Michael Garrigan
Reduced to Possession
1.
In Idaho I’m standing along Kelly Creek
in a valley where one side is a lush coastal
disjunct rainforest; plants that grew when this
was sea-side long before the Cascades pushed
these mountains inland; and the other slope was burnt seven or eight
years ago (bare fields of tall grass with fresh groves of aspen dotting
ridges and dark carcasses of big cedar along the edge where fire grew
hottest before petering out at the road and river) reading
a Forest Service sign that says
"Whitefish may be reduced to possession”
and I’m hoping
to catch one just to marvel at its scales and feel it slide across my palms
back into its home waters because if it doesn’t belong here then surely
I don’t and what about the seeds of invasive plants that will blow off
these ATVs and spread along these open slopes and grow and never
be eradicated but instead will become thick and unwieldy and yet these
whitefish that have lived in these waters for as long as the westslope
cutthroat trout that must be released and only caught using single,
barbless hooks may simply be reduced to possession and so I start
casting which is just another way for me to try to hold something
from this world and I wonder if being held by something
is also to be possessed or haunted by it or maybe
it means death in some way, a loss of autonomy,
like being held by the ground
completely, yes, but also an embrace
is a form of holding which is not a death
or an owning or a taking-over of spirit, no,
so maybe holding is something our bodies
do and possessing is something our thoughts do
and maybe to be possessed is simply to be in reciprocation
to something you cannot name like how the water
moves slightly whenever my fly lands
without ever knowing the names
for hook or wind or feather and oh!
there’s a hawk leaving a cloud and oh!
something just nudged the surface and oh!
how words shift meaning so I keep casting,
trying to think like the water
but then I come back to it
and what if all we’ve held is all we are
or maybe
we are always holding and being held,
possessing and possessed,
a world full of embraces
that sometimes end in death
and sometimes only in heldness
and sometimes, sometimes
2.
Wild celery crumbles under our boots and rain soaks spores
into thick whiffs; the whole riverbank smells like lunch in August
at the park, ants on a log—peanut butter spread across
translucent green ribs with raisins dropped on top—
and ham sandwiches that my two sisters and I eat while our mother
pours us more juice and my father is at work and they are all so far away
right now, everybody that I know: my two dogs, my wife, all the students
I’ve taught, my Nana, Tyler who died in a car accident in 11th grade,
Guy who used to blare Herbie Hancock on his boombox as we walked
down to Schenley Park to get high every other day during our freshman
year at Pitt, my neighbors, Tom who I shared a tent with for six months
on the Pacific Crest Trail, Trevor who I also shared a tent with but up in
Maine, and Sue my 11th grade Creative Writing teacher, everybody but
Andy and Noah who I’m bushwacking up this river with in search
of cutthroats and bull trout and this wild celery we keep tramping on,
this is all, this is enough at this moment: this river, these wildflowers,
these people, these memories, these scents, these longings for home.
3.
I sleep under ancient cedar and each morning
I trace their woven bark trying to translate
some old language. I want to speak their stillness.
I want to study their shade and settle in their shadows.
Ferns fill the understory and I walk through them
gathering dew on my ankles, letting the softness
wash me awake while I drink
coffee from a bent titanium cup.
What if I lived among the same beings for my whole life?
What if I only grew where I was born?
How would I participate in a community of fate
like that, listening to the same river for centuries?
What would it be like to live in the wild abundance of home
every moment until fire or flood or lightning or saw?
I roll out of my tent and walk into the dark
cedar silhouettes, unfurling into my dreams.
4.
I have two dogs. One is a puppy and the whole world
is new to her. Just yesterday she watched in disbelief
as wind took leaves until she couldn’t stand it anymore
and chased each and every one of them as they fluttered
and bounced in no particular way back to the ground off
invisible surfaces. The other is ten or eleven or twelve
and he watches as far as his eyes will let him and finds
the sun to lie in and won’t be surprised when, if, it snows
this winter, knowing this is the way life works. I always
want to find myself between the two with their bodies
close enough for me to touch, to watch, to listen.
5.
Everything I have held has also held me and
will all I’ll be when I'm reduced to possession.
Watching a Goat Drop on New Year’s Eve After Eating Psychedelic Mushrooms
We stick our hands into the ziplock bag and gently grab whatever we can, careful not to break stems or crush caps, none of us ever handling fungi before, but we know we have to be delicate in our holding, so we are, but not in our consuming—never in our consuming; we smile nervously as one of us cracks a joke about a bad trip and another breaks that spell with a confident reference to Fear and Loathing before we throw them in our mouths chewing furiously quickly one, two, three before swallowing knowing one hesitation will keep us out of the group journey. We’re too young to buy beer so we just smoke bowls and drive backroads listening to Gomez until we reach the frozen river where we watch moonlight glisten ice and light our cigarettes, staring at the embers as we exhale, studying a map of our lungs. One of us says something, so we drive to the outside of town, park at the end of Falmouth Road, and walk up to the edge of the crowd as each person starts to slide into a whole body; the stars streak and our voices blur illegibly into lights running up a flagpole swelling with halos towards a pulsating goat hanging from a strap. We linger, not knowing what to do with these bodies we have just discovered. We smoke our cigarettes and somehow the clouds breathe with us until everyone starts chanting 10, 9, 8, 7, even though it’s only 10:30 6, 5, 4, and the goat stalls, the pulley stuck, and it bleats and bleats and we just keep chanting 4, 4, 4, as a couple of volunteer firefighters pull on the rope and it drops another few feet 3, before stalling again and bleating and now I’m bleating and my friends are bleating and our faces pull towards the goat stretching our eyes into dilated river boulder pupils and our suddenly spindly beards wave as we become stuck goats dangling in the air on December 31 waiting for a midnight that has somehow grown further away and how old are we? at least 16, probably 17, somewhere in that deep current of time before we scatter towards whatever it is that shatters us but right now we are bleat, bleat, 2, bleat, 1, bleat Happy New Year!!!! bleat.
My goat eyes close into a prismatic darkness until I wake the next morning knowing it’s a new year because I smell sauerkraut and when I tell this story over beers 20 some years later my buddy tells me that they never dropped live goats down in Falmouth, but I double down and swear our goat hooved the air and bleated until it reached the ground, knowing memory is a hallucination shaping the present.
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He is the author of three poetry collections — Ghost Hunting Glaciers (winner of the Grayson Books Poetry Prize), River, Amen (winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry) and Robbing the Pillars — and his writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Hopper Magazine, Water~Stone Review, and North American Review. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize.
Banner Art:
Neil Welliver, Trout and Reflection, 1980, Art Institute of Chicago
