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.