Michael McGriff


Sitting around the Burn Pile in a Season of Negation, Thinking of Jaan Kaplinski

 

 

It’s never the fashion to grow old

and speak of stars skimming the creek

as small, biting flies, and exalt them.

 

And it won’t matter to this cigarette

burning toward my rank fingers

that the hoof is simply a fortified, exacting toe

or that the pelvis makes us human,

just as it will never sway you

toward one decision over another

that the discount mattress store

on Curtis and Broadway floods every winter

and that it used to be the Army Surplus Center

where I sorted through piles of fatigues

and wandering borders.

 

I take a single thought, in this hour,

staple wings to its side, press

two bottlecaps into the clay of its face

and stare at it from such a distance

that it finally grows mournable

and therefore worthy of abandonment.

 

I have nothing to say but this:

the water is green with distance,

its column of flies,

the crown for a headless king.


Michael McGriff is the author of four collections of poetry: Eternal Sentences (University of Arkansas Press, 2021), Early Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and Dismantling the Hills (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). His other books include the story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object, 2014), a translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer, 2010), and an edition of David Wevill’s essential poetry and translations, To Build My Shadow a Fire (Truman State University Press, 2010). He serves as co-director of the creative writing program at the University of Idaho.