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Blurring, stammering,

Miles pile close together against years —

Cold ash on calloused hand-skin

The remembered feeling of fingertips

Against palms:

Nickels rubbed dime-thin in hidden earth

And smeared across the decades

While you remain,

and wait.

In the late wind, you sleep too near the shoreline;

Too near the railyard.

It’s a crime,

They say.

Truth be told,

You dared the eye of each horizon’s devil:

You paid your dues;

You awoke to hail;

You gave your shoulder over to bent, broken tree trunks

And lost cemetery names —

A sea-crashed view;

A shadow

Left in last night’s fire-ring

And given over to the morning —

Which finds the night (along with you)

Mis-remembered, precious, alight.

There it is — the crux of all things —

Christ on his cross,

And you in the man-tall weeds, much later,

Waiting for the conduction of crew changes near the viaduct;

Waiting for straight avenues out from underneath

Storm warnings

Via hotshots heading west —

Bolt-out of prairie-school nights.

Still, there — adrift, awakened, remembered —

The lightning-soaked cloudfields

Have no part of being escaped, or left alone.