What I've Learned

So now

When snow makes the boughs heavy

And the towns go unlit

And the wildest children

Are hushed with fear

In their parents’ arms

Do you turn – wind flailing

The way it only ever claws

At eyes beneath bridges –

And ask

What I have learned

Along the long, long ways.

I have learned to

Leave my doors wide open;

To hide flint in my sleeve

And steel between my toes;

To practice the

Path of short knives

Through long, wet wood.

Panic is a waste,

And worry fuel.

I learned this in hard ways;

Learned to snap my knife shut against my hip

With one hand

And end conversations

On friendly terms when

The time had come for them to end.

Christmas Poem

One dark
and misremembered day

I knelt
panting

and concerned myself
with blood

that carries ash
in rivulets

to unseen seas
at dusk.


I came at last
then

to think
that You stood

among my ruined
footings

and asked
of me

damnable things -

unanswerable
questions:

to think that You
were about
the business of
belittling
my heart

and calling me to pocket
with some dutiful
demanding
parody of grace

my every hope
between
unanswering
dusk,
dusk,
and dusk.

And so,
at that certain solstice,

I rolled
in soot
at the roots
of your dark trees,

and slept in dust

believing
You had brimmed me up
against northern shorelines
quickly, coldly

beneath the old,
unpalmed
forest floor of stars
for no real reason.

I had swallowed by then
and nearly forgotten

Christmas

and its steadied hand
held
against the forehead of each
otherwise proud,
immutable year.

You filled me
full of fuses
and swept Yourself back
between hills.

You presented me
to inopportune nights.

In dreams those days,
I was a boy again,

and willing to brave
the stairs and patio door,

and wrath of parents
to put bare feet to the yard
on Christmas Eve.

The empty roads filled with silence;

The night moving over rails
behind the house;

The moonlight
thick
between trees;

The lone rabbit
leaving no tracks
despite
infinities of snow.

You

raised me up
in Your great stillness
some unnamed morning after

and pushed the wandering sight
from my eyes
in Your own unending grace.


And I ask You now:


how could I have known?


How could You have thought
I would have known,

on any
of those cold shores,

that Your great form
had already

lumbered through all those forests before me?

Tree Climbing

My family used to spend many long weekends in the summers and falls at the Fritzsches’ cottage in Paw Paw, Michigan. My best friend James and I would wander the dirt roads and sandy paths through forested back-forties for entire mornings or afternoons at a time. Sometimes we’d stumble upon a field of raspberry bushes and eat ourselves sick on them. Sometimes we’d walk the untold miles into town to the one record store there, cool off in the AC, buy nothing, and arrive back home at dusk. Sometimes we’d sharpen sticks with new knives, or launch empty single-serve pudding cans into the air with Black Cat firecrackers. Sometimes we’d swim ourselves to exhaustion in the lake until the sun went down, and ghostly fires lit the shores, and we were more tired than we would admit, and the daddy longlegs on the musty cinder blocks swayed in the twilight and the breeze in our dimming eyes. 

One autumn day, we spilled out from the wilds  of an unharvested field to find ourselves below a line of long, tall trees. The wind pushed and pulled us. The trees were tall, and spiked with branches that launched themselves, ladder-like from the trunk. Tree-climbing was a little boy’s game of chess, and these trees were easily conquered. As boys will do, we picked the tallest tree. Up went James, then up went Kevin. The climbing was easy, step over step: Not like climbing old oaks or stingy maples. Foot over foot, arms around the trunk, up and up, faces scratched bloody on bark. Sunlight bouncing and dancing among golden leaves; faith in the strength of branches resting in the arches of smallish feet. Slowly, voices begin to be lost in wind; and the trunk thins, and the branches with it; and the treetop sways.

How high? 50, 60, 70 feet? The wind moves, and we move with it. The tree yields, and we yield with it. I smile, clinging to the skinny trunk. I am dizzy, and my stomach laughs inside me. The sun is beginning to set. “I guess we should go,” James says. He is above me: First up into the tree. But I am below, pioneer in the descent. I take a moment, and turn my face outward, and gaze upon the world before me. Below us, a brown and glowing patchwork of tended fieldwork; over my shoulder, the sunset resting upon the lake. And all the world swaying, rocking in the wind, moving in a familiar rhythm. Thin lines of gold-sanded roads widening to horizon. Combines resting, their drivers huddled near thin lines of smoke trailing upward to our noses. Our fathers building fires, our mothers making a meal, our sisters telling stories. The coming night timeless: a parade of hymns.

The wonder stays with me. 

Years. 

Decades. 

Still.

And my right foot wanders, blindly, downward to find purchase. And with this, we are on our way home.

Night Story

Your eyes open.

And the shadows

In the sleeping house

Unfurl themselves,

And bow noiseless down

Before you, a grace

To gild the edges of

Your pathway down the hall.

Outside, the years

Swirl

And gather beneath the oaks,

And wait for the curve

Of your hand to rest

Upon the storm door handle.

An age is ending, 

Tonight.

You move, out into it:

The same warm dark

You found at the foot

Of your parents’ porch;

The same sourceless glow,

Not quite moon or lamplight,

That you found bleeding

From around each edge

And black branch once hung above you.

The streets and the houses are thinning

With each step,

And the fabric

Between what you have known

And what you have glimpsed,

And wondered at,

And guessed.

And now, the fields:

The leaves driven into them,

And the wind,

The outline of the forest edge

Before you

And the years turned to their every second,

And your life a slight Aurora

In the corner of your children’s sky.

Hill-walking at night

Is careful work:

The feet remembering

Steps they have not known.

The starless sky makes that sound:

A ringing wholeness

That calls out and welcomes home.

The tired world sighs,

And in its sighing

Unscrolls traces

You remember knowing, but lost

Like a dream to the morning

In your sea of reachings

And sadnesses.

And now, suddenly, they are here,

Forming before your waking eyes

In the age that is ending in this night,

Among your years that gather, embarrassed

Beneath the trees,

And the humble shadows

That bow and flee from underneath your feet,

Within the dim, but deep and sourceless light – a hand

That leads you on

Into the woods.

Here, at the edge of all things that wait,

And hold themselves blameless

Before the throne of God,

You leave behind all manner of

Flickering, fleeting light:

A screen door standing open in an empty house,

Taking to it the gathering dark of October and its fallen leaves;

Your childhood church,

Its blurry springtime windows and dead pastors;

Your owned and endless miles of thick, steel track lifted up —

Lifted up 

From upon the earth,

Caressed into thin, molten, delicate thread

By the Maker’s hand,

And lovingly cut.

Theory and Grace

The noise of string theory drags itself

Along eternal lengths

Of leaf edge.

It has no God.

No small town along great rivers.

No barn-side in dusk

Painted with the hope

Of 1889.

No arm-length recollection

In cornfields.

No spring-nights bowed low.

No pre-dawn hunt for snakes among cousins

And blood brothers.

One wonders what its peace is worth.

How many bushels? How many miles? How many troublesome hives?

How many days?

How many alleys, traces

Stacked with straw, Rye, and gold?

It is a worrisome risk — the hope that rural pens inscribe

Across the face of doubt and science:

The untenable weight of faith.

All that noise of shoreline, siding, airfield is

Simple sawtooth:

Cicada-wing describing

And meaning

A walk

Along the purple lines

Of freight maps and flight plans

And clover-lit fields in dusk.

I did dream of Isaac on the altar, once;

I stood up straight

Among the pines, in the night,

And then collapsed with no legs beneath me

In impassable February fields.

But Abraham’s God is not a God of sleep,

And every silence is a journey,

And every journey

Worth its weight in blood

Trails an umbilical churchyard

Through the snow;

A short saga —

A wilderness myth

Swollen with

Footfall and bear-step and spark-speak

Regarded well

Near each ocean,

Honored well among effigy mounds

And jamborees

And camp nights

And dead vacation Bible school friends.

I have tried —hard —

To make it less,

But life

Is a lesson

Of vagrants and vagrancies.

I know

(And more to the point,

The stars, the moon, the North —)

That the galaxy

Matters less than

Lengths of bannock in rainless nights

Wrapped like snakes around green sticks,

Or fire — the surface and the edge of prophecy

Pried with penknife up

From underneath bark.

It’s an old muscle-memory:

Wait. Hope. Kneel. Pray.

Watch the tall grass sway.

It is nearly nothing,

The way the ages

Make their way around the gorgeous curves and distances and kiss

Old-man horizon.

Money will not pay

For the dry sand beneath the fire —

Nor time;

Experience;

Or lessons learned.

Grace gives that.

Sweet grace

That kneels along the unmarked ways;

That burns its hands cupping coals

You left untended in your sleep

In weather and long night;

That whispers you awake

On cold plains in the unspeakable, terrible night,

Pulling the cushion of its scars

Along the ridgeline

Of your face.

R.I.P. R.E.M.

I remember when my friend Roger brought his copy of "Chronic Town" to school so that I could sneak it home and give it a listen. (That sort of music and album art being frowned upon in our house at the time. And thanks, Roger, for REM, Love and Rockets, Husker Du, The Church, and The Chameleons, among others.) I was not immediately enthralled with "Wolves, Lower," and lifted the needle halfway through the song. But three seconds into "Gardening at Night," I was hooked - bad. There was a time when I considered REM my favorite band. That time was well in the rearview by the time the horror of "Shiny Happy People" came along and Michael Stipe started actually stringing full comprehensible sentences together in interviews. But in those early years, Stipe's mumbled, impressionistic ramblings draped over beautiful jangly guitars and tight American rhythms moved in and out of my days and nights like a weird, seamless, subconscious soundtrack. Those times are slipping into a Gaussian-blurred and faded snapshot of recollection these days, but that doesn't diminish the brilliance and audacity of musical art so simultaneously intricate and simple that it stands unembarrassed among the greatest this nation has ever had to offer to the earth. So, because of that, today I'm a little sad. The harsh reality is, they should have called it quits a few albums ago. And everyone who's honest knows it. But the truth also is, they were once an American treasure.

"Trust in your calling, make sure your calling's true."

R.I.P. R.E.M.

Song for Early September

Summer’s last sigh
Bending low then lying down — lost
And unconcerned —
For the long, familiar sleep
Of iced shores
And dark, lovely spaces
That find themselves beneath
Tree-fall and trestle;

Leaves
That crowd riverbanks:
That bruise the traces
And railways and blacktop with thick gold
And thin red,
And hesitate and shake
In air and light too suddenly cold
For short sleeves or laughing out loud;

The truth of what is
Pulled from last year’s threadbare
Coat sleeves and pockets
And given to the wind
And the present dusk
Sliding slowly down from
Hat to boot
Where shoulders end
And prairies launch themselves
Unembarrassed
Upward
To the nameless sky
And outward
To the yearless horizon.

I come by these things honestly,
Stumbled upon in early fall.

When my years are
As weary as my miles,
And never far
From the edge-lands of fire
That stand
Against armies of unseen eyes.

When all things are edge, and canvas, and slate.

When lift bridges still,
And all crossings grow as silent
As the space between the stars,
And the time for listening, watching, waiting
Has passed.

Lines Composed on a Balcony Near a Tourist Trap

The glass of the lake
whispers memories,
centuries; a dream
spelled out in wave-song.

I've moved alongside
Beneath the thick stars;
Wrapped in the coal-black;
Held in the Big Hand.

I have seen figures
At the ends of roads -
Hundreds of years old -
Whispering questions;

The ancient questions
My feet asked the earth.
What are the waves worth?
Where are the seraphs

Beneath each surface?
The waves are silent.
The silhouettes fade.
The black of the night

Pivots once, then stills.
The trees near the lake:
They have no questions.
Nor the dead brakemen;

Nor the dead sailors
Whose feet wandered here,
And who gave sweethearts
No warning, but left

The night to its own;
The dark between stars
To converse with leaves,
And in their silence -

Together embraced -
Watch each ember fade.

The Light

And when the sun is chisel to horizon’s stone,
Atrophied two-lanes
Grow effigy;
And lakes, and seas of sawgrass, and shoreline shadows
Take the wind, the waves, the years,
The Grace of God
And figure in the longing eye
Bent trees; misremembered maps;
The honesty of firelight.

Unsettled dreams of hope
Fold starlight and
Companion darkness into
Shapes of hands
Holding coffee cup and pipe;
Hands holding hands holding hands
In Prairie School decades
Hollowed in the ends of
Probation halls and harbor towns in dusk.

Deep In the imagined chest
Are piles of flint and charred bird-bone;
Circles of abandoned ash.

In dreamed mornings, quiet feet whisper
And toss coffee into weeds;
Crouch;
Face west for a while;
Move against the wind and
Kick sand upon the rail to still the coasting car.

There is no complication in it.

Grace, peace, justification:
All dirt in hair; blood on hand;
A whispered sermon
Embarrassed
By the way
Sons cling to their father
When the wind is loud
And murderers knock on the windows of the night.

The open door and lit light at the end of hard roads in the fall.

The Apocrypha of hope.

The laughter and the back-slap of strangers.

The safety thumbed
On the automatic knife.

Faces put hard to constellations.

The end of the line
And what comes after.

The light

The light

The water

The steel

Worn silver by wheels.