alone tonight in the woods or in a silo.
Mirror for popping your zits, hand dryer
for drying your hair, your musty coat.
You’ve come to run warm water
over hands you can no longer feel,
come to sit and rest and do nothing,
and think nothing, and be no one.
You ask the boy at the counter
if you can have some water. He nods,
tapping his foot to a bluegrass tune,
slides a paper cup toward you
with a smooth hand, asks
out of habit if that will be everything.
PRIMER
And what if you have nothing?
I pick up a stick. Yes, that’s always first.
And next? I see what I can see around me.
Find the sun or moon. Find high ground.
Find north by where the moss grows.
Yes. Now close your eyes. Find them.
The sun’s behind. I can feel it
on my neck. High ground’s to my right.
North’s ahead. Yes. And the wind?
The wind’s west. It cools my left temple.
Yes. And next? If I can bug out
I bug out. Otherwise I go high
and dig a foxhole and tie something bright
above me. You’re forgetting something.
Right—first I cut my name in the dirt,
then I go high. Yes. And next?
I walk a loop with my bright thing in sight.
If I find a better stick I switch for it.
Yes. And if you need to cry?
I crawl inside my foxhole and cry.
And what do you tell yourself as you cry?
Someone’s coming. Yes. And what if
no one comes? Each hour I call
in all directions. I listen. Yes.
And what do you listen for?
Sounds that shouldn’t be there. Yes.
Sounds that should be there but aren’t.
Yes. And what have you heard
since we started? A bird. Yes. Another bird
far away. Yes. A gust in the trees.
Yes. Your voice, if your voice counts.
Yes, my voice counts.
THE MUSCLES IN THEIR THROATS
The Neanderthals tracked mammoths through the snow.
Postholed twice between each of the creature’s
blue-hued prints. Peered down at the toe digs, hoping
for any fissures in the powder that might be a sign
of weakness. Nightmares larger than the caves
they slept in. Before they hunted them, they fire-hardened
their spears, but as they bored holes in the midriff
and carted home great slabs of marbled meat, and later,
as they boiled the pelvis for a red-marrow broth,
we don’t know for certain how much they could say
to each other. It’s no different now. My brother
strips boughs off the wind-stunted pines at tree line
and stacks them on a boulder. I drag them over scree
to the A-frame we’re building on the shore of a nameless
alpine lake. We need the branches for insulation.
A foot thick for every ten degrees below sixty.
This high up, it’s bound to freeze. We know the spearheads
were basically the same for two hundred thousand years.
And the design worked, though the hunters
had to get feverishly close—the bones we’ve studied
are riddled with burst fractures, the skulls
remolded from concussions. I squeeze inside
to see where the light is breaking through.
In the cold I watch my breath escaping out the holes.
But when I try to tell my brother where to add
more boughs, he darkens what’s already dark enough.
The horseshoe-shaped muscles in their throats
were anatomically modern, so there’s no real reason
they wouldn’t have been able to speak. When scientists
finish a life-size model of the esophagus, we’ll finally hear
what their voices must have sounded like.
LODESTAR
Nothing you’ll find more orphan than the heart.
The dim mission of its reptile-eyed insomnia,
its nameless drive, its bulging catalytic beat.
The night sky wheels with the same fever, as if thrown
from a bowler’s hand with english on it. Orion.
Ursa Minor. You cannot constellate desire any more
than you can braid cord from the tongue’s sinewed utterance
of a name, a name hallowed at night into the wind,
the wind tethered to the earth like flame to black spruce,
quartered and four years dried. Beargrass. Monk’s Hood Lichen.
Methuselah’s Beard. Old Man on the Mountain.
You take your bearings by a belt of pulsing stars.
You turn to reckon with the one that doesn’t move.
Polaris. Dog’s Tail. Leiðarstjarna. Nail. Mismar.
GATHERING FIREWOOD ON TINPAN
I bundle them against my chest, not sure
if they’re dry enough. Gauging how long
they’ll keep me warm by the thickness.
I step around carefully, looking for
the deadest, searching the low places
for something small and old that will catch.
I pick up the dander loosened
as my father folds his hands, lowers his head.
The rolling thunder on the surface of a nail.
I pick up the cross that seesaws his chest
with each step. The day I lost my faith.
The night my dog ran away and came back sick.
The battery pump of her final breath.
Still wondering if she left alone,
or if my father walked her out of this world.
Still wondering what he used for a leash.
I go further into the trees and find
more fuel. My friends faded on oxy
and percocet. My cousin Josh
buried young in the floodplain.
My brother and the ways I burden him.
Living it over and over each night.
My father walking into every dream.
My fire not bright enough to reveal anything.
Not even his face. Not even the leash.
COUSIN JOSH ON DOOMSDAY
Fargo, North Dakota
It don’t matter what you believe. Could be a chunk
of the sun wipin out the grid just as likely
as the Lord Himself snuffin us out one by one
like a bunch of candlewicks. Could be a oil shortage.
Or the souls of the dead come back to reckon.
My buddy Critter figures it’ll be the Lake of Fire—
all the flesh dripping off our dicks while we drown
at the same time over and over forever.
But most folks won’t tell you what they believe.
My ma, she never broke silence on the issue.
My old man, he says I’m crazy. Says I’m gonna drink
myself to death before anything else gets the chance.
Me, I got my chips pushed in for somethin natural.
A meteor maybe. Or a polar flip. But like I said:
when you’re throwin pies, it don’t matter much what the flavor is.
It’s more folks thinkin like me than you’d think.
And like most of us, I got a bug-in plan for stayin put,
but I also got a bug-out plan for gettin gone.
Not that I’m gonna tell you where I’m goin.
It’s high in the mountains—I’ll say that much—
but that’s all the scat this cat’s gonna leave in the sand
for you to track by. Ah, who am I kiddin?
I’ll be stuck in this town till God sucks
&
nbsp; his last breath. Let me ask you somethin:
You think I’m crazy to have a hundred pounds of Spam
buried in caches? You think I’m crazy to have Critter
shoot me with a .22 so I know what it feels like
to get hit in a bulletproof vest? Well, you know what?
I hope I am crazy. I hope I’m the craziest son of a bitch
you ever met.
ASKING FOR WORK AT FLATHEAD BIBLE
All the positions are filled, the pastor said,
but you could be a floater. Meaning
I woke each morning not knowing
and at breakfast a man named Archer
told me what to get busy with. On Monday
I hunched in the kitchen scrubbing beets.
On Tuesday I helped the carpenters
dismantle a barn’s gable. The shifts blurred
like faces seen from a carousel pony.
In the laundry I folded linens, in the pottery
I cleaned the kiln, my hands getting nicks
from pulling shingles, stains from applying
glazes, flaky skin from scrubbing
at the scullery’s foot-pedal sink.
But none of the wear showed deeply.
Archer called them wishy-washy hands.
Make up your mind, he teased, flooding
flapjacks with his homemade syrup.
He laid his hands on my hands and turned them
as a father might turn turtles to show his son
the belly patterns. The pastor squinted.
What am I looking for? By the time
Archer sent me back to the carpenters
they had the second story down. In the kitchen
the lunch menu changed. The laundry granted
one towel per camper instead of two.
It was easier to adapt than you’d think.
If I had a hammer in my hand, I pulled nails.
If I had a sheet, I found the corners.
JIM TUCKER LETS ME SLEEP IN HIS TREEHOUSE
North Platte, Nebraska
My son built this whole thing: measured
every board, pounded every nail.
Did the trapdoors, windows, knocked out
a wall right where you’re standin to fit
the kitchen. Got so he just about lived
in this tree. Did his homework up here,
took meals, ran a cord from the porch
for a heater, even kept a pisspot and a shitter.
His mother fussed, but I warned her:
chain a dog to a leash and all you got
is a beast chewin leather. Let the same dog roam
and it’ll circle back home every time,
and that’s how it was with Brian.
My boy loved this tree and this tree kept him
busy. Taught him the eye for true,
the eye for level, the eye for inches.
Once you see the world that way
there aint no shakin it. Take these shims here.
That there’s four inches, that’s three,
that’s three and a quarter, that’s five, that’s five,
that’s four, and I can go on like that.
So could Brian before we lost him
to the war. Matter a fact, he had the eye
twice as dialed as mine—could name it
down to an eighth, even a sixteenth.
More than once I called bullshit
and took out the ruler, but my boy
was always right, even when he saw it
from an odd angle. My wife says I got
an inflated sense of my own manhood,
but I tell her I know ten inches
when I see ten inches. And she says,
Jim Tucker, if only you could see
how odd it looks from this angle.
Bet you never heard that one before.
TO THE RAIL COP AT RATHDRUM
You knew you had me for trespassing,
and probably for vandalism, but you weren’t sure
how to charge me for the fire still burning
under the train bridge in the railyard you patrolled
nightly, the flames throwing a shiver-glow
on the tagged girders, the rusted tracks, the plastic
unblinking eyeball on the seeable side
of your otherwise unremarkable face.
Arson, you thought, but you knew the word
wouldn’t hold up in court. You unbuckled my pack,
hoping for more—dope, or a fingerprinted weapon,
or a scale for weighing and selling. You ran
your flashlight over the bushes, needling the beam
through the barest branches, shocking
the dry leaves with the raw bleached-out colors
of themselves. With your one good eye you caught
my brother’s duffle among the torqued shapes
of your shadow-show and realized
I wasn’t alone. You cuffed me to a piling.
Tiptoed a search of the firelight’s perimeter.
Asked me who it was out there in the dark.
Asked me why he was hiding. Said my silence
couldn’t protect him, and only made it worse
for me. You radioed for backup, widened
your circle, your boots glissading the sloped beds
of the railroad tailings. You offered to cut me
a deal for a name. Said the cold truth
was my buddy wouldn’t protect me, not once
he was caught, not once he was facing the law.
You’d be surprised, you said. You asked how well
I knew him. Said I should think about that
before I threw myself on the tracks.
Think about that: Who was it out there
in the cold dark hiding? How well did I know him?
As if you needed those questions
in this. And sure enough, after the sky tipped
the dipper into the iron wash of dawn
and my coals smoldered on
in the ritalin moods of the wind, and after failing
to find any ID tucked in the socks
at the bottom of the duffle, you gave up—
drove home, and left me with the day shift.
EARSHOT
Sure, I was provoked. Eggshell carefully
opened with the tip of a needle-nose.
Black Cat slid down into the yolk.
Lit with a Bic. Thrown so the firecracker
clapped against my ear. Silence tunneling
after, embryo shampooing my hair. Almost
choreographed. More than my brother
hoped for, I know. But believe me when I say
there was no excess in the flat head nail
jeweled through the two-by-four.
No hesitation in my hands, choked up
for accuracy and control. Shhh—
I can’t hear you anyway. Stop running.
I need to be three feet from your skull.
FLOOD OF ’97
In the flood of ’97 everything went to shit.
Somewhere in Canada the Red River clogged
and coated the roads in downtown Fargo
as high as the stop signs. Not much was saved.
Dark water churned for a moment as the river
tipped over, then a stillness filled the basements.
It was the same all over town. The rambler rooftops
looming like islands. Foundations rotting
in the afternoon silence. Everybody camping
in a cousin’s backyard, or staying with an uncle
down in Fergus. The old folks at Eventide
had to move to Oak Grove and spent two weeks
sleeping on cots in the brick chapel.
When the ice sheets broke and brown water
flowed up to Hu
dson Bay, the basements drained
and people opened their own front doors
like strangers. Tiptoed through bedrooms
and ran hands over water-warped walls.
Went in the kitchen and swore the fridge
had been moved. All summer, people found
rusty things they didn’t recognize. Things
that must have floated in from other homes.
Fathers walked the silty streets and knocked
on doors, trying to find the rightful owner
of a shovel or a broom. An elderly woman returned
to Eventide and discovered a soggy photograph
on the mildewed carpet in her tiny room.
She peered at the blurry faces and tried to remember
going to Egypt. Wondered who the man could be,
standing beside her at the Sphinx.
THE RAFT
He baits the hook with an Indian Paintbrush petal,
lets out the line, reels, traps it with his thumb pad.
October. Powder on the peaks. We float on a raft
lashed together with a loose weave of duct tape and rope.
I paddle us forward with a cottonwood branch,
my leg in the water for a rudder, trying to hold us close
to the darkness of the drop-off where the trout go
to stay cool in the afternoons. Later we’ll make a fire
and cook our catch with blueberries gathered frozen
from the cirque above the tarn. We’ll blow on the coals.
We’ll check for tenderness. We’ll add ash in place
of salt. But for now I’m watching the sunlight
bounce off the surface and shimmer in the shadow
under my brother’s hat. The way he plays the line.
The way he lets it troll behind us. The way the trout
cloud our wake and flick their rainbowed sides.
I’m torquing my leg underwater. I’m turning us back
toward the darkness we’ve drifted away from.
COUSIN JOSH ON FAMILY
Fargo, North Dakota
You ever had some loose screw try to tell you
your friends is the family you choose?
Well I wouldn’t bottle the breath of the minister
that delivered the message. The family you got
is the only family you’re gonna get,
take it or leave it. Wanna know what I got?
I got myself sisters. Two of em. But that’s all I got