Skoog - Rough Day

Note to the Reader Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque eu. Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. Thank you. Thank you.

We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible. to Jill and Oscarfor Ben and for Catherine What Im interested in doing is having a great time, and the audience having a great time, and living as long as I possibly can, and Im as much in the dark about what happens after that as everybody else. Except I have a faith, which is, which is, which is, you know it isnt anything to do with any particular people who I mean, whats it all about? Why dont you tell me? Shane MacGowan, interviewed in MOJO, February 2010 ONE Whats in these books that have come to me although they dont belong to me I dont think to whom then should they be delivered also I dont know why piled on the desk they came to me mostly paperback the books smell like someones house is burning in the dusk it is like having been given a hand no a shell bone shards from the cemetery at the end of the bus line to cemetery hill for books are territory of the hand these handed up by hands that shook my spine what is in this body that has come to me although I dont think it is properly mine to whom should it be delivered why to me I also dont know by what design as though at the end of another way Ive been given a footprint to trap between my hands A mile outside of Yellowstone loose sky fallen into bruise I put down my hitchhiking sign wait for dawn at a gas station I work mink oil into my boots and talk about the early snows sketch in ballpoint a strangers face on the last page of the book of elegies I have been carrying around Im trying to find where influence end a force emigrant in spirit forget the old language silent and defeated to see the original inquiry was too small a child passes into an empty house passing into uncertain encounter what will save me is the taste of miles dirty under midnights skillet the west has helped me listen to myself the west is a place that kills and kills and kills What is silence for wholly identical to itself unless it find saltine night or does it decide to belong as if telephone wires were antlers or an athletic portrait of calm I was nothing coming into this name like plastic it knows a way to die goes under or becomes lit water or whatever the dj calls the nameless avenue that cuts a long pillow again skys wet hard ancient feet Rage: after the funeral I spend a week with it throw open and slam closed doors the garden trellis a grotesque tragedian on its fall stage it roars in the garage I find no rake only the animal we hunt and avoid silent in its cage Our bare brief jeweled guitar goes gone into bright wilderness to write its own songs a king carries groceries along the frontage road lickweed blooms in the yard abandonment covers the house I look up from work what am I allowed to see? close as heard rain sharp as a closed knife a condition of sorrow forgotten in tallgrass rusts a draft horses iron shoe my cure You might have to put down your money for a minute because we have a custom and the custom is * a glacier covers us tonight midnight walks silver miles and across barroom smoke I hear a rough train bear scepter east * they put me to bed I come back down to run between tables mother why am I writing this poem I am practicing that language of unfinishable sentences who wants pancakes? and what is this pancake to you? What my mother loves is solitaire and when her eyes start fading to move about her house lights off my brother is an orange crate of records on a car hood playlist for silences ahead my father is a plaid armchair that smokes a tornado warning combs the elm and after my mother sets me adrift in the pool with tennis racquet on yellow raft to ferry small lives the storm washed in identify by weight each feathered furred alive or lifeless form and dump out without decorum Light chores between first and second sleep she writes seven letters after dinner counsels her children on what to avoid naps beneath an oil of sea and cliff rises to make coffee for neighbors I keep lights low too now it goes by too fast her age she leaves no valediction no shield just still rooms a green yard and a full pool car wheels counting bricks as they round the corner Ice recoils tonight from marshes bangs the set-out trash below my rental cold and round already melting at my feet hail breaks every pane I cover with tape and cardboard full sky turning blue over the rooftops wet my cheek through broken glass down in the garden pumpkins lump their own hallucinations sow thistle chickweed clover broadleaf plantain red-root amaranth what was planted dies any work of hands only weeds keep growing with moist matted prosperity even the hour we abandon the garden then the long winter Meanwhile I am preparing a way to miss the exiting animal grizzly bear whooping crane the slow hesitant and administrative desert tortoise that I will probably outlive or my son will already I see that my death will or will not be like extinction if only in the sense that there was some noise and then there was no noise yet why when I am grieving do I insist the dead are inexact without specifying how extinction the bad trophy and this is a good knot for holding a horse and this is the deserts smell after a good rain and here is the canyon where we stop for love and these are the red and orange seeds of the ocotillo and these are the spines of the pencil cholla and here is the debris and here is the rain and here is how to live with almost nothing and beyond, even as the rattlesnake takes its shade from my long standing even as the tarantula goes to the highway at sunset and is not struck Some parts of speech are harder to draw and yet to be really happy beaten and beaten I must say my three lines and wait beside the machinery firing like a mind watching a fellow inmate run cantering in that prison without walls forgiveness an insider and has rascalled its steel a disorder that tells you when shadow rings it destroys is adolescent says come out of the darkness though from this angle I cant tell whether its the wind fussing its level or Im good at being a man and what that would mean One time I fell down got cut got pushed down into a ringing in my ear ringing that may be listened to all I can tell you is my own experience and dont want to get sideways with that power theres no rain here lights the same have you ever been in an alley like that compost and broken basketball hoop punk gloom of after-party that breaks up at dawn when the older boy sets a recliner on fire breakfast comes differently after that then children her pulse beats under black concert T stereo and gin on the other side they find me in the barn half-asleep where alley turns from road loft hay bundled and forked becomes dust attic curates a chain on a nail aerial twitches through residual boards Im a hundred years from plough that quartered here dusky in the rafters: a sparrow ones always nearby someones always nearby TWO At times I want to walk off the set of my body break my name and burn it first rain fell hard now how lightly like the first silences I had any right to survive the first joys close to the highway far from the on-ramp elders argue in a bus stop crche one says to the other I will not look at you I will stab your singing throat Midnight radio from Astoria plays funk Im thinking about storms far out at sea at the cabin table as songs end and the needle taps against the marina my wife sleeps over her shoulder fishing boats move miles bobbing lights adjust to roar walking in the morning we find a speedboat smashed on the feldspar of Lost Boy Bay a weekenders aluminum toy so may the dispatcher hear me calling in the registration I pause between each number each letter Let me try this clumsy again at dawn casting knots that deform the current concentric toward the zeppelin barn not salmon but a kind of unemployment Im drawing with three sides of the valley in my ear my body a green overtone how many nights within enormous hearing of the sea how many exposures until I fail to comprehend bramble against shoulder catching thorn to rip flannel each thought a rope to lash a mattress on top of my car The historical marker is a form of guilt backward meaning that might pull a muscle in your neck adopting the historical posture of the park ranger who rushes in with scratches on his arm dotted line of blood showing through his shirt shows us reconstructed Acadian rooms where things were done with bowls and linen Europe discarded to various colonial rooms forgotten in boxes to build an outsider culture that our ranger his mind still in last nights bed recites glancing down at his cell phone what is he supposed to do now call the woman or man he just left and say what then probably all history is there derange the language they once used my mind in its cold migration doesnt care where it lives will always move between a series of eleswheres latching satchel hurrying over the bridge up winding roads into the bamboo vantage over whale-farted seas The condo held the rock stars body like a puppet and though it keeps small lawn clean and circumspect as a crche when I walk past it coming home from Blue Moon Taverns oil painting of Theodore Roethke I quiet the possibility to pass unnoticed to hover like a phrase I only am beginning to feel love now that faces are slipping into disuse and also how hate may be given unseen and perhaps the work is to abandon it like a shelter I havent ruined my body yet with joy though I worry it like a carpenter working on a building for ghost safety of rage comfort in revenge I once found them at the edge of song fleeing the fire the cold either I would give a full accounting of time but cannot remember it and anyway that world has passed us except for antiques college students smoking on a porch Whatever I have been doing all my life I am doing now here beneath the drop ceiling a lost dancer an unemployed machinist at the nameless house edited from footage we only live a moment what the diorama excludes we may be able to see one anothers pain over the waves under the cliff body over thoughts of body and yet one Wednesday I sold my car the one my mother and father got lost in coming back from the cemetery her asleep in the backseat white-haired eyeglasses in her hand now I take to streets and slow Seattle down I was a palace I was a forest one scene and then another a son whatever the word is for the living suddenly alert and trying to get it all down in playbill margins between changes read it back to me Ill try to stop singing in the Saturn Bars security-camera grey and red neon where Clouet crosses St.