5-28-2014

All that stink and rust
alongside Calumet City,

Alongside
Potato Creek,

Not
harmonized with
church windows
purposed or

given
to distortion;

not filtering the
setting sun or
yard limit signal lights;

Not,
and

None of it.
None of it.

And telling
stories
of shoulders earned
in dusk or

I have run

alongside.

Or

I am running,

alongside, and

pulling, breathless,

fractals heavy
and still.

Behind all that I
have been given;

gathering
along the twilight wilds

beautiful pushes;

found meanings,
remembered.

My boys awake with
terrifying
wonderments
upon their tongues;
sputtering
in the fields of my once-owned miles,

gilt-edged
transcriptions
spread out
upon years
and bedspreads
and flowering heads
of cottonwoods
near hard-kept fires,

my explanations
numb-mouthed and
liquored,

and
whispered,

and

filled with my father
and his fatherlessness.

5-16-2014

Strong trees, older
than the numbered streets,
were winnowed and
bent, and carried
by the first light
that poured over
bungalows and furnaces
through thick glass blocks
set amongst
the house's oldest bricks.

Thin black shadows
framed with dancing fire.

"Here am I,"
I said.

"Send me."

I have not followed you
anywhere since
in any way,

and yet you have been always true
to our first conversation;

dark indwelt with
dread impossible light,
threaded
through the doorways
and the sills.

And though you have made
your language to me
a rhythm
of silences
and sidings
and half-remembered truths,

I know that I have seen
the edges of you

out

among the waitings,

your voice formless,
vast, and
inexplicable,

murmering
to whom
you have chosen to murmer.

Pontiac

In Pontiac

the flat fields
lay out before themselves
for days.

Their own edges
bleed proud over cornices
of bowed horizon.

And
great ash trunks,
and cottonwood,

bend

as though they have
been soaked in the
raw-thumb
years that bringers
lived beneath them.

As though they
have willingly

in grace

gone supple.

Stars and the Moon

It is all light - points
and dashes -
gold and green and red,

and spinning black, gray, rust
between,

ancient, much of it,
antique, some;

and clear, some,

or pulsing
with the rhythms
of things
that pass,
or carry.

Those beds of wide grass,
fat with water,

stars

and the moon

upside down upon them.

May Day

Washed up over old Thursday.
Thursday night,
nearly abandoned Reformed church husks
are stenciled on unremembered
Cook/Lake county borders.
Over the states, the years.

NaPoWriMo - Aprils

Hidden in a drawer
among the knives and lighters -
up where the kids can't reach -
is an envelope filled with every April
I have ever lived.

April because it offers the most reliable
history of variation,
the occasional blizzard
poking out, askew among
heat waves and drenching gullywashers,
tornadoes roughing up the edges
of fall-familiar days.

April because it lives in a sure hope
after winter,
and I love winter,
but still thirst for summer come April.

April because it has the heaviest lift,
innumerable tons of foliage,
leaves needing lofting up to
bare branches,
and the innumerable tons of
new rain needed to maintain it.

April because each one is remembered
as its own crossing.

Sometimes, late at night,
I take them out and spread them
on the coffee table,
and reread each one.

April, because it always had
the most to teach.

4-30-2014

Old teeth,
graven
with

remembered

terrifying
   shadows,

impossibly;

curves
    in
carved
steel,

having had
left in me
old spring,
and,
still,
worn upward
from dredged pockets,

cold wrists,

slivered semicircles
forged
among
leaf tips.

They have had me,

thieving straightaways;

memorized

edges of saplings;

late avenues of molten leaf litter;

the leather strops

of empty municipal parks.

4-25-2014

It is not
a way through,

but the birds
arrange trees

In the dusk.
Who's to say?

4-24-2014

I know that in some measure
my boys are kept too far from
who I am.

They sleep
in their unembarrassed ways -

their breathings recalling
in me my own father;
The ways he had no father.

The way the wind rushes,
and breathes

along the usuals,

and the knotted fists of
east
pile up at the ends of west.

They love the singing of branch ends
in tall maples.

The wind.

The purple night.

NaPoWriMo 4-22-2014

I once watched a man
imitate the sound
of an engine failing
for five straight,
sawtooth minutes
in the deep woods,
emptied of pathways
at dusk
in or out.

The treetops
in the failing brown light
took on sickle shapes
and leaned in
close together,
staring.

NaPoWriMo 4-20-2014: Easter

That confusingly appropriate episode
on a bewilderingly beautiful
near-Chicago Easter afternoon,
when a baby bunny is discovered
hopelessly wedged between the spring's
fresh rabbit fencing
and the galvanized garage-side;

When you carefully coax it backwards to freedom,
and it scrambles blindingly
back toward its trap,
then pivots suddenly and bolts, panicked,
into the open garage,
where you chase and corner it and
gently bring it to your hands
while the kids cheer,

and you walk,
caressing its fuzzy head and calmly whispering
assurances,

and you place it safely under the yews.

Then ten minutes later,
a shrill rabbit-shaped cry
when the pickup, its driver cautiously eyeing
your children in the yard,
meets the tiny rabbit in the road.

Right in front of the house.
In front of the wife and kids.

Two plastic bags,
the kids banished to the back,
you approach the bundle of dead fir
in the street.

But its heart is beating
there, still,
a million miles a minute,
its terrified eyes
unblinking, and wide
and staring up at your own.

And you have to retrieve a shovel,
quickly,
to finish what the truck did not.

The same shaking hands
that had loved
this perfectly formed, gray
gathering of misadventure
so carefully before,
now so carefully aim,
and swing for a quick end

there,
on Easter Sunday,
and hurrying to do it,
in front of God
and all the neighbors.

4-19-2014

Easter best?

Sure.

Because after death and redemption and resurrection,

I am sure God expects
Lily-pure fragrance,
Sharp pleats
And bright pastels.

Nothing grave-stenched,
Or smoldering,
Or as honest as the
Inconsequence
Of any sacrifice we could bring.

WaPoWriMo - Good Friday

We get the day off.
I usually ruin it:
I know what I cost.

NaPoWriMo - 4-18-2014

I know what you did,
and what it means.

But I am still
spending time
propped
beneath remote
Canadian trestles,

begging spark
along
paths of trespass.

I am fat with my shame.

And the grace
that you so freely give
does not ever pierce
the hearts
that you have hardened.

NaPoWriMo - 4-18? Something?

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.

NaPoWriMo - 4-17-2014

I dreamt that a man from
Global Facilities found me
in a conference room at HQ,
interrupting to inform me
that the agreed-upon move
was complete.

I spent the night in short sleeves
and thin khakis, in the cold rush, lashing pens
and desk legs to grabiron
with shoe laces and torn socks
and Canadian jam knots.

NaPoWriMo 4-16-2014: The Bay of Fundy

Main streets
full with half doors,
top halves
open, light spilled
from behind

carve gray
mineshafts into
shore-fog

and form a closeness,
or maybe closenesses
tempering
an unspeakable expanse.

These counties
collapse and fold
in upon themselves
like dying spiders,
sloppy with
five-dollar lobster
pouring out
into the walk-up, starless dark.

The surviving traffic
at the far end of the country
steers by knee
through
centerless towns;

towns that do something like welcome
hungry
traversers.

Nearby,
The Bay of Fundy
does
what the Bay of Fundy does,

And
leafless trees
go thin, fragile,
silver with frost
where they meet the assumed sky,

and sweat
in heavy rivulets
and pourings
where they cling to the earth.

NaPoWriMo 4-15-2014

I dreamt that a man from
Global Facilities found me
in a conference room at HQ,
interrupting to inform me
that the agreed-upon move
was complete.

I spent the night in short sleeves
and thin khakis, in the cold rush, lashing pens
and desk legs to grabiron
with shoe laces and torn socks
and Canadian jam knots.

NaPoWriMo - 4-14-2014

Calm
down.

If I could
have taught your
corpse
to fly
the way
your corpse
has dreamt
of flying,

over the North Shore
libraries
and student unions,

I would have
done it by now,

showing to you
plainly
unceasing
ebbings, retreatings
of shoreline.

All that's gone along now,

And you wear the truth
of tired men.

You protect yourself
those crazy ways.
Those

arms across an earthen face,
all elbows and knees,

bones like roots.

NaPoWriMo 4-13-2014 - Palm Sunday

Later,
after the bokeh haze
of adaptations
crafted for children

concerning
your arrival,
your passing through

dimmed

from fragile pastels
to harsh, oxidized
firmament,

The trouble between us began.

Some years,
frost still
caked the soil;
and the coat racks
in the foyer
still swelled
the way they did on Christmas Eve.

Other years,
the doors and windows
were propped open,
and the ceiling fans turned,
and Sunday School
spilled out onto the
eleven-o'-clock
lawn.

We took turns
passing hands
over the cornerstone:

Remembrances that were
not holidays;
milestones
adrift
upon the ancient calendars;
and days dreamlike
and unsteady

when we were led,
hastily choreographed,
up from behind the choirloft
stairs,

confused palm fronds
waving in imaginary abandon.

When I surrendered
to your triumphant
entrance,
I was but a child.

How could I have known
the dark depths of your great will;
the dread potential
of your great silence?