8-25-2013

Late some nights
The sill plates whisper
footsteps over frame,

And the house harvests me
from sleep.

And the still
between each room
congratulates

The putting aside
of childish things.

Yet then
I recall,
with all I am,
stars
above the roof.

And the boy I was
meets me on the porch,
and grasps after
my affection.

8-16-2013

All those kids, tattooed tourists
With their loud, crowded miles.
There's room for them in your kitchen,
Your yard, still holding
The constellations,
Your songbook
Brimming over with jungle fire.

At some point, there are grandchildren,
And the neck remembers with
Tenderness the way the routes out
From underneath summer storm warnings
Blossomed
Into all those Milky Way baths,

And the shake and the shudder
Shook the candy of the earth's crust
Off the remnants of you that mattered.

And the road
The road
The road bends west. It bends west,
A puzzle solved always to that answer,
A distance figured always to that measure.

What better answer will you stand and give to all those asking
Evenings,
Alone or otherwise,
When the reeds bow down along the angle of the wheel-rush?

None.

The grace of each curve
Answers itself.

Embers

Someone left embers.

It's always that way:

The same, dim glow rising,
Its dead language pouring
Over the underneaths of leaves.

The courses of Fox Sedge
Tramped down into traces
And blacktop in the day

Fold up,
And the dark of their foldedness
Spills between stars,

And we hear the sounds of shores,
Though we are too far inland
To hear it.

A long list of the impossible ways clouds
Become aurora goes lost,
And leaves itself on the knife-slick stones
Of a creek bed.

They'll build houses here.

The list will never be read.

Before that happens
Let's gather wood.

Make a fire, here.
Put our legs next to it.

Build it up
With pocket weight and carvings.

Leave a pile of embers.

8/10/2013

About rathering to be lost
The treelines along
Unapproved roads have
Strong thoughts.

There is

A quiet so still
That snow on tree bark
Is a rattle.

A fire so bare
That it's red whisper
Is noise in twilight's ear.

Even the heated space
Between the storm door
And the frame remembers

The journey grows
It's own strong jaws;

Ash scraped
Over rock
Oxidizes
Into
Moving shadows
Of unnamed things.

The constellations pinion,
Suddenly,
In a way that they cannot,

And you are left to wonder.

What is this all worth?

What language
Has been hammered
From the babble?

Unanswered

Words evaporated
From around the edges
Of moments
In those ridiculously finite journeys,
Late summer Sunday,
Gridline roads
Embarrassed
Only with the occasional
Adventurous curve;

That road
To Hegewisch Records;

That road along the quarry;

Pleasant Lake Road;

All those unanswered chases
In the long-yeared days.

What was waiting?
In the shadow of the Wings?

An older eyeful
Of the last of the dry wood
To surprise a dead fire
Beneath star-hurled spears,

Maybe.

Or later,
Sons lying wide-eyed, crying at sunset,
Having dreamt of the day their father dies

While you remember,
And want
And do not want
All of your wandered earths,

And you wait
For the
Words that will give them comfort
To coalesce
Around the moments.