What You Awoke

What you

Awoke

Your hands
offered up

Tall
pines

proud

Staggering

leaned
over gold

Straight branches

Under and

Along

Dreams of
rivers

twin,

navigated

knotted lines

surrendered

necklaces,

chainlink,

high school
darkrooms

and

rockets
sent

to
what was
hoped

for,

shut eyes,

miles,

piles of
sharpened

stones,

record store bin

dividers.

Left
By the road.

10-3-2013

The trees
surrender in unison,

and their leaves are lost
in one collective gasp
to roadways and shoulders
and lift-bridges.

We stand at the edge of the park
and see it
lumbering, thick-furred,
long-clawed
toward us
along the tracks.

In our childhoods,
we recall this death.

Our first death.

We give the trees
until the end
of October
to get it done.

To paint the earth
with fire,

before the wind
and the white
come
to our doorframes
and our driveways;

before the deer-kill.

Before the diesel
jellies
in the tanks
near Lake Winnipeg,

and the cold moon
carves itself into
what we see
and what we hope for.

10-2-2013

In the end
you will own all rivers,
so
you will own
my drowning;

And those pines
uprooted for it
that widen the banks
and polish my bones.

I asked of you
all that I'd been
commanded to ask.

I waited, knifeless,
in all that dark.

10-1-2013

I had been
explaining the prairie
to my sons when
the Fox Sedge and
Culver's Root
leapt up around us,
and they were suddenly gone to me
among the saddle-tall stalks.

Long before,
I fell upon a
shoreless plain
and watched it
unfold this way.

For years I rolled,
a wordless fool,
between autumns,
and gatherings
of unlit streetlamps.

I stumbled over well-vined
pumpkins,
and the church-watched sorrows
of grace
pulled away and out from underneath.

But thank God
for those low-angled twilights
hanging off my belt,

old as iron mines:

 I would not have otherwise come across my boys,

their legs
shaking,
knit together
near
the grown-over paths.

That Autumn

It's true.

The floor of the world
beneath that
row of pines.

9-26-2013

Dreadful shapes
Of once-living men,
Mouths in that slanted dusk
Shaping unvoiced words,

Those

Silhouettes conjured near the edges
Of what drops off
In darkness.

We carried
Our canvas micarta courage close to us

And I speak

for myself
when I say we
were

Too weary for the horror.

We leaned
Up on our elbows, voiceless,
With the fatwood smoke
Pouring under black-glass
Constellations,

And watched --
The way one watches
Spider legs erupt around corners,

Or a play emerge
in wordless gasping
From a splintered stage.

    The knife-worn stars.

In fields by us
Pumpkins bloomed.

I hold that breath:

The moon grinning
An old gold
Over unharvested things,
Through coal-soaked, bare-branched
Trees,

And nothing warm, and

The silhouettes brimming, yet,
Poured over mile-filed shoulders;
Shadows split open over
Edges,

All that troublesome math
Tumbled at the bottoms

Of creeks

That pour
Over all that these remembering
Hands could ever make of
Autumn,

Fall.

Thinnesses

Babel
Gathers up
in a lost man's
hymnbook of found things,
and drags its leaves,
its leavings

The way my
Frightened children
Come at night,
Little railyards,
Stumblings
Whispered
On edges
Of my Great Lake.

A man is given this old gift
And cannot help himself
But try
to give it back,

Grace
left to benevolent
strangers;
scraped
of spark:
hammered
into thinnesses
where God still is:

The shallow rivers;
The snow on banks;
the soaked socks
that weep on sticks
near the remembered fire.

Sense

Even when
Ghosts are called up from
Civil War daguerreotypes,
And those blurred and

Pictured men run after
The cornfields
To which their ends have been
Prescribed,

None of it makes sense.

A woman makes the right
Decision at the wrong time,
And finds herself
Dead in the kitchen.

Some evenings, still, I look
At my legs
And imagine them dead,
Detached,
Glowing a weird glow,
Weary of pulling me along these things.

I know it doesn't make sense.

The way an evening
Crowds around children
On the driveway:
The voices,
The dark,
The sliver of moon
That near-autumn
Evenings crave;
The joy we suppose
So close to sleep
When we no longer recall,
But remember recalling,
And the locusts
Taunt us with the
Constancy of every summer's end.

It all piles up
Out west in an
Amber stack
Of rust:

All that bone cancer;

All those
Horizons
Poured out
In last, staggering
Embraces
Over Sunday night.

It doesn't make
Anything.

We may as well
Teach our children how
To wander properly;
How to level
The eye to
The unending knife.

And no more lies about
The ends we make spiders meet.

Wonders

A man's years fill up with the surfaces of lakes,
And clouds after storms
That bow low above them,
And branches tracing ovals
Over constellations,

And the smell of things
When the sun is set,
And the wind has stopped
Contending with old treetops
And new nests,

And the world of kindling needed
By all possible nights has been gained
From awkward jawings
And repurposed tool steel,

And, south,
Lightning
Pours noiselessly over hills.

There is God of course.
And a family.

They all climb up within him -

Wonders and
Wonders,
The
Recollection of
Wonders.

8-25-2013

Late some nights
The sill plates whisper
footsteps over frame,

And the house harvests me
from sleep.

And the still
between each room
congratulates

The putting aside
of childish things.

Yet then
I recall,
with all I am,
stars
above the roof.

And the boy I was
meets me on the porch,
and grasps after
my affection.

8-16-2013

All those kids, tattooed tourists
With their loud, crowded miles.
There's room for them in your kitchen,
Your yard, still holding
The constellations,
Your songbook
Brimming over with jungle fire.

At some point, there are grandchildren,
And the neck remembers with
Tenderness the way the routes out
From underneath summer storm warnings
Blossomed
Into all those Milky Way baths,

And the shake and the shudder
Shook the candy of the earth's crust
Off the remnants of you that mattered.

And the road
The road
The road bends west. It bends west,
A puzzle solved always to that answer,
A distance figured always to that measure.

What better answer will you stand and give to all those asking
Evenings,
Alone or otherwise,
When the reeds bow down along the angle of the wheel-rush?

None.

The grace of each curve
Answers itself.

Embers

Someone left embers.

It's always that way:

The same, dim glow rising,
Its dead language pouring
Over the underneaths of leaves.

The courses of Fox Sedge
Tramped down into traces
And blacktop in the day

Fold up,
And the dark of their foldedness
Spills between stars,

And we hear the sounds of shores,
Though we are too far inland
To hear it.

A long list of the impossible ways clouds
Become aurora goes lost,
And leaves itself on the knife-slick stones
Of a creek bed.

They'll build houses here.

The list will never be read.

Before that happens
Let's gather wood.

Make a fire, here.
Put our legs next to it.

Build it up
With pocket weight and carvings.

Leave a pile of embers.

8/10/2013

About rathering to be lost
The treelines along
Unapproved roads have
Strong thoughts.

There is

A quiet so still
That snow on tree bark
Is a rattle.

A fire so bare
That it's red whisper
Is noise in twilight's ear.

Even the heated space
Between the storm door
And the frame remembers

The journey grows
It's own strong jaws;

Ash scraped
Over rock
Oxidizes
Into
Moving shadows
Of unnamed things.

The constellations pinion,
Suddenly,
In a way that they cannot,

And you are left to wonder.

What is this all worth?

What language
Has been hammered
From the babble?

Unanswered

Words evaporated
From around the edges
Of moments
In those ridiculously finite journeys,
Late summer Sunday,
Gridline roads
Embarrassed
Only with the occasional
Adventurous curve;

That road
To Hegewisch Records;

That road along the quarry;

Pleasant Lake Road;

All those unanswered chases
In the long-yeared days.

What was waiting?
In the shadow of the Wings?

An older eyeful
Of the last of the dry wood
To surprise a dead fire
Beneath star-hurled spears,

Maybe.

Or later,
Sons lying wide-eyed, crying at sunset,
Having dreamt of the day their father dies

While you remember,
And want
And do not want
All of your wandered earths,

And you wait
For the
Words that will give them comfort
To coalesce
Around the moments.

Lines Composed Outside of Harpers Ferry

East upon east,
All is ghost;
Ancestor;
Remnant.

Even the present nights
With their trees, moving,
Are unearthed
From battlefields.

The Shenandoah
Remembers when it had no name;

And townless
Places were bent around by it,
And by clouds in the mountains
Above it,

Before sword-scabbard hangers
Lost themselves
From the dead,
And went on to oxidize,
And will their way up toward hazy sunshines
Through plow-furrows.

These things know,
And sometimes us,
That the days here have not earned themselves
And likely never will.

The Father

July's ageless heat
Parted near midnight
And the breeze poured between the banks.

Cricket-chirp wrapped itself
Around wind through long grass,
The soundless lightning west,
Those sharp-edged days gone
Folded over and
Blurred.

It was fine, rare enough
That someone said
We should sleep uncovered.

A fire came up.

Food.

Scripture.

And the night moved through the branches.

Somewhere in the ink and silver,
Elohim lit upon the
Circling pine boughs
Above dying embers,
Sleeping us;
Impossibly
Perfect barbicels
Spilling over
Owl eyes
And knots.

I blinked the dirt,
The ash,
The stars,
The moon,
The edges
Of clouds,
And the improbable
Age and youth
Of the ends of all miles
Into my waking sight.

He asked if he could approach.

(He asked.)

"Don't call me Elohim,"

He said.

untitled (6/26/2013)

Soon
go these days,
quiet as lawns;

the sides of wide rivers
you've not yet known;

stars burnt through charcloth

pinwheeling,

fire gone silver

suddenly unchecked
by time, distance,

or recollection.

And then,

the graceless years
against which
our legs have
labored
fall,
and go diaphanous.

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.