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.