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?