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.