Home Burial (2 page)

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 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.

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.

—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.

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.

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.

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.