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.