Michigan

It could be Michigan. The bared branches;
the succulent mist racing to sunrise.
Or Riverdale: The Southshore tracks humming;
Halloween dusk of failing furnaces -
mills giving slag and taconite to ships
and trains made up in sad and muddy yards.
It could be the strangers. The men walking:
the tired caution measured against hope.
The library unlit and left open;
The reach of trees remembered when the night
Might be the last, embers not resurrected.

Moon

Wondering what it was —

coming above abandoned buildings,
left cellar,
walls
stuffed with pages,
newsprint
in fatherless fields.

Turns out
it was only the moon,

apocolypse,

blood pressed

moving
over silver

clouds, and
stars, and
glass, lake,

lanternlight
pushing
like strangers
over an old map
through
smoke and frost and
the edges that cornhusks
give,
up. Up.

The
ageless
emblems
emeralding
in transit:

Those Sunday nights
in the church basement.

And all things stilling.

All things hushing,
unafraid.

Hiraeth

And what way next,
the careless question,
nervous under storms
with no destination
sharp or filled
with fire.

Thunder
in the heel,

the steel of it
resounding

winter,
speeding through the
Minnesota bends;

graffitied cocoon;

too-trusted coat
and the barn-sides
passing,
passing -

strangers
slung over shoulders

and paths
beneath pins.

That stack of blame,
wild as God;

and God 
a broken knife
lost beneath the waves

and your children
wanting
to know

the ways you know
His grace is good.

Is It A Dream?

In a dream, all these ways home
spilled upward from an ankle.

Snakes fled from
footfall through the Beggarsticks.

Wanderings flowed
through
waterway shoulders.

And August,
old as ever,
silhouetted
strangers
on horizon.

Young days
filled old shoes,

And pressed themselves
through safety glass
on carnival shores.

In that dream,
that old, old dream,

Soft skin reveals its scars
to the earth
like Moses
given to the reeds,

and I cross over
wide, open roads
in sudden, surprising
leaps.