Ages

Three men stood
on the shore of a lake
near the start of a river.

Things get confusing after that.

There was that one night,
In that blizzard. Light pulled away from the
library windows and piled up
against trees.

Steel mills came and went.

There were fires.

The sounds of unseen things
moving through forests
leapt up beneath strange stars.

The Burlington Northern
ran slow as sap
in a yearless autumn.

Dreams smeared together:
lightning took the maple
out front,
and we carried the
purple flash
with us for years,
across hard miles,
and dropped it
at the feet of three
men on the shore.

We were children,
and our children were fathers.

Owl-eyed moons
swarmed the end of the age.

Ishpeming

Ishpeming
lit like a porch,
lifted itself
arms open
to a lost pulpit.

All those lakes were
weepers opened up
on a cold face
looking north;

each moment
old,
lit
from the inside
out.

I said a prayer
for my compass
even as I tossed
it to the pile.

All that confounding iron
pushing pine needles
up off the earth,

and a great North,
arms open
to unnamed constellations.

Sometimes

Sometimes, everything pinions.

Everything is changed.

A few people see it, or understand.

They nearly make it to shore
near Wilmette,
but freeze
in the shallows
instead.

They try to remember

for the rest of us,
but give up
and go up over the high ground,
around blind corners,
across the forest borders
without us instead.

A river's edges are nudged
a few degrees west;

The moon becomes a molten eye.

It begins that way:

A blurred, orange comet
bleats ransom and redemption
nonsensically over
your shoulder,
falling
over the miles,

and you stop to rest beneath it.

It's near Christmas, again.

In mud-caked dreams,
your unborn children
try your patience
like a knife dropped in the snow.

Sometimes, everything pinions.

Everything is changed.

A few people see it, or understand.

They nearly make it to shore.

December

I imagined angels
more than once
in moments
same as snow,
slow and sifted,
drifting downward
to this weary earth.

They were there in
black ends of branches
circling
the eye's last
glimpse of night,
singing an endless,
silent reach
with outstretched hands,
and trumpets
stilled and raised.

Sheep and shepherds all
were dizzied beneath
the same stars,
a flurry of dark wings
unfurling suddenly among
December's trees,
where all who'd been hard-taught
to wait were afraid,
but awake
in the expectant night,
listening.

Trouble

The unspoken dream of
hammer on iron -
those black shadows
gathered
to the surface
of the workable form
of the world -

and the night,
brimmed with a
dulling bronze comet,
and gold coals spread
in dying splendor
by cursed heels
along shores.

Words cast out
come back
unanswered
as God's own Silence;
God's own nights
almost lonesome as our own,
nearly sure as traces home.

Immanuel

They built a fire
behind the church;
we pushed ourselves
between the minutes
thick as epochs.
I lost dad in the crowd.
Mixed freight
leaned its height
against the starfield,
and chased the west.
I found a horseshoe.
In some old Christmas,
there were stables,
And God With Us,
wanting us to learn
to be alone.

Noel

All that prairie,
then, and still,
gathering itself
to charcoal lines of
brook and stream,
and shoulders put to snow
and dusk;
And all those nights, same,
their flickerings and
shadows and
whispers and
hope-holding
silences
spilling to void, taking form
in recollection
and retracements,
incessant old ways
cutting over the grain
in the dark.

Each of those
damnable nights
hoped to brick
a testament closed,
but could not quite:

Those days brimmed instead
with winter,
and ill-advised journey.

Locals lit the lift-bridges
like Christmas trees,

And we stayed put.

At night,
We dreamt
the horizons
we displaced in the day;

We awoke in the places
we dreamed.

And there, the shadow of something immense
on the gravel two-lane:
an ambulance overturned;
wheels spinning, grasping
after purchase like the hands
of a broken watch.

We came from among
the edges
and gathered, weeds all,
to the banks of that great road.

Good news.

The Child's eyes are open.

He searches each our faces in the pre-dawn light.