Home Burial by Michael McGriff Page B

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.

    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