Authors: Michael McGriff
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.
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 surviveâ
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?â
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.
And the two moths
that drown in the lakes
of your eyes
will manage the rest.
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.
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.
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.
âIt's my turn.
âMake the worst face you've ever made.
âYou look like you're dead.
âYou look like a ghost who can't shit.
âLet's pretend we were murdered.
âLet's do one with our mouths open.
Midwinter.
She lets the darkness
sit down beside her.
Some nights
she walks through the pasture
and out of her body.
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 daysâshe'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.
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 nightâ
not the trick,
but the distress call
we manage to send out
while we are pinned
to our stillness.
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 facesâ
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 pinochle gameâ
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 paintingâ
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.