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  for Britta

  ...here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws...

  —Jason Molina

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Kissing Hitler

  New Civilian

  Dead Man’s Bells, Witches’ Gloves

  Catfish

  My Family History as Explained by the South Fork of the River

  In February

  New Season

  Sunday

  Invocation

  Year of the Rat

  Symphony

  To the Woman Whose Waist-Long Hair Lowered Itself into My Dream for the Third Night in a Row

  Overhearing Two Sisters in the Empty Lot behind the DMV

  Midwinter

  Note Left for My Former Self

  The Cow

  All Dogs, You Said, Are Descendants of the Wolf

  Crows

  Circadian

  Alone in Hell’s Canyon

  The Line between Heaven and Earth

  Pipeline

  Above the Earth

  Drinking at the Rusted Oyster

  The Residence of the Night

  The Book of Hours

  Don’t Explain

  In the Break Room

  The Light in November

  The Garments of the Night

  Against My Will

  Notes

  About the Author

  Books by Michael McGriff

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  Kissing Hitler

  I’ve tried to keep the landscape

  buried in my chest, in its teak box,

  but tonight, awakened

  by the sound of my name

  strung between the trees,

  I see the box on my nightstand

  giving off the kind of light

  you never know you belong to

  until you see it dance

  from a pile of metal shavings

  or shaken loose

  from a sword fern’s root-wad.

  It’s the same light that trailed me

  the entire summer of my sixteenth year,

  driving County Road 64

  toward Power Line Ridge,

  the three radio towers

  blinking in the Oregon dark.

  Between each red pulse

  the dark hung its birthrights in front of me,

  a few dead branches

  crawling up from the ditch,

  a lost bolt of mooncloth

  snagged on a barbed-wire fence,

  shredding in the tide wind.

  The light my oldest friends

  slammed into their veins

  or offered to the night

  when they made amends.

  One of them,

  the tallest and toughest,

  the one who used to show up Saturdays

  for my mother’s breakfast—

  he could juggle five eggs

  and recite the alphabet backward—

  he told me as he covered my hand with his

  while I downshifted to enter the gravel quarry

  that he wanted to punch the baby

  out of Jessica’s stomach—

  he’s the one, tonight, whose carbide hands

  have opened the lid of this little box.

  I can see the two of us now, kissing Hitler.

  That’s what we called it—

  siphoning gas,

  huffing shop rags.

  And we kissed him everywhere,

  in other counties,

  with girls we barely knew

  telling us to hurry

  before someone called the cops.

  They can’t arrest you for kissing Hitler.

  That’s what we said.

  The last time I saw him

  he sat on the edge

  of his father’s girlfriend’s bathtub,

  bleeding and laughing hard into a pink towel.

  I can’t remember—

  maybe it was a birthday party.

  Maybe we’d climbed in

  through the living room window,

  looking for a bottle or some pills,

  at the same moment the adults stumbled in

  from the Silver Dollar, hardwired

  to liquor and crystal.

  That was the summer

  when people just went crazy.

  And there we were, locked in the bathroom,

  someone yelling and throwing themselves

  against the door,

  my friend’s blood fanned out behind him

  into points of red tar,

  into points so fine they made me think

  that someone, somewhere,

  must belong to a family that passes down

  the art of painting immaculate nasturtiums

  along the lips of bone china,

  the smallest detail touched into place

  by a single, stiff horsehair,

  by a young father holding his breath,

  trying not to wake the child

  swaddled at his feet, his hand

  steady as five white mining burros

  sleeping in the rain.

  New Civilian

  The new law

  says you can abandon your child

  in an emergency room,

  no questions asked.

  A young father

  carries his sleeping boy

  through the hospital doors.

  Later, parked at the boat basin,

  he takes a knife from his pocket,

  cuts an unfiltered cigarette in two,

  lights the longer half in his mouth.

  He was a medic in the war.

  In his basement are five bronze eagles

  that once adorned the walls

  of a dictator’s palace.

  Dead Man’s Bells, Witches’ Gloves

  The dreams of those buried in winter

  push through the ground in summer.

  Among the orders, my dead

  belong to the ditches of county roads.

  Before the new people came over

  to negotiate the easement

  with their version of a city lawyer,

  my mother hung dozens of foxgloves

  above our door.

  A dead crow hung by its feet

  from the same hook.

  Even in death, that purple luster

  is a kind of singing.

  Catfish

  The catfish have the night,

  but I have patience

  and a bucket of chicken guts.

 
I have canned corn and shad blood.

  And I’ve nothing better to do

  than listen to the water’s riffled dark

  spill into the deep eddy

  where a ’39 Ford coupe

  rests in the muck-bottom.

  The dare growing up:

  to swim down with pliers

  for the license plates,

  corpse bones, a little chrome...

  But even on the clearest days,

  even when the river runs low and clean,

  you can’t see it,

  though you can often nearly see

  the movement of hair.

  I used to move through my days

  as someone agreeable

  to all the gears

  clicking in the world.

  I was a big clumsy Yes

  tugged around by its collar.

  Yes to the mill, yes to the rain,

  yes to what passed

  for fistfights and sex, yes

  to all the pine boards of thought

  waiting around for the hammer.

  The catfish have the night

  and ancient gear oil for blood,

  they have a kind of greased demeanor

  and wet electricity

  that you can never boil out of them.

  The catfish have the night,

  but I have the kind of patience

  born of indifference and hate.

  Maybe the river and I share this.

  Maybe the obvious moon

  that bobs near the lip of the eddy

  is really a pocket watch

  having finally made its way downstream

  from what must have been

  a serious accident—

  the station wagon and its family

  busting the guardrail,

  the steering wheel jumping

  into the man’s chest,

  his pocket watch hurtling

  through the windshield

  and into the river.

  Wind the hands in one direction

  and see into the exact moment of your death.

  Wind them the other way

  and see all the tiny ways

  you’ve already died—

  I’m going to put this in my breast pocket

  just as it is. Metal heart

  that will catch the stray bullet

  in its teeth.

  I chum the water, I thread the barb.

  I feel something move in the dark.

  My Family History as Explained by the South Fork of the River

  My grandfather says

  he stepped out of his dream

  the same day my grandmother did.

  In this way they entered the world.

  If you put your ear to his chest

  you’d hear something so absolute

  that you’d leave for the river

  enter the salmon run

  and disappear through the keyhole

  at the river bottom.

  He tells me

  I never had a mother.

  My mother has always said

  that after her mother died giving birth

  and became a reflection

  in a mud puddle

  that my grandfather

  turned into a dog

  who spent the rest of its life

  drinking from the pools

  in gravel roads.

  My grandmother

  says my mother

  can find anything.

  She says my mother is a water witch,

  and that’s why she leaves us

  for days at a time

  and comes home ragged

  and soaked with rainwater.

  My mother has a special branch

  that follows the water.

  My grandfather says

  I was never born at all,

  that I’m just borrowing this body

  until something better comes along.

  He says I’m half bird

  and half fish.

  He says there’s a house

  beneath the river,

  that I’m in a riddle

  where a boy flies

  in two skies at the same time.

  In February

  She looks at the apple trees

  and imagines rows of people

  standing in line for something.

  She even dreamt once

  of being among them,

  waiting patiently to enter

  the open doorway

  of the earth, which shone

  with a light so forgiving

  it could have spoken.

  Her son’s been dead

  nearly a year, and yesterday

  while driving to the feed store

  she braked suddenly

  and threw her arm

  across the rib cage

  of his absence.

  The ice grows down the ruts

  of the gravel driveway.

  The possum by the well

  frozen in place

  for over a week.

  Wood smoke hangs

  halfway up the trees,

  the air is still.

  Gunshots can be heard for miles,

  and every kind of water

  and laughter.

  New Season

  Beside our neighbor’s half-framed barn

  the hip bones of a dead deer continue

  to be stripped and polished by the rain,

  an arc of gray electricity

  traveling between them.

  And the water

  collecting in the ashtray on the porch

  isn’t a lake, but it’s big enough for God

  to stick his thumb in.

  I admire the rats in the wall.

  They rejoice in the night.

  They call to each other

  as they work.

  Sunday

  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.

  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.