She’s basically comatose, but she can shake
her head for no and you’d be surprised
how much power that gives you.
They had her hooked up to this thing—
I don’t know what you call it—a shock
treatment kind of thing they hoped
would give her back her speech. But when
they explained all this she shook her head.
Doc said shake once for yes and four for no.
If the math wasn’t happening I coulda
called the shots, but you know damn well
that head shook exactly four times.
So they sent us home. Somehow she bosses
me around with that headshake, gets across
every little message. And it’s weird,
I used to be as quiet as a mule, but with her
gone mute I feel it’s my duty to charm the air.
But enough of me clearing your throat—
I’ll shut up so you can tell about your travels,
just let me roll her once more.
Friends ask me how I’m holding up.
That’s what they say: How you holding up?
But what they mean to say is this:
How’s tending a vegetable that don’t grow? Well,
if there’s a god and he’s listening right now
I’m nothin short of ashamed: this thing beat Jesus
right out of me. But when you lived
what I lived and seen what I seen
happen to who it happened to, there just aint
nothin in it. No order. No holiness.
And don’t sit there eyeballing me like maybe
the Lord’s breaking earth to sow seeds.
Don’t tell me there’s a larger purpose.
I won’t hear it. I won’t listen to another word.
PRIDE
After pulling a score from the dumpster
behind Krogers I stroll through
sliding doors with egg-caked hands.
The greeter greets me as I pass. I scan
the aisles like a surgeon studying the mint
versions of organs she cuts out
of men. The dented cans of black beans,
undented, would have cost me
ten bucks. The unexpired cartons of cream:
another twenty. I smile at the math.
For the dark roast alone I’d have forked over
forty-seven. For eight uncracked eggs
out of a dozen: about a buck-eleven.
Might as well be money I found.
Might as well be money I made.
By the time I get to the frozen foods
I’m up two hundred. Markdown meats
and I’m up three. In the bathroom
I lock the door behind me and twist
on the tap. As the yellow crust peels
off my hands the mirror clouds over
with steam. I finger the total
where my face used to be.
NEWS
Whoever you are, they take care of you.
Dean leans over and labors the crank-window,
asking where you need to go. Lillian shows
how to clean and reload. Tucker. The Lees.
Savannah shrunk by cancer. Lyle by diet,
ordering you what he can’t eat. Hands that pass
the double cheese and hands that steer the wheel,
a foot floored toward Tennessee, our necks keeping
Hendrix’s beat. Each morning another warning
about the darkness out there. Triple murder,
no suspects. Alien abductions in the Palouse.
A family gone missing. A family found,
their organs removed. Each day, against all this
breaking news, another stranger saving you.
ST. MARY’S MEMORIAL
He wakes to the sound of the television talking,
the blinds drawn, a room that doesn’t smell
like his. In the infomercial glow he can see
he’s in a hospital gown and his fingers
are missing. He thinks he can feel his thumbs
but when he paws at the gauze he finds
purple stumps. Swollen. Stitched. Last night
when the cops brought him in from the windchill
he was too far gone to know his name
or if he had insurance. Now on the screen
a beautiful woman is selling him
a vacuum. A blender. A new kind
of shampoo. Even before she lets him eat
the orderly begins teaching him how to use
what’s left over. What he can hold by pinching
It gets easier, she says, peeling the lid
off a tub of yogurt. The first day is always
the toughest. The man looks down at the blue
slippers on his feet. Stares at the screen
as the woman slices the prices in half. Catches
the orderly’s young, educated eyes as she lifts
a plastic spoon for him to bite. Darling,
he says, this aint the first day of anything.
COUSIN JOSH ON LIGHTHOUSE MISSION
Fargo, North Dakota
Don’t tell none of the fellas in here, but I’m not
really homeless. I’m just waitin for some shit
to blow over. And truth be told, this aint a bad
little shelter, but I wouldn’t even pretend to sleep
if I hadn’t landed myself a top bunk. I got my shit
stuffed up in the rafters and my shoes
tied up there too. Some a these guys go lookin
for their size in the night, or at least for somethin
they can trade with. It’s anything for a fix
with these crackheads. I don’t even take off my kicks
in the shower. Thought I saw some bad bathrooms
in the big house, but at least I made it outta there
without some kinda mushroom growin
on my foot. I did two years on a drug thing,
I don’t mind tellin you. Two years up at county
and four years down at the university:
where you think I got my education?
I wouldn’t say it too loud among this kinda crowd,
but I’m a republican. Any man with half a head
is a liberal when he’s young and a conservative
when he’s grown. That’s a fact. That’s a nature thing.
Speakin of nature, I don’t fuck with the food in here.
A couple months back my buddy Critter
found a finger in his pudding cup. A human finger,
and I aint bullshittin. Had a fingernail and everything.
Clipped off below the knuckle. A little tiny one.
Looked like a lady’s finger, but it coulda been a child’s
just as easy. Before the cops came and took it away,
Critter was fingerprintin dollar bills with the dead
finger, usin the butterscotch like it was ink.
He printed about ten bills, then turned around
and started sellin em for two bucks a pop.
And the craziest thing is, folks was buyin em!
Motherfucker was doublin his luck on each buck,
and I wasn’t the only fool to notice. Pretty soon
all the crackheads was takin a extra pudding cup
and tryin to find another finger. Some of these maniacs
is still lookin to this day. Anything for a fix,
like I told you. Anyways, I got mine up in the rafters
if you wanna buy it.
SOFT HUNTING
Crouching behind a Cosco container
we rattled into Fargo in the dark,
the searchlights raking your face,
warping your nose, the air tubes
hissing in our ears as we whispered
to each other, as yo
u drew the plans
with your finger on my knee.
Or was it me who drew the plans
on your knee? Was it Fargo or Mandan?
Cosco or Hanjin? How would you
describe the train’s soft hunting
back and forth on the tracks,
the stutter-stops of all five engines,
the painful groan of a local
lurching forward through the yard?
Could you bring to life the welder
suddenly above us, working
on the girders of a bridge as we passed
underneath? Could you make a stranger
feel the hot sparks cascading—
the way they hovered in the air
like snow, the way they glowed
as we caught them in our oil-
stained hands, the way I brushed them
from your tangled hair. It doesn’t matter.
Every version of this story is equally
useless. Because no matter how far
we try to pull away from each other,
no matter how far we ride these coal-
dusted rails over our own Dakotas,
it’s always the same old story
with us, the burden of having a brother
coming down on us both like fire.
THE MARK
Some say fire, some say language.
Some say God made us in his image
on the sixth day. Some say tools,
some religion. Some say whenever
we first dug a hole, marked
a grave—maybe the Neanderthal
family found in northern Spain:
skulls, ribs, jaws, a bowlful of teeth,
a nearly complete spine, a hand,
every digit intact, arranged
below flowstone almost as in life.
Some say art, some crude representation.
Some say cooked caribou
catalyzed the boom in our brains.
Mother, father, child, infant.
Harris lines in the femurs told
how meager their meals were.
Their collarbones gnawed on, sawed
through, hacked at with flint tools,
ribcages crushed with something blunt
to get at the liver and marrow:
if they were buried they were buried
by their murderers. Some say up-
right gaits, opposable thumbs,
three-pound brains. Their skulls
cloven with engraved lithic blades.
The written word. Ritual.
Organs still warm in the middle.
Empathy. A sense of shame. Some say
we’re still on the way to human.
NORTHERN CORN
Traveling alone through Minnesota
as the corn comes in. Steel silos filling
to the brim. Black trees leaning
off the south sides of hills as cold light
falls slantwise against the gristmills.
You have allowed another year to pass.
You have learned very little.
But that little is what you’re throwing
in the furnace. That little is stoking the dust-
coals of last year and burning something.
Burning blue. The ninety-year-old father
is bringing his crop in. He climbs
off the combine, checks the engine,
moves an oak branch. He pours
rye whiskey from a thermos and sips
the lidless excess of his private noon.
The size of his hands. The size of one finger.
The flathead prairie of his calloused
thumb pad. He lies awake in the middle
of the night and whispers something
and suddenly loves his son again.
The way excess falls through him.
The way oil runs down the Mississippi River
and remains on the surface and burns.
The father no longer breathing.
The respirator breathing. The father lying
in a hospital bed in a nightgown.
The plastic tubes and machinery.
The whole hospital breathing.
The janitor waxing the vinyl floors
at midnight while life is trying hard
to leave. You must go to your father
while he is still your father.
You must hold him. You must kiss him.
You must listen. You must see the son
in the father and wonder. You must admit
that you wonder. Stand above him
and wonder. Drop his swelled-up hand.
Whisper something. Now unplug the machine.
CUTTING FOR SIGN
Flat on my back in the sagebrush
as cops cut for sign by the tracks,
snowflakes falling loose and drawled
through their shaky tubes of light.
Wyoming. A fluke September storm.
I’ve been lying still for so long
snow fills the creases in my coat,
makes moguls on my buttons, drifts
on my brow. Less and less of me
to find. When the flashlights move
down the mainline the flakes turn
to flecks of darkness, visible
against the low, cloud-muffled sky.
My shoes capped with cones
of powder, my outline broken
by crisscrossing sticks. Less and less.
BUTTE
My brother bolt-cuts a hole through the mesh
over the Family Dollar dumpster in Butte.
I lower myself through. Dull light mumbles
from the car-emptied lot, slumping
on day-old donuts, moldy seed bread,
a bulk bag of oats the rats have chewed through.
I hand up the bread. I hand up the donuts.
I hand up the tub of yogurt someone
bought, opened, tasted, and returned.
I go shoulder-deep through the yolk-crusted bags,
reaching—maybe fruit, maybe meat.
After a while you can name what you feel.
Groping wet shapes with the tips of your fingers.
Lifting them up to your brother.
COUSIN JOSH ON HIS LIVER
Fargo, North Dakota
Ma’s always on me about my diet. Always on me
about the cancer and the stomach acid
and the diabetes. So what if my liver gave out?
So what if the doctor says not even a sip?
If a grown man wants to sit back and crack
a cold one that’s his own Han Solo. But Ma can’t
leave it alone. Can’t stop prayin for me.
Says she wants to see her one and only son
in heaven. And I keep tellin her: Ma, you can see me
right now! Feast your eyes! It aint my fault I aint
Christian. I’d be the first man up the believin pole
if there was somethin to believe in.
She sets mantraps every Sunday, but
the truth is, she couldn’t drag my ass to church
if I was a sack and she was a dragger.
If the Lord wants me he can come and get me.
I aint hidin. I aint got no sheet over me. Sure, I’ll shit
and piss for a few more years, but it’s no big secret
I’m a dead man. All Ma wants to wonder is if
I’ll be up there dancin when she gets there.
And the thing that knocks my cock around
is how she never doubts her own goddamn grace,
never doubts she’ll slide through them pearly gates.
So I’m always teasin her, always askin:
Are the animals up there, Ma? Are the plants?
Are the Neanderthals? I bet the whole planet’s
up there. I bet when you get there you don’t even
know you’re there, cept for all the Neanderthals
walkin around. I bet it’s like goin home
to your folks’s place years after you moved out—
everything’s the same, and everybody’s there,
and you’re there, and there’s that moment
when you first walk in and smell what the house
smells like. You know what I’m talkin about.
Straightaway you know that smell. You know it
better than you know your own goddamn face.
And you know you aint never smelled it
no place else. Not in all these years. Not whiff one.
And the smell rushes at you and fills you up.
And the only thought you can think is how in the dry dive
did I survive all this time without it?
AFFORDING THE FUNERAL
for Josh
Your folks were about to downsize anyway.
The Ford. The riding lawnmower. Letting go
of the furniture was harder. The hope chest
had sailed from Norway with Great-Grandpa Morris
in 1904, but the age and the make made it
liquidable. The trampoline. The jewelry.
There was no need to pay a pastor outside the family.
Uncle Dan did a fine job. Told the story
about the mullet to highlight your stubbornness,
which everyone said afterwards they loved.
The china covered most of the casket. The speedboat
got the headstone. And someone from Odegard
Funeral Home went to Aunt Mary’s church,
so they gave us permission to come a day early
and dig the hole. We were told we had to reach
the standard depth, but they were willing
to turn a blind eye while we got there.
SHOALWATER
Waves grind the shoreline and darken into pools.
Crabs shuffle sideways, lost in the washed-up eelgrass.
Seagulls spit littleneck clams to the rocks
and don’t even eat the shattered bodies.
They fly as high as the clouds and wrap talons
in the wind. But this kind of love isn’t rare.
When I dream about my brother he disappears
if I look. He wears a bird-bone bracelet,
but I only know this by feel. Even his hair
is something I imagine. His nose occurs solely
as contours. I walk down the beach
and throw stones at the oncoming waves.
This is the best we can do. We leak every time