Two Poems from Dead Elk

by Michael Garrigan

Dead Elk Attends a Billy Strings Concert
      For Josh

Reckless ain’t even the word; 
	surrounded in the pit by all this skin and meat 
		reminds him of his first winter,   
                how they kept warm by curling close. 
     All nuzzle, 
          all plucked lip, 
               all eyebrow in armpit,
     all soft chest strums against hard bellies; 

     Deliberate picks, ragged harmonies; 
     For months they were just one itchy thing.  

Their bodies bend & break around each other, 
moving like they’re tumbling through rapids. 
	Free, would be the word. 
             Limber, another. 
                  Together, also.   

All this movement must be intimacy, he thinks. 
All the bodies absorb the sound and he remembers
a grove of pines his mother took he and his sister 
to right before she was about to give the world 
more of herself and there was a feeling there he had never felt, 
as if once they stepped into the circle of trees the needles grew 
like roots wrapping around their ankles and their mother
told them not to move and not to be scared, just to be held 
by this world for a while because now they were
part of some song they’d always be humming 
without ever knowing all the words. 

As the stage empties he leans over 
     whispering tie dye into the nearest neck
	   reminding them to put his body back
           under pine-soil when the music ends. 


Dead Elk Hears the Soundtrack to His Biopic Starring Woody Harrelson

every time he chews on clusters of Indian paintbrush.

It must be the color coating his lips that gets him into character, 
that starts him strutting through larch, swaying his haunches, stretching his chest, 
flaring his nostrils, rubbing his pointed, obtuse rack on everything it leans into
making sure the eagles see it through the canopy, letting sun catch it; 

no one will fuck with me he mutters and the music of his swagger 
across the duff crescendos right as he reaches water and the river takes his 
cigarette and he drinks and his lips are washed clean and he hears nothing 
in the sunset as the stars slowly start scrolling through the credits. 

Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He is the author of two poetry collections — 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.

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