The Unforgettable

I was an anxious young scholar back in the late 80s when I attended Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois. My freshman year, stranded on campus without wheels, the long, northshore weekends were, at the beginning, depressing and unbearable. So, my long-suffering father, without so much as a whisper of complaint, would drag himself - dinnerless, clothes still soaked in nylon vapors after a long week laboring on the factory floor, north, through the Chicago rush hour up, all the way from Tinley Park to Bannackburn, then down again. Why? To haul his only son, along with his college homework and his laundry, back to South Holland for the weekend. 

And this way we would travel the insufferable miles through the thick city, week, after week, after week, in silence. 

In silence, except that I would make it a point to subject him to the latest tunes that had captured my rebellious heart, courtesy of the JC Penney tapedeck buried in the dash, and the week's latest mix tape. Every week, all the way back home, week after week. The Alarm. The Cure. Big Country. R.E.M. The Silencers. Simple Minds. 

And so we'd go, the two of us, riding with no words between us through the long, long city on Friday night, the selfish soundtrack of my struggling new-adulthood drama trying to crowbar some vaguely angry and pointless point into a tired and good man's life.

But, of course, all revelation has its roots in underestimation. My dad is many things:  among them, a musician. And also - of course - a dad. Little did I know that he was slowly giving me and and my fervent demands for attention a fair shake. 

And so it was, one night, in that long struggle against Chicago traffic, when this song ended, and he asked, "What do you like about that?" And I explained. And he understood. And then he explained. And I understood. And we talked about improvisation, and genre, and precision, and ambiguity, and four-part harmony, and poetry, and faith and art. At the time, we rewound the tape and listened to this track again. He said he could appreciate it - he may have even said he liked it - but it didn't matter at that point. He was showing me how to be a dad, and it's an example I try to hold up in front of me every day as I navigate my boys' days. 

This song is near to me for many reasons, but especially for this.

5-1-2017

Slowly, I am unbecoming.

I can read it
In old machine language,

Ecstatic
And plain;

In wet leaves that
Shimmer on torn limbs, among
Vortex signatures that have bested
Door
And trail.

In my teeth, I feel
Each step.

And
Under lamplight,
Near floods,

In old spring,

I have
Become difficult
to recall.

Still, I am lifted up
In old ways forward;

Among the
Calls of
Dreamed birds.

NaPoWriMo 4-29-2017

In dreams of torn
Fence, fence lines,

Shovel is
Put to neck

Of stationary fronts
That snake

North

To this city
From an unseen Gulf,
Then suddenly east. Then
Suddenly south,

Debris signatures
Hot, still
On the radar when

Atmospheric pressure catapults
To
Catastrophic calm,

And the tops of trees
Go
In their old instants
From bolt-taking panic
To sold-farm stillness.

And my compromises -
My thumb-breaking springtimes - their

Choices and wonderments

Stop mattering
In the ways we all think
Mattering
Lives and moves among us.

NaPoWriMo 4-22-2017

All those sunsets from which I stumbled.

It only took a few
Before I could read
At last
The list of my cruelties.

A few more,
And I learned to inscribe it
Along any passageway
Or path forward
Given.

It isn't a bad thing, or even sad.
Just indelible, hard.

NaPoWriMo 4-21-2017

Did you know that
Robins can dive, reckless
And deadly as any
Hawk or Peregrine?

Sit still in your own yard
Or local park long enough,
And you will find it for yourself.

All it takes is a bird, a tree and
Something wanted
On or in the earth beneath.

It's always been that simple:
Predation and desire,
Perches on the same limb.

NaPoWriMo 4-20-2017

I am not myself
I told the landscapes.
The blurring shorelines.
Still, I was. And am.
On this earth, will be.

NaPoWriMo 4-19-2017

Without explanation,
Or reason,
The sudden silence comes.

And silence in answer.

And the silences first spill, then gather
In tired,
Empty nights
Into
Pictures of Elohim.

Imagined, abandoned, or known,
He shadows us along the
Rivers and the four-lanes.

We are dogged, birth to death,
And drowned, one way or another,
In his pleas for our return.

NaPoWriMo 4-18-2017

We have only what our hands toil to give.

How hopeless is that?

Melt your raw fortitude;

Pour its trust
Into the sinewed shell
Of your will,
Your work ethic.

Good enough for you, I guess.

I won't be pulling my train over those pylons.

NaPoWriMo 4-17-2017

On April nights
When the air goes completely still,
And even the sounds of passing cars
In the distance
Become ancient,
And twenty years become two,
Then two-hundred, then twenty,
We all know the way time
Presses us unbearably against
The inside of this great, unbreakable sphere
We were created to pierce.

NaPoWriMo 4-16-2017

Every fire is ancient. First.

A continuation. A disappearance.

A perfect model, convincing
The place
That made you

That the feather of ash
Caught
In your wrist's hair

Is as old as the world.

          Of course,

It is.


We stack these Easters
Behind the open linen closet door,

Hoping
They amount only to

Our old, harmless feet chasing
The late of the evening.

But, truthfully,

Easters are not so easily stacked,

And our footsteps are not so harmless,

And our fires are not so purposeless.

NaPoWriMo 4-15-2017

The flowering trees.
The swingset straining, groaning.
Easter near twilight.

NaPoWriMo 4-14-2017

Saturday before Easter;

Warm at last.

Mud along the river
Becoming
Wanderable stone,

And flooded barrens
Prairie again, pouring

Grasses upward,
Wind-bent and chin-high.

Freight moves free again
Along furnace-spun webs
Away from unlocked canals,

Joy and regret unfolding,
Tumbling over and around
Through opened dams,
Spilling into unhidden-again sunsets,

Saturday after Good Friday.

NaPoWriMo 4-13-2017

Spiders the size of watermelons,
Proud, though outnumbered among their arthropod brethern,
Ring in the new season with celebratory parades along the walls of the house.
It's what you get after a too-mild winter -
Nature's way of reminding us that four, distinct and extreme seasons are
God's perfect design.

NaPoWriMo 4-12-2017

Our old homes
In their old neighborhoods
Turn suddenly present
Yet unreachable,
The way of silent movies.

NaPoWriMo 4-11-2017

The Straits of Mackinac
Will not cow to engineers,
Or promise that ice will never
Coalesce on towers and cables,
Loose in spring, closing the roadbed below.

Once we thought there was an easy way north:
Thick coat. Thin knife. Maps. Wind-proof matches.
Now we know how bridges get built.
You have to humble yourself.
Give your maps to the lake.

WaPoWriMo 4-10-2017

The list of skies I
Know,
That could be cleaved easily,
Rendered equal to
A lifetime of falling,

Is infinite

     Like the wait for an outbound catch
     Near an edge of churches
              On the shore of
              A great and unnamed inland lake.

NaPoWriMo 4-9-2017

The Boy Scout fountain along the tracks
In Park Ridge still bubbles away
Each spring.

And that half a tobacco shop across from it
Might still offer up
Delicious cigars to the young
And uninitiated.

And the moon, in October,
Still holds its orbit, somehow
Over Lake Bluff cemeteries,

And the green glow of FM
And tape deck spilling REM and Stone Roses
Into the murk.

Soon comes young Halloween;
Thanksgiving.

And old Christmas.
Easter, near new shores
Gone quickly familiar, and thin.

Spinning, and spinning, and spinning,

Glimpses
Of the old Boy Scout fountain
Along the tracks
In Park Ridge
Going long, and gold, and skinny, like fire.

NaPoWriMo 4-8-2017

These men were always dropping keys.
Or sometimes stealing, then dropping them.
Or hanging them from low branches near tears in chainlink.
Or filing them on wet cement
And using them to engrave or carve.
Always everything, anything, leaned
Against their design or intended purpose.
They had no earthly use
For the things, and still used them,
Or otherwise tumbled them in their pockets,
Constantly.

NaPoWriMo 4-7-2017

When you lie down on the
Heat-thieving earth at night,
Clusters of galaxies
Nest in treetops,
Cradled in the crooks of
Dead branches.

NaPoWriMo 4-6-2017

Thousands of miles, gone.
I can still hear the sharp snow
From any warm bed.

NaPoWriMo 4-5-2017

We live in a house
That is unpredictable.

Sometimes,
We live upstairs,
With a thick, locked door
And a lockpit set
Hidden in the walls.

Other times,
There is an abandoned
Hospital appended to the living room,
Forbidden to us.

It always comes down to
Exploring when we don't want to;

Lighting a fire
On an old sofa,

Striking out when that fire has died
And the sun has set.

NaPoWriMo 4-4-2017

You will remember
The great curve. The black wave.

The deep Earth undertow.

The road, taking; taking;
Dripping its scent,

Drunk licorice

Dreams of ways forward.

Clear skies.

Something in your sons
Remembers better.

NaPoWriMo 4-3-2017

Under trees
Now gone,
Shaking still

Disestablished leaves
Over renamed streets,

Our mumbled arguments yet over-pour
Outline and fill,

And bleed

Long-worn words and their containing fonts into the page;

Their bird flight onto
Misremembered skies.

Science once
Wore paper animal masks
Near fire.

What has never changed?

NaPoWriMo 4-2-2017

What else are Sunday nights for, in new spring?

The sky boils black-blue and
Skirts just northeast of the county line.

Sheds and granaries are wrecked
There
As the birds sing above the backyards here.

Christ is resurrected for us, all of us, still

NaPoWriMo 4-1-2017

It is near spring again,
And the treebranches
Spider-leg into thin
Sky,
And the common grackles
Call themselves forth from
Nothing,
From winter,
And bring
The black of their wings
To all the edges of each blue. 

And again.

Where are we going
With our now-thin jackets;
Our unlaboring
Engines

Aligned along the old, old
Evenings,
Their sunsets growing long, long
Again,

A familiar migration?

1/15/2017

The trees undo themselves once a year.
Each fall folds
Upon itself into a winter.

All is imperceptibly slow. Then
Fast, fast.

Until all time is a flickered blur
Of falling orange on white,

Misremembered sadnesses;

Hoped, dreamt light
In the deep dark
That goes
Over barn roofs,

The impossible miles

Of black limbs
Reaching, up.

1/17/2017

Now again
The Geminids come -
Seldom spark
In dusks of hoped-for days.

In us
They round hard corners
And well-designed city blocks, and
Go feral and river-unstraight.

The gone campus;

The stands of tall ashes;
The misremembered maps and declinations

Keep guard, now

Over where we were, sure,

When first for us
Came the Geminids,
Seldom spark
In dusks of hoped-for days.

1-3-2017

Municipal gradings

Bleed along

Glacial melt.

Answers beg,

Question,

What

Do you know

About this world?

Those mornings

Cousined up before

Light

And chasing snakes

On the river.

What do you take to you

In these half-finished

Houses of your

Ways north?