Home Burial Read online

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 wheat.

  Symphony

  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.

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

  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.

  Overhearing Two Sisters in the Empty Lot

  behind the DMV

  —It’s my turn.

  —Make the worst face you’ve ever made.

  —You look like you’re dead.

  —You look like a ghost who can’t shit.

  —Let’s pretend we were murdered.

  —Let’s do one with our mouths open.

  Midwinter

  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 days—she’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.

  Note Left for My Former Self

  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 night—

  not the trick,

  but the distress call

  we manage to send out

  while we are pinned

  to our stillness.

  The Cow

  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 faces—

  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 game—

  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 painting—

  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.

  All Dogs, You Said, Are Descendants of the Wolf

  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.

  Crows

  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.

  Circadian

  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.

  Alone in Hell’s Canyon

  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

  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 mon
ey,

  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.

  Pipeline

  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