10-16-2016

There, the low gold glow - upheld over unharvested

Fields along the bled-black journeys - north, west - undid locks.

And the hid way through went clear when daylight left our dusks.

The elms and maples rose up in frightful silhouette.

Crew changes went wrong in fogs; October lost our heads.

Someone said, "Hold close what God promised to you bastards."

And then it was dizzying dives into pools of black.

Some nights I build fires in the backyard dark, after work.

I remember, like some still do, what it meant to hope.

10-9-2016

The edge of the Milky Way.

You could strop it sharper
If you had the time.

It would be easy,
That edge against
All those others:
Waiting, silence among them.

But there was no time,
The dusks too soon dawn,

And those step-stones
Each night
Lulling you and
Your friend's father

Out
From the shore

To the bottom of
Lake Michigan.

9/25/2016

Autumn passes over the world,
Brimming
Quiet and certainty.

The cicadas go.
Then the katydids.

Then the memory
Of what the
Dead trees looked like in spring.

Brittle gold,
Finality, pass
To the stalks and fields,

And the twilights make their
Agreement again with
Fire,
Low
In the early night.

Green and growth
Shrink from old pathways
And the space between homes.

The secret ways north
Turn obvious again.

8-13-2016

Cirrus clouds
Flake like flint
Against the half-moon,

Shifting,
Fine grain in knife handle

Where that moon,
Ever noted, has remained,
Cat-eye
Over maples,

And where train sounds have gone
Too close to the sleeping children.

All night,
The sky
Thins to edge and whittles away
The top of the old world’s breath.

I am still waiting underneath it,
Carving my names into
The triangles made by the
Stars above this hemisphere

Leuchtturm 3-22-2016

In this dream
I am tasked with choosing
A piece of farmland.

It's easy
Because I
Remember an inheritance

That includes
Great iron swaths of
Longitude,

Subjugated blast furnaces

That slip from unfathomably far beneath the sunset

And merge into the Loop
At daybreak.

Leuchtturm 3-9-2016

I do not know what led to it:

I dreamt an inland sea
Aside scavenged offices,

And I set a tree on fire.

A town that once had been familiar to me
Awoke,
Put on the dawn,

Embarrassed necklace,
And rushed to my encampment.

I remembered,
And for them,

The sudden gasp of cold spring
Over untilled fields;

The unintended nature
Of the jungle yes,
Pearl within all no.

2-22-2016

I should thank
It is the middle of

The long, and I am must,
And beautiful, first

Impossible
Straight blade,
Walkway night that

You know me,
Such that I cannot say
So you are infathomed,
And I should go,

My shoulders along
The rows of corn

And bones below.

I should say
I've been a shadow,
The middle of.

Leuchtturm 5

Wheat,
    Burnt gold.

That sudden crash
    In the kitchen
    In the middle of the night;

        The fumbling after deadbolt;

        The panicked heal
        Hooked over spike-lip
        Beneath the shaking steel door.

What is it for, worth, when the last light

    Moving over fields
    Is final, same
    As the dreaded miles,

    And the way through 
    That was beaten down
        Again, again,

            Is grown over every morning?

Leuchtturm 4

We found the lightless floor at 2AM,
Our old legs
In that house in Michigan,

Near that lake:
    Shallow; trudged for days
    Until the green-gray drop-off.

We opened two sets of sliding doors

And winter poured in -
Christmas,
Blinding and
Same as the year my
Great-Grandfather died:

My young body caught pneumonia;
Nearly his death.

The stars there are slowly melting spring-steel:
A great, feral grace
Crawling
Over the rush of the world
Passing beneath it,

And all the earth's deer
Hanged from all the earth's branches -

    The night's great horizon
    Rushing, breathless -
    The world of it receding
    Over unseen edges
    And taking us, and the children

    When we lean too far
    Through open doors
    Into the dark.

The snow
Against our necks
Saws our
Breath;

The
Safety we have promised
I could never give.

And so it goes molten.
Perfect. Beautiful.

Leuchtturm 3

Remembering,
Keys on bent coat hanger
Worn silver against gold,

Mock Orange
And Ditch-Apple Osage leaves

Hushing each other
In shadow.

From underneath all things,
From where
The low sun pours through
All faults,

Black walls go porous,
And the forward
Spin of years stills.

Leuchtturm 2

You ask me, our children safe behind us,
About the rocks in Pennsylvania
When I was lost and
Near-lifeless, among cornrows --
Sleeping in empty-church twilight,
Waiting for any freight.

When I was terrified;

When rocks piled by strangers
At my head, my feet,
Were the whole of the world,

You ask, our children not safe
Behind us,
About the house in Pennsylvania,

And I am discovered by

What would answer us both,

That boy,
Stood up, dumb,
In audacious grace.

Leuchtturm 1

What we treasure;
The remainders,

    When there is nothing to know
    But mud piling up
    Along the canal.
    The long list,
    The knife of fathers,
    Comets observed,
    Remembered.

We pull alongside that
Decade-thick list of only words
And understand the long legs
We find beneath us
By the falls.

    One more remembered lake-path;
    One more jungled abstinence;
    One more set of
    Childless nights
    Along the palisades
    And effigies.

1-27-2016

The wrist goes still

and springs are unfed,

A few nights
pored over

Januaries,

Hands found in
morning coals,

Nights black as

The county,
flood warnings
ladled about the Kankakee,

And the way across
clear, still not possible,

Half-accomplished.

1-5-2016

Even when I was that child,
One leg in the Calumet,

I am here,
Nearer to
The way all things nosedive

Lifeless

Into snowbanks
In the end.

Even as I pulled my
Pockets empty each
Into seething winter
Rivers,
Hope
Clawed past my shoulders to find
My children.

And when I despair,
I remember
All my needed knives,

Gone from me
To depths of great lakes
By my own hand,

And careen around the sunless bends
With all that is required to keep careening.

1-1-2016

The angles
Found alongside,

The fire, the worries.