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.

Lines Composed Outside of Harpers Ferry

East upon east,
All is ghost;
Ancestor;
Remnant.

Even the present nights
With their trees, moving,
Are unearthed
From battlefields.

The Shenandoah
Remembers when it had no name;

And townless
Places were bent around by it,
And by clouds in the mountains
Above it,

Before sword-scabbard hangers
Lost themselves
From the dead,
And went on to oxidize,
And will their way up toward hazy sunshines
Through plow-furrows.

These things know,
And sometimes us,
That the days here have not earned themselves
And likely never will.

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.

Blanket of Stars

Of all things, the sky is impervious.

Underneath I dream
a bad road,
and still batter whale bellies
and tourists for tin roofs.

In dreams we talk west
with tail ends and sweet backs
and stew builders;

we prone the body, there,
or nail a rattler,

or make a hole in the water
when the batting's been handed the match.

Trust

These leaves,
this grain,
these ties -
knowing
Elohim knows
the best way home;

Trust vining
through years

And then the spring sky
resting on trees,

and a finished thing inscribed,

moments gathered decades
near basement doors,

and winter's dropped knives
found.

My cold hands
have been a name for you
as long as I've been full of sin.

I've been my own way through,

And I
remember well

trusting,

the way slate
Connecticut tombstones
trust the earth,
near the sea.

in answer

I still stab
numb-thumbed after
what answer
the shoulder
and the road
expect
after all that asking,

and silences after.

You can sharpen
anything with
anything:

That much is clear.

Sunset came
again
again,
in smoke-eyed waves
pouring
clockwork
over the black-branched hills;

That old
oxidized
shadow of dawn.

That much I know;

And this:

The dark is present
in the answer;
and spark as well;
and fatwood,
and youth.

Entropy

It is the way of
things that unfold or
spiral;

That is to say

God
in the black centers of galaxies,

his
names erupting
in comets;

And my understanding
of the yoke
of the world;

my wordless corpse

lengthwise in snow,
the chiseled symbol of me
scribing
name to years
pulled eyeless
over limestone
and sundog,

drawn up
from tide
or road
to the light
of the bewildering moon.

Waiting for Snow

Half a window with its night;
an angle;
a tumult;
a beach and its glass
abandoned in moon;

A Scandinavian grind
of college nights
leaned against
library glass.

The decades —
what they wait for,
what they mean —

and what the
window murmurs
with its night,
its open doors moving,
years moving over.

Sing for me a loss —
a half-night;
that street-lit porch;

those belly-full clouds
and that sea
and all that shines upon it.

At the end of the world
come the spires of pines
and the stars between:

Everything opened
in one great moment
I once knew.

I put on my boots
and took them off again.

I moved from
the house
toward the tracks
in the night.

I heard that old voice

Promising, promising,
promising.

And I was afraid.

A Dream of Windows Where There Are None

All my remaining days are

frames absent
posts;
small years
gasping
Easter without fire
over
thresholds
hushed
behind the choir loft.

I am
unembarrassed,
poured over
church lawns;

long shadows
of last bridges.

I am
a last people;

a dreamt language
of exhausted pictographs
pounded
into
brass
and cornhusk

where my children sleep,

become.

what locks go unlocked

All those buried axles
and the road become trail,
become rumor
near slag heaps
and ruined moons,
and the ways forward.

What locks go unlocked
fill up the firelight,
and the ingratitude
of passage
circles three times
in the tall grass
and settles too close
to the old encampments.

In the middle of the night
the treetops and the smokestacks
pivot against starshine;

it's all backward,

the face of the compass spinning
beneath the needle.

Shelter

Who has time
for sturdy
rooftops,
those days
spilling through
the old kinds of winters,
the chill smoothing
splintered doorframes,
the snow going
to interior corners?
Those days
outside the kitchen windows,
the silvered sun
pressed between
horizon and the low, gray, down
of the sky -
lulling geese
to stay too-long
in ponds -
were meant for
ages walked,
not overflown.

In the end
east pulls itself to west,
and there's no getting by it.

It all makes sense
the way that nothing ever does, or did;
the way the days still pass
beneath feet
numbed cold, soaked and stilled.

Nickels

My sons' eyes always ask
if I have ever
re-carved nickels into gold.

And I have not
In all the light
of knife-tipped lanterns,

Or the wild
of edges
lit beneath
the sea of what shines
out west.