Locks

The locks were off the doors,
and I lacked the skill
to remake them.

A little more time.

A little more attention.

A resilience
that eluded me;

a strength
that
collapsed
within me

and left me

to all those evenings.

The Quiet

The world —

    its form;

its sigh
dying in
the figure
rounding
the corner
of the house
in the dark;

the firelight
dripping off the ledge of the night;

a life lived by a fountain;

     a body abandoned
in the bus.

    Moose hunters
in spring.
Cleared ways
are carved by the forgiving tide

and give the world
a canyon:

A space
between two shallow walls.

Quiet as a whisper.

Quiet as hope.

Midnight Conversation

I've never actually seen
a monster,
and I've been alive
a long time,
so there's probably
no reason to worry.

Probably.

I suppose, if I think about it,
there was that time
in Michigan,
when I stayed up
way past my bedtime,
talking and laughing
with my cousins
instead of sleeping.

We all heard it --
a low growl.

But that could have been anything.
Honestly.

But then again ...

Maybe it was a kind of monster
that is attracted by
the sound of children
who can't stay in their beds.

I guess, having no documented proof,
the possibilities are wide open.

There could be creatures
that live under beds
or in closets
or in the vents,
and feed off of the
disobedience of
boys too wound up
to be still hours after
prayers have been said
and goodnight kisses
distributed.

In theory, I mean.

But I doubt any little boy
has ever actually been eaten by one.
Don't you?

Why not
get back in bed and be very, very still,
just to be on the safe side.

Sleep tight.

Near A Mountain

Near a mountain,
a man
is losing the things
his hands have found.

He watches
the shine
of antenna
in starlight

and hums
the tune of his final days.

A dozen light years
away,
Voyager One and Voyager Two
tease the edges of
vast things.

In 1886,
his great-grandparents
struggle through birth.

He wraps
the entirety of ages
in twine
and Bible verse
and barbed wire

manufactured
in a century
near his own,

in a factory
near Canandaigua
where his people
come from.

45

You suppose
so little
in the night

with youth gone
and roads dark
and lamps dim.

The world kneels.

Old churches
fade away.

Horizon
shuts itself
against stars.

Things do not
end here, now:

We go on.

What I Am Not Paid to Do

What I am not paid to do
could be gathered
to a gold point
near snack shacks
on the Plymouth seashore

headstones
thin as slate
deep as hope

blind as bones

these rings of sunshine
I have dreamt
and grasped falling backward
and lost,

spiraled to
the future
of men
I've never known
or bested



I wonder
what kind of spark
my soul

might give
against
the steel of
held-out miles

A good question,

this is

in weeds

no fatherhood left
to give

no daughters, sons —

a deserved curse —

deserving
I have given
the limping veins of my own wrists
grasping after couplings
in the

North

the North.

What I am not paid to do
plunges
in the slipstream and

grows a soul and

retrieves
rings of sunshine
from that

which was

Krakauer

Krakauer
used to argue
with me
in the music
of the
Long Wait.

The sound of deer ticks
climbing sawgrass.

I swear
and swear to God
I tried to lose
that book.

I crossed
rivers
but could not
empty it from me,

Could not bury it
in the ash
or the stack of twilights
of all that I'd made scant.

It was always finding
its way to the
top of
those thin
nights,

A residual haunting.

He had me talking to myself
in the silence

or the sway

or the great timeless sea of crickets.

"I'm careful,"

I'd say.

"Yes.
But lost.
And too eager to be lost to your care."

I'd Need a Dictionary

“Camouflage Metamorphosis.”

My oldest son’s

Spelling words

Greet me at the refrigerator door.

I wonder what change
Is being hidden.

The World and the Earth

More like a trail of arrowheads
covered over with dirt,
these turned fields in Illinois.

This world consumes
every energy given it;
pulls your body
to its edge,
snakes its hands
into your front pockets
and pulls them inside-out,
pushes everything it finds there
into the yawn of its own horizon.

I feel my ghost
straining
against my bones.

I once did
and will again
step across the river stone
of town-edges

and find the simpler earth
within the world.

Persistence

Empty chairs

at sidings

and long grass

and trees

and empty barns

and campgrounds

and backs against doors

and twilight in faraway parks

and watches

and edges

and panic

and life

and trick knees

and long walks

and repentance

and redemption

and hope

and aching sorriness

in the heart-ending
silence
of potential
departure.

Weaponry

Sam said I should write a poem
about bows and arrows.

I've only shot arrows a few times in my life.

Once,
I sunk one into my best friend's
ankle.

If intended,
it surely would have impressed.

The arrow sailed wide past the target,
skimmed the grass,
and flew beneath the wooden
partition
just as he was leaving
the camp restroom.

In actuality,
we both were
pretty well impressed.

I don't know what it is
about boys and weaponry,
but I anticipate
an anxious few years
while my
House of Testosterone
grows into wisdom.

I remember
walking from my house
all the way to Hammond
(a long walk indeed)
with a friend
who wasn't a friend
but knew the way.

Cheap throwing stars
were on the menu
at a weekend flea market
where the mall-ninjas flocked.

We spent the afternoon
sinking our purchases into trees.

And the side of my house.

And, eventually, into each other.

Because shuriken-deflection skills
are gained only through
discipline and practice.

I have a Polaroid
of my cousin and myself
standing side-by-side,
my uncle's loaded .22 rifle
pointed nonchalantly at his head.

Such things never bothered me
until I had my own boys.

Still,
there was that day
I found my uncle's switchblade
on the counter in his apartment
when I was ten:
his first instinct
was not to
snatch it from my hands in horror.

Instead, he glanced sideways
to see if any of the women
in his life were hovering,
then grinned,
and showed me how it worked.

Because switchblades are cool.

It's as simple as that.

Sure, I closed the blade
on my knuckles a time or two,
but that only taught me
the proper modicum of respect.

Conversations About the Treachery of Polar Bears

Creatures get the devil in them
sometimes.

A paw the size of Montana,
but the sweetest, sweetest face;
nose twitching every
point on the compass in the wind.

He'd seen the sun set
only to rise again
minutes later;

He'd watched
upsidedown freighters
sail the white horizon.

What kind of animal
could make sense
in a place like that?

He let me smoke
machine-pressed,
cheap Cuban
cigars in his store;

let me take my boots
and my socks off;

let me doze off on the floor.

"Socks like these
used to be made of wool
you'd spend a year
saving for."

I was going to do what I was going to do.

He said.

I was going to end up
where I was going to end up.

But not without
pancakes at midnight
with his daughter
at the foot of a closed bridge,
and state-of-the-art socks,
and a windproof lighter,
and a coat
made of the stuff of
Thor's hammer.

"Don't be a plaything,"
he said.
"Be awake;
and pointy, and sharp, and painful,
and more trouble than you're worth."

A chuckle.

A silence.

"That's not the way you want God to take you to his bosom,"

he said,
staring.

Dreams That Are Not Dreams

I am dragged out of bed
away from my wife
and thrown into the hold
of the Kinsman Independent
where my feet rust through the hull
and spill me into Superior's depths,
and wreck her against October's shoals
just before the shipping lanes are closed.

Or
vertigo spins up
and fills me.
I open the front door,
hunting the source
of some untrusted sound
in the dark,
and my foot nearly falls
into the chasm
of an open porch on a highiron
heading west.

Or
there are heated words
in an old kitchen.
The music in the living room
keeps getting louder.
Unseen children
cry and laugh,
and pull at uncapped pens,
blank pages,
and well-worn maps
spilling from my pockets.

Or
I watch my
only knife fall into a river
and sink
as I let go
everything else my hands have known,
and the sky
tumbles around me
as I fall.

Or
God's hands
grasp two corners
of a blanket
and unfurl it
beneath
unfamilar stars,
then
plunge into the depths
of Lake Superior
to find my
sinking corpse.

Questions

If you ask too many questions,
the roads grow over with trees
and murk.

You lose all hope
of finding your way back
to where you pray you belong.

It's a tripwire
stretched across all of
creation:

try pinning a photon
to a map
and see how that works out.

Wondering
aloud to yourself
while marching
into wild places
is a good way
to get yourself killed,

although you might net yourself a painting
or a novel on the way.
Maybe a Theory of Everything.
Some momentary peace
with that murder.

I asked too many questions once.

It's what we lose
with our childhood,

When the language the universe
prefers
is resolute silence.

A march
toward whatever comes next.

Untitled

Silent for so long.
I can barely remember
your voice in the trees.

Hotshot

I have
never
been
asked
to
pour
words
around

the
slack
taken
out

the
onyx
shake
and

tooth
loose
sway

rust
in
the
blood

confines

ballast
and
bars
and

bars
and
ballast

heels
thinned
with
wind
noise

bad
skies
and
sirens

a
town
a
blur
a
way

teeth
ground
down
in
the
roar
of
it

ears
marked
with
it

years
piled
with
it

book
of
coats

and

the

shadows

of

leaves

over

head

racing

and
the
moon

the
glint
of
ruin

ended
age

diesel

the
road

the
panting
road

And With My Rural Pen I Stained the Water Clear

Children wheel
in their century
on the lakeshore,

grey sky and green
waves
hiding time,

leaving undeclared
the sameness of
their lives
with mine,
and the lives
of the countless
unseen
who have shipwrecked,
portaged, picknicked,
and survived here.

They bring me rocks.

Sticks to whittle into pens.

They rush me;
rush me —

pull me from the
dying steeltowns

to explain
The way sky and
water
pour themselves
one into the other
and make an unknown thing;

The way waves
push silence
across the table
to the world.

All these things
I once made uneasy peace with;
these things I long ago agreed
with God's silence
would never be explained.

My knife shapes the tips of drift-twig pens
while my voice wanders
from the shore
far into the lake,
and the boys no longer listen.

We will leave those pens behind —
half-carved, uninked —
when it's time to pack up and go.

I've left so many unfinished,
unanswered and unanswering,
strewn across the miles.

East Troy

Everyone in Elkhorn was asleep,
and all the gas stations closed.

"Under the Milky Way"
poured out of the LTD's
speakers,
and no one spoke.

No cancer in Paul's bones yet.
No dead fathers.
No decisions made that could not be undone.

Fast-forward through
"Gardening at Night"
and settle into
"Love Comes Tumbling."

The summer air
feels that way
through open windows
only when you're young, and
the darkness of the road ahead
signifies
only the
fact of night.

Minutes

Some days
at the office
the birds
that move in the view
outside the window
manage to press
themselves into
a certain minute
with enough force
to fold it in
upon itself

and their wings
are the same wings
that belonged to birds
long dead
that pressed
themselves into
the other side
of the same minute
years ago
on some shore,
or above some clearing.

What I'd give
to stack those
minutes
into an age,
and remain in it.

Near

Headstones bloom
a lilac
sudden as barnfire,

and
that's life.

Our legs
carry us between
the slate

in grass as tall
as Black Hawk
on his horse.

Near waves now

after all those
creeks
emptied into
silence;
saplings bent
and staked
wrong way
to the trail.

All those dirty tricks.

Now and then
we take a count
and come up short,
or come up long;

an extra shadow in the
carriage of the gloaming,

his form familiar,
yet hidden to us
as we beat our way
out beneath
a blanket of stars.

In dreams,
seraphs push dirt into the fire
and urge us on.

In the morning,
the ending of all things
is near to us,
and hangs thick with
hope and dread
in the cold, final mist.

Sleeping In

I know I would have slept in that dawn.

I have slept in over many dawns,
or at least laid still
with my eyes shut.

Even in the most uncomfortable of circumstances,
my body has been able
to stay up far too late,
and remain far too long past sunrise
in places and ways that would make
my mother cry.

I would have staggered from Golgotha,
heart rent in confusion and despair,
begging God for reasons and hope.

Blindly finding none,
I would have willed myself awake
well into the night, praying, muttering, fretting.

No breakfast the next day.

Another impossibly late night
away from all others; away from rumors and news.

I would plot a journey.
Some place far from the tomb.

I would have drifted off on the desert floor.
Slept in.
Missed all the excitement.
Staggered into town, slowly
gathering the gospel to me;
finding it
like the last, hidden present
on Christmas morning.

Good Friday

Colorado.

Sitting on Buffalo Bill's grave.

I do not know what town
this mountain overlooks -
its light now struggling upward
through a sudden snow -
the sun failing to
unseen starlight above.

Midnight

and my eye is on
the gift shop door.

The stillest of all places in that earth,
in that time.


The weight of my expectation
has never slackened.

My children do not understand
distances; the ways roads,
ways through, and hopes
go fragile and wear like
bones.

I am not anxious
for the stories to be gathered together
and revealed;
am sorry for the way
the old hills and rivertowns and causeways
crowd the creases of
unheld maps.

But Good Friday
hides within itself Easter,
and with every hammer strike,
dawn pries stone away from stone.

         (I stumbled down
         mountains,
         returned home again and again to find
         the linen closet door
         inexplicably open.)

Fences

"Well, that's it then," a fence will say.

A top rail weathers and fails following a decade
Of winter after summer;
Chain link is pried from the post
And rolled back
More often
And by more persistent hands
Than those charged with upkeep
And repair.

The very things they keep us from
Betray them:
The angles of the hemmed-in land
And the wind
Channeled over it;
The irresistible value
Of goods, or mystery, or shortcut.

Some fences are laws
And others are suggestions.

We know the difference.

Others are rules put there only to be bent.

The trick Is discerning which to honor;
Which to cautiously pass over, through, or under;
Which to destroy and dismantle
In your passing;
And which to outlast, patiently,
Like the wind.

The Right Things Right

The boys are young
but old enough
to hear from me
that we are far
from what matters.

My oldest knows
that grease between
the rotor and
the hub is more
than convenience;

that the right way
of doing things
gives divine voice
to the human,
and form to grace.

Reasons

Reasons are fine things:
comfortable on flat surfaces.

They do not take to them
the same space
as beer bottle shards
washed, tumbled
among the waves and rocks
of Lake Winnipeg,

polished to impossible shine:
improbable, inarticulate
jewels
refracting aurora.

Life kneels,
supplants,
and makes a way
for reasons.

But not the
high tides
in the Bay of Fundy,
or
event horizons
that stack and coil
on the shores
of singularities.

I have been
dragged, legs kicking,
to every single Easter dawn
all my sorry days.

Oh!

The way my life has contended
with the gulf
between the wild, the certain;
with that which will not
rest on shelves,
or lean against clean edges;

the incongruity
of turned ankles gathered too far from home.
Feet lost to
expected rungs on the grabiron.
Small-caliber muzzles,
and the hand of God
wedged firm between the hammer and the shell.

Sweet grace.

My mind's oldest, grandest adversary.

The Ways

Rain on the ways north.

Rain

and horizon's eyes
finding

Renaissance
crevasses
in the most
present of
moments.

Our heels
press into the trail.

The river bank
bends

like light
through a lens

to surround
our honeymoon road;

The river bank
bows in the rain

and falters beneath the weight
of its own curve,

unfolds in its old, foolish years

a grace.

An insistence.

An imposition.

The earth
holds to itself
an exhausted world

reckoned larger
on the inside
than the out.

When we rest
I will
attain for us a tale

from between the lengths
and distances
we have gathered
to our cuffs:

A man leans over kindling to
strike the back of his knife
against flint.

There is a shadow; a bear;
a struggle —
something
unaccounted for
and sudden —
ruined factories
and inflated prices.

Beacons bloom open their light
on the unfurled shores of great lakes.

A rescue comes.

Tight-knotted questions
beat with the wind
against star-strewn, abandoned
rafters.

Doorposts.

You remember
door
posts.

And then
up again.

Up again,
and
feet to it
at dawn.

It makes sense.
(All of it.)
The way
iron buried in the earth
betrays the compass.

The way
trackage is abandoned
and the report of it
goes unpublished.

The way
one moment at
dawn publishes
ancient traces
through
wheat and forest.

The days
press suddenly and cold
well past our recollection
of crossings
and clearings.

We said, "North"
but may have
meant west.

East.

South.

The Road has carved Itself into Itself.

Rain abandons the path
that blossoms
out from beneath the trees.

We're warm

We find warmth

We are reconciled.