Free Home Burial by Michael McGriff

Kissing Hitler

    I’ve tried to keep the landscape
    buried in my chest, in its teak box,
    but tonight, awakened
    by the sound of my name
    strung between the trees,
    I see the box on my nightstand
    giving off the kind of light
    you never know you belong to

    until you see it dance
    from a pile of metal shavings

    or shaken loose
    from a sword fern’s root-wad.

    It’s the same light that trailed me
    the entire summer of my sixteenth year,
    driving County Road 64
    toward Power Line Ridge,
    the three radio towers
    blinking in the Oregon dark.

    Between each red pulse
    the dark hung its birthrights in front of me,
    a few dead branches
    crawling up from the ditch,
    a lost bolt of mooncloth
    snagged on a barbed-wire fence,
    shredding in the tide wind.

    The light my oldest friends
    slammed into their veins
    or offered to the night
    when they made amends.

    One of them,
    the tallest and toughest,
    the one who used to show up Saturdays
    for my mother’s breakfast—
    he could juggle five eggs
    and recite the alphabet backward—
    he told me as he covered my hand with his
    while I downshifted to enter the gravel quarry
    that he wanted to punch the baby
    out of Jessica’s stomach—

    he’s the one, tonight, whose carbide hands
    have opened the lid of this little box.

    I can see the two of us now, kissing Hitler.
    That’s what we called it—
    siphoning gas,
    huffing shop rags.

    And we kissed him everywhere,
    in other counties,
    with girls we barely knew
    telling us to hurry
    before someone called the cops.

    They can’t arrest you for kissing Hitler.
    That’s what we said.

    The last time I saw him
    he sat on the edge
    of his father’s girlfriend’s bathtub,
    bleeding and laughing hard into a pink towel.

    I can’t remember—
    maybe it was a birthday party.
    Maybe we’d climbed in
    through the living room window,
    looking for a bottle or some pills,
    at the same moment the adults stumbled in
    from the Silver Dollar, hardwired
    to liquor and crystal.

    That was the summer
    when people just went crazy.

    And there we were, locked in the bathroom,
    someone yelling and throwing themselves
    against the door,
    my friend’s blood fanned out behind him
    into points of red tar,

    into points so fine they made me think
    that someone, somewhere,
    must belong to a family that passes down
    the art of painting immaculate nasturtiums
    along the lips of bone china,
    the smallest detail touched into place
    by a single, stiff horsehair,
    by a young father holding his breath,
    trying not to wake the child
    swaddled at his feet, his hand

    steady as five white mining burros
    sleeping in the rain.

New Civilian

    The new law
    says you can abandon your child
    in an emergency room,
    no questions asked.

    A young father
    carries his sleeping boy
    through the hospital doors.

    Later, parked at the boat basin,
    he takes a knife from his pocket,
    cuts an unfiltered cigarette in two,
    lights the longer half in his mouth.

    He was a medic in the war.

    In his basement are five bronze eagles
    that once adorned the walls
    of a dictator’s palace.

Dead Man’s Bells, Witches’ Gloves

    The dreams of those buried in winter
    push through the ground in summer.

    Among the orders, my dead
    belong to the ditches of county roads.

    Before the new people came over
    to negotiate the easement
    with their version of a city lawyer,
    my mother hung dozens of foxgloves
    above our door.

    A dead crow hung by its feet
    from the same hook.

    Even in death, that purple luster
    is a kind of singing.

Catfish

    The catfish have the night,
    but I have patience
    and a bucket of chicken guts.
    I have canned corn and shad blood.
    And I’ve nothing better to do
    than listen to the water’s riffled dark
    spill into the deep eddy
    where a ’39 Ford coupe
    rests in the muck-bottom.

    The dare growing up:
    to swim down with pliers
    for the license plates,
    corpse bones, a little chrome...
    But even