Magic Hour

The soft gold of rust at sunset
lifts itself, a bridge,

And the corn's gone against the drought.

This song is old:

EJ&E
humming itself
into existence
in the distance;

Lake
gracing itself
in waves
among the mills.

Late summer comes
with its parking lot fairs
and old seconds,
recollected neon
piled against
the sudden silence
of coats
and pockets.

Where we are
we have never been;

Where we were
we will be again.

Each Leaf

Each leaf
begs in its own way
among
shadow, cloud,
and sun
for
your young soul to
retrace
old paths
your feet
have written.

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.

About Time

When we were young,

and frost on the windows in winter

reminded us of nothing before us,

and did not cause us

to draw parallels to spiritual realms,

we would have nothing of

giving ourselves to sleep,

or handing ourselves over to the night.

Now, when the winters walk through our streets

like dying old men, and breathe their breath

against our living,

we pivot in the room toward the darkest corners;

corners not covered by the spitting flicker of candle

or imitated light of halogen, mercury, or decaying tungsten,

and we secretly crave sleep—

a caught breath in raging floods.

And the sounds of souls walking the hallways;

of clocks scratching out ages;

of hearts unknowingly slowing;

of winds scouring the face of the earth;

of loose change on the dark-matter pavement—

these things and all things

remember in us only the death of time.

***

Everything was now then,

like bullets through tempered glass;

bombs on airplanes.

I wish I could say we wept and gnashed our teeth,

and read The Waste Land by the sea,

but we did not.

We smoked cigars and laughed,

never hushed at feeling the time pass,

or knowing that there is no time

like time past.

Knowing that the death of time

would be remembered in us.

***

There went a flurry of notes from the score,

racing from one page in a book of billions,

on a shelf of trillions:

There is a trip around the lake,

a fall from the cradle,

a car crash;

            a birthday and a funeral.

There is a vacation out west,

a view of the ocean,

a dead sister . . .

Look, there—

we are sitting on the rocks by the sea,

laughing.

(And now is when I hear the music first;

when you spoke;

in between each word—

notes drifting across the vast waves.

And here is my face turned to stone.)

. . . a last year spent staring at a ceiling,

a lost dog,

a skinned knee . . .

See! There—it has happened;

is clear upon the face of us—

the turning inward and back,

the longing for moments fate-swallowed and gone.

***

The tombstones near the ocean are made from slate,

thin as the second and the hour,

dark as the closing smudge of the sun’s last gasping

at dusk.

The hills should not hold them—

sand-thin and whispering with grass.

The old Bostonians do not care,

and will hear nothing of it,

knowing that time floods away from things

and not through.

Nothing is worn away that was not in some ways already gone.

And so we stood gape-souled near the cemeteries,

nearly gone.

Already gone.

Already

Eyes looking for a now not rushing away,

not sudden,

not dark and echoing in the years

of other people before us.

Gone.

***

We did best to discover early

a life reaching up and touching the infinite:

adoration; confession;

thanksgiving; supplication;

where Christ’s faithless bride taught us to pray:

“I come before you

with praise and adoration

for being who you are—

Creator and Lord of all the universe;

you alone worthy of all praise.”

Yet the old men—those who still pray—

have taken their barges miles from this

among the reeds,

and see the infinite waiting to grasp,

not to be grasped,

and simply cry out

for the frost-gilded panes

of their youth;

to see the play of light

with praise and adoration

behind the glass

for being who you are

and to remain on the edge

and you alone

of knowing it completely.

are worthy.

***

We picked cherries in the summer sun,

and ate ourselves sick on them in the afternoon.

The next day, after hard sleep and a slow morning,

this sickness was forgotten,

easily.

Look, you don’t understand—

there is great light behind this;

the way we so quickly forgot such things;

the way we were so harshly stung by the fruit of the tree

and then were content with only sun and lake-breeze and lunch.

Years later we crave the very afternoons!

When I look at you in those moments of silence,

when the point of talking is lost up in the sway of branches

and the cloying fragrance of fat leaves,

I see you hovering there,

back there,

smelling the rotting tree-fruit on the undergrowth;

craving the drowning-lakes of lands left behind in time,

not space.

Until you catch my eye,

jarred at

touching the shirtsleeves of heaven.

And time digs

hard into the earth;

passes us, its victims,

through the jungle’s teeth.

***

The chirp of the cricket is ancient—

as ancient as imagined—

more ancient nonetheless.

The chirp of the cricket is ancient as lightning.

Its rhythm measures temperature—

so deeply it is ingrained

within the world.

Time moves within the cricket and binds it to the earth.

The moments shimmed between flash and thunder

unravel into distance.

Time moves within the thunder, hammers and holds it

to the face of the world.

The second-hand rounds the watch-face

while we sleep,

and tethers us to the earth—

holds us in a box,

above another box,

until we slip between notches on the clock,

where each cricket before and ever after,

and every storm

are then, now, and next

Each chirp

and momentary flash

pinhole to brighter light behind.

***

The last time we saw the Mackinac Bridge together

we were quite young;

terrified

by web-like cables lofting the monolithic corpse of roadway

to sway above the straits.

The car lurched forward toward predation through the eye of a toll booth,

and we braced ourselves behind the backs of weak parents and vinyl seats

against the roar of the steel grate chewing at the underbelly,

the churning green deep waiting to swallow and to end us.

I traveled the bridge last year

unafraid,

unmoved in the least.

***

Talk of dreams is exhausting,

and you are sleeping, sent to dreams yourself

as I speak.

Nonetheless, you should know that the man

was without a face, and knelt slowly and annoyed

when he saw that I had seen the perfect, full and centered

span of the bridge.

The bridge was in the desert,

and had always seemed incomplete—

not broken, destroyed, or unfinished—

but obscured, as if hidden by the light of the sun.

It ran east to west,

with firm footings on each end:

to the east voices in wind,

signs and wonders;

to the west, fossil records and ice cores.

Regardless,

the man was faceless,

and carried an unloaded gun.

When I approached the height of the span

I was old,

and still not near death.

I was old and full of memories

of the road past and still ahead;

of life lived and yet to come.

And there

upon the bridge a great conjoinment:

quantum states infinite, fragile;

the microwave shadows of beginning.

The man dipped slowly to the ground

as I turned to the waking state.

He knelt,

spitting,

raking mud from the earth

onto the tips of shining copper shells.

I felt the sting,

turning to find the face of a clock

where I supposed the man’s would be.

***

Your heart has told you many things,

not the least of which is this:

that hell is the repetition of time—

Look at this beggar, hanging himself again and again,

talking to himself all the while

—and heaven as well:

In your heart you claim to know

that the clock still secretly holds captive

that celestial bliss,

where the world is but a collection of afternoons

at the lake or the churchyard,

and the moments are linked and looped

into joy on the face of a child.

. . . Time

Your heart,

which itself

for now so faithfully beats the minute,

will fail in the shadow

of that light.

And you might laugh

that you ever supposed to see

Moses among the rushes

and then again

at the parting of the sea.

Did you really think to find Christ crucified

for all eternity?

has its beginning and its death . . .

Mile-markers confused

for the road.

***

None of this of course matters

while you are driving north on a Sunday night

heading for October,

the windows down for no more reason

than to know that indeed it is

growing colder, and to slowly inhale

the smell of the Great Lakes

even there,

when the rush of air, machinery and oil,

of factory slag and diesel fuel

is oddly pure, and makes this great now

you occupy

largely impenetrable

and lovely.

You will point out, of course,

that this is no salvation—

and rightly so.

You will laugh—

there, you have—

and remind me

(requiring reminding)

that this is what makes it matter the most:

these moments of distracted joy,

when attention has been drawn away

from the shadows behind the glass

by some friend’s joke

or request for information

from the conversation across the hall,

and then,

just as you are speaking,

in your peripheral half-sight

you sense naked movement in the great room

behind the glass:

All the eternal truth your heart will ever hold

captured

in the last light of a flashbulb’s death.

And that is all—a fleeting sense of clarity;

a dim aurora

faintly stitched across your life.

***

Yes, the stars are resplendent tonight,

and yes, I have been looking all my life

for one single unifying proof.

But defending a negative is suicide—

as countless suicide notes would say—

and I cannot provide what my own mind requires.

It is easy for you to suppose, upon viewing the stars,

that because at this moment you do not care one way or another,

the question need not be settled all at once, if at all.

And still, I say, there is this troubling set of minutes that haunt

the thoughts that truly do not matter,

which linger at the edges of the day;

there is this memory of perfect, trusting knowledge—

remembered as clear and unquestionable,

and devilishly ungraspable now—

that kept me, I believe, physically warm

when I was a child.

And now I have rendered you silent!

(Certainly, you still speak, laughing at me now;

but something larger and indelibly real in you

has locked onto these fragments of which I speak.)

Yes, your only point was that the stars are resplendent tonight.

No, they do not appear at all indifferent to the sky.

***

The hours are hay-filled

with talking endlessly;

cornhusking,

spouting and pouring out

about baggage and travel and signs.

Who is this single voice pulled out from the idle

crowd of chatter bursting the windows and the frame?

We have stuffed the moments full of speed and straw,

hurrying the days away through the gates.

You turned to me in a moment of social pause

not merely to glance up at the drapes or the balls of dust

in the corners near the ceiling, but to lean in

near my drowning ear and ask, delicately,

“Who is it that sits in the corner

that way

not speaking,

his knees drawn up to his chin,

looking at no single person and still me,

directly, when my sight cares to wander that way?

Who is it that sits in the corner

as if there is no conversation,

no annoying glint of serrated half-light

battering the window and the eyes?”

I suspected I might answer you,

and then you moved away, sucked back into the

maddening churn.

I suspected I might answer you,

but there were no words in my cringing face

to race out to meet you, after all;

to fall away from the moments to say

that we were not occupying the same instant

just then,

and there was no man, distracted, intent

or otherwise in the corner,

but a tiger—

the same tiger—

pacing circles

and eyeing the crowd.

The years burn away like parched fields of hay.

You have found swaying saw-grass

where I have stared hours at seraphs’ great wings.

***

All of these things have occurred to me

as though laid out upon a table:

The bridge in Mackinac;

the span in the desert;

the clock-faced man;

the graves by the sea.

All of this occurred to me in time.

And I suppose, in truth it has occurred within

that very moment when first I

leaned close to the windows in winter as a child.

Somewhere all of these met in us,

and we were haunted

by amorphous collections of light and shadow

groaning outside the door of our dreams

and our incidental speech.

You know, if you take a moment to,

the way the seconds have piled up

to bring us here to our valley;

the echoes of monks’ feet shuffling over stone,

the creak of rough-hewn wood against the sea,

the bristling scratch of pen against the parchment,

and the unheard sound of countless crumbling cities

have conspired to place us here,

silent and staring through the open chasm of a tire swing

or kitchen window

or coffee mug

past the beginning of all things;

past the beginning of the first, perfect language

to the bright nimbus of the first, perfect word.

This is the substance of proof that stands outside

the world—

that stands outside the golden frames our ages have built.

Renaissance after renaissance collide and die at our feet,

begin and halt continually at the wall of today,

this page,

this word.

***

Look, this is the last of it.

I have stood in this place and that,

and still not every place.

I have stood here and longed for

that place I left behind.

I have returned to that place,

and turned once again to some other place.

I have known only one station in the great

river of time,

and the smaller times within it.

I have longed for times my eyes

found more pleasing,

only to find my eyes failing, and untrustworthy.

Look, this is the last of it.

The world is a belly full of ghosts,

and every life its own world,

built on the beach-sand

of that life’s eyes.

I have felt the shifting sway in

re-read books

and crumbling, revisited neighborhoods and homes.

This is no single breath

given once,

as cold and as solid

as place.

Our very lungs refuse the notion.

And so this longing remains,

to return to places never seen;

never occupied;

never left.

This fervor is

whispered between lines of gravestones

near the sea,

between lines scratched in the

face of the clock and the compass.

Heaven is unhinged there—there—from the frame of the world.

Look, this is the last of it,

when the days grow dim

and the grasshopper

drags himself along,

and we feel on our faces

the breeze of spirits

and cherubim passing.

Every moment

in every lifetime of moments

is the moment before the last.

Almost

Almost
in leaf-tips
wind-thrown treetops
wavecrests
far from Christmas
among cicadas
shadows
slung off in
lantern swing

A remembered house

Nearly a grace
with
lamposts
bent
like trees

and life
a passage

in between
our streets,

years, wandered
and shores

lifelong
and receding
into the
dead-foot now,

almost, almost
the substance
of things not seen.

Unwelcome

I was not always a stranger.

Not long ago, no place in the country
Was unfamiliar.

Unless I misremember,
Dragging behind me
My Chicago miles.

I find again all those
Unwelcoming places.

Orbiting roads,

Lonesome crickets
In the park near twilight,
Unfamiliar foliage
In unfamiliar summer.

Some things go along, unchanged:
Hopelessness at dusk.

All those tobacco barns slowly
Failing.

Boyhood

I remember a long field,
no pathway through.

The way the light
climbed fathomless heights
and remained
in periphery.

Long mornings
near trains,
bruising our heels
on the ballast,
hunting snakes,
mesocyclones
gathering
on the horizon.

Each moment
was a completeness
unto itself.

I remember
the wind
in the long grass,
the leaves,
the waves —
listening the way that
children do,
waiting for nothing.

Our stillnesses
came reluctantly,
but God
was in each one.

Before the
days lost
the gold of that certain
slant near dusk,
and my feet
tramped
the tall grass
into trails.

Summer, In Its Night

Summer
in its night
moved
open-eyed
through Prairie School
avenues and
empty eightlanes
past the furnaces and mills.

That thick stillness
of involuntary rest
coaxed apart
each slow moment
to filaments
of Cottonwood seed
and lightning
silent in the distance.

The sound of waves.

The sound
of lovers shouting, laughing far off.

The sound of

cassette
spindles
softly
unspooling
"All Cats Are Grey"
to the Bible
in the backseat,
near the shore.

Something sad, contained,
made its way
among the infinite.

Memories
of ourselves
near vast, open water,
tamed with distraction
by candy necklaces
and stainless steel
slides.

Later – much later –
inebriated
tide-racing
on ridiculous
stretches
of sand in the dark.

The story of that
which we would one day watch
disintegrate
was always written on our bones –

The compass needle
locked up sure
as an hour-hand.

We thought
because of this
that
compasses are true,
and can be known.

But they are not. Cannot.

Memorial Day

I shook Big Jim Thompson's hand
and it was all Dolton
had to give the earth.

A parade.

This and the
public pool;
The K-Mart and its
knives;
the fathomless railyard
pressing up against the overpass:
The path to church.
That old long door swinging open.

The grass still grew prairie-long then,
past imagined saddles.

And

Those maps
and folds
and demarcations
gone diffuse
in the taconite black,
harbored
between each
star;

the truth of molten
glow in transit
across sleepless walls.

My skinny legs
grew strong
along the tracks.

Taking
a beating
was the same
as learning how to fight.

I wondered,

what parts of this life are secret?
What parts of me
have their meaning
in the way

I care about the curve
of roads
and the grain of bark,
and tie,

opening,

opening?

My transgressions
piled up.

My worlds ended.

My questions gathered:
"Who am I, and who am I to say?"

Etc.

That cold hand
of the child of me
rests still
on railing
after railing.

Pillars of Light

Dawn. November.

Eyelids stuttered,

Found all things
That give light
Spilling
Upward from themselves.

Sudden
As a man's name,

They formed
Iridescent pillars,
Earth to sky.

There were four of us
Begging coals for fire
And fire for joe
As though
We were not filled with wonder.

We moved out
From underneath
The night;
Moved among the
Pillars.

I murmured
"Ice crystals."

Everyone agreed.

Cigarettes were rolled.

Yet even then,
All those burnt miles
Put behind,
Nothing was as simple
Or as settled.

God's hand gripped
Some of our necks:
A whisper
Through clenched teeth.

"Look at that.
Look at that."

"Look!"

I secretly remembered

Knowing.

Even then,
Hope flickered
In my ash-covered hands.

Happy

Blue circles spin
above

thick within
thin, green miles.

Our heels wear well
against clockspin;

against
the wilds
of compasses
confused
with iron
slung hard and
deep into the earth.

Blame bleeds
its shores upward
through the packed wet
of old forest floors

And fills
a tetanus moment,
tipsy in its
silence —

specks and planks
and planks and specks

and
shame rounding
itself against
the sharp folds of curtains
in glassless windows
and the sound of traffic
below;

soft curves
of hard roads
heaving
merciless selves
from dusk-yards
into
the west.

In winter,
we dream of buildings
old, secure: strong
as grace.

They hold themselves up
while buffalo drive themselves
in great thundering herds through
and past
and off
of cliffs.

We are happy,
because we have not been swept away.

By all rights
we should have been,
having been where we have been,
when we should not have been.

Wilderness

Fiddleback spiders blossomed
lilac.

Everything was a surprise then:

     Footsteps on the bluebells
     loosing
     a blanket of stars.

Words used to appear
and scatter that way before me.

Treetops bloomed
into the dark.

Hands high and open,
I staggered beneath
their grace,

avenue
to God's whisper.

Or maybe
hands up and empty
beneath
the wind in the leaves.

Soon after,
came that heel
pressing
my face hard into the mud.

I fear it:

Being the wilderness.
The distance that is crossed
in the stories he tells.

Second Earth

There is another earth
beneath.
Between.

I know my way
from here
into it;

chainlink rolled back
in scrolls of rust,

dusk
pouring in;

late rain
cold upon the branches

and leaves that push against the passage

the smell

of mud
and slickened
tie plates
in the stillness

of shouts that go
unsounded.

These unnamed Sundays
Are an unstemmed tide again,

Unanswered questions
spilling the banks,

Lineless horizons.

Unbutton
your shirt,
even though it's cold.

Wash, shave.

Pour what you call hope
into the ending age.

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.