In the early hour.
In the hour of copper.
In the secret minutes
coiled around wooden spools
and scrawled into the sill-dust
beneath our open window.
In this room lit up
like the throat-latch
of a horse, like sea foam
under the breeze of a black moon.
You are asleep, the dingo
collapsed between us,
the shadows across your stomach
umber-flecked and swimming
toward some vague memory
of blue that the early hour
has wrung from its hair.
Your breath smells of farriers’ hammers,
of April spreading its sheer fabric
among the first blooms
of the dogwoods.
The edge of the flood plain
is a red crescent
and you shimmer
like a lost axe head in the creek.
When starlight becomes a flange
for the motion of no thought,
when the whereabouts
of the azaleas
become uncertain,
the outline of your face
is sky-written in the black loam
of the thunderheads.
When Cygnus scrapes his iron beak
against the rafters,
when the hidden cathedrals
in each whitecap
slice across the river,
when the fourth dimension
of the dingo’s skull
fills with green light,
when a bucket of sparks
empties onto the mantle-dark
shoulders of this early hour,
you become the early hour.
You become water
dressing up as the opposite
of bone and rags,
you become an island
filling with reeds,
the shore wind repeating itself
and forgetting where it lives,
the sound of two feathers
crossing one over the other
among threads of dust.
You sail past the dead
with their saffron-yellow teeth,
their gristmill jaws,
and their wings clipped back
to callused nubs.
In this early hour
I hear a rustling
in the dogwoods,
the sound of a table
being set, a deck of cards
slid across
the crushed lip
of its box.
I hear the rail yard
draw an arrow
to the edge of our country—
and though there are no trains,
a few dogs run mad beside them
through the tall,
impossibly blue grass
as you drift within your body
and into an hour as nameless
as the stone heart of a plum.
from Poetry Northwest 11.2 Winter & Spring 2017More by Michael McGriff from the library
Copyright © Michael McGriff
Used with the permission of the author
on behalf of Poetry Northwest.