12-17-2013

On muddy fields
turned up same
and black
and ready,

new songs sang themselves
into waiting,

among waiting,

where keys dangled
in seen-comet still.

The singing yet
pulls itself
through
inlet crookedness -
earth crookedness -

to fractal shorelines
straightened,

fractured in their straightening,

poured out,
pressed down,

Their remainders
spilling over the unlit west.

Old December

Its sky,
lightless.

Ending month
of unseen clouds

Or inundating stars -
their ungatherable heat
embered
in the cold
of their own silver light
above ungloved pines.

Its houseless nights
and windowless bends.

Its unbridged straits
and catch-out-to-anywhere murk.

Its brittle taste of juniper.

11-27-2013

Sleep is a place of unlinked fenceposts;
the old message unread, remembered,
dragged by ankle
over wild shines
and left
unopened
between
unmeeting things.

Hands drift
toward doors there,

Traverse and 
unfold,
and give noise
in their unfolding

against
thresholds,
Begging after answer

From rooms behind
strewn with blanket
and cornhusk
and panic.



How to be still,

in those rooms.

How to wait;

How to outlast
ceilings

until the embered stars
alight upon them.

Sills

The oldness in
my legs
unfurls,

Its promises
lengths spent

along the Little Calumet.

That certain sound

Of trains
that makes a song.

The sills
of it
lifted

to my eyes.

Novembers

Confounded language
and aftermath,

leaves
cradled under fences,
edges gathered,
drawn, spun,
lifted up by old light
atop
silhouettes of
high-tension towers
strung over the low,
late-autumn sun.

Six or seven minutes

in all the world
have been hammered
from this slant of light.

And there, maybe,
the delicate erosions of
footfall
in leaf litter
along the Indian Boundary Line,
or in some years
the rusting Wabash,
poured upon, vanished
by wind and dark
and the moments
they define.

I wake up and pray
without ceasing
in that old country,
when it comes near.

Those old, shivering days;

Another earth,
drifting
alongside the old one,

its
dust,
its uttering serpants

spinning slowly away
in rivulets
of silver

in a new skyline
on shores
just over the rise.

Flashlight Mythology

Because I love my children, I have rightfully taught them to honor the Marvel universe above the DC universe. The reasons for this are obvious to the most casual observer. 

Until recently, the one and only exception to this rule was The Dark Knight. Batman, after all, has always been the most Marvel-like hero that DC has to offer. Is this a surprise? Of course not: Batman's story -- from top to bottom -- is the closest DC could ever come to the pathos, irony, and dramatic grit that Marvel's heros bring to the table. Wolverine and Batman could very easily spend a night closing bars together in a way that Aquaman and Iron Man never could. Marvel's evil has always been far more tempting and gray and empathetic than DC's; its good always far more conflicted, precarious, and morally tough. In short, Marvel's universe has always been far more difficult; in a word, real. A mythology that resonates because it knows, authenticates, and mirrors.

The weakest link (ironically) in DC's universe has always been Superman. Here you have an invincible being - impervious to all known weapons - imbued with all imaginable superhuman abilities. Can outrun anything. Can move any object. Can withstand any weapon. Can see, hear, do pretty much anything. A being of omniscience, omnipotence, and (for all practical purposes) omnipresence. His one weakness? Yeah. A green rock that shows up every now and then as the plotline demands.

So imagine my surprise when we watched "Man of Steel" tonight.

Here's a movie that gets very well how the humble comic book -- at best -- captures the flickering, fireside mythos of the ages. And does so without ever once winking at itself or us.

I don't know.

Maybe my expectations were so low that I couldn't help but be pleasantly surprised, but I found the whole exercise to be exhileratingly refreshing, and surprisingly moral.

Weakness as strength, strength as weakness. Grace in restraint, restraint in respect. You know, that sort of thing.

11-10-2013

The night,

The comet.

The
trailhead.

The young, remembered

November;

Old tasks given
by God.

His windowless rooms

Dragging
from between
out-buildings.

His patient
curve,

Giving
shorelines
to maps,

The Calumet City
and
Cline Avenue
ways out
from underneath.

The form of
Testaments
Left upon tables;

The shame of what was traced
In that dust.

The call?

Wailing

After the framing
and the doors have
swelled
beyond all entrance.

A Near-Halloween Story

It's late October. I had made my way back to Marquette by car. Restless, I'd decided to wander around Prairie du Chien. I spent most of the night before smoking cigar after cigar on the roof outside my motel window, with cheap Scotch frying in my gut. Still, the next morning I woke up with the sun. I wandered along the old main street, stepping into small bookstores and cafes, finding nothing. I spent the day smoking and scribbling among the effigies in Pike's Peak State Park. By dusk, I have talked myself into the Phillips 66 gas station/restaurant near the tracks, obvious with a half gallon of water occupying the space in the booth next to me. My olive-green coat. A thick, dirty duffle bag. Suddenly dark, there was time, still: Time for a walk, maybe.

I move out onto a street that finds itself on the outline of a bluff, that finds itself stranded near the Mississippi. It's practically raining leaves. Parties and gatherings and mutterings spill out onto back porches of a Saturday night. It's cold. I'm underdressed, obvious again. There's a silver quad-cab pickup in the dark back at the gas station when I return; and a man, a woman; a small girl; hugs and kisses. I'm inside, next, back at my booth. The man from the quad-cab pickup is walking past, his eye on me. I can see that the people who work here know him. Painfully, I'm a stranger to them.

Outside a train idles alongside the river near the bridge. Barges rust in the current. The year is pulling itself toward winter. I take glances, then stare at the pickup man, unblinking. I do this because he is stopped near me, drilling holes through me or something just over my shoulder, obvious; framed in the fluorescent light like a fat harvest moon. My face feels long, thin. He comes alongside me. I can feel the floor come up under my feet. Some silence travels between us. He's a heavy man, I observe. Weathered. Unshaven. Stuffed with his years. I can hear him breathe as he regards me. I gather my obvious dufflebag into my lap and push my back upward and into the back of the booth and breathe. Quickly, he lifts his right hand up into the air - an exaggerated gesture - and lowers it. He looks away, and up, and lifts up the sleeve on his left arm, begins slapping the face of his black-banded watch rhythmically, slowly with two fingers.

"Fifteen minutes," he says, the words tumbling sloppily past themselves, tiredly, as though uttered from the mouth of an exasperated teacher. "We'll go west for a while. Then almost a stop. A near full stop." I push myself back into my booth and straighten myself, again. "Then waaaaaay north. I'm meaning way north. Right? Straight hours, not minutes." I look down at the table. I put my hands there and study my fingers. "It's mixed," he says. "But it's going pretty much straight through. Get out there now if you're looking for something that won't shake the shit out of you." He walks away, slowly.

And it's getting later. Colder and colder. Darker and darker.

It's nearly November. I find myself back outside. The ground is vibrating. I am walking, blatantly, next to the idling train.

The light from the gas station; The houses; The picnic pavilion; The bridge over the Mississippi; The moon. All that light, so yellow and thin. Like weathered Scotch tape over a neglected photograph.

The river-sounds nose up against the wind in the trees. For a moment I imagine I'm watched, but the moment passes. My coat is too thin, and I'm clenching my teeth, even shaking, the autumn wind peeling its slight edges away from the warmth of my chest. It's clear. It's late to be catching out. Nothing in me honest is up for can-opening another trip north.

And I'm tired.

But a weird obligation hangs heavy in the darkness over me, and I have thrown chains around thick, unseen poles that launch themselves up from bedrock to Polaris.

And so I am, stolen, and framed in a stupid crosshair on a map of Iowa, mining a string of well-mixed freight for a grain car.

And now the Quad-Cab Man is coming along the dim edge of the track. I recognize his pear shape and the borders of his coat. He seems tired.

"Go home," he says, clearly, bluntly.

I slow, and then stop. I'm not in trouble: There isn't a hint of a threat in his voice. But a firmness lives there. He doesn't break his stride, but keeps trudging up the line toward the engine.

"Come on guy. Get yourself home."

Something fatherly in his words disarms me. His eyes look past mine.

"Forget it." He stretches out the word: "Ferrrrrget it." Both of his arms arc slowly up into the cold air.

"Go home! You want to see Thanksgiving, right?"

He passes by me.

"They're gonna find you dead in that coat, guy."

Suddenly my eyelids, my arms, my legs, my duffle bag all seem unbearably heavy. The cold pushes through my jacket, and cuts past the buttons on my shirt to rest against my bare chest. A part of me that hasn't been afraid for a long time is instantly nervous. This is not the first time someone has said this sort of thing to me. But suddenly it feels as if a filter has been lifted off of the lens: Literally. Visually, physically, everything changes. Everything looks dirty and greasy and raw; and the air is ice-cold; and the train stinks; and my stomach goes queasy.

Something darker than the darkness of the descending night seems to ooze and crawl from around the edges of the still, silent railcars looming now more above me than next to me.

The train feels suddenly and strangely unfamiliar. A kind of hostility bubbles up from underneath it.

The cars tower over me -- black, hulking masses -- as if they might collapse in a heap in their great tonnage upon my frail form.

But there's that weird obligation still hanging in the air. So I keep walking along the line, but move a few paces apart from the staring string of freight.

I feel a slow terror begin to grip me, from somewhere outside of myself. I cannot appropriate this train, and yet I am still searching for my grain car.

And now my head is throbbing, and I feel like I must steady myself. And I am beset with what I can only describe as an abject feeling of pure horror; unmitigated dread, as though at any moment the devil himself might lean out from one of the cars and pull me up.

I stumble away from the train, the line, slowly, unable to make myself run.

As I manage to put more space between myself and the tracks, I feel the black dread ease. I keep glancing over my shoulder to reassure myself that the train isn't actually somehow still occupying the space immediately behind me.

I make it to the city park with its bank of picnic tables, and hurl my bag and my water away from me as if some of that weird blackness still clings to them. I throw myself down on a weathered bench, feeling as though I've just sprinted a mile pursued by a twister.

I'm still catching my breath when I hear the slack action ripple down the line of freight, and the train begins to haul itself away.

The night softens again, and I can hear leaves on the pavement; cars crossing over the bridge.

Nearby, laughter and conversation.

Slowly, saved yet again, I return to myself.

October

These ancient nights
Stack close
To the ends of all things
And pour into the earth
Still; again; with
Cold, sturdy edges
Honed against their own forms,

Alone as October

Trees
Returning
To their own, tried darknesses;
Sinking back
Into shadows
That they have brought alongside
Themselves.

And the wind, murmuring
Familiar rounds
Through another year's dusk
Of recalling leaves,

It's sigh
Curling over
Stirred coals

And the old, grasping whisper
Gathered
Against fence line
And threshold.

And late -
In the storied,
Waiting murk -

Winter

Come over the open
Fields of fallen corn
To nose up to the fire.

I remember well
Each and every return.

10-20-2013

These October trees
Grasp hopelessly
After their leaves
In fear of inevitable winter,
Its coming absences,
And wild, empty winds
Screaming over plains.

And the winter will come, and
It's absences,
And the trees will crouch
Naked
On the plains, in the wind,
Leafless and stony and old.

And all night, every night,
They will dream
Of pulling their long roots
Out of the earth's crust
And stumbling, fat-footed
In flight, and wander,
And escape.

But somewhere,
Near the thin sapling still suspended
At the center of what the decades
And the wounds and the weathers
Have calloused and encased,

They know that they
Are purposed
To awaken where they were;
Find themselves where they were.

10-17-2013

When the leaves have fallen
To the last,

There is no
Possibility
Of branch-lifted leaves
Moving
In wind
Against a harvest moon.

And without harvest
The moon is same
As any month,
Leafless
Or otherwise.

Roads are that way,
In their waiting:

The expectations
They lift up
Through themselves;

That path behind the chapel
At college
That quits itself
And becomes
A thick.

That drive home
From
Alongside wreckages.

Yet

When the leaves have fallen
To the last,

The harvest moon
Is uncovered
Easily

From beneath the black wet branches.

What You Awoke

What you

Awoke

Your hands
offered up

Tall
pines

proud

Staggering

leaned
over gold

Straight branches

Under and

Along

Dreams of
rivers

twin,

navigated

knotted lines

surrendered

necklaces,

chainlink,

high school
darkrooms

and

rockets
sent

to
what was
hoped

for,

shut eyes,

miles,

piles of
sharpened

stones,

record store bin

dividers.

Left
By the road.

10-3-2013

The trees
surrender in unison,

and their leaves are lost
in one collective gasp
to roadways and shoulders
and lift-bridges.

We stand at the edge of the park
and see it
lumbering, thick-furred,
long-clawed
toward us
along the tracks.

In our childhoods,
we recall this death.

Our first death.

We give the trees
until the end
of October
to get it done.

To paint the earth
with fire,

before the wind
and the white
come
to our doorframes
and our driveways;

before the deer-kill.

Before the diesel
jellies
in the tanks
near Lake Winnipeg,

and the cold moon
carves itself into
what we see
and what we hope for.

10-2-2013

In the end
you will own all rivers,
so
you will own
my drowning;

And those pines
uprooted for it
that widen the banks
and polish my bones.

I asked of you
all that I'd been
commanded to ask.

I waited, knifeless,
in all that dark.

10-1-2013

I had been
explaining the prairie
to my sons when
the Fox Sedge and
Culver's Root
leapt up around us,
and they were suddenly gone to me
among the saddle-tall stalks.

Long before,
I fell upon a
shoreless plain
and watched it
unfold this way.

For years I rolled,
a wordless fool,
between autumns,
and gatherings
of unlit streetlamps.

I stumbled over well-vined
pumpkins,
and the church-watched sorrows
of grace
pulled away and out from underneath.

But thank God
for those low-angled twilights
hanging off my belt,

old as iron mines:

 I would not have otherwise come across my boys,

their legs
shaking,
knit together
near
the grown-over paths.

That Autumn

It's true.

The floor of the world
beneath that
row of pines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unfamiliar

Where I am now,
late at night at times
long after last locks,

    the floor shifts

such that folded years
are moved to edges
and brimmed over.

It seems then as if
I still move along
a memorized treeline
of missed hints
in unnumbered
darknesses.

Dogs with their teeth;

The world with its miles;

What was pressed by silence
from pathways
through the thick.

The backyard's stars
are the same stars,

no more tamed
by my collar,
my fire,
my furnace:

Nothing devised
could ever hope
to house their reflection.

The floor shakes that way
north of coffee,

and skylines
blur together.

It gets unsafe to move around,
even on your knees.

So I lay down -
spend that same night staring
at the face of what
has always stared back.

The Ring of the Bell

I have not named my panic.

That's why possibility
still crouches near embers

and faith yet mumbles
flint with steel
in pockets
on the old shoreline
near dawn.

Heading west,

I can still feel the steel
of the ring
of the bell
in my hands.

Still Don't, Never Will

I was raised up from an imaginary town
and jostled awake.

I was carried
in the ink
past unnamed rivers.

It happened under weary stars - all of it -
under comets
without names.

It sounds romantic:
years,
winters,
decades.

Firsts and seconds.

But it's just simple:

A cartographer's
lazy dream
of blue and red;
marbled terrain
spreading north
where the railroads thin.

I saw what I saw,
and I knew what I knew.

But I didn't see much,
and didn't know enough.

    Still don't. Never will.