Silver

Won’t your hand
Find my hand
In the watery grave
Of the moon?
When the silver
That drifts
Along the sliver
That lives
Between the light
Of stars
And the ink of night
Alights upon
Leaf-tips;
Sleeping barbicans
In the flicker
Of long-gone autumns?
When the combines
Swarm along state routes,
And their reflections
And their shimmerings
Quiver in the wind
As we pass in the silence —
That Silence.
Among trees;
Among ruined bridges;
Among rail-spans, spillways, and lift-bridges;
Among the shadowed spans of doorways
Awash in the last
Innocent Christmas
You remember;
In the ash that leaves my lips
And settles on my sleeve
As we traverse each distance.
You lean in close,
As the road descends
In its grace
From blacktop, to gravel,
To grass.
You have found a secret; that secret:
An ending — here —
The beautiful ending of lights —
In a world that never once
Deserved those lights,
Or the finding of those lights.
We move together, then:
Beneath, among, above
These horizons that
Have held us to the earth,
And we are free:
As free as
Every silver thing.

It was not all a dream.

My parents recently concluded what can only be called a terrible real estate transaction that began with discussions about the changing economic profile of their neighborhood, the realities of yard upkeep, and proximity to grandchildren ... and concluded with curses issued to our federal government, a brush with financial fraud, and several episodes of yours truly brandishing a glass of straight gin on ice cursing under his breath very late at night. All of this over five months, in the worst real estate market this country has seen since the Great Depression. It's an interesting story, but not meant for this space.

Back in 1976, I was as much of a mess as one 7-year-old boy could be: I was at the top of my form in good old Riverdale, Illinois, in my quaint track-side school that went from kindergarten to third grade: I was the fastest, the strongest, the funniest, and -- I thought -- the smartest in all of Park School. (Ah ... big fish in little ponds.) And then my world went upside-down. When I first caught the scent of the possibility that my parents were considering pulling up roots and moving elsewhere, I was indignant: This was not possible. What motivation could explain this absurdity? Here, all was well: I was within walking distance of my school, my grandmother lived in the "apartment" upstairs, my great-grandma Torrenga lived a mere two blocks away, my best friend's grandmother lived right next door (affording me access to said best friend upon his frequent visits), and all was right with God and his universe. Of course, my seven-year-old brain failed to recognize details such as the gang- and riot-riddled high school my sister and I were destined to attend based upon our address, or the fact that our parents were forced to sleep on a fold-out hide-a-bed so that my sister and I could have separate rooms.

And so we landed in South Holland. I remember how terribly conflicted I felt the first time I stepped foot on the property: Here was a foreign land, a virtual desert expanse of suburbia compared to our near-Chicago bungalow jungle in Riverdale. Here, few backyards had fences; the railroad passed right behind the house -- and there were four sets of tracks! The block offered no less than four neighbor boys -- boys! -- to play with as opposed to the oddly imbalanced overabundance of girls to be found on our Riverdale block. It seemed oddly rural compared to our Riverdale address: there was something sad and lonely about the evenings here, and the dark seemed darker and the night more deep. The school wasn't a simple kindergarten to third-grade affair: No, it was kindergarten straight up to sixth grade. It seemed like a college campus to me, where I was at the bottom of the seniority list.

But, my vote was a small one weighed against our circumstances, and we took the move. I think back on it now, and I feel bad for my parents: The grief I must have caused them. My oldest son cries whenever we cart an old piece of furniture or a decrepit appliance to the curb, he's that sentimental: "But I LOVE our old water softener!" he sobs; "But I love that washing machine." My heart aches for him, but I'm exasperated: Life finds innumerable ways to explain to us the grief we've unknowingly caused others, no? But I digress.

The day we went to our soon-to-be-new house, I was nervous, but excited. There was a basement stairway, with grapevines growing upon the railing. (With real grapes! That you could eat!) There were, of course, the rail lines, with their regular schedule of house-shaking freights. There were dirt bike trails and their attending dirt bikes -- soon to become the nemesis of my father. There were the string of backyards that would become a convenient baseball diamond/football field/battlefield/graveyard. And there were paintings, left by the previous owners, of naked ladies in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Wow! (These were seen once, and never again.)

So we bought our house on Prince Drive in South Holland. We settled in, we made a life, we grew up. It was a good place to grow up -- the right balance of comfort and toughness that a kid needs to learn his way. There were the crazy kids, and the good kids, and the bad kids, just like every other neighborhood. In the summers, we would spend too much time with each other, get bored, get into fist-fights, storm off, and realize that we were the only game in town, and learn to negotiate peace. My poor father -- forever pining for a return to his pure rural roots -- found ample space for a large garden; my mother, a daughter of Chicago, found herself on familiar ground. It was as close to a perfect compromise as the family would ever find.

I don't know what you can say about a home, except that you know what makes it a home while it is yours, and whatever that is can never be truly expressed to anyone else. Thinking back, I have glimpses: Of hot summer afternoons spent swigging cold Coca-Cola from glass bottles beneath the mock-orange tree in the backyard while the freight trains rocketed by; of snow-days and blizzards spent too-long in the backyard making snow forts until runny noses chased us indoors to hot chocolate and Spiderman cartoons. It was a good house, a good home.

My parents stayed as long as they could. Things were getting to a place where I was uncomfortable letting Liz and the kids travel there on their own. It's just one of those things. The church was gone; most of our friends and family were gone. My best friend and I were robbed at gunpoint two blocks away one Christmas: "Throw your wallets on the ground, and there better be money there or you're both fuckin' dead!" There you go. Welcome home. It was time. Dad had to give up a glorious yard, hard-fought-for and hard-won; Mom had to give up the home she'd tweaked to her tastes over three decades. And, for me, on that last day -- as the moving vans closed their doors, and I backed out of that driveway for the last time -- I couldn't resist one last circuit around the old sights. The thing is, I realized fairly quickly that I'd become a relic; a stranger among my old haunts.

My parents are blessed to have a wonderful home in a wonderful neighborhood, not more than 10 minutes from where I live. Our kids are silly with excitement, apparently because they have a new house to explore, but clearly because their beloved grandma and grandpa are now only 10 minutes away instead of 45 minutes. My father has lost a wonderful backyard, but gained an entire neighborhood that is safe to walk around in, day or night. It's taken me a long time to get that life is nothing more than a series of chapters that conclude and subsequently serve as the prologue to the next, and that this isn't a bad thing, or even a sad thing, just a true thing.

Burning Like the Midnight Sun Gold Ring in the Mud Mix

Well folks ... this is probably it for the "BLTMS" remixes for me. This was particular fun.

Latest remix effort: Old Man Byrd Baby's Heartbeat Mix

Mr. Chandler "Drive into the Wilderness" Mix

My second remix from "Burning Like the Midnight Sun." This was more or less a response to my good friend Jeffrey Kotthoff, who suggested most remixes were too "safe."

Burning Like the Midnight Sun "Forever Rising" Mix

The Choir has provided mix stems from their latest album, "Burning Like the Midnight Sun" so that those so inclined can take a turn at remixing the tracks. This is my first effort, basically just a more ambient take on the original.

RIP Michael Been

Michael Been, lead singer/songwriter for the semi-obscure post-punk band "The Call" died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 60. He was to music what Flannery O'Connor was to literature. He was someone who described his musical and spiritual journey as the "slow wearing away of ignorance." He understood the realities of grace — both wonderful and terrible — better than most. I count myself very fortunate to have discovered his talent in my formative years. Tribute poems are seldom good, and I seldom have written them, but here's one — for what it's worth. RIP Michael Been.



God arranges to have certain people
Born in Oklahoma, where Union Pacific
Lines are straight as the skyline
Save for the earth’s curve,
And twisters noose downward from cliff-clouds
To lasso thin towns and two-lanes.

Your voice is still heavy as blacktop —
Grace and mercy washed against
The cinder block basement-wall of law.

In back country like this —
Jungled up in the scrub next to the tracks,
Sharpened against the edge of hot panhandle nights —
The ache for a glimpse of treeline or riverbank
Leaks
Into every voice you might carry to the world.

In ways like this
God arranges to grant to the earth
The meek,
Those who know well to whom we die,
To whom we’re to be reconciled.

They lead us through the desert,
Some urgently singing at each fork in the path;
The mocking governments, the mocking mainline,
The mocking fringe, the mocking world
Held fast — dumb — by the throat
While the poor in spirit snake by.

It’s a violent grace —
A dam-breaking,
House-swallowing,
Brother-drowning grace.

It presses even the preacher
Until the preacher cries out
“Hell’s been raised!”

And there in the ending of all moments
There is mercy in Hell.

Untitled ...

Blurring, stammering,

Miles pile close together against years —

Cold ash on calloused hand-skin

The remembered feeling of fingertips

Against palms:

Nickels rubbed dime-thin in hidden earth

And smeared across the decades

While you remain,

and wait.

In the late wind, you sleep too near the shoreline;

Too near the railyard.

It’s a crime,

They say.

Truth be told,

You dared the eye of each horizon’s devil:

You paid your dues;

You awoke to hail;

You gave your shoulder over to bent, broken tree trunks

And lost cemetery names —

A sea-crashed view;

A shadow

Left in last night’s fire-ring

And given over to the morning —

Which finds the night (along with you)

Mis-remembered, precious, alight.

There it is — the crux of all things —

Christ on his cross,

And you in the man-tall weeds, much later,

Waiting for the conduction of crew changes near the viaduct;

Waiting for straight avenues out from underneath

Storm warnings

Via hotshots heading west —

Bolt-out of prairie-school nights.

Still, there — adrift, awakened, remembered —

The lightning-soaked cloudfields

Have no part of being escaped, or left alone.

Treasures

This week’s list of treasures/artifacts nearly lost to the lawn mower: one small rubber lizard and one small rubber frog from the dollar store; one piece of orange sidewalk chalk; one non-functioning squirt gun; one hand trowel; one spark plug gap gauge (i.e., “space money”); one Matchbox Corvette (lucky save); one Hot Wheels “highly modified and stylized” school bus (Hot Wheels … would have happily mowed over it); multiple “favorite stones.” A pet peeve I share with my wife is a yard cluttered with the detritus of the day’s joyous chaos — the inevitable evidence left after two little explorers/spacemen/bad guys/Jedi/firemen/policemen have run roughshod over the property — so this was a somewhat unusual yield.

I sigh with frustration when I nearly mow over these treasures, not because I am afraid my Briggs & Stratton might be threatened by an encounter with any of them, but because I remember the strange combination of jealous attachment and fickle abandonment that accompanied similar treasures when I and my friends were young. In fact, I recently had the weird experience of not only putting my hands on some of those forgotten treasures, but also passing some of them along to Sam and Luke. This weekend we helped my folks clear out their attic in preparation for their impending move. I spent a sweaty, spidery, uncomfortable hour in the attic followed by a six-hour hike down Memory Lane. Here, preserved undisturbed for 30 years, were the possessions I treasured enough to carefully entomb in the attic when I was still a child. For my kids, it represented quite a haul: As I type this, I’m glancing over at a Ziplock bag containing Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Boba Fett, and one hapless unnamed stormtrooper — a length of string still firmly tied around his waist, his terrible yet well-deserved last moments spent dangling over the source of some no-doubt horrific demise frozen forever in time. There were hundreds of Topps Star Wars trading cards — harvested from untold numbers of hot summer-day walks to Kim’s Rexall to buy bubblegum packs. There was the big box full of Legos — the revelation of which elicited an actual gasp of surprised shock from my oldest son and some sort of “ecstatic collapse” upon his grandparents’ floor (promptly mimicked in slow motion by my younger son) — that still contained several fully realized space fighters carefully sculpted by yours truly when Ronald Reagan was our new president. There were notes written in the language my best friend James and I invented; pins and coins; birthday cards from my great grandma; diaries and first love letters; bullet casings and “No Hunting” signs from the farm in Michigan; that big bowie knife my grandpa bought me over the protests of my mother; a forged ring and length of chain unearthed at an abandoned farm; countless railroad spikes found along the tracks behind the house; a rusted horseshoe unearthed at a Boys Brigade sleepover behind our church in South Holland; and on and on.

And then of course there was the actual treasure box: A little wooden chest bought as a souvenir on a vacation to King’s Island, containing the absolute cream of the crop. When I was a child, the box and its contents were so important, I wrapped it in bicycle chain and secured it with a padlock. Here were all the objects that one little boy treasured above all else. Seeing them now was vaguely touching — my grown-up brain now able to connect dots and make connections that I was then unaware of. Here was a toy stopwatch, given to me by my father: When I was very young, I spent an extended period of time in the hospital with pneumonia and a terrible pancreatic infection. It was touch and go. The day I was finally released, while my mom was wading through paperwork, my dad hoisted my still weak body up into his arms, took me to the hospital gift shop and asked me if there was anything I would like. I was fascinated by watches and stopwatches — still am, actually — and I was fixated on a particular toy stopwatch behind the counter. “Are you sure?” my dad asked. “That’s not a real stopwatch, you know. It’s tin and plastic.” I didn’t realize it then, but I know now he was happily prepared to buy his surviving son an actual, honest-to-goodness stopwatch. But I wanted that toy stopwatch, and so I had it. When I lifted it out of my treasure box on Saturday — and you need to trust me when I say I’m not adding this for dramatic effect — I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t start ticking away loudly when I thumbed the start switch.

There was a jumble of keys, each one a story. One skeleton key was unearthed while digging in the backyard of our corner house in Riverdale. I was delighted when it happily engaged the lock of our heavy oak door. I was doubtful, by my great-grandmother encouraged me to give it a try. It was like magic. I still remember the way she smiled when the tumblers clicked. Several of the keys came from my Uncle Gil, who knew I loved keys, and would produce one or two of them upon every visit to our house. I was a shy boy, but Uncle Gil would make a point at the beginning of every visit to crouch down to look me in the eye, and carefully display and explain each key — what it was for; how it was used; how he came to be in possession of it; what he liked about it; why someone would want a key for its given purpose. I didn’t know a lot about Uncle Gil, but I knew he had fought in the Philippines in World War II, and that he never talked about it, and that I should never ask him about it. Uncle Gil never had any kids of his own, but he sure was a great uncle. In fact, all my uncles were great, and I’m thankful for my own kids’ uncles — every crazy one of them. Most of my keys came from uncles, most with a story. There were keys in the box from other sources: Some from old cars we sold; others from the old house; others found while playing in the yard or in the park. But all the keys from my uncles are together on one ring, a separate ring.

There was a chunk of fool’s gold, a vestige of one of the many vacations my family took with my best friend’s family. We were in Cuba, Missouri, and the walkways were literally paved with fool’s gold. James and I thought it was fantastic. Our dads patiently indulged us as we gathered literal buckets full of the stuff. Not only did we collect these buckets during our time there, but we actually carted them home. At the campground where we were staying, they would show Yogi Bear cartoons just after dusk. One night, while we were waiting for the cartoons to begin, my dad and I saw a fireball streak across the sky. My dad said that was a piece of a rock that had been flying around in space for thousands of years that was burning up in our atmosphere. I was awestruck. For years these buckets of fools’ gold remained in my parnets’ garage. Years ago, I had chosen the most brilliant specimen and sequestered it in my treasure box.
There was a pair of cufflinks and a tie bar my father gave me — no doubt around the time cufflinks and tie bars were going out of style; a piece of gunflint unearthed at the Tippecanoe Battlefield near Lafayette, Indiana; a 4H pin from my dad’s days on the farm; Indian head pennies rationed out by my Grandma Bink over the years; my first pocket knife; a ring with my birthstone in it; a resin-embalmed scorpion given to me by my aunt and uncle who moved to Arizona back in the 70s.

I watch my sons play together, and I instantly recognize the shorthand of their love and their interaction. There’s something about boys that leads them to talismans or totems … treasures … little altars built to their conquests and discoveries. I have a sister — who I love dearly, and who I happily played with on countless summer days. My childhood neighborhood was bereft of male companions, so I made do with my sister and her friends. But our play was in some ways always negotiated: We’ll play house, but only if I get to take off Ken’s head and pretend he’s the Headless Horseman; we’ll play Batman, but only if he’s happily married to Barbie and has a baby. But there’s just something about brothers and the mischief they make and the treasures they uncover … I wasn’t born with a brother, and so I had to find one. His name is James, and we have been of one mind for a long, long time. Our play never involved negotiation: We innately knew that the Lego vehicles we spent 30 minutes carefully crafting and engineering in silence were going to meet their fate crashing against the side of the oven from atop the stairs; we knew that, while camping, we were going to wake up at the crack of dawn with the unspoken mission to conjure the previous night’s fire from nothing but ashes and cooling embers, armed only with our breath and a few dry leaves. When I was crazy, wreckless and wandering with a stupid, broken heart, the Spirit moved and gave James the grace of his dead dad’s gun collection and the wisdom to drive me to Beecher to shoot shotguns at empty paint cans and pumpkins. That’s the way it works. As old as we get, it never leaves. It’s a weird, undefined thing … call it the Holy Spirit moving over the face of the deep. I see it when Luke is scared, and Sam drops every treasure he owns in that moment to the ground to rush to his brother’s side.

Some have been encouraging me to share more poems. This is one of those rare ones that actually felt finished after I wrote it down. It's actually — and I guess obviously — a collection of several poems written together over the course of a few days. From my "wanderings in the wilderness," when I was always heading north ... always north; as north as north can be. (Why north? Because it isn't south, apparently.)

The Canadian Northern Suite

I. Departures

Union Pacific

Runs slow as sap

This year,

Still I insist

A stranglehold —

Track-pulse coursing through the grabiron

Like last life through a vein,

Thundering,

Drinking in the autumn

While it dies wonderful deaths.

I have missed

The slack-action

Of great departures

All my life —

A long day

Sheltered at the siding

Watching trains slip by.

I would trade

My life for this —

One skull

Worth the moment;

The great rivers

So much larger

Than each bridge.

Sunsets dig beneath

Each surface

As they fade,

Parade the light;

Give the tree-line

Bones, ghosts,

wings —

Creation myths

In life unceasing.

I have never put

That light behind,

Bulkhead-strong

In tatters

And torn blankets;

County bridges, good weather,

Grace in transit.

II. So Taken Care Of

That day when the sky was God,

Smoke spiraled

Clean sacrifice

To heaven;

Bare sleep on old rugs

Was devotion

In the cool bridge-shade

Of early morning.

That black street preacher’s

Holy Ghost

Smiled my face,

The way he reached me

Here, after every

Dangerous mile,

And trusted

That my soul was saved.

That day Jesus was demanding

In the rush of boxcars in the yard,

I was awakened by the growl of

Harleys on the four-lane,

The sky clouding over

So shafts of light

Might girder my chest.

That day he cracked a smile,

Said

“Be that way!”

And walked out ahead of me

Down the line,

The slack-action

Rippling through the couplers

A lifelong journey up my spine;

The birds of the fields

Well-considered;

So beautiful;

So taken care of.

III. Fire Ring

Finally,

The corn is neck-high.

A little late —

Autumn clouds now rolling in;

Heavy silence

Near the fire;

Late summer’s whispers

In the rows

To the clearing

Near the river.

Moonshadows

On the face of us,

Gathered from

Convergences

Untold,

Let go of

A little late;

Eyes shining gold

Through fire,

Giving everything

To flame,

To the murmur of current

Over the rise.

Moonbeams cross-section

The moments,

Distilled forever;

Tin cups

Filled with it —

This night —

Sugared coffee;

Cloud-smothered Perseids

Streaming songs

Of falling to the world.

A little late —

The earthen us —

Thinking of

The double-doused circle

In the morning;

Perfect, magical ring

Holding always

Dying embers in the speeding sun,

Drowned with

Water from the river

Even now

Coursing hopefully on.

IV. Arriving

I remember knowing

The necessity

Of stumble and momentum —

Hovering above

A grid-covered earth

And drinking in direction.

I recall new vocalization;

Songs of pilgrimage

And journey

Pushed through well-hewn

Stiff-water doors,

Arriving out of anterooms —

Out of tunnels

Through the black-lung crust

On platinum rails,

Escape velocity

Twitching in the ears,

Humming every year

Into crosshair focus.

Arriving I imagine

The days before the roar

Of flow and current,

When the curvature

Of the earth was overstated,

Misdirected into confines

Hoping to ice the soul

From care.

V. Catching Out

Living all of life tonight —

One night

To force familiarity

Into endless American miles.

Roadside with open arms

And hands

I give you

Bandaged days;

Every tired moment.

The world collects its toll —

Nightshade-deadly

As a thirty-eight

Hidden in the hay-bin;

Strangers on the road;

Boxcars coasting in the yard.

Wind through weeds

Pulls tomorrow’s miles

Longer,

Stretches me through

Fields of pumpkins,

Over mountains,

To the sea.

Tonight we sleep

A crucifix

In tall grass,

Stars shining through

A distant surface

And bleeding ancient light —

Our eyes oceans

To accept it.

And grace at last is the diesel pull

Of forward and forever,

Trackside always in the morning,

Fires for the chill of Fall,

A glimpse of Jesu

Through safety glass,

And coffee steaming through

The sunrise

Where we part,

Where I am unashamed to laugh aloud alone.

VI. The Trestle

You have traveled north

To where the earth

Holds onto the sun

For as long as it can,

And still stays cold,

Sighed into a flat sleep

Against the sky.

You are stepping off of trains

That have brought you

From the door of one life

To the next,

And interrupt the journey

With this trestle —

Triple-layered lumber

Stacked

By unseen hands

To last the floods,

The winds,

The claws and the backs

Of bears.

You will catch the sun

Between the creek bed

And the rails,

Find Polaris next

And watch it drift

Into your tomorrow.

The Holy Ghost brought you here

To breathe aurora —

To sleep and then awake

To watch this trestle

Take the weight

Of pilgrimage again:

Strong shoulders give it all

In one deep groan,

Longing for the promised land;

Wishing it as easy.

In the morning

You will find all things new,

Beautiful and strange

As a dead bird’s wings

Spread open on the tundra.

And you —

You must let go of it and leave,

And catch out

From all these standing places,

Having dirtied your hands

Against all manner of iron;

Against the dust

Lifted up upon your palms from

Sifting through

The old-bone days;

Caught in all ways up within

The very journey toward

The unsaid things you seek.

Terrors of Boyhood

I was probably about 6 years old when Matthew Meese, who lived around the corner from me, had the brilliant idea to play cowboys and indians. We went to his house, where he ran inside and momentarily produced the following: A papier mache "Indian shield" that his older brother had made in art class; a handful of .38 caliber bullets; and a chrome snub-nosed .38 revolver. (Matthew's father was a security guard.) He handed me the poorly painted papier mache shield and all but one bullet, and then began busily working at the revolver, trying to figure out how to get the chamber free from the gun in order to begin loading bullets. While he was doing this, my eyes were darting from the shield to the gun. I can still feel the sweaty lead tips of those bullets tumbling around nervously in my hand .... My six-year-old brain was apparently ahead of Matthew's in the logic department: "I don't think this shield will stop bullets," I offered. His response? "It's a shield, shields stop bullets." No, no ... something was wrong here. (I knew that when mom safety-pinned a bath towel around my neck to approximate Superman's cape, that didn't mean I'd suddenly inherited the ability to fly and stop speeding freight trains with my outstretched arm.) Maybe I should run this whole thing by my mom. I handed Matthew the shield, and ran back around the block back to my house, where my mom was standing on the sidewalk talking to neighbors, like they used to do back in the old days. (The days when six-year-olds were free to roam the block on their own.) I approached my mom, and tugged on her shirt. I held out my hand and asked if it was true that ALL shields stopped bullets, even ones made of paper.

And that was the last time I ever saw Matthew Meese.

I did manage to keep a bullet ... As I recall, I had a pretty good idea my mom would confiscate them, and so I pocketed one on my way around the block. I had that thing for years. I would lose it much later, after we'd moved to a new town. Another crazy friend was convinced that one could cause a bullet to fire simply by smacking the end of it hard enough. He tried his best to drop it firing-mechanism-side-down into an empty storm sewer in an attempt to set it off. And there it remained, despite all attempts to recover it.

There are days when I stare in amazement as my two boys tempt fate - seemingly in every conceivable way - around the house. My oldest - who will cover his ears and run screaming from the room if you attempt to read him any story wherein a character gets in trouble or becomes sad - will happily try to traverse the living room by leaping from chair-top to chair-top. (Thankfully his head is harder than his pillow-soft heart.) My youngest son has made a habit of announcing all of the things he was thinking of doing, but didn't do. It's a frightening list: "Daddy, I didn't put my arms in the fire ..."; "Daddy, I didn't hit that little boy in the face ..."; "Daddy, I didn't put my head in the TV." He's also taken to providing sneak previews of intended future life choices: "Daddy, when I drive my car, it will be faster than police cars ..."; "Daddy, when I grow up I will jump out of helicopters ..."; "Daddy, one day I will break up all the trees in the whole world." (?) From both of them I get helpful promptings: "You should drive the car FASTER!"; "You should put your glasses in the fire ..."; and my favorite - SAM: "Let's take our brains out and step on them!" LUKE: "Oh YEAH! Take our brains out and put them in a MONSTER TRUCK!" This is the state of affairs at 5 and 2. Drat.

A Quick One ... Off the Cuff ...

This is a way for me to
Collect the differences
Between satellites and stars —
Hold the history of lakeshore
Travel and train wreck
Against my chest;
Mackinac straining against
The years — decades of
Old rust falling from the
Heights into taverns and
8mm recollection —
Church basements dark
With promise and hope.

God Says ...

My sister married her husband Rich back in June of 2008. She asked me to read a poem at her wedding ... preferably one I'd written ... and preferably one I'd written for the occasion. Poems are few and far between for me these days, so it was a challenge. Of course I agreed, put something together pretty quickly ... and then put it down until a week or so before the big day. (Because I work best under pressure, or something.)

As the extended family's resident technophile, I was also recruited to compile the requisite Ken Burns pan-and-scan bride/groom slideshow, and the soon-to-follow also requisite wedding video DVD. So when it came time to author said DVD, the question came up: To preserve my commissioned wedding poem for the ages, should I rely upon the grainy, hesitant image of my middle-aged, nervous, tired self reading said poem at the wedding - garnished with my inability to do so without breaking into tears mid-way through the reading, my shining forehead glistening with flop sweat ... or should I break out the After Effects badness and whip up a quick graphical representation? I took the After Effects route, which is presented here for your edification. It was quick and dirty - only a solitary lens flare effect and a quick Gaussian blur thrown in there for the heck of it - but it was an interesting experiment. In a minimalist sort of way, I hope it hints at what visual/graphical treatment can bring to the poetic table.

One final note: DVD-standard footage is interlaced, which can cause some goofiness when played back on a computer. I didn't bother de-interlacing anything, so the text may be kind of blurry and blotchy ... especially when compressed by Google. But, sorry to say, I've messed around with it as much as I'm willing to. So squint, you big baby.

Happy Mother's Day

From Sam:

I love Mom because: "She loves me and plays with me. She makes food for me and then I don't have to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich myself."

What I Know About Mom:

What does she do?: "Laundry"

What does your dad call her?: "Liz"

What is her favorite food?: "Sandwiches"

What is her favorite color?: "Green"

Does she have any brothers or sisters?: "No"

What does she like to do for fun?: "Play with me"

What is your favorite thing about her: "I like to look at her"

(Note: Could be Daddy's favorite thing about her too.)

Here Comes Spring

Winter in Manhattan is officially declared over with the coming of Irish Fest, culminating in the Irish Fest parade. (This is the case even if snow is piling up and the windchill is a healthy decade below zero.) At the end of the parade the town Christmas tree is unceremoniously taken down and dragged through town chained to the back of a pickup truck. This year we had beautiful weather and a great time. Please excuse the shaky camera: my Flip camcorder has no image stabilizer. As for my dorky laugh, I have no excuse.

About Me and Trains

When I was seven years old, we moved out from under the shadows of blast furnaces and forges just outside of south Chicago in an attempt to escape the patch of rust quickly growing on the industrial economy of the area. I was in the middle of second grade at Park School, three short blocks down from our house, one block over from my great-grandma Torrenga’s house. Park School was a kindergarten-through-third-grade affair housed in a little red-brick building on a corner lot shared with Riverdale’s only park, a tiny catholic church, and four sets of railroad tracks carrying both freight and chrome-bright commuter cars. We surfaced a couple of suburbs to the west, in a house with a large, fenceless backyard featuring another four sets of tracks a literal stone’s throw from the back patio. From an early age, I learned to be comfortable with the blaring horns of trains; the roar and the shake: They did not keep me from learning my d’s from my b’s in Miss Marcunis’s classroom as they thundered by in the afternoon, nor did they wake me up every two hours as they rocketed past and shook the Lego bins against my bedroom wall through the night. I could stand close enough to the tracks to stare into the engineer’s eyes and study with leisure the look of consternation on his face as it dawned on him that no amount of persistent horn-blasting would open up any further distance between my person and his engine. Mind you, I wasn’t reckless, nor were most of the kids in my neighborhood. (Glenn was reckless, but that’s another story.) In the ebb and flow of the day’s rhythm, we grew to instinctively know when to expect the trains. We knew what kind of freight to expect: Mornings brought boxcars and grainers; mid-afternoon meant a potpourri of automobile carriers and flatcars carrying semitrailers and bulk containers; later afternoon and early evening brought torpedo cars with their mysterious orange-glowing molten cargo: They came one after another in short order all through the evening and into the night. They looked to me like some sort of mournful, mystical parade of endangered mammoths linked tail-to-tusk, thundering sadly, slowly off into the dark West.

My poor mother tried every trick imaginable to leverage my predisposition toward nervousness to keep me from growing too comfortable with the tracks and the trains. When it became apparent that appealing to my sense of self-preservation was gaining no traction, she pulled out all the stops: She informed me that if one stood too near a passing train — through some mysterious feat of physics that she was at a loss to elaborate upon — this would cause the train to derail, no doubt killing any workers and passersby, and causing untold millions of dollars worth of damage. And wouldn’t that make me feel terrible? This approach saw some success for a few weeks, until the hypothesis was challenged and put to the test by the neighborhood crew and found wanting.

I’ve always had a terrible sense of geography, direction, and place. Because of this, I easily filled my imagination with ponderings about where these trains came from and where they were going, free of any practical understanding of where the Dolton railyard was in relation to my home, or how the mills and foundries were arranged to shuttle liquid steel and slag from one arm of the operation to another via rail. Long before I understood hobo lingo for death — catching the Westbound — I would find myself studying trains from the first hint of arrival in the east to the last glimpse of dissipation to the west. I was filled with a sense of sadness and longing that is hard to describe and embarrassing even now to admit. It’s always been with me.

The odd thing is, anyone who knows me will testify that I’m by nature a cautious man. My childhood was filled with secret worries and self-imposed pressures that darkened my poor little heart with terrible and unnecessary wall-clouds. Think of long dark hospital hallways at night, absent of mothers or fathers. And yet, where trains are concerned, walking along a line of desolate freight cars at night is a far more comfortable prospect to me than buying tickets, navigating a schedule, and facing a car full of people on the South Shore line with my oldest son to get to the Auto Show at McCormick Place on a bright Saturday afternoon.

As I write this late at night — no joke — I hear two train horns out on the old Wabash line in town. It awakens in me some sleeping old ageless wonder; it makes me want to get my hands on that secret Rand McNally railroad map, adjust for declination on my Silva compass, stuff a notepad, pen, a lighter, some cigars, sunflower seeds and an extra knife into a freezer-sized Ziploc bag, cocoon this all inside a quilted flannel jacket, cable-tie it all together … and catch out. It makes me want to wake up my oldest son and put him in the car, drive him down to the tracks, and watch the trains pass by together, answering any questions he has. It makes me thank God for my good wife and my family; my warm bed; my house and my garage full of tools; the many, many lonely miles I’ve seen north, south, east and west, and the Heaven beneath them.