Providence Forge
A letter to people who have hurt us begins
With a calloused hand —
Graced with the most tired earth’s offering —
Gently pressed against breath-thin panes —
Waves of nearly timeless light
Imagined from the unseen Lake.
Timelessness is overwhelming
In our homes,
Our factories,
Our sixteen-lane avenues, empty,
That lie high above furnaces, foundries, and four-story flames.
We’ll have sons and keep them from these places;
We’ll have night skies cinder-freed and stacked
Weightless upon the many years of those sons.
But the express lanes will keep
Sweetly open for us, stern with constant flow;
Tucked like tobacco
Between each word passed among us.
God bless old Chicago,
Mine:
The yards and rails,
Feuding architects;
Kidnapped Indiana blast furnaces, not settled
In the dusk;
Hummingbirds among weed-flowers and rust
Beneath beginnings of bridge-spans —
Midwest miscreants
Still drinking
The grace
In which they’ve been dunked.
Are we moved?
We are moved, indeed.
Saturday evening
The sun downs;
Remaining friends shudder, huddle,
Talk their way out of sand-dune dusks
And abandoned houses;
Dead parents;
Altar calls;
Damp distributors that would abandon us too close to Ford Heights for comfort.
It gets to the point then (when the light is golden, molten, thick as syrup)
That we cannot be destroyed.
We roam through our corrugated towns
Unhindered, free as looseleaf on streets.
And so then
I will nearly stumble
From the bungalow porch,
In my remembering return
To the lanes,
The Lake —
That contending timelessness —
And be unearthed, unembarrassed to say how much I love Christ,
Babble over drinks about how good he’s been to me and mine.
Why not?
Prairie School nights
Rush
To meet the shores
And abandon anything clever
Our professors would crowd
Past the faith of our fathers or their closing factories.
And we are otherwise alone.
So comes mercy —
Clear crossing;
Group therapy
Or town meeting
And permission to skip.
It is as simple
As suddenly comprehending
What cannot be expressed:
The key is splitting the passage first in two,
And then in two again, again,
Again;
Then working the Title
Into the body of the text.
In all of this, I am only remembering a forge:
Nondescript —
All spark and shadow —
The black
Of each moment
Hammered
Between stroke and strike.
What will we tell our children about worry?
What will we tell them about the wilderness of years
Meant only to brace for surrender?
(Tired, full of joy,
The land yields —
It always does —
And what was worrisome remains always that way.
What once could kill us always could.)
***
Waters still beneath
A kind of troubled time. Your life.
The present kids pose against
The family Bookstore window a hundred years ago.
All smiles and simple joy,
They follow hallways down
To chairs propped and emptied
Onto church-lawns, steep kettle-sides,
Perfumed songs, shy shoulders
Beside fire-rings.
The whole of it is remembered through murk:
The strange sounds of trees
Recalling in you
Pathways along rails
And the smell of slag:
Your soul sinks in you
Like taconite spilled from bison-fierce, pierced hulls.
There at the bottom,
Its panic gives way to a world-sick peace.
Then silence. And everything. A resigned glance
Against shadows in the creases of the house.
Something moves. Leaves, maybe. Inside somehow.
A silent hammerstrike's spark begins everything
Again,
Simple as today.
A love for Elohim strong enough
To destroy half-hearted friends
Begins again and again,
Again.
***
The radio says
I really don't know clouds.
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.
I'm a man of means, by no means.
I’ll fly away.
In a photograph from years before 78 RPM records
Were left alone in the basement,
I watch water fall
From Skyway gutter fields
To anticipate the horizon
Of stogies and small-batch
Garage lights that ignite with the moon each night.
What kind of doubt could make your back burn,
When your two-year-old is as certain of God as he is the floor,
And his knowing settles in you
Dust kicked up by freightliners
Passing wild-eyed west
And longing
For your calluses, your carvings?
The world is disappearing,
And your years and wanderings
Into sad Grace,
Falling into the black
Between the vertical blinds and the glass;
Between the miraculous barbicans winged
Within filthy, frightened young doves felled stupid from the nest
Onto the un-watered front lawn.
After all,
It means everything.
(It is the street where you live.
It is the Bible-black barrel of a gun and the eyes behind it.)
It is the way a half-done water tower
On the edge of town
Wails in each sunset
With improbable cranes and
Rust-soaked welds:
As you drive it drowns in corn;
A weight crushed upon your lungs
And the heart of your father
And the frowns of your sons.
Regardless,
At the end of the day
The county-damned farmers
Till fields
And send mice scurrying to your crawlspace
And kitchen
While you travel the two-lanes back home.
Sunday brings church
And potential tornadoes;
Songs you barely recall and nearly dropped to sanctuary floors —
Strangers.
The day is coming, wild and frothing,
When you will need to drive north as you can
And learn to protect your children
From wind.
Or sit in silence
As the meeting passes you by,
Satisfied that you know God,
Or that you know how to fire a six-gun.
***
In the end, you're mud-caked and unashamed.
You are lowered into the Des Plaines or the Calumet.
Revolution lives in you.
God's grace is naked and loud.
Stands an open dream,
One-faced,
Walled and strong and old.
In the dream we’re still,
Floating inches above
Streets thinning to roads,
Then strands,
Then narrow ways forward that end.
We’ve been standing for a while,
Remembering church foyers
And trees with step-ladder limbs
Near each other and nearer still
To each moment leading to the last:
Mills in great distances;
Torpedo cars traversing foundry-to-forge,
Glowing after midnight behind the house;
The sounds of small bones, feather-wrapped, resting
In the hand;
A last time for everything and first time for what is next.
We’re laughing — our fathers, mothers, children with us.
We’re staring through the wavering glass of Mason jars
Out across prairies, trainyards, and half-sold lots.
We’re standing next to campsites, on shorelines, near small fires
Blown by the wind.
We're clothed in righteousness.
We're on hillsides, waiting.
***
Something about the living dead,
Breathing sewers,
Your dad’s .22 pistol sock-strapped and ready to defend
Makes us laugh
And suck on smoke,
Loving our families and waiting for rapture,
Heading west.
All of this.
It’s a place on a map.
It’s a joke,
Funny
Because it’s true.
