Plunder: The Company
Under every green tree
a burning of measurement
in cord & board foot, in tons
of ore: gold, silver, lead.
Seven pounds of meat
per day, five pounds of flour
per week, the contract said.
Timber needed to build
the works, to build the mines,
to build the town, the tracks
running out. The smelter eats
seven hundred cords of wood per day,
devours all the ore someone
can bring & more, refines nature’s
handiwork with heat & cyanide,
releases what shines within.
Friday Night, Bannack
Because the cowboy asks me to, I rise
in the smoke-filled room. We greet
shyly as at the start of courtship, hats tipped
back on our heads—moons behind a cloud
of hair, then we step hard through the fiddle’s
unremitting saw, the pressbox’s exhalation,
a song that raises our feet despite the long
hours in the saddle or the mine, work
that’s given us our rough hands. But these hands
can’t offer relief with such delicate maneuvers.
The failure of women to appear—the ones
we left at home across the country, who love us—
or will someday. We will build toward that
hour of square wooden buildings, window glass, lace,
where a woman is fit to be seen.
We increase
our speed as the tempo builds and the rollicking
of our bodies pressed like slices of roughneck bread
sandwiching the tune between us. Our
sweat sluicing us in salt, in musk, in cheap
liquor coming out our pores. The man who asks
is the man who leads over the rise
of the melody’s swelling. Each step
stamps our desire into the gapped boards
of the floor. We shed nearly all at the spin—
the work and what this way of living’s made us.
What distance did I know?
The pacing of the river from
the house, the expansion of my father’s reach
year by year, beyond the town, the routing of supplies like water
wending its way from maker to boat to seller’s
hands. The extension of the priest’s orans, the floating lace,
the hang of the chasuble’s dull gold. The breadth of the voice unfolding
my imagination from Antwerp to
the New World. Red dirt of Kentucky, the Cherokee,
the crumbled empire of Napoleon, given away, the West. What could be
done at twenty, or in just twenty years?
The journey beginning with an island. Begin with
a stretching of the neck toward horizon, with a vessel, the sea.
Rivers and Mountains at the End
If I believed in heaven, it would be
some low-slung valley with scattered
pines & strands of gold-gone aspen.
Some patches quaking in wind, some not
& sometimes on the same tree
& since I am dictating belief
I fill my creed with a cloudlessness
so blue it’s mistaken for a movie set
for some old picture, when picture meant
film & because I can’t get enough—
the valley rills with blue, go ahead
and choose lake or pond or meandering
oxbow. I pronounce this dogma:
we believe in one valley free
of smoke, no wildfire or flame, no burnt
offerings, also no development.
Let old heaven & its many mansions all
recess into ruin, even the great old
gate. Let it fall into earth, become
artifact of the previous age. But even this—
one person’s uncertain paradise too
is a failure, limited & I am aware
& yet, it’s still mine—
a kingdom yet to come.
Slowly Now the Shadows Lengthen
Soon the deer will come
to the pond. The pinks
of their tongues cooled
by water—they strengthen me—
I would call this desiring home
Let your figure tarry
with me, ghostshape
in my remembering. I am lonely
without your silhouette quickening
the night star. You are with me
when I close my eyes. Rest
your head against me
like a teal hen set
in the sleep of her nest.
Upward and trackless they go
my words parting nothing,
not distance, not longing.
Prayers scatter like chaff,
the fade of ember rising.
This isn’t paradise
though it would be easy
to believe in if you were
beside me. A kingdom
is just an emptiness
unless there is another
with whom to divide it—
heavy, bitter-skinned
wild summer plum
honeyed to its stone.
Jory Mickelson's first book WILDERNESS//KINGDOM is the winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, Court Green, and The Rumpus. They live among the moss and the mud of the Pacific Northwest. To learn more about them and their writing visit www.jorymickelson.com