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.