About Time

When we were young,

and frost on the windows in winter

reminded us of nothing before us,

and did not cause us

to draw parallels to spiritual realms,

we would have nothing of

giving ourselves to sleep,

or handing ourselves over to the night.

Now, when the winters walk through our streets

like dying old men, and breathe their breath

against our living,

we pivot in the room toward the darkest corners;

corners not covered by the spitting flicker of candle

or imitated light of halogen, mercury, or decaying tungsten,

and we secretly crave sleep—

a caught breath in raging floods.

And the sounds of souls walking the hallways;

of clocks scratching out ages;

of hearts unknowingly slowing;

of winds scouring the face of the earth;

of loose change on the dark-matter pavement—

these things and all things

remember in us only the death of time.

***

Everything was now then,

like bullets through tempered glass;

bombs on airplanes.

I wish I could say we wept and gnashed our teeth,

and read The Waste Land by the sea,

but we did not.

We smoked cigars and laughed,

never hushed at feeling the time pass,

or knowing that there is no time

like time past.

Knowing that the death of time

would be remembered in us.

***

There went a flurry of notes from the score,

racing from one page in a book of billions,

on a shelf of trillions:

There is a trip around the lake,

a fall from the cradle,

a car crash;

            a birthday and a funeral.

There is a vacation out west,

a view of the ocean,

a dead sister . . .

Look, there—

we are sitting on the rocks by the sea,

laughing.

(And now is when I hear the music first;

when you spoke;

in between each word—

notes drifting across the vast waves.

And here is my face turned to stone.)

. . . a last year spent staring at a ceiling,

a lost dog,

a skinned knee . . .

See! There—it has happened;

is clear upon the face of us—

the turning inward and back,

the longing for moments fate-swallowed and gone.

***

The tombstones near the ocean are made from slate,

thin as the second and the hour,

dark as the closing smudge of the sun’s last gasping

at dusk.

The hills should not hold them—

sand-thin and whispering with grass.

The old Bostonians do not care,

and will hear nothing of it,

knowing that time floods away from things

and not through.

Nothing is worn away that was not in some ways already gone.

And so we stood gape-souled near the cemeteries,

nearly gone.

Already gone.

Already

Eyes looking for a now not rushing away,

not sudden,

not dark and echoing in the years

of other people before us.

Gone.

***

We did best to discover early

a life reaching up and touching the infinite:

adoration; confession;

thanksgiving; supplication;

where Christ’s faithless bride taught us to pray:

“I come before you

with praise and adoration

for being who you are—

Creator and Lord of all the universe;

you alone worthy of all praise.”

Yet the old men—those who still pray—

have taken their barges miles from this

among the reeds,

and see the infinite waiting to grasp,

not to be grasped,

and simply cry out

for the frost-gilded panes

of their youth;

to see the play of light

with praise and adoration

behind the glass

for being who you are

and to remain on the edge

and you alone

of knowing it completely.

are worthy.

***

We picked cherries in the summer sun,

and ate ourselves sick on them in the afternoon.

The next day, after hard sleep and a slow morning,

this sickness was forgotten,

easily.

Look, you don’t understand—

there is great light behind this;

the way we so quickly forgot such things;

the way we were so harshly stung by the fruit of the tree

and then were content with only sun and lake-breeze and lunch.

Years later we crave the very afternoons!

When I look at you in those moments of silence,

when the point of talking is lost up in the sway of branches

and the cloying fragrance of fat leaves,

I see you hovering there,

back there,

smelling the rotting tree-fruit on the undergrowth;

craving the drowning-lakes of lands left behind in time,

not space.

Until you catch my eye,

jarred at

touching the shirtsleeves of heaven.

And time digs

hard into the earth;

passes us, its victims,

through the jungle’s teeth.

***

The chirp of the cricket is ancient—

as ancient as imagined—

more ancient nonetheless.

The chirp of the cricket is ancient as lightning.

Its rhythm measures temperature—

so deeply it is ingrained

within the world.

Time moves within the cricket and binds it to the earth.

The moments shimmed between flash and thunder

unravel into distance.

Time moves within the thunder, hammers and holds it

to the face of the world.

The second-hand rounds the watch-face

while we sleep,

and tethers us to the earth—

holds us in a box,

above another box,

until we slip between notches on the clock,

where each cricket before and ever after,

and every storm

are then, now, and next

Each chirp

and momentary flash

pinhole to brighter light behind.

***

The last time we saw the Mackinac Bridge together

we were quite young;

terrified

by web-like cables lofting the monolithic corpse of roadway

to sway above the straits.

The car lurched forward toward predation through the eye of a toll booth,

and we braced ourselves behind the backs of weak parents and vinyl seats

against the roar of the steel grate chewing at the underbelly,

the churning green deep waiting to swallow and to end us.

I traveled the bridge last year

unafraid,

unmoved in the least.

***

Talk of dreams is exhausting,

and you are sleeping, sent to dreams yourself

as I speak.

Nonetheless, you should know that the man

was without a face, and knelt slowly and annoyed

when he saw that I had seen the perfect, full and centered

span of the bridge.

The bridge was in the desert,

and had always seemed incomplete—

not broken, destroyed, or unfinished—

but obscured, as if hidden by the light of the sun.

It ran east to west,

with firm footings on each end:

to the east voices in wind,

signs and wonders;

to the west, fossil records and ice cores.

Regardless,

the man was faceless,

and carried an unloaded gun.

When I approached the height of the span

I was old,

and still not near death.

I was old and full of memories

of the road past and still ahead;

of life lived and yet to come.

And there

upon the bridge a great conjoinment:

quantum states infinite, fragile;

the microwave shadows of beginning.

The man dipped slowly to the ground

as I turned to the waking state.

He knelt,

spitting,

raking mud from the earth

onto the tips of shining copper shells.

I felt the sting,

turning to find the face of a clock

where I supposed the man’s would be.

***

Your heart has told you many things,

not the least of which is this:

that hell is the repetition of time—

Look at this beggar, hanging himself again and again,

talking to himself all the while

—and heaven as well:

In your heart you claim to know

that the clock still secretly holds captive

that celestial bliss,

where the world is but a collection of afternoons

at the lake or the churchyard,

and the moments are linked and looped

into joy on the face of a child.

. . . Time

Your heart,

which itself

for now so faithfully beats the minute,

will fail in the shadow

of that light.

And you might laugh

that you ever supposed to see

Moses among the rushes

and then again

at the parting of the sea.

Did you really think to find Christ crucified

for all eternity?

has its beginning and its death . . .

Mile-markers confused

for the road.

***

None of this of course matters

while you are driving north on a Sunday night

heading for October,

the windows down for no more reason

than to know that indeed it is

growing colder, and to slowly inhale

the smell of the Great Lakes

even there,

when the rush of air, machinery and oil,

of factory slag and diesel fuel

is oddly pure, and makes this great now

you occupy

largely impenetrable

and lovely.

You will point out, of course,

that this is no salvation—

and rightly so.

You will laugh—

there, you have—

and remind me

(requiring reminding)

that this is what makes it matter the most:

these moments of distracted joy,

when attention has been drawn away

from the shadows behind the glass

by some friend’s joke

or request for information

from the conversation across the hall,

and then,

just as you are speaking,

in your peripheral half-sight

you sense naked movement in the great room

behind the glass:

All the eternal truth your heart will ever hold

captured

in the last light of a flashbulb’s death.

And that is all—a fleeting sense of clarity;

a dim aurora

faintly stitched across your life.

***

Yes, the stars are resplendent tonight,

and yes, I have been looking all my life

for one single unifying proof.

But defending a negative is suicide—

as countless suicide notes would say—

and I cannot provide what my own mind requires.

It is easy for you to suppose, upon viewing the stars,

that because at this moment you do not care one way or another,

the question need not be settled all at once, if at all.

And still, I say, there is this troubling set of minutes that haunt

the thoughts that truly do not matter,

which linger at the edges of the day;

there is this memory of perfect, trusting knowledge—

remembered as clear and unquestionable,

and devilishly ungraspable now—

that kept me, I believe, physically warm

when I was a child.

And now I have rendered you silent!

(Certainly, you still speak, laughing at me now;

but something larger and indelibly real in you

has locked onto these fragments of which I speak.)

Yes, your only point was that the stars are resplendent tonight.

No, they do not appear at all indifferent to the sky.

***

The hours are hay-filled

with talking endlessly;

cornhusking,

spouting and pouring out

about baggage and travel and signs.

Who is this single voice pulled out from the idle

crowd of chatter bursting the windows and the frame?

We have stuffed the moments full of speed and straw,

hurrying the days away through the gates.

You turned to me in a moment of social pause

not merely to glance up at the drapes or the balls of dust

in the corners near the ceiling, but to lean in

near my drowning ear and ask, delicately,

“Who is it that sits in the corner

that way

not speaking,

his knees drawn up to his chin,

looking at no single person and still me,

directly, when my sight cares to wander that way?

Who is it that sits in the corner

as if there is no conversation,

no annoying glint of serrated half-light

battering the window and the eyes?”

I suspected I might answer you,

and then you moved away, sucked back into the

maddening churn.

I suspected I might answer you,

but there were no words in my cringing face

to race out to meet you, after all;

to fall away from the moments to say

that we were not occupying the same instant

just then,

and there was no man, distracted, intent

or otherwise in the corner,

but a tiger—

the same tiger—

pacing circles

and eyeing the crowd.

The years burn away like parched fields of hay.

You have found swaying saw-grass

where I have stared hours at seraphs’ great wings.

***

All of these things have occurred to me

as though laid out upon a table:

The bridge in Mackinac;

the span in the desert;

the clock-faced man;

the graves by the sea.

All of this occurred to me in time.

And I suppose, in truth it has occurred within

that very moment when first I

leaned close to the windows in winter as a child.

Somewhere all of these met in us,

and we were haunted

by amorphous collections of light and shadow

groaning outside the door of our dreams

and our incidental speech.

You know, if you take a moment to,

the way the seconds have piled up

to bring us here to our valley;

the echoes of monks’ feet shuffling over stone,

the creak of rough-hewn wood against the sea,

the bristling scratch of pen against the parchment,

and the unheard sound of countless crumbling cities

have conspired to place us here,

silent and staring through the open chasm of a tire swing

or kitchen window

or coffee mug

past the beginning of all things;

past the beginning of the first, perfect language

to the bright nimbus of the first, perfect word.

This is the substance of proof that stands outside

the world—

that stands outside the golden frames our ages have built.

Renaissance after renaissance collide and die at our feet,

begin and halt continually at the wall of today,

this page,

this word.

***

Look, this is the last of it.

I have stood in this place and that,

and still not every place.

I have stood here and longed for

that place I left behind.

I have returned to that place,

and turned once again to some other place.

I have known only one station in the great

river of time,

and the smaller times within it.

I have longed for times my eyes

found more pleasing,

only to find my eyes failing, and untrustworthy.

Look, this is the last of it.

The world is a belly full of ghosts,

and every life its own world,

built on the beach-sand

of that life’s eyes.

I have felt the shifting sway in

re-read books

and crumbling, revisited neighborhoods and homes.

This is no single breath

given once,

as cold and as solid

as place.

Our very lungs refuse the notion.

And so this longing remains,

to return to places never seen;

never occupied;

never left.

This fervor is

whispered between lines of gravestones

near the sea,

between lines scratched in the

face of the clock and the compass.

Heaven is unhinged there—there—from the frame of the world.

Look, this is the last of it,

when the days grow dim

and the grasshopper

drags himself along,

and we feel on our faces

the breeze of spirits

and cherubim passing.

Every moment

in every lifetime of moments

is the moment before the last.

Almost

Almost
in leaf-tips
wind-thrown treetops
wavecrests
far from Christmas
among cicadas
shadows
slung off in
lantern swing

A remembered house

Nearly a grace
with
lamposts
bent
like trees

and life
a passage

in between
our streets,

years, wandered
and shores

lifelong
and receding
into the
dead-foot now,

almost, almost
the substance
of things not seen.

Unwelcome

I was not always a stranger.

Not long ago, no place in the country
Was unfamiliar.

Unless I misremember,
Dragging behind me
My Chicago miles.

I find again all those
Unwelcoming places.

Orbiting roads,

Lonesome crickets
In the park near twilight,
Unfamiliar foliage
In unfamiliar summer.

Some things go along, unchanged:
Hopelessness at dusk.

All those tobacco barns slowly
Failing.

Boyhood

I remember a long field,
no pathway through.

The way the light
climbed fathomless heights
and remained
in periphery.

Long mornings
near trains,
bruising our heels
on the ballast,
hunting snakes,
mesocyclones
gathering
on the horizon.

Each moment
was a completeness
unto itself.

I remember
the wind
in the long grass,
the leaves,
the waves —
listening the way that
children do,
waiting for nothing.

Our stillnesses
came reluctantly,
but God
was in each one.

Before the
days lost
the gold of that certain
slant near dusk,
and my feet
tramped
the tall grass
into trails.

Summer, In Its Night

Summer
in its night
moved
open-eyed
through Prairie School
avenues and
empty eightlanes
past the furnaces and mills.

That thick stillness
of involuntary rest
coaxed apart
each slow moment
to filaments
of Cottonwood seed
and lightning
silent in the distance.

The sound of waves.

The sound
of lovers shouting, laughing far off.

The sound of

cassette
spindles
softly
unspooling
"All Cats Are Grey"
to the Bible
in the backseat,
near the shore.

Something sad, contained,
made its way
among the infinite.

Memories
of ourselves
near vast, open water,
tamed with distraction
by candy necklaces
and stainless steel
slides.

Later – much later –
inebriated
tide-racing
on ridiculous
stretches
of sand in the dark.

The story of that
which we would one day watch
disintegrate
was always written on our bones –

The compass needle
locked up sure
as an hour-hand.

We thought
because of this
that
compasses are true,
and can be known.

But they are not. Cannot.

Memorial Day

I shook Big Jim Thompson's hand
and it was all Dolton
had to give the earth.

A parade.

This and the
public pool;
The K-Mart and its
knives;
the fathomless railyard
pressing up against the overpass:
The path to church.
That old long door swinging open.

The grass still grew prairie-long then,
past imagined saddles.

And

Those maps
and folds
and demarcations
gone diffuse
in the taconite black,
harbored
between each
star;

the truth of molten
glow in transit
across sleepless walls.

My skinny legs
grew strong
along the tracks.

Taking
a beating
was the same
as learning how to fight.

I wondered,

what parts of this life are secret?
What parts of me
have their meaning
in the way

I care about the curve
of roads
and the grain of bark,
and tie,

opening,

opening?

My transgressions
piled up.

My worlds ended.

My questions gathered:
"Who am I, and who am I to say?"

Etc.

That cold hand
of the child of me
rests still
on railing
after railing.

Pillars of Light

Dawn. November.

Eyelids stuttered,

Found all things
That give light
Spilling
Upward from themselves.

Sudden
As a man's name,

They formed
Iridescent pillars,
Earth to sky.

There were four of us
Begging coals for fire
And fire for joe
As though
We were not filled with wonder.

We moved out
From underneath
The night;
Moved among the
Pillars.

I murmured
"Ice crystals."

Everyone agreed.

Cigarettes were rolled.

Yet even then,
All those burnt miles
Put behind,
Nothing was as simple
Or as settled.

God's hand gripped
Some of our necks:
A whisper
Through clenched teeth.

"Look at that.
Look at that."

"Look!"

I secretly remembered

Knowing.

Even then,
Hope flickered
In my ash-covered hands.

Happy

Blue circles spin
above

thick within
thin, green miles.

Our heels wear well
against clockspin;

against
the wilds
of compasses
confused
with iron
slung hard and
deep into the earth.

Blame bleeds
its shores upward
through the packed wet
of old forest floors

And fills
a tetanus moment,
tipsy in its
silence —

specks and planks
and planks and specks

and
shame rounding
itself against
the sharp folds of curtains
in glassless windows
and the sound of traffic
below;

soft curves
of hard roads
heaving
merciless selves
from dusk-yards
into
the west.

In winter,
we dream of buildings
old, secure: strong
as grace.

They hold themselves up
while buffalo drive themselves
in great thundering herds through
and past
and off
of cliffs.

We are happy,
because we have not been swept away.

By all rights
we should have been,
having been where we have been,
when we should not have been.

Wilderness

Fiddleback spiders blossomed
lilac.

Everything was a surprise then:

     Footsteps on the bluebells
     loosing
     a blanket of stars.

Words used to appear
and scatter that way before me.

Treetops bloomed
into the dark.

Hands high and open,
I staggered beneath
their grace,

avenue
to God's whisper.

Or maybe
hands up and empty
beneath
the wind in the leaves.

Soon after,
came that heel
pressing
my face hard into the mud.

I fear it:

Being the wilderness.
The distance that is crossed
in the stories he tells.

Second Earth

There is another earth
beneath.
Between.

I know my way
from here
into it;

chainlink rolled back
in scrolls of rust,

dusk
pouring in;

late rain
cold upon the branches

and leaves that push against the passage

the smell

of mud
and slickened
tie plates
in the stillness

of shouts that go
unsounded.

These unnamed Sundays
Are an unstemmed tide again,

Unanswered questions
spilling the banks,

Lineless horizons.

Unbutton
your shirt,
even though it's cold.

Wash, shave.

Pour what you call hope
into the ending age.

Gatherings

Gatherings
of spring and winter,
one after one, spinning
incandescent recollections
of beach-glass
battered smooth to stone,

and summers,

leaping
from handhold
like toddlers
wanting to walk
and stumble, and find.

I long to move
along rivers,
and fields that are like rivers,

and good parts of
forgotten towns,

shrug off those
flown-over miles

and bend down to
sift fingers
through them;
sew myself
into the hems of
slow storms

and sap-encased days,

and surround each second
with what I have been given
to give.

I name each one of them;
weave and wear them
like a tapestry
of rain-filled culverts
and sun-roughened
lift bridges
that live
to move through all the
worlds in the tired world.

I am still gathering them to me,
and there is no shame is
in that.

Again

Muscles are overwhelmed,
go slack.

This is familiar.

Over the side,
legs kick
the void beneath
the swell.

Shores collapse,
and their fires
with them.

The shadows of
conifers
remain unchanged
where they were left:

The notes
you wrote to yourself

so you would not forget.

The wind shakes
sand from
its hackles,

empties itself
of shore-light

and lumbers
up
through the jungle
to meet you,
again.

You are ridiculous,
again.

paper

Tattered twenties
spend the same as new
but I have been
that corner
torn away.

Paper.

The Trees Are What Matter

The list of things
I no longer need to know
was written at dusk
in a wagon wheel rut
cut through a field of wheat
that emptied out
onto a sudden shore.

I kept it folded
in my pocket for years.

One day,
I reached for my keys
and the wind took it
from me,
carried it across the
neighbors' yards
and highway 52
into the
swaying arms
of many trees.

National Poetry Writing Month

There once was a poet named Kevin,
who thought NaPoWriMo was heaven.
But when the month was all done,
he'd had enough of the fun,
and it seemed like he'd pretty much run out of steam with the whole thing and was ready for a little bit of a break.

Fooled

Floorboards may as well be oceans.

The earth curves that way
and the tiny world
seems eternal.

Year blooms to year,
still age
does not steal us
from ourselves
until it does.

And that always a surprise.

On mountaintops,
I've seen the game:
horizon bent to a finite bow.

But then the starfields

that
fool us still in greater ways,

flat blue and silver
sprawled upon the
ceiling,

glimpsed
through
failing atmosphere,

stacked thick
with infinities
and heavens.

Locks

The locks were off the doors,
and I lacked the skill
to remake them.

A little more time.

A little more attention.

A resilience
that eluded me;

a strength
that
collapsed
within me

and left me

to all those evenings.

The Quiet

The world —

    its form;

its sigh
dying in
the figure
rounding
the corner
of the house
in the dark;

the firelight
dripping off the ledge of the night;

a life lived by a fountain;

     a body abandoned
in the bus.

    Moose hunters
in spring.
Cleared ways
are carved by the forgiving tide

and give the world
a canyon:

A space
between two shallow walls.

Quiet as a whisper.

Quiet as hope.

Midnight Conversation

I've never actually seen
a monster,
and I've been alive
a long time,
so there's probably
no reason to worry.

Probably.

I suppose, if I think about it,
there was that time
in Michigan,
when I stayed up
way past my bedtime,
talking and laughing
with my cousins
instead of sleeping.

We all heard it --
a low growl.

But that could have been anything.
Honestly.

But then again ...

Maybe it was a kind of monster
that is attracted by
the sound of children
who can't stay in their beds.

I guess, having no documented proof,
the possibilities are wide open.

There could be creatures
that live under beds
or in closets
or in the vents,
and feed off of the
disobedience of
boys too wound up
to be still hours after
prayers have been said
and goodnight kisses
distributed.

In theory, I mean.

But I doubt any little boy
has ever actually been eaten by one.
Don't you?

Why not
get back in bed and be very, very still,
just to be on the safe side.

Sleep tight.

Near A Mountain

Near a mountain,
a man
is losing the things
his hands have found.

He watches
the shine
of antenna
in starlight

and hums
the tune of his final days.

A dozen light years
away,
Voyager One and Voyager Two
tease the edges of
vast things.

In 1886,
his great-grandparents
struggle through birth.

He wraps
the entirety of ages
in twine
and Bible verse
and barbed wire

manufactured
in a century
near his own,

in a factory
near Canandaigua
where his people
come from.

45

You suppose
so little
in the night

with youth gone
and roads dark
and lamps dim.

The world kneels.

Old churches
fade away.

Horizon
shuts itself
against stars.

Things do not
end here, now:

We go on.

What I Am Not Paid to Do

What I am not paid to do
could be gathered
to a gold point
near snack shacks
on the Plymouth seashore

headstones
thin as slate
deep as hope

blind as bones

these rings of sunshine
I have dreamt
and grasped falling backward
and lost,

spiraled to
the future
of men
I've never known
or bested



I wonder
what kind of spark
my soul

might give
against
the steel of
held-out miles

A good question,

this is

in weeds

no fatherhood left
to give

no daughters, sons —

a deserved curse —

deserving
I have given
the limping veins of my own wrists
grasping after couplings
in the

North

the North.

What I am not paid to do
plunges
in the slipstream and

grows a soul and

retrieves
rings of sunshine
from that

which was

Krakauer

Krakauer
used to argue
with me
in the music
of the
Long Wait.

The sound of deer ticks
climbing sawgrass.

I swear
and swear to God
I tried to lose
that book.

I crossed
rivers
but could not
empty it from me,

Could not bury it
in the ash
or the stack of twilights
of all that I'd made scant.

It was always finding
its way to the
top of
those thin
nights,

A residual haunting.

He had me talking to myself
in the silence

or the sway

or the great timeless sea of crickets.

"I'm careful,"

I'd say.

"Yes.
But lost.
And too eager to be lost to your care."

I'd Need a Dictionary

“Camouflage Metamorphosis.”

My oldest son’s

Spelling words

Greet me at the refrigerator door.

I wonder what change
Is being hidden.

The World and the Earth

More like a trail of arrowheads
covered over with dirt,
these turned fields in Illinois.

This world consumes
every energy given it;
pulls your body
to its edge,
snakes its hands
into your front pockets
and pulls them inside-out,
pushes everything it finds there
into the yawn of its own horizon.

I feel my ghost
straining
against my bones.

I once did
and will again
step across the river stone
of town-edges

and find the simpler earth
within the world.

Persistence

Empty chairs

at sidings

and long grass

and trees

and empty barns

and campgrounds

and backs against doors

and twilight in faraway parks

and watches

and edges

and panic

and life

and trick knees

and long walks

and repentance

and redemption

and hope

and aching sorriness

in the heart-ending
silence
of potential
departure.

Weaponry

Sam said I should write a poem
about bows and arrows.

I've only shot arrows a few times in my life.

Once,
I sunk one into my best friend's
ankle.

If intended,
it surely would have impressed.

The arrow sailed wide past the target,
skimmed the grass,
and flew beneath the wooden
partition
just as he was leaving
the camp restroom.

In actuality,
we both were
pretty well impressed.

I don't know what it is
about boys and weaponry,
but I anticipate
an anxious few years
while my
House of Testosterone
grows into wisdom.

I remember
walking from my house
all the way to Hammond
(a long walk indeed)
with a friend
who wasn't a friend
but knew the way.

Cheap throwing stars
were on the menu
at a weekend flea market
where the mall-ninjas flocked.

We spent the afternoon
sinking our purchases into trees.

And the side of my house.

And, eventually, into each other.

Because shuriken-deflection skills
are gained only through
discipline and practice.

I have a Polaroid
of my cousin and myself
standing side-by-side,
my uncle's loaded .22 rifle
pointed nonchalantly at his head.

Such things never bothered me
until I had my own boys.

Still,
there was that day
I found my uncle's switchblade
on the counter in his apartment
when I was ten:
his first instinct
was not to
snatch it from my hands in horror.

Instead, he glanced sideways
to see if any of the women
in his life were hovering,
then grinned,
and showed me how it worked.

Because switchblades are cool.

It's as simple as that.

Sure, I closed the blade
on my knuckles a time or two,
but that only taught me
the proper modicum of respect.

Conversations About the Treachery of Polar Bears

Creatures get the devil in them
sometimes.

A paw the size of Montana,
but the sweetest, sweetest face;
nose twitching every
point on the compass in the wind.

He'd seen the sun set
only to rise again
minutes later;

He'd watched
upsidedown freighters
sail the white horizon.

What kind of animal
could make sense
in a place like that?

He let me smoke
machine-pressed,
cheap Cuban
cigars in his store;

let me take my boots
and my socks off;

let me doze off on the floor.

"Socks like these
used to be made of wool
you'd spend a year
saving for."

I was going to do what I was going to do.

He said.

I was going to end up
where I was going to end up.

But not without
pancakes at midnight
with his daughter
at the foot of a closed bridge,
and state-of-the-art socks,
and a windproof lighter,
and a coat
made of the stuff of
Thor's hammer.

"Don't be a plaything,"
he said.
"Be awake;
and pointy, and sharp, and painful,
and more trouble than you're worth."

A chuckle.

A silence.

"That's not the way you want God to take you to his bosom,"

he said,
staring.

Dreams That Are Not Dreams

I am dragged out of bed
away from my wife
and thrown into the hold
of the Kinsman Independent
where my feet rust through the hull
and spill me into Superior's depths,
and wreck her against October's shoals
just before the shipping lanes are closed.

Or
vertigo spins up
and fills me.
I open the front door,
hunting the source
of some untrusted sound
in the dark,
and my foot nearly falls
into the chasm
of an open porch on a highiron
heading west.

Or
there are heated words
in an old kitchen.
The music in the living room
keeps getting louder.
Unseen children
cry and laugh,
and pull at uncapped pens,
blank pages,
and well-worn maps
spilling from my pockets.

Or
I watch my
only knife fall into a river
and sink
as I let go
everything else my hands have known,
and the sky
tumbles around me
as I fall.

Or
God's hands
grasp two corners
of a blanket
and unfurl it
beneath
unfamilar stars,
then
plunge into the depths
of Lake Superior
to find my
sinking corpse.

Questions

If you ask too many questions,
the roads grow over with trees
and murk.

You lose all hope
of finding your way back
to where you pray you belong.

It's a tripwire
stretched across all of
creation:

try pinning a photon
to a map
and see how that works out.

Wondering
aloud to yourself
while marching
into wild places
is a good way
to get yourself killed,

although you might net yourself a painting
or a novel on the way.
Maybe a Theory of Everything.
Some momentary peace
with that murder.

I asked too many questions once.

It's what we lose
with our childhood,

When the language the universe
prefers
is resolute silence.

A march
toward whatever comes next.

Untitled

Silent for so long.
I can barely remember
your voice in the trees.

Hotshot

I have
never
been
asked
to
pour
words
around

the
slack
taken
out

the
onyx
shake
and

tooth
loose
sway

rust
in
the
blood

confines

ballast
and
bars
and

bars
and
ballast

heels
thinned
with
wind
noise

bad
skies
and
sirens

a
town
a
blur
a
way

teeth
ground
down
in
the
roar
of
it

ears
marked
with
it

years
piled
with
it

book
of
coats

and

the

shadows

of

leaves

over

head

racing

and
the
moon

the
glint
of
ruin

ended
age

diesel

the
road

the
panting
road

And With My Rural Pen I Stained the Water Clear

Children wheel
in their century
on the lakeshore,

grey sky and green
waves
hiding time,

leaving undeclared
the sameness of
their lives
with mine,
and the lives
of the countless
unseen
who have shipwrecked,
portaged, picknicked,
and survived here.

They bring me rocks.

Sticks to whittle into pens.

They rush me;
rush me —

pull me from the
dying steeltowns

to explain
The way sky and
water
pour themselves
one into the other
and make an unknown thing;

The way waves
push silence
across the table
to the world.

All these things
I once made uneasy peace with;
these things I long ago agreed
with God's silence
would never be explained.

My knife shapes the tips of drift-twig pens
while my voice wanders
from the shore
far into the lake,
and the boys no longer listen.

We will leave those pens behind —
half-carved, uninked —
when it's time to pack up and go.

I've left so many unfinished,
unanswered and unanswering,
strewn across the miles.

East Troy

Everyone in Elkhorn was asleep,
and all the gas stations closed.

"Under the Milky Way"
poured out of the LTD's
speakers,
and no one spoke.

No cancer in Paul's bones yet.
No dead fathers.
No decisions made that could not be undone.

Fast-forward through
"Gardening at Night"
and settle into
"Love Comes Tumbling."

The summer air
feels that way
through open windows
only when you're young, and
the darkness of the road ahead
signifies
only the
fact of night.

Minutes

Some days
at the office
the birds
that move in the view
outside the window
manage to press
themselves into
a certain minute
with enough force
to fold it in
upon itself

and their wings
are the same wings
that belonged to birds
long dead
that pressed
themselves into
the other side
of the same minute
years ago
on some shore,
or above some clearing.

What I'd give
to stack those
minutes
into an age,
and remain in it.

Near

Headstones bloom
a lilac
sudden as barnfire,

and
that's life.

Our legs
carry us between
the slate

in grass as tall
as Black Hawk
on his horse.

Near waves now

after all those
creeks
emptied into
silence;
saplings bent
and staked
wrong way
to the trail.

All those dirty tricks.

Now and then
we take a count
and come up short,
or come up long;

an extra shadow in the
carriage of the gloaming,

his form familiar,
yet hidden to us
as we beat our way
out beneath
a blanket of stars.

In dreams,
seraphs push dirt into the fire
and urge us on.

In the morning,
the ending of all things
is near to us,
and hangs thick with
hope and dread
in the cold, final mist.

Sleeping In

I know I would have slept in that dawn.

I have slept in over many dawns,
or at least laid still
with my eyes shut.

Even in the most uncomfortable of circumstances,
my body has been able
to stay up far too late,
and remain far too long past sunrise
in places and ways that would make
my mother cry.

I would have staggered from Golgotha,
heart rent in confusion and despair,
begging God for reasons and hope.

Blindly finding none,
I would have willed myself awake
well into the night, praying, muttering, fretting.

No breakfast the next day.

Another impossibly late night
away from all others; away from rumors and news.

I would plot a journey.
Some place far from the tomb.

I would have drifted off on the desert floor.
Slept in.
Missed all the excitement.
Staggered into town, slowly
gathering the gospel to me;
finding it
like the last, hidden present
on Christmas morning.

Good Friday

Colorado.

Sitting on Buffalo Bill's grave.

I do not know what town
this mountain overlooks -
its light now struggling upward
through a sudden snow -
the sun failing to
unseen starlight above.

Midnight

and my eye is on
the gift shop door.

The stillest of all places in that earth,
in that time.


The weight of my expectation
has never slackened.

My children do not understand
distances; the ways roads,
ways through, and hopes
go fragile and wear like
bones.

I am not anxious
for the stories to be gathered together
and revealed;
am sorry for the way
the old hills and rivertowns and causeways
crowd the creases of
unheld maps.

But Good Friday
hides within itself Easter,
and with every hammer strike,
dawn pries stone away from stone.

         (I stumbled down
         mountains,
         returned home again and again to find
         the linen closet door
         inexplicably open.)

Fences

"Well, that's it then," a fence will say.

A top rail weathers and fails following a decade
Of winter after summer;
Chain link is pried from the post
And rolled back
More often
And by more persistent hands
Than those charged with upkeep
And repair.

The very things they keep us from
Betray them:
The angles of the hemmed-in land
And the wind
Channeled over it;
The irresistible value
Of goods, or mystery, or shortcut.

Some fences are laws
And others are suggestions.

We know the difference.

Others are rules put there only to be bent.

The trick Is discerning which to honor;
Which to cautiously pass over, through, or under;
Which to destroy and dismantle
In your passing;
And which to outlast, patiently,
Like the wind.

The Right Things Right

The boys are young
but old enough
to hear from me
that we are far
from what matters.

My oldest knows
that grease between
the rotor and
the hub is more
than convenience;

that the right way
of doing things
gives divine voice
to the human,
and form to grace.

Reasons

Reasons are fine things:
comfortable on flat surfaces.

They do not take to them
the same space
as beer bottle shards
washed, tumbled
among the waves and rocks
of Lake Winnipeg,

polished to impossible shine:
improbable, inarticulate
jewels
refracting aurora.

Life kneels,
supplants,
and makes a way
for reasons.

But not the
high tides
in the Bay of Fundy,
or
event horizons
that stack and coil
on the shores
of singularities.

I have been
dragged, legs kicking,
to every single Easter dawn
all my sorry days.

Oh!

The way my life has contended
with the gulf
between the wild, the certain;
with that which will not
rest on shelves,
or lean against clean edges;

the incongruity
of turned ankles gathered too far from home.
Feet lost to
expected rungs on the grabiron.
Small-caliber muzzles,
and the hand of God
wedged firm between the hammer and the shell.

Sweet grace.

My mind's oldest, grandest adversary.

The Ways

Rain on the ways north.

Rain

and horizon's eyes
finding

Renaissance
crevasses
in the most
present of
moments.

Our heels
press into the trail.

The river bank
bends

like light
through a lens

to surround
our honeymoon road;

The river bank
bows in the rain

and falters beneath the weight
of its own curve,

unfolds in its old, foolish years

a grace.

An insistence.

An imposition.

The earth
holds to itself
an exhausted world

reckoned larger
on the inside
than the out.

When we rest
I will
attain for us a tale

from between the lengths
and distances
we have gathered
to our cuffs:

A man leans over kindling to
strike the back of his knife
against flint.

There is a shadow; a bear;
a struggle —
something
unaccounted for
and sudden —
ruined factories
and inflated prices.

Beacons bloom open their light
on the unfurled shores of great lakes.

A rescue comes.

Tight-knotted questions
beat with the wind
against star-strewn, abandoned
rafters.

Doorposts.

You remember
door
posts.

And then
up again.

Up again,
and
feet to it
at dawn.

It makes sense.
(All of it.)
The way
iron buried in the earth
betrays the compass.

The way
trackage is abandoned
and the report of it
goes unpublished.

The way
one moment at
dawn publishes
ancient traces
through
wheat and forest.

The days
press suddenly and cold
well past our recollection
of crossings
and clearings.

We said, "North"
but may have
meant west.

East.

South.

The Road has carved Itself into Itself.

Rain abandons the path
that blossoms
out from beneath the trees.

We're warm

We find warmth

We are reconciled.

Lent

Let me be this shape
found
in the lowering dusk;

this young man at the old
post office window.


The leaves are
depot and gully and shadow -
the trying, the forming,
the giving
and denying
of ancient
sounds and shapes

old as lakes,
and council trees
in unembarrassed clearings,
fire rings.

Let me snag thin fabric
upon thick branches;

upon ballast;

upon thin rails
of water
meeting sky

in river-towns I have
heard bells ringing
outward from
at night.

Let me be this
Barlow-knife shape
of shadow
made by
church doors opened at Easter:

A shadow
that knows
how much it owes
and cannot pay;

a shadow that grasps
after the form
and the light
from which it has been cast.

Doorposts

At times the doorposts are
same as ever
in their push and their pull,
and the stars, and the
night beneath them,
and the causeways and the
hills, and the ways
to shores.

And the distances are
same; the
dim light of cities
traversed, the pathways of
impossible light across the
empty hallways, and the
sleeplessness -- the
maps that gather with
dry leaves at the
treeline near the old roads.

And the figure kneeling
in the waves is the same,
and his ruined grip,
and the fear that coils
in the old jungle; dreams
poured over silences
that go dead-leaf thin
in troubled dawns.

Planets still race over
horizon faster than Orion.
Each vastness remains,
between the doorposts in the
house where you live.

Afterimage

Kinematoscope horizons stack
And flare

silver rain
spending itself
in rivulets

over
discovered edges
of grown-over paths.

Gray light
pours over green leaves like
taconite spilled
from a ruined hull.

The world
carries
old pocket-weight
to you —

these things
your hands have lost —

gathered
from shoulders
of roads
that you have dreamed,
whose miles
your feet cannot recall.

They pour like
water through your fingers
and pool
upon the floor.

A roaring
flicker slows
along a treeline,
and stills
in the house where you live.

A silhouette resolves
in the interlude.

Sunlight
bleeds around it.

You remember this:
turning over
drawers,
pushing artifacts
and talismans
up around its corners
to define it.

The way you
once stirred embers
under green leaves
in the silver rain,
beneath gray light.

Untitled

Somewhere warm
other people
we once will one day be
or could have one day been
sip whiskey and joe

but here beneath the
edges of stars
at the end of lines
the earth is stabbed
with brittle years

and old words
I have rubbed
thin and quick with spark.

The days are ripe
with flailing
and the sound that
open-end wrenches make
when cast
against the long block.

I have been mistaken
for a man
who never
rubbed his fingers
down to blood
for fire,

or tasted the pulp
of his own teeth.

Old friend Chicago
shrugs in anger

and lifts
torpedo cars
up off the rails.

Elegy

Colorado helped you along
In your memory, your telling;
The dusk, the shadows, and the stars:
Your hands shaking like the treeline,
Clumsy with striker and steel match.
You could barely stand to be seen
Sparks pouring from your fingertips.
You could hardly bear to be heard.

Slipping away into the west
The states, the mountains moved aside -
The ages, the griefs, the lost days.
You were embarrassed with your grace -
A sudden mercy, and final.
You knew each one of our goodbyes
And fanned each into a poem
Within a circle of small men.

North Dakota helped you along
In your memory, your telling;
The rain, the rivers, and the dark;
The way things were when work went thin
And your wife left for higher ground;
The road nosed up against your door,
The sound of your laughter was changed,
And what you took to heart was left

In the space manufactured by
The way your hands filled your pockets.

Alaska was ridiculous.

Heads shaking all around the coals.

And silence, then. A way around.

I was nervous, and could not sleep.

Water moved around the jungle.

Those gone days haunt my children's sleep.

Grandpa

My grandfather on my dad’s side was the only living grandpa I had growing up. I knew him as a long haul truck driver. A cowboy. One who wandered. There were vague whispers of time spent out west on ranches and in rodeos. My father recalls brief, dusk-lit visits back on the Michigan farm - where his father had abandoned his own children to his parents and spinster sisters - as fun and brief: brothers saddled to bucking calves in the snow; laughter in the hayloft near Christmas. Hymns in the night around the piano. And then that sad horizon, soaking up their only father, again, one last time.

Everything I’ve learned about forgiveness I’ve learned from my dad.

I didn’t understand the gravity of what it meant for my grandfather to take up residence on a parcel of land near my uncle’s house after decades of abandonment and absence, nor the weight of the grace that attended his appearances around fire rings on our visits north. As a boy, I knew him as a mythical figure; a grizzled man with a deep, storied voice, coaxed from a restless soul by an endless chain of Marlboro cigarettes. 

One day, after an eight-hour journey from Chicago, I wandered my way to his single-wide trailer door. He regarded me with a grandpa’s grin. There were questions about my father: How had he been; how was work; how was the car. What were they teaching me in school. There was a pipe in his mouth; guns and knives in the kitchen. I went away with a rifle and a box of rimfire .22 shells.

I was half-way through the box at twilight when dad and Uncle Jim wandered out to find me near the river. My uncle asked if he could see the gun. “Grandpa said you could have this?” I nodded my head. Knowing glances traded between uncle and dad. “Maybe one day, Kevin. But this gun isn’t your grandpa’s to give.” And I already knew it. They let me finish off the box of shells until the sun was gone.

In some ways, I felt bad for grandpa. His father’s shadow was long, deep: cast by a man whose life was framed by a passion for serving and loving God and others. But, at least in some measure, my grandpa was his father’s son. Early in his life, his dad had scattered his presence across the wilds as well: clawing his own restless way out of the Dakotas into the bowels of copper mines and whiskey bottles before the irresistible call of God’s grace encircled him. His presence still looms large generations after, over my own life, and the lives of my children. I feel his hand on my head all these years since. But grandpa held onto his wandering ways far longer, and came to the table of grace much later, than his father did.

My father had a knife: A black-handled, full-tang knife. Sharp as the day is long, laid in a black leather sheath, emblazoned with his riveted initials. He won it at a county fair. I coveted it. My mother was scared to death of it, and my father was not yet ready to surrender it. One day, on a visit north, my grandfather accompanied us on a trip into town. In a hardware store, I found a case full of knives. “You like those?” grandpa asked. I nodded. “Which one?” I considered the question hard. There were Swiss Army knives, replete with magnifying glasses, saws, and awls; there were pearl-handled beauties. But my eyes wandered to the big bowie knife most like my dad’s. He grinned. “You like that one?” I nodded again. At the checkout, my mother’s eyes were filled with a mix of anger and horror as my grandfather rang it up for me. “Better get a sheath,” he said, tossing an unfinished leather beauty near the register. Again, those knowing glances, this time mom to dad. I still remember dad’s wry smile as we left the store. I felt like I was ten feet tall.

One night, I was still awake when I should have been asleep. It was cold. The snow was thick, and battered the windows. The wind found its way past the door frame up to the edge of my quilt. The grown-ups were awake with their coffee, their theological debates, their laughter. But soon, the silences grew. The conversation turned to recollection. I heard my mother’s voice, describing the state in which they found my father so many years before, abandoned, forsaken by my own grandpa, my unknown grandma. Dad was the oldest boy. He remembered. He had been so neglected, so hungry, so malnourished, that his body had begun to feed upon itself for sustenance. His own teeth crumbled under the weight of the neglect, and crumble still.

The next day, at breakfast, I watched my grandpa, spinning another one of his tales over cereal and pancakes. I stared at his face; glanced at my father as he circled the room; my uncle as he paced. Why was this man here, at the table? How could he be? Later, that summer, my father and I packed up the Palamino camper, and backed up the LTD to hitch it up. I watched my dad, his father, as they said their goodbyes. They embraced. 

One day, my father’s family gathered at the old farm. It was a last goodbye. Everybody knew it, but nobody spoke it. One of my aunts – one of my father’s surrogate mothers – was going to die. Every black sheep and good child was aware and present for the goodbye. Grandpa started a fire in the field nearby, the brim of his hat shining gold as the noonday sun. He sang a rendition of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” while my cousins and my Uncle Larry laughed and looked on. Then quiet. “I can sing like an angel,” he said. “Like an angel. It doesn’t mean a thing. Not a thing.” Tears ran down his face and into his beard, as he quietly began the first verse of “How Great Thou Art.” 

Everything I’ve learned about forgiveness I’ve learned from my dad.

Everything I’ve learned about grace I’ve learned from my grandpa.

It was years, so many years later, that I found myself beneath a trestle in the bitter and the snow in Manitoba. I half-dreamt the sound of piano and hymn in the dark and the wind; I half-dreamt my grandfather’s tear-streaked face in the firelight, and my hands found his face. We leaned together, there, and our begging, giving eyes wandered up between the dark timbers and the stars to God.

What I've Learned

So now

When snow makes the boughs heavy

And the towns go unlit

And the wildest children

Are hushed with fear

In their parents’ arms

Do you turn – wind flailing

The way it only ever claws

At eyes beneath bridges –

And ask

What I have learned

Along the long, long ways.

I have learned to

Leave my doors wide open;

To hide flint in my sleeve

And steel between my toes;

To practice the

Path of short knives

Through long, wet wood.

Panic is a waste,

And worry fuel.

I learned this in hard ways;

Learned to snap my knife shut against my hip

With one hand

And end conversations

On friendly terms when

The time had come for them to end.

Christmas Poem

One dark
and misremembered day

I knelt
panting

and concerned myself
with blood

that carries ash
in rivulets

to unseen seas
at dusk.


I came at last
then

to think
that You stood

among my ruined
footings

and asked
of me

damnable things -

unanswerable
questions:

to think that You
were about
the business of
belittling
my heart

and calling me to pocket
with some dutiful
demanding
parody of grace

my every hope
between
unanswering
dusk,
dusk,
and dusk.

And so,
at that certain solstice,

I rolled
in soot
at the roots
of your dark trees,

and slept in dust

believing
You had brimmed me up
against northern shorelines
quickly, coldly

beneath the old,
unpalmed
forest floor of stars
for no real reason.

I had swallowed by then
and nearly forgotten

Christmas

and its steadied hand
held
against the forehead of each
otherwise proud,
immutable year.

You filled me
full of fuses
and swept Yourself back
between hills.

You presented me
to inopportune nights.

In dreams those days,
I was a boy again,

and willing to brave
the stairs and patio door,

and wrath of parents
to put bare feet to the yard
on Christmas Eve.

The empty roads filled with silence;

The night moving over rails
behind the house;

The moonlight
thick
between trees;

The lone rabbit
leaving no tracks
despite
infinities of snow.

You

raised me up
in Your great stillness
some unnamed morning after

and pushed the wandering sight
from my eyes
in Your own unending grace.


And I ask You now:


how could I have known?


How could You have thought
I would have known,

on any
of those cold shores,

that Your great form
had already

lumbered through all those forests before me?

Tree Climbing

My family used to spend many long weekends in the summers and falls at the Fritzsches’ cottage in Paw Paw, Michigan. My best friend James and I would wander the dirt roads and sandy paths through forested back-forties for entire mornings or afternoons at a time. Sometimes we’d stumble upon a field of raspberry bushes and eat ourselves sick on them. Sometimes we’d walk the untold miles into town to the one record store there, cool off in the AC, buy nothing, and arrive back home at dusk. Sometimes we’d sharpen sticks with new knives, or launch empty single-serve pudding cans into the air with Black Cat firecrackers. Sometimes we’d swim ourselves to exhaustion in the lake until the sun went down, and ghostly fires lit the shores, and we were more tired than we would admit, and the daddy longlegs on the musty cinder blocks swayed in the twilight and the breeze in our dimming eyes. 

One autumn day, we spilled out from the wilds  of an unharvested field to find ourselves below a line of long, tall trees. The wind pushed and pulled us. The trees were tall, and spiked with branches that launched themselves, ladder-like from the trunk. Tree-climbing was a little boy’s game of chess, and these trees were easily conquered. As boys will do, we picked the tallest tree. Up went James, then up went Kevin. The climbing was easy, step over step: Not like climbing old oaks or stingy maples. Foot over foot, arms around the trunk, up and up, faces scratched bloody on bark. Sunlight bouncing and dancing among golden leaves; faith in the strength of branches resting in the arches of smallish feet. Slowly, voices begin to be lost in wind; and the trunk thins, and the branches with it; and the treetop sways.

How high? 50, 60, 70 feet? The wind moves, and we move with it. The tree yields, and we yield with it. I smile, clinging to the skinny trunk. I am dizzy, and my stomach laughs inside me. The sun is beginning to set. “I guess we should go,” James says. He is above me: First up into the tree. But I am below, pioneer in the descent. I take a moment, and turn my face outward, and gaze upon the world before me. Below us, a brown and glowing patchwork of tended fieldwork; over my shoulder, the sunset resting upon the lake. And all the world swaying, rocking in the wind, moving in a familiar rhythm. Thin lines of gold-sanded roads widening to horizon. Combines resting, their drivers huddled near thin lines of smoke trailing upward to our noses. Our fathers building fires, our mothers making a meal, our sisters telling stories. The coming night timeless: a parade of hymns.

The wonder stays with me. 

Years. 

Decades. 

Still.

And my right foot wanders, blindly, downward to find purchase. And with this, we are on our way home.

Night Story

Your eyes open.

And the shadows

In the sleeping house

Unfurl themselves,

And bow noiseless down

Before you, a grace

To gild the edges of

Your pathway down the hall.

Outside, the years

Swirl

And gather beneath the oaks,

And wait for the curve

Of your hand to rest

Upon the storm door handle.

An age is ending, 

Tonight.

You move, out into it:

The same warm dark

You found at the foot

Of your parents’ porch;

The same sourceless glow,

Not quite moon or lamplight,

That you found bleeding

From around each edge

And black branch once hung above you.

The streets and the houses are thinning

With each step,

And the fabric

Between what you have known

And what you have glimpsed,

And wondered at,

And guessed.

And now, the fields:

The leaves driven into them,

And the wind,

The outline of the forest edge

Before you

And the years turned to their every second,

And your life a slight Aurora

In the corner of your children’s sky.

Hill-walking at night

Is careful work:

The feet remembering

Steps they have not known.

The starless sky makes that sound:

A ringing wholeness

That calls out and welcomes home.

The tired world sighs,

And in its sighing

Unscrolls traces

You remember knowing, but lost

Like a dream to the morning

In your sea of reachings

And sadnesses.

And now, suddenly, they are here,

Forming before your waking eyes

In the age that is ending in this night,

Among your years that gather, embarrassed

Beneath the trees,

And the humble shadows

That bow and flee from underneath your feet,

Within the dim, but deep and sourceless light – a hand

That leads you on

Into the woods.

Here, at the edge of all things that wait,

And hold themselves blameless

Before the throne of God,

You leave behind all manner of

Flickering, fleeting light:

A screen door standing open in an empty house,

Taking to it the gathering dark of October and its fallen leaves;

Your childhood church,

Its blurry springtime windows and dead pastors;

Your owned and endless miles of thick, steel track lifted up —

Lifted up 

From upon the earth,

Caressed into thin, molten, delicate thread

By the Maker’s hand,

And lovingly cut.