excerpt

"I fear no thing that invites fear. I stagger past uncashed checks and press my hands against the backs of the Winnipeg strangers God puts in my way, and I arise, palms pressed against the glass of that so-cold night. It's so weird, the number of loose, un-collared dogs left trotting up and down the streets here; the absence of black people;  the strong wind and the way the tree branches don’t bend or move within it."

Remembering

And the thin fires,
Night skies flickering by
With years burred to them.

Those silhouettes of boughs
Stay on the hillside.

I remember
Mountains
Of pumpkin-orange coals;

Dime of a moon;

Frost gilding deer paths.

I can name
Each needed thing my hands have ever dropped.

They swing
From branches
Of silver-lit trees.

Rust

To the old golden shadow
ages go

upward
through finger-traced, rust-writ rivets;

fields folding back,
unfurling black earth,
black night
beneath the silent stream
of tumult stars.

These visions
gather up against
the second-story glass
of hoped marriage near winter;

Then fall,
mud-heeled,
ash-handed
near the knife-swing moon.

All that hard truth of harvest
hovering
over pumpkins,
cold as steel parting
bloodlessly
to flint.

Dawn came
cold-throated,
quiet
as rides back south.

Where my sons
sleep in comfort,

The old world brimming
spark underneath.

Harvest

Coat-edges
whisper
barrel-soaked
with smokestack,

harvest,

curbside
argument
layered in key and flint,
companion
glint hanging
off of
years
and cellar
hinge.

All
still as
lamplight
in Prairie du Chien

and Sunday coming;

spokes in
telephone poles

and that walk.

That walking;

Forest-facing
broken boiler
dream
beneath the moon.

All night,
each manner of glow
blooming
slack-action,

Those spiders
on the laundry lines,

Unharvested fields
An unbundled freight of shadow
and alarm.

These children meet,

and are unnmet.

That's Halloween -
its dark rivers
in the middle of
The States.

The
church-window
unkept,
the cornfields
murmuring
their own outlines
in the
hatchet-swing dark.

And harvest half-asleep.

A grinning death, afire.

Gallon

A plastic gallon
fills with rain-soaked leaves
beneath lamplit
unnoticed connifers.

Call it water.

Phillips 66

arcing (Lord
at last) and
calling,
drifting
through the flint mist
of freshwater shoulders.

These towns
are husk

And lean
like children
on the arm.

The pines have parted,
their shadows
unshouldered by
the snow,
and trunks have bent
beneath old halogen.

They groan in
uncontested wind

And make up an old train.

A belly full of ghosts.

A way home winding

through tree-slung deer-hides
and forests of Halloweens.

The old gospel
of a wide, yellow
watching moon
holds itself
to riverbanks,
and waits.