untitled (6/20)

The firmament
Of the space between trees
Is the most unsteady
Of earths
Wondered wordlessly,
Close cousin to last gifts
Given to the world
In hospitals,
Or to those lying black-toed
Near stopped rivers.

It is a hope
That memory pillars;
That tumbles against
A childhood,
A corner garage
Near disaster
Where the knees brace,
And the hands seek to unsheath
A knife that is not there,

Was never there;

In God's great grace,

    Could have been there.

It is the old, great gift
Of a three-quarters moon
Swallowed black by
Unsteady weather,

The waiting silence
That holds each moment
Apart from the next.

A firmament.

A wall in water
Of one kind or another

Against which
Broken things tumble
In new morning.

For When My Sons Ask Why

Why you have come here —

walls escaping interstates;

national weather service

clinging to old dusks;

And there
a full glass,

a travel;

a bend of hibiscus shadow
in the front yard;

a stropped light pressed
against glass.

It has always been the
convex grind of wind on
shaking lamp light;

the edges
that streams make;

the
list of familiar things
that happen at midnight:

the engine,
steaming;

the branches, breaking;

the days, rushing,
stunned suddenly still.

Same

Then the way the charcoal
Clouds move

And that old story, full of
Shrouds.

Tornado warnings
Barely west

And a same songbook of
Unsharpened dusks.

The night,
Always:
And things allowed to be true
That pivot in the wheat.

And those shadows,
Questing after right angles,
Still.
 
And waves,

Leaves. The wind among them,

And all that is murmured.

Blanket of Stars

Of all things, the sky is impervious.

Underneath I dream
a bad road,
and still batter whale bellies
and tourists for tin roofs.

In dreams we talk west
with tail ends and sweet backs
and stew builders;

we prone the body, there,
or nail a rattler,

or make a hole in the water
when the batting's been handed the match.

Trust

These leaves,
this grain,
these ties -
knowing
Elohim knows
the best way home;

Trust vining
through years

And then the spring sky
resting on trees,

and a finished thing inscribed,

moments gathered decades
near basement doors,

and winter's dropped knives
found.

My cold hands
have been a name for you
as long as I've been full of sin.

I've been my own way through,

And I
remember well

trusting,

the way slate
Connecticut tombstones
trust the earth,
near the sea.

in answer

I still stab
numb-thumbed after
what answer
the shoulder
and the road
expect
after all that asking,

and silences after.

You can sharpen
anything with
anything:

That much is clear.

Sunset came
again
again,
in smoke-eyed waves
pouring
clockwork
over the black-branched hills;

That old
oxidized
shadow of dawn.

That much I know;

And this:

The dark is present
in the answer;
and spark as well;
and fatwood,
and youth.

Entropy

It is the way of
things that unfold or
spiral;

That is to say

God
in the black centers of galaxies,

his
names erupting
in comets;

And my understanding
of the yoke
of the world;

my wordless corpse

lengthwise in snow,
the chiseled symbol of me
scribing
name to years
pulled eyeless
over limestone
and sundog,

drawn up
from tide
or road
to the light
of the bewildering moon.

Waiting for Snow

Half a window with its night;
an angle;
a tumult;
a beach and its glass
abandoned in moon;

A Scandinavian grind
of college nights
leaned against
library glass.

The decades —
what they wait for,
what they mean —

and what the
window murmurs
with its night,
its open doors moving,
years moving over.

Sing for me a loss —
a half-night;
that street-lit porch;

those belly-full clouds
and that sea
and all that shines upon it.

At the end of the world
come the spires of pines
and the stars between:

Everything opened
in one great moment
I once knew.

I put on my boots
and took them off again.

I moved from
the house
toward the tracks
in the night.

I heard that old voice

Promising, promising,
promising.

And I was afraid.

A Dream of Windows Where There Are None

All my remaining days are

frames absent
posts;
small years
gasping
Easter without fire
over
thresholds
hushed
behind the choir loft.

I am
unembarrassed,
poured over
church lawns;

long shadows
of last bridges.

I am
a last people;

a dreamt language
of exhausted pictographs
pounded
into
brass
and cornhusk

where my children sleep,

become.

what locks go unlocked

All those buried axles
and the road become trail,
become rumor
near slag heaps
and ruined moons,
and the ways forward.

What locks go unlocked
fill up the firelight,
and the ingratitude
of passage
circles three times
in the tall grass
and settles too close
to the old encampments.

In the middle of the night
the treetops and the smokestacks
pivot against starshine;

it's all backward,

the face of the compass spinning
beneath the needle.

Shelter

Who has time
for sturdy
rooftops,
those days
spilling through
the old kinds of winters,
the chill smoothing
splintered doorframes,
the snow going
to interior corners?
Those days
outside the kitchen windows,
the silvered sun
pressed between
horizon and the low, gray, down
of the sky -
lulling geese
to stay too-long
in ponds -
were meant for
ages walked,
not overflown.

In the end
east pulls itself to west,
and there's no getting by it.

It all makes sense
the way that nothing ever does, or did;
the way the days still pass
beneath feet
numbed cold, soaked and stilled.

Nickels

My sons' eyes always ask
if I have ever
re-carved nickels into gold.

And I have not
In all the light
of knife-tipped lanterns,

Or the wild
of edges
lit beneath
the sea of what shines
out west.

Unfamiliar

Where I am now,
late at night at times
long after last locks,

    the floor shifts

such that folded years
are moved to edges
and brimmed over.

It seems then as if
I still move along
a memorized treeline
of missed hints
in unnumbered
darknesses.

Dogs with their teeth;

The world with its miles;

What was pressed by silence
from pathways
through the thick.

The backyard's stars
are the same stars,

no more tamed
by my collar,
my fire,
my furnace:

Nothing devised
could ever hope
to house their reflection.

The floor shakes that way
north of coffee,

and skylines
blur together.

It gets unsafe to move around,
even on your knees.

So I lay down -
spend that same night staring
at the face of what
has always stared back.

The Ring of the Bell

I have not named my panic.

That's why possibility
still crouches near embers

and faith yet mumbles
flint with steel
in pockets
on the old shoreline
near dawn.

Heading west,

I can still feel the steel
of the ring
of the bell
in my hands.

Still Don't, Never Will

I was raised up from an imaginary town
and jostled awake.

I was carried
in the ink
past unnamed rivers.

It happened under weary stars - all of it -
under comets
without names.

It sounds romantic:
years,
winters,
decades.

Firsts and seconds.

But it's just simple:

A cartographer's
lazy dream
of blue and red;
marbled terrain
spreading north
where the railroads thin.

I saw what I saw,
and I knew what I knew.

But I didn't see much,
and didn't know enough.

    Still don't. Never will.

Ages

Three men stood
on the shore of a lake
near the start of a river.

Things get confusing after that.

There was that one night,
In that blizzard. Light pulled away from the
library windows and piled up
against trees.

Steel mills came and went.

There were fires.

The sounds of unseen things
moving through forests
leapt up beneath strange stars.

The Burlington Northern
ran slow as sap
in a yearless autumn.

Dreams smeared together:
lightning took the maple
out front,
and we carried the
purple flash
with us for years,
across hard miles,
and dropped it
at the feet of three
men on the shore.

We were children,
and our children were fathers.

Owl-eyed moons
swarmed the end of the age.

Ishpeming

Ishpeming
lit like a porch,
lifted itself
arms open
to a lost pulpit.

All those lakes were
weepers opened up
on a cold face
looking north;

each moment
old,
lit
from the inside
out.

I said a prayer
for my compass
even as I tossed
it to the pile.

All that confounding iron
pushing pine needles
up off the earth,

and a great North,
arms open
to unnamed constellations.

Sometimes

Sometimes, everything pinions.

Everything is changed.

A few people see it, or understand.

They nearly make it to shore
near Wilmette,
but freeze
in the shallows
instead.

They try to remember

for the rest of us,
but give up
and go up over the high ground,
around blind corners,
across the forest borders
without us instead.

A river's edges are nudged
a few degrees west;

The moon becomes a molten eye.

It begins that way:

A blurred, orange comet
bleats ransom and redemption
nonsensically over
your shoulder,
falling
over the miles,

and you stop to rest beneath it.

It's near Christmas, again.

In mud-caked dreams,
your unborn children
try your patience
like a knife dropped in the snow.

Sometimes, everything pinions.

Everything is changed.

A few people see it, or understand.

They nearly make it to shore.

December

I imagined angels
more than once
in moments
same as snow,
slow and sifted,
drifting downward
to this weary earth.

They were there in
black ends of branches
circling
the eye's last
glimpse of night,
singing an endless,
silent reach
with outstretched hands,
and trumpets
stilled and raised.

Sheep and shepherds all
were dizzied beneath
the same stars,
a flurry of dark wings
unfurling suddenly among
December's trees,
where all who'd been hard-taught
to wait were afraid,
but awake
in the expectant night,
listening.

Trouble

The unspoken dream of
hammer on iron -
those black shadows
gathered
to the surface
of the workable form
of the world -

and the night,
brimmed with a
dulling bronze comet,
and gold coals spread
in dying splendor
by cursed heels
along shores.

Words cast out
come back
unanswered
as God's own Silence;
God's own nights
almost lonesome as our own,
nearly sure as traces home.