And the two moths
that drown in the lakes
of your eyes
will manage the rest.
Year of the Rat
I winch up the sky
between the shed roof and the ridge
and stand dumb as a goat
beneath its arrows and buckets,
its harmonies and hungers.
Each night I feel a speck of fire
twisting in my gut,
and each night
I ask the Lord
the same questions,
and by morning the same
spools of barbed wire
hang on the barn wall
above footlockers of dynamite.
We used to own everything
between the river and the road.
We bought permits
for home burials
and kept a horse’s skull above the door.
We divided the land,
we filled in the wells,
we spit in the river,
we walked among the cows
and kept the shovels sharp.
Tonight I’m sitting
on the back porch
of the universe
in the first dark hours
of the Year of the Rat.
I’m tuned in to AM 520
and, depending
on how intently I stare
into the black blooms of the sky,
it bounces either
to a high school football game
or to the voices of rage,
of plague and prophecy.
The wind off the river
is weak and alone, like the voice
of my brother.
He’s trying to melt the plastic coating
from a stolen bundle
of commercial wiring,
a black trickle of smoke
winding through his body
to empty itself into a pool
that shimmers with the ink of nothing.
If I had faith in the stars
I’d let those four there
be the constellation of my brother
lying flat on the ground, asking for money.
I like the song
he almost sings,
the one he doesn’t know the words to
but hums to himself
in these few moments
of absolute stillness.
And I like how he’s resting
with his hands under his head
as he stretches out
among the dark echoes
and spindled light
of all that black wheat.
Symphony
It rained all night, hard,
the constant hum
like an orchestra tuning up,
its members taking purposeful,
deep breaths.
When I closed my eyes
I saw my father
unstacking and restacking
an empire of baled hay,
heaving his days
into the vagaries
of chaff-light.
The conductor raises his arms,
whispers a quick prayer
in a foreign tongue,
then begins.
To the Woman Whose Waist-Long Hair Lowered Itself into My Dream for the Third Night in a Row
When she stepped down from her pickup
and spilled her purse onto the blacktop,
the pills from an orange
pint-sized prescription bottle scattered
and began melting in the rain.
She knelt there,
the tungsten-gray streaks in her hair
indistinguishable
from the paths the pills cut,
bleeding across the parking lot.
Overhearing Two Sisters in the Empty Lot
behind the DMV
—It’s my turn.
—Make the worst face you’ve ever made.
—You look like you’re dead.
—You look like a ghost who can’t shit.
—Let’s pretend we were murdered.
—Let’s do one with our mouths open.
Midwinter
Midwinter.
She lets the darkness
sit down beside her.
Some nights
she walks through the pasture
Some nights she sits
in the Studebaker
junked by the millpond
and dials through the radio,
the electricity of Jupiter
hijacking the AM frequencies
with its ocean sounds,
its static code, a coyote
whose mouth is stuffed
with volts and rust.
Tonight she sits at the kitchen table.
She could be over the bay,
high enough to see
that it’s shaped like a rabbit
hanging limp
from the jaws of the landscape.
She hasn’t spoken
in days—she’s afraid
what comes alive at night
will break if she talks about it.
The wives of the Legionnaires
bring her food once a week,
and a Bible the size
of a steam iron.
She packs up her china
each afternoon,
then unpacks it before bed.
She could be flying
the way it looks
with all this fog gusting by.
Note Left for My Former Self
I’ve seen a group of farm kids
hypnotize a rabbit
by pinning it on its back
then stroking its neck.
This is what I think of
when I see you in the night—
not the trick,
but the distress call
we manage to send out
while we are pinned
to our stillness.
The Cow
I used to think of this creek as a river
springing from mineral caverns
of moonmilk and slime,
but really it’s just a slow thread of water
that comes from somewhere up north
to trickle its way out
near the edge of our property.
And I’ve always imagined
the toolshed as it is,
though it was once
an outbuilding for a watermill
whose wheel and timbers
have been reborn
as exposed rafters and flooring
for the Old Money in the valley.
The day before my grandfather died
he drove a diesel flatbed
to the edge of the creek
and paid ten day laborers
to unload this shed.
He left his will on the shed floor,
which wasn’t a will
as much as it was a quick note
scrawled on the pink edge of an invoice
for a few bundles of chicken wire.
I found the note
and showed it to no one.
This shed should have the smell
of seed packets and mousetraps.
It should have a calendar
whose pages haven’t turned since Truman.
The sounds of usefulness and nostalgia
should creak from its hinges,
but instead there’s nothing
but a painting the size of a dinner plate
that hangs from an eightpenny nail,
a certain style of painting
where the wall of a building
has been lifted away
to reveal the goings-on of each room,
which, in this case, is a farmhouse
where some men and women
sit around the geometry
of a kitchen table playing pinochle,
a few of the women laughing
a feast-day kind of laughter,
and one of the men, a fat one
in overalls with a quick brushstroke
for a mouth, points up
as if to say something
about death or the rain
or the reliable Nordic construction
of the rafters.
A few of the children
gathered in a room off to one side
have vaguely religious faces—
they’re sitting on the floor around their weak
but dependable uncle
who plays something festive
on the piano. The piano
next to the fireplace, the fireplace lit,
a painting of the farmhouse
hanging above the mantel.
What passes for middle C
ripples away from the uncle, the children,
the wobbling note finally collapsing
in the ear of the cow
standing in perfect profile
at the far right of the painting.
The cow faces east and stands knee-deep
in pasture mud. The pasture
is a yellow, perspectiveless square,
and the cow, if you moved her
inside the house, would stand
with the sway of her back
touching the rafters.
Perhaps the fat man is referring
to the impossibility of it all,
the inevitable disproportion,
the slow hiss of something he can’t explain.
The cow is gray and blue
and orange. This is the cow
that dies in me every night,
the one that doesn’t sleep
standing up, or sleep at all,
but stamps through the pasture muck
just to watch the suckholes she makes
fill with a salty rot-water
that runs a few inches
below the surface of everything here.
The cow noses through
the same weak spot in the same fence,
and every night finds herself
moving out beyond the field of her dumb,
sleeping sisters.
The cow in me has long admired
the story the night tells itself,
the one with rifle shots and laughter,
gravel roads crunching under pickups
with their engines and lights cut,
the story with the owls
diving through the circles
their iron silences
scratch into the air.
The cow in me never makes it past
the edge of the painting—
and she’s not up to her knees in mud,
she’s knee-deep in a cattle guard.
Bone and hoof and hoods of skin
dangle below the steel piping
into the clouds of the underworld.
The cow cries, and her cry
slits the night open and takes up house.
The cry has a blue interior
and snaps like a bonfire stoked
with dry rot and green wood.
The cry is a pitcher of ink that never spills,
until it does, until it scrawls itself
across the fields and up into the trees.
The cry works in the night
like a dated but efficient system.
The cry becomes a thread of black water
where the death-fish spawn.
On nights like this
the cow inside me cries,
and I wake as the cry leaves my mouth
to find its way back to the shed,
where it spreads
through all the little rooms of the painting
like the heat building up
from the fireplace by the piano.
The cry makes a little eddy
around the fat man’s finger.
It turns the pinochle deck
into the sounds of the creek
trickling into nothing.
The cry watches my grandfather
weeping over the only thing
he said to my father
in two decades,
which he didn’t say at all
but penned onto a crumpled invoice
that found its way to the nowhere
of my hands.
The cry in the cow
in the painting in me
rotates in the night
on a long axle of pain,
and the night itself
has no vanishing point.
All Dogs, You Said, Are Descendants of the Wolf
Luis, they dragged their hooks
through the slough for your body.
You would’ve liked how it snowed
on the rescue team, the searchlights
shining into the easiness of all that white
entering the water,
the smoke of drag slicks
entering the darkness.
Your laugher was ridiculous and certain
and swirled around you
like the ravens of luck.
You’re still out there
in the orchard-light of August.
You’ve just been thrown
from your uncle’s horse.
You’re picking gravel from your knees,
shaking the dust from the black wings
of your happiness.
The lamp you left in me
has enough oil to last the winter.
Saint Luis, Protector of Horse Thieves,
beholden to nothing
but the wild dog in the moon.
Crows
Nine varieties of crows
whoop and gnash
in my bloodstream.
I’m overcome with nine
particular kinds of joy
as I cross under the power lines
along the rail yard.
The tracks touch in the horizon,
forming the tip of an exquisite beak.
Circadian
A farmhouse, burned down
for the insurance money,
stood where my life had been.
By then a cold seam of daylight
ran through the trees.
Star-still in that early hour,
a fence-hawk
began to fill with tar
as it looked across
the glittering, overfished river.
Alone in Hell’s Canyon
Out here in the desert
I smell smoke from a fire someone made
thinking he had the exclusive company
of the wildflowers
that bloom every hundred years.
Perhaps he too awakened last night
to the noise of a grand floating hall
where an entire people
was celebrating.
One person had the job
of tending thousands of chandelier candles.
I listened to him drag his ladder
from one to another, hour after hour.
The Line between Heaven and Earth
The line between heaven and earth
glows just slightly
when a bear’s gallbladder
is hacked out and put on ice
in California.
The gallbladder rides
in a foam cooler
on a bench seat
in a pickup heading north.
The line between heaven and earth
carries a crate of dried fish on its back.
The man driving the gallbladder
used to sell Amway
and sand dollars blessed
by Guatemalan priests.
The crate of fish
also contains the stars,
which do not spill out
above the truck stop
on the Oregon side
of the border,
where one man
counts another’s mon
ey,
and the gallbladder passes hands.
This is my father,
who drove two days
to spend all the borrowed money
he could find,
who unpacks the organ,
lets it warm on a tin sheet
above his Buick’s engine block
before he crushes
an ashy powder into the bile
and spoons it
into the mouth of a child
whose shallow breaths
become the music of blood
riding the updrafts
of the foothills.
Pipeline
On the new calendar,
on a day no one cares about,
I wake with the taste
of galvanized nails in my mouth.
The fog tumbles off the bay,
and those who hunger
for a clean shave and fortune
prepare their strategies
for the pipeline
that will tear through our acreage,
a ninety-foot clear-cut swath,
hundreds of miles long,
suits and easy money.
A thin white noise hissing
at the back of everything—
even my boots carry the sound,
even the chimney caps,
a drawer full of bobbins,
a chipped pint glass
and its mineral-brown water.
During these last weeks of summer
I get shuffled
from one day to the next
like a tin bucket
passed along a fire line,
the water slopping out,
never quite reaching the barn
or the dusty horses.
I want the music of Eric Dolphy
to drift above the land surveyors