The Coal Life: Poems

Offerings

Offerings “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” —Rainer Maria Rilke Every so often a tiny hillock appears beside the front porch where I kicked over the last one: no anthill, no discernable utility, more like a fresh burial, or an offering of dirt as soft and fine as the dust collecting in the communion cup from my wedding. Whatever ruminates the soil does so with its hollow morel horn sifting the flecks of my skin, my wife’s eyelash and crumbs from her late lunch, and consuming them, pushing the refuse into a heap with its wide, crescentic chin. The creature waits for my footsteps, the front door slamming behind me, then knock knees up from its ancient cave, circling its chest with its burgundy claw—as if some kind of genuflection— before a hurdy-gurdy crank, a gold doubloon, my feathered crappie jig, my wife’s red button that it has pressed into the soft clay walls. It bows beneath the hot breath of the dryer vent and, in a pitch the world has long forgotten, praises the glistening mound of my car, dewy and warm like a newborn god. 30 ...