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.