitchcock, 1914–2010

  In the Break Room

  The mill holds us

  in its mouth,

  the graveyard shift

  and its floodlights.

  There’s a stillness between us

  as we eat our sandwiches

  and leftovers.

  Back in town

  someone’s daughter

  stays up all night

  eating her own hair.

  A woman on Third Street

  applies makeup to a corpse

  she’s recently washed.

  A cop drifts over a fog line

  in his Crown Victoria.

  Todd thinks the foreman’s

  new girlfriend looks

  like a country singer,

  her hair shines

  like broken glass.

  She rests her hand

  on the animal of sleep

  and it leans against her leg.

  In fifteen minutes

  she’ll crawl up a ladder

  into a metal cage

  where hot sheets of plywood

  shoot out one after another

  like a satanic card trick,

  and she’ll guide them

  by the edge, in midair,

  and let them drop

  to the sorter...

  until she closes her eyes

  just long enough

  to float upon the waters

  where sleep winds

  through the cattails.

  When a sheet of veneer

  tears her face open

  a corpse’s hands

  will be placed together,

  the cop will drive

  his cruiser into the river,

  which will soon fill

  with a daylight our curses

  may never reach.

  The Light in November

  The days in their damp, cold eternities.

  Gravel roads corkscrewing past haylofts,

  skulls that buck in the shore wind,

  a few ghosts testing their ropes.

  The Lucky Logger Diner

  stands where the pavement ends

  and the gravel begins.

  Above my favorite booth,

  the portrait of Lewis and Clark

  our mayor painted for the county fair.

  I like it when the light sits beside
me.

  Even the light in November

  that staggers behind my father

  as he walks home from the cannery,

  pausing in the middle of the bridge

  to watch a gravel barge

  lower its boom into the river.

  The piece of him the season will take

  drifts out into the dead-letter office

  of the evening air, and the light passes,

  brushing his sleeve.

  The Garments of the Night

  The night undresses.

  Its clothes, strewn

  across the fields

  and over the houses,

  begin to pile high

  where the creek spills

  into the green gears

  of the lake.

  I’ll pull the dark thread of my faith

  until whatever it holds together

  falls into a gulch

  of black stars

  where some buzzards

  unravel the dead,

  placing each strand

  on a stretch of river rocks

  still warm to the touch.

  Against My Will

  Against my will

  I am reborn as a bird

  who claws its way

  from the throat

  of a man

  who never cared

  for the moth-light of August,

  who never read

  the cosmologies of rain

  or the doctrines of silt,

  who never walked

  into the static death-light

  the goats tear away

  from the clover,

  a man who bled himself

  of axle grease

  keno tickets

  and county roads

  named for men

  whose legacies

  are Stop signs raddled

  in buckshot

  and gray light.

  The night

  keeps painting its tongue black,

  and I am reborn

  as a bird who flies

  from the throat of a man

  who gives no thought

  to January’s frozen

  moon-crush

  twisting the alder branches

  from their trees.

  Against my will I am reborn

  into a land stretched flat

  and bled of its salt and black ice,

  of its choked roots and bird’s blood

  looped through the eyelets

  of the southerly winds.

  I am reborn as a denier

  of barn dust

  pinion moans

  stolen hand tools

  and chipped dishes.

  I am reborn with no thought

  for the river’s breath

  pulling a tune

  through the cathedral ribs

  of a common rat.

  I am reborn as one free

  of reduction gears

  ash buckets

  green sparks

  analog currents

  amphetamines

  pounding inside

  the stubborn machine

  of the horse’s skull.

  I am reborn

  into the darkest hour

  and its search parties,

  their flashlights dimming

  as the morning

  brightens the room

  where I am reborn as a bird

  who claws its way

  from the throat

  of a man

  who wears my name

  for a face

  and the heavy jewels

  of compliance

  around his wrist.

  I fly through the window

  of his voice

  and make my way

  to the edge

  of the continent

  where the scrubtrees

  cower from the shore

  and I discover

  like the trees here

  it’s against my nature

  to look out

  over the sea.

  Salt-disasters rage

  and burn the feathers

  on my back.

  I open my mouth

  and it’s the man’s voice

  calling me home.

  Notes

  The epigraph “...here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws...” is taken from Jason Molina’s song “Farewell Transmission” on his Songs: Ohia album Magnolia Electric Co. (Secretly Canadian, 2003).

  “The Cow” is for David Wevill.

  “All Dogs, You Said, Are Descendants of the Wolf” is based on James Everett Stanley’s painting 070707.

  About the Author

  Michael McGriff was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. His books include Dismantling the Hills; To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill; and a co-translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola. His poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, Bookforum, Slate, Narrative, The Believer, and The Wall Street Journal. He has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship. He is the founding editor of Tavern Books, a publishing house devoted to poetry in translation and the reviving of out-of-print books.

  Books by Michael McGriff

  Home Burial

  Dismantling the Hills

  Choke

  The Sorrow Gondola, Tomas Tranströmer [translator, with Mikaela Grassl]

  To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill [editor]

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the books and periodicals in which these poems first appeared: “Catfish,” “The Garments of the Night,” “Invocation,” “Note Left for My Former Self,” and “The Residence of the Night” in American Poetry Review; “Above the Earth” and “Alone in Hell’s Canyon” in Bat City Review; “My Family History as Explained by the South Fork of the River” in The Believer; “Year of the Rat” in Cortland Review; “In February,” “Pipeline,” and “Sunday” in Indiana Review; “Against My Will,” “In the Break Room,” and “Midwinter” in The Missouri Review; “All Dogs, You Said, Are Descendants of the Wolf,” “The Cow,” “Don’t Explain,” and “New Civilian” in Narrative; “The Book of Hours,” “Dead Man’s Bells, Witches’ Gloves,” and “Kissing Hitler” in Neo (Portugal); and “The Line between Heaven and Earth” in Slate.

  “Drinking at the Rusted Oyster” first appeared in Oyster Suite, a fine-press edition with poems by Carl Adamshick, Matthew Dickman, and Michael Dickman (Charles Seluzicki Fine and Rare Books, 2011).

  Special thanks to the Lannan Foundation for a Literary Fellowship and residency at Marfa that offered essential funding and artistic space. // Thanks to Jo Chapman. // Thanks to Michael Wiegers. // Thanks to Eavan Boland and the Stanford Creative Writing Program. // Thanks to James Everett Stanley. // Thanks to David Wevill, Sara Michas-Martin, Bruce Snider, and Andrew Grace for poring over this book in its earliest forms. // Thanks to Britta Ameel, Carl Adamshick, Michael Dickman, Matthew Dickman, Joseph Millar, and Dorianne Laux—ever faithful.

  Copyright 2012 by Michael McGriff

  All rights reserved

  Cover art: James Everett Stanley, 070707, watercolor, 16 x 19.5 inches

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  LANNAN LITERARY SELECTIONS 2012

  Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman, 50 American Plays

  Michael McGriff, Home Burial

  Tung-Hui Hu, Greenhouses, Lighthouses

  James Arthur, Charms Against Lightning

  Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec

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