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Monday, September 30, 2013

That Autumn

It's true.

The floor of the world
beneath that
row of pines.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

9-26-2013

Dreadful shapes
Of once-living men,
Mouths in that slanted dusk
Shaping unvoiced words,

Those

Silhouettes conjured near the edges
Of what drops off
In darkness.

We carried
Our canvas micarta courage close to us

And I speak

for myself
when I say we
were

Too weary for the horror.

We leaned
Up on our elbows, voiceless,
With the fatwood smoke
Pouring under black-glass
Constellations,

And watched --
The way one watches
Spider legs erupt around corners,

Or a play emerge
in wordless gasping
From a splintered stage.

    The knife-worn stars.

In fields by us
Pumpkins bloomed.

I hold that breath:

The moon grinning
An old gold
Over unharvested things,
Through coal-soaked, bare-branched
Trees,

And nothing warm, and

The silhouettes brimming, yet,
Poured over mile-filed shoulders;
Shadows split open over
Edges,

All that troublesome math
Tumbled at the bottoms

Of creeks

That pour
Over all that these remembering
Hands could ever make of
Autumn,

Fall.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Thinnesses

Babel
Gathers up
in a lost man's
hymnbook of found things,
and drags its leaves,
its leavings

The way my
Frightened children
Come at night,
Little railyards,
Stumblings
Whispered
On edges
Of my Great Lake.

A man is given this old gift
And cannot help himself
But try
to give it back,

Grace
left to benevolent
strangers;
scraped
of spark:
hammered
into thinnesses
where God still is:

The shallow rivers;
The snow on banks;
the soaked socks
that weep on sticks
near the remembered fire.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Sense

Even when
Ghosts are called up from
Civil War daguerreotypes,
And those blurred and

Pictured men run after
The cornfields
To which their ends have been
Prescribed,

None of it makes sense.

A woman makes the right
Decision at the wrong time,
And finds herself
Dead in the kitchen.

Some evenings, still, I look
At my legs
And imagine them dead,
Detached,
Glowing a weird glow,
Weary of pulling me along these things.

I know it doesn't make sense.

The way an evening
Crowds around children
On the driveway:
The voices,
The dark,
The sliver of moon
That near-autumn
Evenings crave;
The joy we suppose
So close to sleep
When we no longer recall,
But remember recalling,
And the locusts
Taunt us with the
Constancy of every summer's end.

It all piles up
Out west in an
Amber stack
Of rust:

All that bone cancer;

All those
Horizons
Poured out
In last, staggering
Embraces
Over Sunday night.

It doesn't make
Anything.

We may as well
Teach our children how
To wander properly;
How to level
The eye to
The unending knife.

And no more lies about
The ends we make spiders meet.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Wonders

A man's years fill up with the surfaces of lakes,
And clouds after storms
That bow low above them,
And branches tracing ovals
Over constellations,

And the smell of things
When the sun is set,
And the wind has stopped
Contending with old treetops
And new nests,

And the world of kindling needed
By all possible nights has been gained
From awkward jawings
And repurposed tool steel,

And, south,
Lightning
Pours noiselessly over hills.

There is God of course.
And a family.

They all climb up within him -

Wonders and
Wonders,
The
Recollection of
Wonders.