For Job From The Train
The particles are still my
Companions though they make
Up hurt, or filth
Or worse a low sky
That doesn’t and will
Not snow. The inhuman
Processes of the fields
Are making me have
To sleep and write. I barely manage
Vast memories of vanished
Friends
My friends
My friends if you have to
Collapse keep on collapsing into
Everywhere and all of
The salt-cracked roads
And lo
There arose a commotion
And noise of bones
Coming together bone
To its bone, and sinew
Was upon them, the river’s
Frozen smoke
And flood, strangling
Poor thicket and the mud
At the bottom of the
Quarry must be as hard
As broken bottles now
This goes too fast
For my little faith and flesh
Leapt upon them and on
Past the last house
Standing, still, fallen
Wire and the stockade fence
At yard’s end gathering rags
And rain, wave
Upon unnailed wave of
Erasing, breaking
Over the persisting
Illusion of a past, it’s all
Really there. Really, really
There. Okay? You just go on
And on. I will not work
I will work
On being stuck, here
Is a place I made
Out of shovel and chiffon
Ruffle and railway trestle
Shade to wait in, preparing
To face the dawn
Object to object
Trumpet to drum skin, leaf
To loaf, organ
To watch-movement, pilot
Light to prairie fire, anticolor
To panther, anvil horn to
Rounding hammer, breath
To glass, belly
Button to tongue, fist
To barnside, dust
To dust and past
Us now orgasm an artifact
Of the lens, my bones
Full of gluons, my loneliness
An arrangement of stones
Vigil
Vigil strange I kept
on the field one night
No
The rain does
Care for us nor
Is it our
Own I
Forget
What we said bright
As hammers
Moving
Our eyes as if this
Was the way
A song gets
Made No
Never
Made
Hammer
Beat
And please
The belly the lever
And the storm
Into morning No one’s anger
In the park
Tonight is uncontrollable
Nobody’s breathing
Stops while your eye
Still tortures the light
Like a seed
The earth Hello
Hello each
Thing hello
Is the song
Hello The little bird
Eats
The little night
Unfinished
Little bird
Of my blood will not
Stay
Taught
An Earlier State Of Things
Vomit up
Wolves while wolves
Bark
At the brightening
Cold. It was Sunday
In the winter of
Our accidents. O
Thunderless valley inside
Of the buried plum
Pit.
We waited
Ten days
For me to talk.
His teeth were bad.
The one discolored
Star
Of morning gonged into the open
Eye
Of his dying
In our gladness.
In our mud. It rung
The length of us all
Night long so small
A peace
I disclose
It only to my wife
And my disease. What
Lunge what
Light
Now recently begun
To touch the other end of him
When he sleeps, a light
That light can only
Soil. I only
Report this.
My molecules
Are the molecules of
Stones. That
Is an older discipline
Of screaming which
By this they are trying
To teach
To me now. The wild
Silence. The cold’s
Density squeezes
Flowers out
From zero. I also
Need to be here. Still breathing
The other side of breath, sun
Sun, turn the dirt
On. The burnt
Murmur, the
Coughs and soundings down
The wire
Winter
Attention it is the god in us that loves them The slow hand bores The hard board, so Holed the rain Falls, ancient Regimes of It falling. It is autumn In this vat But still Ever smaller And meaner Augusts Are coming Now to find us out Of what before Us was in us left To burn. At times I do Feel the others on my skin And admit now I didn’t know It from music. I put on the radio To interrupt the dream That I put on our boots To have. What little Thunder we are Owed thrown Against the wall and Shot. Washed White As blood it was My last Lamb and it hurt it Heard
The Dead Put On Their Summer Lives
This place
Of the hollow
Between the river
Is and river
Was waits only
Always for
Rain and the smell
Of the rain
Is in the animal. Mole
Swallow and phone
All listening
With a tiny
Disdain. So
We are endangered
To perfection at last
Under the airplanes
Huge ear. There
No question would be
What the old men were
Singing. The all
Imperiling
Laugh, the old
Bad vowel where
God hid
His sound. The founding
Drowning
Out
Of which the careless
Town still
Makes its talk (the girl
who jumped off the trestle
into the water
thought
a train was coming
down the vanished track)
Once
They had the Nike missile
Battery back there and before
That a brick factory, my sweetie
I heard
Them blow it up
And up in the night
Of rattling
Pictures. Is this
Of what they dreamed
Of when they dreamed
Of lying
In their ease on the locked
And leaveless ground? Blow
Now your kitchen colored
Hair out
Thou vast
Encrypted sissy
Get it dressed
Up in drumbeats, the rain
Blew the fires out
Before morning
Ray came after
Me with his wrench
And his friends
They tuned me up
Teach
Me town, to judge like prey
Among the handsome
Angers
To distinguish
Ash from laughter, beaten
Down from danced away
To sniff
The wind beneath
The sheltering kaboom
Sobbing The thing’s hollow It goes on Forever and oh My god it’s full Of stars So Speaking repents Of its hopeless hunt in the holy Thicket and turns Back But the voice The voice, the blind- Ness, voice Won’t Radicle Indissoluble As sugar weather Father Weather, broken Bone weather All morning Long we bell and dangle From that sky That empties Bell And sky Of crash of stone Work Is another weather word I learn in you And learn in you till The bed is wrinkled And stinking as the slept-on Sea And the sun The burnt Taste at the end of us
Michael Grinthal’s poems have appeared in Jubilat, Realpoetik, Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Syncopated City and other publications. He is the winner of the Rose Low Rome and Kim Ann Arstark prizes in poetry from Brown University. He has worked for 20 years as a community organizer and lawyer in the racial justice and tenants’ rights movements, and lives in Brooklyn.