Robert Wrigley

So here is the old buck
who all winter long
had traveled with the does
and yearlings, with the fawns
...

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red—
skittish and prone to explode
...

As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool,
this hank's thankless task is vast,
a head down to the ground impossibility, possibly,
...

Because I have come to the fence at night,
the horses arrive also from their ancient stable.
They let me stroke their long faces, and I note
in the light of the now-merging moon
...

Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee
and informed the seven of us in his charge
his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man
he never knew, had been possessed,
...

The Afterlife
1

Spring, and the first full crop of dandelions gone
to smoke, the lawn lumpish with goldfinches,
...

Under dust plush as a moth's wing,
the book's leather cover still darkly shown,
and everywhere else but this spot was sodden
...

Called out of dream by the pitch and screech,
I awoke to see my mother's hair
set free of its pincurls, springing out
into the still and hurtling air
...

Sleepy and suburban at dusk,
I learn again the yard's
geometry, edging around the garden
...

The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired
to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post
of the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was,
...

Because I have come to the fence at night,
the horses arrive also from their ancient stable.
They let me stroke their long faces, and I note
in the light of the now-merging moon

how they, a Morgan and a Quarter, have been
by shake-guttered raindrops
spotted around their rumps and thus made
Appaloosas, the ancestral horses of this place.

Maybe because it is night, they are nervous,
or maybe because they too sense
what they have become, they seem
to be waiting for me to say something

to whatever ancient spirits might still abide here,
that they might awaken from this strange dream,
in which there are fences and stables and a man
who doesn't know a single word they understand.
...

Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee
and informed the seven of us in his charge
his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man
he never knew, had been possessed,
as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor
and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also
that the same man had named Lucy's twin brother,
born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,
along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,
we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.

As we should also always remember to call him
only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,
and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,
least of all with the title "Mister" attached,
which would remind him of that same most hated father
and plunge him therefore into a mood
he could not promise he would, he said, "behave
appropriately within." Fortunately, our job,
unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,
was simple: collect the trash from the county's back roads.

Although, given Lucy's insistence on thoroughness,
this meant not only beer cans and bottles,
all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also
the occasional condom too, as well as the festering
roadkill fresh and ridden with maggotry,
or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar
with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed
into the bed of the township flatbed truck we ourselves
rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments
then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.

Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded
our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston,
sexton of the dump and the dump's constant resident,
in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer
we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch
of wall we could see through the open door
was plastered with fold-outs and pages
from every Stump-salvaged Playboy and nudie magazine
he had ever found among the wreckage there.
Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.

Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known,
by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards
of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once,
while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22
from the rack beside his door and popped
with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us,
then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out,
and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack
to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide
coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.

As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom
and Lucy had no use for, on the truck's dash
all that summer Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,
a tome he said he'd read already eleven times,
this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way,
it might have had to do with something like the gallery
Stump's trailer contained, the first word of its title
meaning something to us, the last nothing at all.
There were things about men we might be
unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.

And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat,
fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade
with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats.
The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness
of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it,
and rats were more common than hares
and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed,
as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity—
the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance
of rats the very earth offered up like a plague,

the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump,
whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox,
seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire.
Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam,
one, after medical school, would hang himself
from a beam in his parents' basement, the others
merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory.
Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump
would spend his last twenty years in prison,
having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slug

through the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away,
balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer,
arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump,
whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself
even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some
court-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself,
was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country
of a scentless white shirt and black businessman's trousers,
in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense,
that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.
...

The Afterlife

1

Spring, and the first full crop of dandelions gone
to smoke, the lawn lumpish with goldfinches,
hunched in their fluffs, fattened by seed,
alight in the wind-bared peduncular forest.
Little bells, they loop and dive, bend
the delicate birch branches down.
I would enter the sky through the soil
myself, sing up the snail bowers
and go on the lam with the roots.
Licked by filaments, I would lie,
a billion love-mouths to suckle and feed.

Where the river will be next week,
a puddle two trout go savagely dying in.
Notice the bland, Darwinian sand: bone wrack
and tree skin, the ground down moon bowls
of mussels, viral stones dividing like mold.
At twelve, I buried the frog because it was dead
and dug it up because I'd been dreaming—
a fish belly light, a lowly chirruped chorus
of amens. I thought my nights might smell of hell.

Bland, hum-drum, quotidian guilt—
if I've killed one frog, I've killed two.
Saint Rot and the sacraments of maggots:
knowing is humus and sustenance is sex.
It accrues and accrues, it stews
tumorous with delight. Tomorrow's
a shovelful, the spit of the cosmos, one day
the baby's breath is no longer a rose.
...

Under dust plush as a moth's wing,
the book's leather cover still darkly shone,
and everywhere else but this spot was sodden
beneath the roof's unraveling shingles.
There was that back-of-the-neck lick of chill
and then, from my index finger, the book

opened like a blasted bird. In its box
of familiar and miraculous inks,
a construction of filaments and dust,
thoroughfares of worms, and a silage
of silverfish husks: in the autumn light,
eight hundred pages of perfect wordless lace.
...

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red—
skittish and prone to explode
even at fourteen years—who'd let me
hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine
caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain
up the head to the eyes. He'd let me stroke
his coarse chin whiskers and take
his soft meaty underlip
in my hands, press my man's carnivorous
kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just
so that I could smell
the long way his breath had come from the rain
and the sun, the lungs and the heart,
from a world that meant no harm.
...

As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool,
this hank's thankless task is vast,
a head down to the ground impossibility, possibly,
since what I'm thinking of is your toe pad pinknesses too,
your soup hots and round-and-rounds, the fine
and perfect poundage of you on my paws, the very cause
and problem I moan and bemoan
the absence of. For Love, above the head
this reddish coil once lavishly wore, there's an air so far away
it's sad for me to even think the same sun's rays play
where it was and do to you what I would do
if I were there or you were here. Still, some thrills
remembered do resemble thrills, one hopes, and the ropes
of it that gently fell around me bound me so well
no hell of miles can defile this dream I dream. I mean
the anyway DNA I can find of you. I mean the home
of bones and blood that holds the whole of you
and which this fizzed-up missive means to conjure, missy,
my world in a curl, girl, this man oh man half man I am
when you're gone.
...

Called out of dream by the pitch and screech,
I awoke to see my mother's hair
set free of its pincurls, springing out
into the still and hurtling air
above the front seat and just as suddenly gone.
The space around us twisted,
and in the instant before the crash
I heard the bubbling of the chickens,
the homely racket they make at all speeds,
signifying calm, resignation, oblivion.

And I listened. All through the slash
and clatter, the rake of steel, shatter of glass,
I listened, and what came
was a blizzard moan in the wind, a wail
of wreckage, severed hoses and lives,
a storm of loose feathers, and in the final
whirl approximating calm, the cluck
and fracas of the birds. I crawled
on hands and knees where a window should
have been and rose uneven

in November dusk. Wind blew
a snow of down, and rows of it quivered along
the shoulder. One thin stream of blood
oozed, flocked in feathers.
This was in the Ozarks, on a road curving miles
around Missouri, and as far as I could
see, no light flickered through the timber,
no mail box leaned the flag
of itself toward pavement, no cars
seemed ever likely to come along.

So I walked, circled the darkening disaster
my life had come to, and cried.
I cried for my family there,
knotted in the snarl of metal and glass;
for the farmer, looking dead, half in
and half out of his windshield; and for myself,
ambling barefoot through the jeweled debris,
glass slitting little blood-stars in my soles,
my arm hung loose at the elbow
and whispering its prophecies of pain.

Around and around the tilted car
and the steaming truck, around the heap
of exploded crates, the smears and small hunks
of chicken and straw. Through
an hour of loneliness and fear
I walked, in the almost black of Ozark night,
the moon just now burning into Missouri. Behind me,
the chickens followed my lead,
some fully upright, pecking

the dim pavement for suet or seed,
some half-hobbled by their wounds, worthless wings
fluttering in the effort. The faintest
light turned their feathers phosphorescent,
and as I watched they came on, as though they believed
me some savior, some highwayman
or commando come to save them the last night
of their clucking lives. This, they must have
believed, was the end they'd always heard of,
this the rendering more efficient than the axe,

the execution more anonymous than
a wringing arm. I walked on, no longer crying,
and soon the amiable and distracted chattering came
again, a sound like chuckling, or the backward suck
of hard laughter. And we walked
to the cadence their clucking called,
a small boy towing a cloud around a scene
of death, coming round and round
like a dream, or a mountain road,
like a pincurl, like pulse, like life.
...

Sleepy and suburban at dusk,
I learn again the yard's
geometry, edging around the garden
and the weedy knots of flowers, circling
trees and shrubs, giving
a wide berth to the berry patch,
heavy and sprawled out of its bounds.
Shoving such a machine
around a fairway of dandelions,
it is easy to feel absurd.
The average lawn, left alone
one hundred years, could become
a hardwood forest. An admirable project.
Still I carry on, following week on week
the same mowing pattern, cutting edges,
almost sprinting the last narrow swaths.
And tonight, as I mow over
the bushels of fallen peaches,
sending pits soaring over the neighbors' fences,
seems hardly any different.
But on one crooked march I walk
across the thin hidden hole
to a yellowjacket hive. The blade pulls
them up from their deep sweet chamber
just as my bare legs go by.

A bee lands heavily,
all blunder and revenge, and the sting
is a quick embrace and release,
like the dared kid's run and touch
of a blind man. I'm blind now
with the shock and pain of it,
howling in a sprint toward the house,
the mower flopped on its side, wild blade loose
in the darkening air.
Later,
the motor sputtered quiet, starved by tilt,
I'm back in the twilight,
a half-dozen stings packed in wet tobacco,
carrying a can of gasoline, a five-foot torch.
The destruction is easy: shove can
slow to entranceway lip, pull
back and light torch, use torch
to tip can. One low whump and it's over.
A few flaming drones flutter out and fall.
Stragglers, late returners, cruise
wide circles around the ruins.
In the cool September night they fly
or die. In the morning I finish my chores.

All the way to winter the blackened hole
remains. On Christmas Eve a light
late snow covers it and all
the lawn's other imperfections: crabgrass
hummocks, high maple roots,
the mushroom-laden fairy ring that defies
obliteration and appears every spring
more visible than ever. Standing
in the window, the scent
of pine powerful around me,
the snap of wood undoing itself in the stove,
I wonder at this thin and cold
camouflage, falling,
gradually falling over what has gone
and grown before. And I hear
that other rattle and report, that engine
driven by another fire. I think of a gold
that is sweet and unguent, a gold
that is a blaze of years behind me.
I hear wind in its regular passes
blowing across the roof,
feel in my legs a minute and icy tingling,
as though I have stood too long
in one place or made again another wrong step,
as though the present itself
were a kind of memory, coiled, waiting,
dying to be seen from tomorrow.
...

The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired
to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post
of the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was,
for a thong of leather to hang it by, which long ago broke—
are now the fingerholes of the mournful wind instrument it's become.
The broad round bowl of it makes a sort of birdly
basso profundo that pearls through the steel, into the post,
the floor joists and walls in two notes: a slightly sharp D
and an equally sharp F, says the guitar tuner,
which explains why all my thinking these days
is in B-flat, a difficult key for all but the clarinet
and this sudden covey of nuthatches, whose collective woe
makes it a minor chord I am in the middle of.
Nothing to do but hoist such silks as the luff
of limbs and needles suggests, and sail on,
the barely-escaped-from-the-cat chipmunk chattering
like a gull, and the mountain's last drift of snow
resembling the back of a sounding whale. Hear the thrum of the rigging,
Daggoo? Hear its profoundest woo, its sensible gobbledy-goo
and doo-wop, the boo-hoos of the spheres, by vectors and veers,
by tacks and refractal jabberings, taking us deeper into the weirdness
of the ghost sea those prairie hills were the bottom of once,
this nowhere we shall not be returning from.
Draw the lines! Assume the crow's nest, Pip. This ship
sails on music and wind, and away with birds.
...

Really just a small cast iron representation
of the latter, a bottle opener mounted
to the southeast post of the shack's porch,
a Christmas gift from my niece,
and nothing to be stood upon, not even by a bird,
except for the nugget of ice at the end of the snout
that gives it a place. Some think art is lost
on the beasts of field and forest. Not I.
The chainsaw sculpture of an eagle
I fashioned years ago and fastened to a stump,
was sniffed at at length before the coyote
lifted his leg and joined the ranks of the critical establishment,
and I did not hold his opinion against him.
Also the badly mounted bull moose head
I rescued from a dumpster and hung on the shack's
central pier: I watched with honest sympathy
the day a cow and calf regarded it,
something like puzzlement on their faces.
As for the nuthatch, he seems for some reason
to see this miniature ursine physiognomy
as nothing more than a place to sit
a while and sing his mournful, repetitive song.
Like last summer, when I took my father to see
his brother's grave, and there was a young woman
sitting on the stone and singing, we thought at first.
But then we realized she was talking, speaking, it seemed,
and earnestly, to someone buried the next row back.
I held my father's arm, and he whispered
'Keep on walking,' and we did, and the woman
stopped talking until we passed into a part of the cemetery
where no one we had known was and sat on a pair of stones ourselves.
When the breeze came we could no longer hear her
and spoke to each other about the monuments of strangers,
some simple, some gaudy and foolish,
rife with byzantine, insistent symbols, each vault
and coffin containing, my father said, 'once stiff just like another.'
Then he said, 'No, that's probably not true.'
Silence, then, just as a moment ago, when I turned
to see the nuthatch had also flown.
...