Year Of The Rat Poem by Michael McGriff

I winch-up the sky
between the shed roof and the ridge
and stand dumb as a goat
beneath its arrows and buckets,
its harmonies and hungers.
Each night I feel a speck of fire
twisting in my gut,
and each night
I ask the Lord
the same questions
and by morning the same
spools of barbed wire
hang on the barn wall
above footlockers of dynamite.
We used to own everything
between the river and the road.
We bought permits
for home burials
and kept our worry-beads
strung through the sockets
of a horse's skull
that dangled from a rail spike
above the door.
We divided the land,
we filled in the wells,
we spit in the river,
we walked among the cows
and kept the shovels sharp.
Tonight I'm sitting
on the back porch
of the universe
in the first dark hours
of the Year of the Rat.
I'm tuned-in to AM 520
and, depending
on how intently I stare
into the black blooms of the sky,
it either bounces
to high-school football
or to a voice of bile
that makes its claims
about a Celestial Empire
where everything conspires
to become plague
or prophecy:
a neighbor, the calendar,
an Arab, the dollar.
The wind off the river
is weak and alone
and obvious,
it's like the voice of my brother.
He's trying to melt the plastic coating
from a stolen bundle of commercial wiring,
a black trickle of smoke
winding through his body
to empty itself into a pool
that shimmers with the ink of nothing.
If I had faith in the stars
I'd let those four there
be the constellation of my brother
lying flat on the ground, asking for money.
I like how he's resting
with his hands under his head
as he stretches out among
the black wheat and looks up,
almost lazily, as threads of light
shine down through the cracks
in the trapdoors of heaven.
And I like the song
he always almost sings,
the one he doesn't know the words to
but has hummed to himself
in his few moments
of absolute stillness.
And I like how he could be
flat on his stomach, hands bound,
and the horses in front of him
stamping in place,
ready to drag him for eternity
as soon as I drop the red kerchief
from my iron fist.