Residence

2015 - present

I live in a logging town. It’s imperfect and honest. Logging is a multi-generational way of life. Many people are judged as less. The wrong people are being judged. Is logging wrong? That is a complicated question. This past year I built my house out of wood.

You held your head in the Millicoma River,
opened your eyes before the spawning kings,

beheld the chuff of their rotting heads,
and said, Is this the milk of Paradise? to no one.
 
And when no one and nothing
was exactly what you wanted
 
I was and will be all-that-is-absence, all blue light
whistling over the farthest ridge.

When men dismantled the mills
plank by plank, smothered eternal fires

and left only one hushed smokestack,
its shadow drinking the pond’s oily water,

I was all the men you cursed,
the final cinder, the chimney sparrows

swirling down the charred throat
of the stack at twilight.

I was time moving over the water.
I was twelve varieties of beach grass

breaking through cement to form the outlines
of foundations where sawmills once rested.

Where was I the day you got your draft card
in the mail? I was the hole in the sky

through which it came. The day your sons left
for the laughter and daughters of the rich

I was the odor of the woodpile
you added to cord after cord, the place

where you split kindling and wept.
I shuffle through the old streets singing

the psalms of the poor. When I kneel
in prayer – one leg in the Millicoma,

one leg in the millpond – I bring my hands
together and join the dust in your room

with the dust of stars, the grain of timber,
the burls in the hearts of men.

-When the Spirit Comes to Him as the Voice of Morning Light, Michael McGriff