Home Burial (3 page)

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.

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.

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.

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

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 money,

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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

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.