Tree Climbing

My family used to spend many long weekends in the summers and falls at the Fritzsches’ cottage in Paw Paw, Michigan. My best friend James and I would wander the dirt roads and sandy paths through forested back-forties for entire mornings or afternoons at a time. Sometimes we’d stumble upon a field of raspberry bushes and eat ourselves sick on them. Sometimes we’d walk the untold miles into town to the one record store there, cool off in the AC, buy nothing, and arrive back home at dusk. Sometimes we’d sharpen sticks with new knives, or launch empty single-serve pudding cans into the air with Black Cat firecrackers. Sometimes we’d swim ourselves to exhaustion in the lake until the sun went down, and ghostly fires lit the shores, and we were more tired than we would admit, and the daddy longlegs on the musty cinder blocks swayed in the twilight and the breeze in our dimming eyes. 

One autumn day, we spilled out from the wilds  of an unharvested field to find ourselves below a line of long, tall trees. The wind pushed and pulled us. The trees were tall, and spiked with branches that launched themselves, ladder-like from the trunk. Tree-climbing was a little boy’s game of chess, and these trees were easily conquered. As boys will do, we picked the tallest tree. Up went James, then up went Kevin. The climbing was easy, step over step: Not like climbing old oaks or stingy maples. Foot over foot, arms around the trunk, up and up, faces scratched bloody on bark. Sunlight bouncing and dancing among golden leaves; faith in the strength of branches resting in the arches of smallish feet. Slowly, voices begin to be lost in wind; and the trunk thins, and the branches with it; and the treetop sways.

How high? 50, 60, 70 feet? The wind moves, and we move with it. The tree yields, and we yield with it. I smile, clinging to the skinny trunk. I am dizzy, and my stomach laughs inside me. The sun is beginning to set. “I guess we should go,” James says. He is above me: First up into the tree. But I am below, pioneer in the descent. I take a moment, and turn my face outward, and gaze upon the world before me. Below us, a brown and glowing patchwork of tended fieldwork; over my shoulder, the sunset resting upon the lake. And all the world swaying, rocking in the wind, moving in a familiar rhythm. Thin lines of gold-sanded roads widening to horizon. Combines resting, their drivers huddled near thin lines of smoke trailing upward to our noses. Our fathers building fires, our mothers making a meal, our sisters telling stories. The coming night timeless: a parade of hymns.

The wonder stays with me. 

Years. 

Decades. 

Still.

And my right foot wanders, blindly, downward to find purchase. And with this, we are on our way home.

Night Story

Your eyes open.

And the shadows

In the sleeping house

Unfurl themselves,

And bow noiseless down

Before you, a grace

To gild the edges of

Your pathway down the hall.

Outside, the years

Swirl

And gather beneath the oaks,

And wait for the curve

Of your hand to rest

Upon the storm door handle.

An age is ending, 

Tonight.

You move, out into it:

The same warm dark

You found at the foot

Of your parents’ porch;

The same sourceless glow,

Not quite moon or lamplight,

That you found bleeding

From around each edge

And black branch once hung above you.

The streets and the houses are thinning

With each step,

And the fabric

Between what you have known

And what you have glimpsed,

And wondered at,

And guessed.

And now, the fields:

The leaves driven into them,

And the wind,

The outline of the forest edge

Before you

And the years turned to their every second,

And your life a slight Aurora

In the corner of your children’s sky.

Hill-walking at night

Is careful work:

The feet remembering

Steps they have not known.

The starless sky makes that sound:

A ringing wholeness

That calls out and welcomes home.

The tired world sighs,

And in its sighing

Unscrolls traces

You remember knowing, but lost

Like a dream to the morning

In your sea of reachings

And sadnesses.

And now, suddenly, they are here,

Forming before your waking eyes

In the age that is ending in this night,

Among your years that gather, embarrassed

Beneath the trees,

And the humble shadows

That bow and flee from underneath your feet,

Within the dim, but deep and sourceless light – a hand

That leads you on

Into the woods.

Here, at the edge of all things that wait,

And hold themselves blameless

Before the throne of God,

You leave behind all manner of

Flickering, fleeting light:

A screen door standing open in an empty house,

Taking to it the gathering dark of October and its fallen leaves;

Your childhood church,

Its blurry springtime windows and dead pastors;

Your owned and endless miles of thick, steel track lifted up —

Lifted up 

From upon the earth,

Caressed into thin, molten, delicate thread

By the Maker’s hand,

And lovingly cut.

Theory and Grace

The noise of string theory drags itself

Along eternal lengths

Of leaf edge.

It has no God.

No small town along great rivers.

No barn-side in dusk

Painted with the hope

Of 1889.

No arm-length recollection

In cornfields.

No spring-nights bowed low.

No pre-dawn hunt for snakes among cousins

And blood brothers.

One wonders what its peace is worth.

How many bushels? How many miles? How many troublesome hives?

How many days?

How many alleys, traces

Stacked with straw, Rye, and gold?

It is a worrisome risk — the hope that rural pens inscribe

Across the face of doubt and science:

The untenable weight of faith.

All that noise of shoreline, siding, airfield is

Simple sawtooth:

Cicada-wing describing

And meaning

A walk

Along the purple lines

Of freight maps and flight plans

And clover-lit fields in dusk.

I did dream of Isaac on the altar, once;

I stood up straight

Among the pines, in the night,

And then collapsed with no legs beneath me

In impassable February fields.

But Abraham’s God is not a God of sleep,

And every silence is a journey,

And every journey

Worth its weight in blood

Trails an umbilical churchyard

Through the snow;

A short saga —

A wilderness myth

Swollen with

Footfall and bear-step and spark-speak

Regarded well

Near each ocean,

Honored well among effigy mounds

And jamborees

And camp nights

And dead vacation Bible school friends.

I have tried —hard —

To make it less,

But life

Is a lesson

Of vagrants and vagrancies.

I know

(And more to the point,

The stars, the moon, the North —)

That the galaxy

Matters less than

Lengths of bannock in rainless nights

Wrapped like snakes around green sticks,

Or fire — the surface and the edge of prophecy

Pried with penknife up

From underneath bark.

It’s an old muscle-memory:

Wait. Hope. Kneel. Pray.

Watch the tall grass sway.

It is nearly nothing,

The way the ages

Make their way around the gorgeous curves and distances and kiss

Old-man horizon.

Money will not pay

For the dry sand beneath the fire —

Nor time;

Experience;

Or lessons learned.

Grace gives that.

Sweet grace

That kneels along the unmarked ways;

That burns its hands cupping coals

You left untended in your sleep

In weather and long night;

That whispers you awake

On cold plains in the unspeakable, terrible night,

Pulling the cushion of its scars

Along the ridgeline

Of your face.

R.I.P. R.E.M.

I remember when my friend Roger brought his copy of "Chronic Town" to school so that I could sneak it home and give it a listen. (That sort of music and album art being frowned upon in our house at the time. And thanks, Roger, for REM, Love and Rockets, Husker Du, The Church, and The Chameleons, among others.) I was not immediately enthralled with "Wolves, Lower," and lifted the needle halfway through the song. But three seconds into "Gardening at Night," I was hooked - bad. There was a time when I considered REM my favorite band. That time was well in the rearview by the time the horror of "Shiny Happy People" came along and Michael Stipe started actually stringing full comprehensible sentences together in interviews. But in those early years, Stipe's mumbled, impressionistic ramblings draped over beautiful jangly guitars and tight American rhythms moved in and out of my days and nights like a weird, seamless, subconscious soundtrack. Those times are slipping into a Gaussian-blurred and faded snapshot of recollection these days, but that doesn't diminish the brilliance and audacity of musical art so simultaneously intricate and simple that it stands unembarrassed among the greatest this nation has ever had to offer to the earth. So, because of that, today I'm a little sad. The harsh reality is, they should have called it quits a few albums ago. And everyone who's honest knows it. But the truth also is, they were once an American treasure.

"Trust in your calling, make sure your calling's true."

R.I.P. R.E.M.

Song for Early September

Summer’s last sigh
Bending low then lying down — lost
And unconcerned —
For the long, familiar sleep
Of iced shores
And dark, lovely spaces
That find themselves beneath
Tree-fall and trestle;

Leaves
That crowd riverbanks:
That bruise the traces
And railways and blacktop with thick gold
And thin red,
And hesitate and shake
In air and light too suddenly cold
For short sleeves or laughing out loud;

The truth of what is
Pulled from last year’s threadbare
Coat sleeves and pockets
And given to the wind
And the present dusk
Sliding slowly down from
Hat to boot
Where shoulders end
And prairies launch themselves
Unembarrassed
Upward
To the nameless sky
And outward
To the yearless horizon.

I come by these things honestly,
Stumbled upon in early fall.

When my years are
As weary as my miles,
And never far
From the edge-lands of fire
That stand
Against armies of unseen eyes.

When all things are edge, and canvas, and slate.

When lift bridges still,
And all crossings grow as silent
As the space between the stars,
And the time for listening, watching, waiting
Has passed.

Lines Composed on a Balcony Near a Tourist Trap

The glass of the lake
whispers memories,
centuries; a dream
spelled out in wave-song.

I've moved alongside
Beneath the thick stars;
Wrapped in the coal-black;
Held in the Big Hand.

I have seen figures
At the ends of roads -
Hundreds of years old -
Whispering questions;

The ancient questions
My feet asked the earth.
What are the waves worth?
Where are the seraphs

Beneath each surface?
The waves are silent.
The silhouettes fade.
The black of the night

Pivots once, then stills.
The trees near the lake:
They have no questions.
Nor the dead brakemen;

Nor the dead sailors
Whose feet wandered here,
And who gave sweethearts
No warning, but left

The night to its own;
The dark between stars
To converse with leaves,
And in their silence -

Together embraced -
Watch each ember fade.

The Light

And when the sun is chisel to horizon’s stone,
Atrophied two-lanes
Grow effigy;
And lakes, and seas of sawgrass, and shoreline shadows
Take the wind, the waves, the years,
The Grace of God
And figure in the longing eye
Bent trees; misremembered maps;
The honesty of firelight.

Unsettled dreams of hope
Fold starlight and
Companion darkness into
Shapes of hands
Holding coffee cup and pipe;
Hands holding hands holding hands
In Prairie School decades
Hollowed in the ends of
Probation halls and harbor towns in dusk.

Deep In the imagined chest
Are piles of flint and charred bird-bone;
Circles of abandoned ash.

In dreamed mornings, quiet feet whisper
And toss coffee into weeds;
Crouch;
Face west for a while;
Move against the wind and
Kick sand upon the rail to still the coasting car.

There is no complication in it.

Grace, peace, justification:
All dirt in hair; blood on hand;
A whispered sermon
Embarrassed
By the way
Sons cling to their father
When the wind is loud
And murderers knock on the windows of the night.

The open door and lit light at the end of hard roads in the fall.

The Apocrypha of hope.

The laughter and the back-slap of strangers.

The safety thumbed
On the automatic knife.

Faces put hard to constellations.

The end of the line
And what comes after.

The light

The light

The water

The steel

Worn silver by wheels.

Fire

Fire is important.

In every honest man
An ancient thought flickers
And makes him lean forward.

Cautionary tales
Are told in shadow,
Cast against stone walls and leaning timber.

Confusion; anger; fear; woundedness;
And all manner of self-having —
Pillars of heartfelt honesty, all.

But young men must be taught:

There is no negotiation
In fire; in warmth; in keeping.

Every man who
Buckles his children into car seats
Or weighs vocation against calling
Must have at the ready
A plan of some kind
For producing fire against the cold

Should there come the suddenness of
Impassable roads in winter;

A season of ditches;

The hungry eyes of clever wolves;

The long and empty night
Of missed trains.

Fear is fine then,
But hands must move,
Find pockets full of tinder and spark,
And pathways forward through the dark.

You will write the epic poem after;
Feel the feelings, face the facts;
Paint the painting; sing the song
Of shepherds singing
As each demon is repulsed, vanquished
To the inner layers of hell itself;

But first — always first —

Fire. Fire against the night.
Fire against the jungle walls.
Fire against the truth of your own failing.
Fire against the faults of plans unraveled,
And dreams dried up.
Fire against embarrassments,
And the wisdom of this fatherless world
That has never been your friend.

Your first duty is to hope,
Always— always —
Hope, and grace, and truth, and love,
And the light they pour
Into the dark.

You must learn to stir embers
And converse with others near the gold-lit edges
While the ones you love are sleeping.

You must learn to laugh when nothing near you laughs
And other things are seething.

A list of things to know about fire:
It is not it’s own reward.
It does not fill accounts or reward performance.
It does not thrive on desire or good intentions.
It does not survive because of fame, or power, or wealth, or good standing.
It does not derive itself from you, but lives in spite of any striving.

It respects a pocket full of cotton swabs and water-proof matches
More than it will ever respect you,
The miles you drag behind you like a pile of chains,
Your weariness,
Or the beauty of your baby son, the goodness of your wife.

Considered Birds

All the birds of the fields consider me,
My posture;
My approximations.

They bathe, half-attendant.

From puddles,
They observe.

I pull my weight upward
Against a lattice of sunlight.

I cough
Ruined engines,
Haul them from my pockets;
Drop them on the shore
Of blacktop meeting shoulder.

The weight of their absence
Describes a golden circle
Around each graveled foot.

God wonders, then,
What weight remains in my shoes
When each step
Pulls a clutch of root and soft tissue from the earth.

I wonder if birds know sadnesses,

Or only differences

In slants of light and shadow;
The presence of passing where
None is normally found.

Then again, in far-apart counties,
Where barn-sides and tree-haunted silos
Lean against our decades,
These endless nights are only moments
To the fields, the mills and rail beds, neighborhoods,
Meanderings
That pass beneath each wing and life-thin clavicle.

I dreamt on my feet, often,
While passing through;
Dreams of barbicans holding moments to themselves.
Dreams of intermingled names
And avenues,
A complication of trackage rights;
An excited dread
Of distant mountains rising up against
The drought of flatlands and horizon
Heading west. And me in no way ready.

When those dreams came, I learned
To shake myself awake
And simply drop. I learned to stare at birds,
Unnerve them in the dawn.

Those well-considered birds
Then rose up unannounced and moved among the clouds
And gathered
Onto the rooftops of houses I have never owned,
Outside of windows never mine.

Their wings were cirrus clouds the clear moon
Shone through;
Stealed away through;
In times and places
Where journeys
Through the wilderness are not necessary,
Shining in the rain through safety glass,
And very far away.

It’s as wearisome, as good,
As anything else planned all along in the mind of God
While we were alone, in the dark,
And had no control of our arms, our legs.

For Jack

Good Friday,
I received this boy
Into my arms,
Straightened my spine
And remembered
Christ’s suffering;
Seraphs’
Illumined hands clamoring
In blind panic
After rebirth –
After the remaking
Of the tired earth;
Gasping, confused,
And undone
All together
In whatever one calls the disbelief
That angels
Pocketed
Upon the audacious reordering of all things,
When God’s great back
Turned shadow to his Son.

(You, boy, had better not ever know
The wanderings and thicknesses I have known.
You had better not:
I already love you so.)

Standing here at last
Above Joliet’s sweet entropy,
I remember for you
Pasts thick with
Sunday schools spilled out onto spring lawns
Near Easter,
When truth was simple
And words filled themselves
With only their own elegant meaning.

I have lived long enough to know
That your eyes see only shadow and shape,
And cannot read yet
Your own father’s scars.

So I stand near this window,
In this golden moment,
And take your impossibly small
Hand into my well-weathered own.

Together
We trace each unfolding river bed, two-lane,
And rail line
Silently,
Smiling, in the moment shared between us.

We understand each other then, don’t we?
While your wild, wondering, wandering eyes
Find mine?

You are good as gold;
Precious as any sunset
Held precipice
Above the Crucifixion;
Precious as any soul
I would set alight,
Or give up willingly to perdition
In the great jungle transit
Of this world; its passing
Into emptiness.

You sigh a new little boy’s sigh
Into the ether.
I gather an old man’s list of failings,
Wanderings, remembrances, follies
Into a collective of dust-strewn weeds
Along a sunlit siding.

And I give it all to you.

It is all I am, all that I will ever be,
And all I have to give.
It is my light in the sky; my wisdom;
My love; my answer; my question
That will one day lead you to
Sunlit lawns behind the church
In spring;
To know your Savior and embrace Him
In the foolishness
That brings joy;
That reveals pathways
In the endless fields,
The endless forests,
The endless seas,
And leads you to remember,
One day, distant, (so distant)
The way my calloused hand
Felt in your new hand
On this day in April,
When we understood
Each other
The way the angels
At last
Understood the need
For Christ’s own
Death;
Christ’s own
Resurrection;
Christ’s own
Life;
New
Life.

Courage

(For Kathy)

I will try my best to be slow-eyed
And level;
Carried and cared-for
Even as I carry and care for
All that has been given me,
All that has been granted.

“Courage catching out,
Courage coming home,”

A cadence I have memorized
And whispered back
To shoreline, shoulder,
And hungry night, aching, full
Alive with both absence and presence.
I am trying
To give this same, simple wisdom
To you, this night:
Do not give —
(Don’t you dare give) —
Any more darkness
To the space between the stars
Than they have given you.

We gathered around your dining room table that certain night
And you telegraphed warnings.
You were quietly guarding
Your sister’s heart, and I shivered,
Watching you watch me.

Later, I won you over,
(Thank God)
Hinting at the way one
Conducts oneself in certain sidings
When the grainers coast like ghosts
And the bulls beat the night
And the bushes
With their Maglites.

You laughed that certain way
That understood the way I laughed.

Years later,
We hiked the ravine behind your house.
You held my son’s hand
And steered him well clear
Of ticks and poison ivy.
You won me over
(Thank God)
When you let him run ahead,
But kept close behind.
As the shadows grew long
And the sun dipped below the trees,
You called him to you
Before he knew that he was scared.

In certain asides,
We have sipped wine,
Together, you and I,
And stared obliquely
At the absurdity of it all,
And agreed upon certain finalities.

Tonight, I pray you understand:
I am pushing aside your mother, husband, brother —
Even sister —
To look you in the eye
The way that you looked into mine
That night;
To hold your shoulders
And say,
“Courage catching out,
Courage coming home.”