The Father

July's ageless heat
Parted near midnight
And the breeze poured between the banks.

Cricket-chirp wrapped itself
Around wind through long grass,
The soundless lightning west,
Those sharp-edged days gone
Folded over and
Blurred.

It was fine, rare enough
That someone said
We should sleep uncovered.

A fire came up.

Food.

Scripture.

And the night moved through the branches.

Somewhere in the ink and silver,
Elohim lit upon the
Circling pine boughs
Above dying embers,
Sleeping us;
Impossibly
Perfect barbicels
Spilling over
Owl eyes
And knots.

I blinked the dirt,
The ash,
The stars,
The moon,
The edges
Of clouds,
And the improbable
Age and youth
Of the ends of all miles
Into my waking sight.

He asked if he could approach.

(He asked.)

"Don't call me Elohim,"

He said.

untitled (6/26/2013)

Soon
go these days,
quiet as lawns;

the sides of wide rivers
you've not yet known;

stars burnt through charcloth

pinwheeling,

fire gone silver

suddenly unchecked
by time, distance,

or recollection.

And then,

the graceless years
against which
our legs have
labored
fall,
and go diaphanous.

untitled (6/20)

The firmament
Of the space between trees
Is the most unsteady
Of earths
Wondered wordlessly,
Close cousin to last gifts
Given to the world
In hospitals,
Or to those lying black-toed
Near stopped rivers.

It is a hope
That memory pillars;
That tumbles against
A childhood,
A corner garage
Near disaster
Where the knees brace,
And the hands seek to unsheath
A knife that is not there,

Was never there;

In God's great grace,

    Could have been there.

It is the old, great gift
Of a three-quarters moon
Swallowed black by
Unsteady weather,

The waiting silence
That holds each moment
Apart from the next.

A firmament.

A wall in water
Of one kind or another

Against which
Broken things tumble
In new morning.

For When My Sons Ask Why

Why you have come here —

walls escaping interstates;

national weather service

clinging to old dusks;

And there
a full glass,

a travel;

a bend of hibiscus shadow
in the front yard;

a stropped light pressed
against glass.

It has always been the
convex grind of wind on
shaking lamp light;

the edges
that streams make;

the
list of familiar things
that happen at midnight:

the engine,
steaming;

the branches, breaking;

the days, rushing,
stunned suddenly still.

Same

Then the way the charcoal
Clouds move

And that old story, full of
Shrouds.

Tornado warnings
Barely west

And a same songbook of
Unsharpened dusks.

The night,
Always:
And things allowed to be true
That pivot in the wheat.

And those shadows,
Questing after right angles,
Still.
 
And waves,

Leaves. The wind among them,

And all that is murmured.