The River Where You Forgot My Name (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) - Softcover

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HAY CUTTING

Fincastle, Virginia, 1803

The sky is just as I imagine
an ocean, vast & unmarred
by cloud. I have yet to learn
to walk among the seedheads
knowing with my palms
their story of moisture,
of readiness. The dew
whisked off now into light,
the reapers gather
at the edges of the grass,
having spent the morning
snarling their blades against
grindstones in a flurry
of deadly sparks. They move
together across the rows,
blurring in the heat,
their scythes like a flock of steel
birds released from the field.

BREAD ALONE

Having accidentally thrown out their decade-old sourdough culture,
the bakers at Park Avenue come to my friend Nick at the Sweet
Grass & ask, can he find it in his heart to share a dollop of starter
with them, but though he is kind about it, though he says, ask me
for sugar, for flour, for honey brewed by bees from high mountain
meadows beyond the valley, no, he cannot give them a bit of the
batter that dwells in a plastic bucket by his rusty ovens, birthed 150
years ago in the windy darkness of a kitchen in Great Falls at the
hands of a Scotch sheepherder plying yeast with water, with wheat
that bloomed & died in the surrounding plains, risen from the wild,
the dough a thing with breath, souring into a richness he feeds, &
folds, hungrily alive in his long freckled hands, like the voice
blazing in a coal worn in a bag below the throat, talisman & torch,
the voice that gives the price for day-old bread, the voice vowing
the simple, leavening power of its love, the voice of some god
howling year after year among the trees.


BRINGING HOME THE BULL

Fincastle, 1806

He follows, docile furnace
of red hide & horn.
The wheels of his hooves

clobber stones. Father
carries only a bucket,
swinging from his elbow

for the miles he drove
the monster with neither
lead nor hook. What

a trap for a vast heart,
for hot rivers of blood
beneath the twitching

rusty coat, under
the creasing knees &
rolling haunch, the velvet

sack of his underbelly.
Hide is flesh, & also
my first instinct.

But no, I'm no child,
& coursing in me this
need: to come to him

steady, find that heat echoed
in my wrists, between us
all sinew, flame, & thew.


APRIL & THE IRON-EATERS

Berkeley Pit: Butte

Should we call the snow geese foolish
for not having known that the green lake

amidst the yellow rock where the waters
of the nation divide was in fact a pit of poison

more acidic than a can of Coke? Perhaps.
Though let's not blame them, especially the ones

that perished, floated like sacked pillows
on the still surface or sank bottomward

a thousand feet down, toward the gleaming
arsenic, sulfide still sputtering from mineshafts

like a toxic starfield without the light of fusion.
Now, fireworks & loudspeakers warn migrators:

Move on, there is no birth, no shelter, no solace
here. Except of course for the extremophiles

repairing in the earth's harsh dark their own
haggard DNA, among them Euglena mutabilis,

which pulls ore from the water to store within
its single cell, then belches air. Ghostly

metal-belly, bizarre homemaker, that as it swims
is forging of waste its version of spring.


IN THE DIVORCE, PATRICIA GOT THE MAMMOTH BONE

She takes it from
the mantel: ulna,
skeletal wedge
mapped with hairline
cracks, & offers
me the bare
billow of its weight,
creeklike scrapes
in the bone where
Alaskan ground squirrels
gnawed toward
the marrow.
We run our palms
over it, consider
setting our teeth
to its edge, imagine
scavengers scattering
when along came
something bigger.
Hunger's warm
rhythm is here in
the white scar
of seeking, of fang
on bone our fingers
trace, ghost-tonguing
this path, this past,
its precious fracture.