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for Britta
...here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws...
—Jason Molina
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Kissing Hitler
New Civilian
Dead Man’s Bells, Witches’ Gloves
Catfish
My Family History as Explained by the South Fork of the River
In February
New Season
Sunday
Invocation
Year of the Rat
Symphony
To the Woman Whose Waist-Long Hair Lowered Itself into My Dream for the Third Night in a Row
Overhearing Two Sisters in the Empty Lot behind the DMV
Midwinter
Note Left for My Former Self
The Cow
All Dogs, You Said, Are Descendants of the Wolf
Crows
Circadian
Alone in Hell’s Canyon
The Line between Heaven and Earth
Pipeline
Above the Earth
Drinking at the Rusted Oyster
The Residence of the Night
The Book of Hours
Don’t Explain
In the Break Room
The Light in November
The Garments of the Night
Against My Will
Notes
About the Author
Books by Michael McGriff
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Special Thanks
Kissing Hitler
I’ve tried to keep the landscape
buried in my chest, in its teak box,
but tonight, awakened
by the sound of my name
strung between the trees,
I see the box on my nightstand
giving off the kind of light
you never know you belong to
until you see it dance
from a pile of metal shavings
or shaken loose
from a sword fern’s root-wad.
It’s the same light that trailed me
the entire summer of my sixteenth year,
driving County Road 64
toward Power Line Ridge,
the three radio towers
blinking in the Oregon dark.
Between each red pulse
the dark hung its birthrights in front of me,
a few dead branches
crawling up from the ditch,
a lost bolt of mooncloth
snagged on a barbed-wire fence,
shredding in the tide wind.
The light my oldest friends
slammed into their veins
or offered to the night
when they made amends.
One of them,
the tallest and toughest,
the one who used to show up Saturdays
for my mother’s breakfast—
he could juggle five eggs
and recite the alphabet backward—
he told me as he covered my hand with his
while I downshifted to enter the gravel quarry
that he wanted to punch the baby
out of Jessica’s stomach—
he’s the one, tonight, whose carbide hands
have opened the lid of this little box.
I can see the two of us now, kissing Hitler.
That’s what we called it—
siphoning gas,
huffing shop rags.
And we kissed him everywhere,
in other counties,
with girls we barely knew
telling us to hurry
before someone called the cops.
They can’t arrest you for kissing Hitler.
That’s what we said.
The last time I saw him
he sat on the edge
of his father’s girlfriend’s bathtub,
bleeding and laughing hard into a pink towel.
I can’t remember—
maybe it was a birthday party.
Maybe we’d climbed in
through the living room window,
looking for a bottle or some pills,
at the same moment the adults stumbled in
from the Silver Dollar, hardwired
to liquor and crystal.
That was the summer
when people just went crazy.
And there we were, locked in the bathroom,
someone yelling and throwing themselves
against the door,
my friend’s blood fanned out behind him
into points of red tar,
into points so fine they made me think
that someone, somewhere,
must belong to a family that passes down
the art of painting immaculate nasturtiums
along the lips of bone china,
the smallest detail touched into place
by a single, stiff horsehair,
by a young father holding his breath,
trying not to wake the child
swaddled at his feet, his hand
steady as five white mining burros
sleeping in the rain.
New Civilian
The new law
says you can abandon your child
in an emergency room,
no questions asked.
A young father
carries his sleeping boy
through the hospital doors.
Later, parked at the boat basin,
he takes a knife from his pocket,
cuts an unfiltered cigarette in two,
lights the longer half in his mouth.
He was a medic in the war.
In his basement are five bronze eagles
that once adorned the walls
of a dictator’s palace.
Dead Man’s Bells, Witches’ Gloves
The dreams of those buried in winter
push through the ground in summer.
Among the orders, my dead
belong to the ditches of county roads.
Before the new people came over
to negotiate the easement
with their version of a city lawyer,
my mother hung dozens of foxgloves
above our door.
A dead crow hung by its feet
from the same hook.
Even in death, that purple luster
is a kind of singing.
Catfish
The catfish have the night,
but I have patience
and a bucket of chicken guts.
I have canned corn and shad blood.
And I’ve nothing better to do
than listen to the water’s riffled dark
spill into the deep eddy
where a ’39 Ford coupe
rests in the muck-bottom.
The dare growing up:
to swim down with pliers
for the license plates,
corpse bones, a little chrome...
But even on the clearest days,
even when the river runs low and clean,
you can’t see it,
though you can often nearly see
the movement of hair.
I used to move through my days
as someone agreeable
to all the gears
clicking in the world.
I was a big clumsy Yes
tugged around by its collar.
Yes to the mill, yes to the rain,
yes to what passed
for fistfights and sex, yes
to all the pine boards of thought
waiting around for the hammer.
The catfish have the night
and ancient gear oil for blood,
they have a kind of greased demeanor
and wet electricity
that you can never boil out of them.
The catfish have the night,
but I have the kind of patience
born of indifference and hate.
Maybe the river and I share this.
that bobs near the lip of the eddy
is really a pocket watch
having finally made its way downstream
from what must have been
a serious accident—
the station wagon and its family
busting the guardrail,
the steering wheel jumping
into the man’s chest,
his pocket watch hurtling
through the windshield
and into the river.
Wind the hands in one direction
and see into the exact moment of your death.
Wind them the other way
and see all the tiny ways
you’ve already died—
I’m going to put this in my breast pocket
just as it is. Metal heart
that will catch the stray bullet
in its teeth.
I chum the water, I thread the barb.
I feel something move in the dark.
My Family History as Explained by the South Fork of the River
My grandfather says
he stepped out of his dream
the same day my grandmother did.
In this way they entered the world.
If you put your ear to his chest
you’d hear something so absolute
that you’d leave for the river
enter the salmon run
and disappear through the keyhole
at the river bottom.
He tells me
I never had a mother.
My mother has always said
that after her mother died giving birth
and became a reflection
in a mud puddle
that my grandfather
turned into a dog
who spent the rest of its life
drinking from the pools
in gravel roads.
My grandmother
says my mother
can find anything.
She says my mother is a water witch,
and that’s why she leaves us
for days at a time
and comes home ragged
and soaked with rainwater.
My mother has a special branch
that follows the water.
My grandfather says
I was never born at all,
that I’m just borrowing this body
until something better comes along.
He says I’m half bird
and half fish.
He says there’s a house
beneath the river,
that I’m in a riddle
where a boy flies
in two skies at the same time.
In February
She looks at the apple trees
and imagines rows of people
standing in line for something.
She even dreamt once
of being among them,
waiting patiently to enter
the open doorway
of the earth, which shone
with a light so forgiving
it could have spoken.
Her son’s been dead
nearly a year, and yesterday
while driving to the feed store
she braked suddenly
and threw her arm
across the rib cage
of his absence.
The ice grows down the ruts
of the gravel driveway.
The possum by the well
frozen in place
for over a week.
Wood smoke hangs
halfway up the trees,
the air is still.
Gunshots can be heard for miles,
and every kind of water
and laughter.
New Season
Beside our neighbor’s half-framed barn
the hip bones of a dead deer continue
to be stripped and polished by the rain,
an arc of gray electricity
traveling between them.
collecting in the ashtray on the porch
isn’t a lake, but it’s big enough for God
to stick his thumb in.
I admire the rats in the wall.
They rejoice in the night.
They call to each other
as they work.
Sunday
Something anvil-like
something horselike
knee-deep and gleaming
in the flooded pasture.
The smell of fence posts and barn-rot.
Culverts and tow chains.
My mother and her illness.
My father and his patience.
My thoughts for them glow like quarry light.
I wish I were the proud worms
twisting out of nowhere
to writhe and thrash
as if their god had fulfilled
his promise.
In rooms all over town
the faithful raise their hands
to the gathering radiance
as I lower my head to the kitchen table
and listen to the black rails of December
bleeding into the distance.
Invocation
Out there, somewhere,
you are a variable
in the night’s equation.
I listen hard
to the hands of smoke
moving beneath the river,
to the abandoned grain elevator
dragging its chains
through the tender blood
of the night.
I listen to the hush
of your name
as it’s subtracted
from one darkness
then added to another.
I pray to what you are not.
You are the opposite of a horse.
Your hair is not the seven colors
of cemetery grass.
Your mouth is not a dead moon,
nor is it the winter branches
preparing their skeletons
for the wind.
A double thread of darkness
winds through me,
and the night’s coarse tongue
scrapes your name
against the trees.
I’ve found a good spot by the river.
The trees line up along either bank
and bend toward the center.
I’ve been trying to get rid
of that part of myself
that I most despise
but need most to survive—
it rises like wood smoke,
it’s shaped like a brass key,
and the hole it looks to enter
can be seen through,
revealing a banquet hall
with one chair
and countless silver trays
piled with rags.
Is your voice in the linden
wood of an oar?
Your face in the daily ritual
of the Cooper’s hawk?
Is your charity the green rot
of a fence post?
Are you near me
as I clean this ashtray
with my sleeve?
Are you the dead doe’s skull
shining from within itself?—
I’ve been pretending
not to hear it speak to me,
even though I’ve entered its voice,
hung my coat
from a nail in its pantry
without bumping the table
or creaking the floor
and moved in the utter darkness of it.
It’s finally late enough
that all sounds
are the sounds of water.
If you die tonight
I’ll wash your feet.
I’ll remove the batteries
from the clocks.