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,
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
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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