Michael McGriff
Michael McGriff Poems
I was wrong about oblivion then,
summer mornings we walked the logging roads
north of Laverne, the gypo trucks leaving miles of gravel dust
...
Above my cold house at daybreak, you hang
in a nest of thinning stars, navigate
the pitch of the roof like November rain.
Where's the invisible bridge you're building
...
Let me be the architect
in the glass city of your mouth.
The wild clock of your mouth
...
Another Oregon November and I'm barreling down
Old Wagon Road again, the night waters of Isthmus Slough
winding through the dark. I gear down the three-in-the-tree Chevy
as Tonya's leg pushes against me. She says, Think you'll leave this place
...
The moon is fishing for compliments
along the sand bar, and I'm holding
a banquet for our separateness,
...
This winter's carnival of rain
tears down and moves east
for the hills.
...
The dreams of those buried in winter
push through the ground in summer.
Among the orders, my dead
...
1. The Scar On My Father's Chest
As a child, the surgeons went in
to unkink his heart's twisted chain.
They left a welder's hasty bead,
...
Dust and blackberry carried on the wind,
sand moving hand over hand
in the dunes, memory,
...
I winch-up the sky
between the shed roof and the ridge
and stand dumb as a goat
beneath its arrows and buckets,
...
Two decommissioned highways cross
and continue toward their borders
with the casual certainty
...
The summer's gone, now
it's the gray machines
of the rain. 5:30, November,
the sun breaks through
...
Like the blue elephants
we watched and never understood
under instant patchwork tents next to the highway
...
We were contracted with the prison crew
to take the ridge. Tear it down.
Trees, scotchbroom, fence posts.
It was too hot to smoke cigarettes.
...
I used to think of this creek as a river
springing from mineral caverns
of moonmilk and slime,
...
She looks at the apple trees
and imagines rows of people
standing in line for something.
...
The new law
says you can abandon your child
in an emergency room,
no questions asked.
...
I've seen a group of farm kids
hypnotize a rabbit
by pinning it on its back
...
Michael McGriff Biography
Michael McGriff (born Coos Bay, Oregon) is an American poet. McGriff was raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. His work has appeared in Slate, Field, AGNI, The Believer, Missouri Review, and Poetry. He is the founding editor of Tavern Books, a publishing house dedicated to poetry in translation and the revival of out-of-print books. McGriff's most recent book of poetry, Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) chronicles the dissolution of a people and their landscape - the coastal Pacific Northwest. McGriff currently teaches at Stanford University.)
The Best Poem Of Michael McGriff
Iron
I was wrong about oblivion then,
summer mornings we walked the logging roads
north of Laverne, the gypo trucks leaving miles of gravel dust
eddying around us. You were the Queen of Iron
and I, the servant Barcelona. The slash-pile
we tunneled through was the Whale's Mouth,
our kingdom. Jake-brakes sounded the death-cries
of approaching armies as they screamed over the ridge
where we held our little breaths and each other,
passing the spell of invisibility between us.
Five years later, you brought your father's
hunting knife to school and stabbed Danielle Carson
in the hip and I never saw you again.
I could say I left town for both of us, that I drove I-5 South
until I reached the aqueducts of California,
and for the first time felt illuminated before the sight
of water as it rushed beneath the massive turbines
spinning on the beige and dusty hills, powering a distant city
that would set me free. I could say
after your father covered the plastic bladder
of his waterbed with baby oil and wrestled you to it,
that in those days after your pregnancy I made plans
to drive a claw hammer into his skull. But I never left,
and when I moved it was only as far as the county line.
If my life has been a series of inadequacies, at least I know
by these great whirls of dust how beauty
and oblivion never ask permission of anyone.
In the book I read before bed, God lowers himself
through the dark and funnels his blueprints into the ear
of a woman who asked for nothing. Tomorrow night
she'll lead armies, in a few more she'll burn at the stake
and silver birds will rise from her mouth. This is the book
of the universe, where iron is the last element
of a star's collapse and the moon retreats each moment
into oblivion. My blood fills with so much iron I'm pulled
to a place in the hard earth where the wind
grinds over the ridge bearing the wheels of tanker trucks
oiling the access roads, where deer ruin the last of the plums,
where the sloughs shrink back to their deepest channels,
and I can turn away from nothing.
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