Lent

Let me be this shape
found
in the lowering dusk;

this young man at the old
post office window.


The leaves are
depot and gully and shadow -
the trying, the forming,
the giving
and denying
of ancient
sounds and shapes

old as lakes,
and council trees
in unembarrassed clearings,
fire rings.

Let me snag thin fabric
upon thick branches;

upon ballast;

upon thin rails
of water
meeting sky

in river-towns I have
heard bells ringing
outward from
at night.

Let me be this
Barlow-knife shape
of shadow
made by
church doors opened at Easter:

A shadow
that knows
how much it owes
and cannot pay;

a shadow that grasps
after the form
and the light
from which it has been cast.

Doorposts

At times the doorposts are
same as ever
in their push and their pull,
and the stars, and the
night beneath them,
and the causeways and the
hills, and the ways
to shores.

And the distances are
same; the
dim light of cities
traversed, the pathways of
impossible light across the
empty hallways, and the
sleeplessness -- the
maps that gather with
dry leaves at the
treeline near the old roads.

And the figure kneeling
in the waves is the same,
and his ruined grip,
and the fear that coils
in the old jungle; dreams
poured over silences
that go dead-leaf thin
in troubled dawns.

Planets still race over
horizon faster than Orion.
Each vastness remains,
between the doorposts in the
house where you live.

Afterimage

Kinematoscope horizons stack
And flare

silver rain
spending itself
in rivulets

over
discovered edges
of grown-over paths.

Gray light
pours over green leaves like
taconite spilled
from a ruined hull.

The world
carries
old pocket-weight
to you —

these things
your hands have lost —

gathered
from shoulders
of roads
that you have dreamed,
whose miles
your feet cannot recall.

They pour like
water through your fingers
and pool
upon the floor.

A roaring
flicker slows
along a treeline,
and stills
in the house where you live.

A silhouette resolves
in the interlude.

Sunlight
bleeds around it.

You remember this:
turning over
drawers,
pushing artifacts
and talismans
up around its corners
to define it.

The way you
once stirred embers
under green leaves
in the silver rain,
beneath gray light.

Untitled

Somewhere warm
other people
we once will one day be
or could have one day been
sip whiskey and joe

but here beneath the
edges of stars
at the end of lines
the earth is stabbed
with brittle years

and old words
I have rubbed
thin and quick with spark.

The days are ripe
with flailing
and the sound that
open-end wrenches make
when cast
against the long block.

I have been mistaken
for a man
who never
rubbed his fingers
down to blood
for fire,

or tasted the pulp
of his own teeth.

Old friend Chicago
shrugs in anger

and lifts
torpedo cars
up off the rails.