The First Thing I Remember Is A Dragonfly

I remember a certain dragonfly.
And in remembering, I surrender.
And in that surrendering, I struggle,

And wander along the Calumet —
The breathless length of Cline Avenue —
The sock-soaked, spring grasslands by the tracks.

Our fathers shopped at Sears; served Church;
Passed through gates, sealed seams, and undid
Wickedness done to them and theirs

In years hard-fought-for and lost —
In ways slow to yield and give.
(They remembered dragonflies.)

The Apostle Paul stands
In all my Christmases,
And nothing undoes this.

And where I remain,
With roads and angles,
And all those traces,

The firelight dies.
The jungle thins.
The days go joke.

(Dragonfly.)

Grace or fate.

A Christmas.

I pause,
and give
myself

to
a
grace.

2-14-2014

I dreamt
within it,

the way
spark and slag
shape snow.

I threw a decade's night
of black
scarves across a fire.

I pushed a boot-pulled
skin
across zodiacal
light.

I gave an interstate;

A house;

Things that are hard
to give up
And easy to give.

I shook a work
from around my neck

And poured through
front doors.

2-11-2014

Do you say
snow machine
or snowmobile,

These days escaping
Mittened dawns;

These uncle's walls
spinning
in hall-light

and ankles, naked in boots?

Do you understand
what splits the difference,
when all light is blue,
and all traversed

Wide-circled, tracks
turn clockwork
over passage?

In dreams,
the pines have been
planted
in patterns.

(Do you say
dusk,
or twilight?)

Do you hear
the ring of the bell
before
or after
church?

Have you
reached out
to catch it?

The dream of
old Chicago
and your
remembered days,
and the road-edges
miled up
like muscular serpents
mocking
your crushing heel
in vain.

February

I dreamt I was in the office.

A package came,
for some vague reason, announced.

I stood up
and remembered
graffiti on the wood
stake fence
beside the T-Mart
in Dolton.

I pushed the arms
of my chair
underneath
my granted desk

such that a thin, imperceptible
layer of nylon
was shed, and fell,
it's echo
arriving on a factory floor
forty years before
near my father's feet.

"A knife!"
They said,

And I made my way
from the back door
across the backyard
to the stopped line
of torpedo cars

Walking in my socks
Toward the mail slots.

At some point,
I was the cause of fire.
And that surprised some.

There was a polite struggle;

A severe angle

wrapped in crayon and
construction paper.

Someone mentioned forge-fire,

and there was a contest:

Something I won
in the cul-de-sac
back amongst the trails,
or something
I was allowed to win.

In the end,
a river-wrapped
blade
washed up in the
mail
near my desk.

My co-workers and
direct reports were
embarrassed.

And well they should have been.

1-15-14

You are stilled
Near where wrecked
Taconite comes up shore;
Near where tailings
Give up
Day and breath,

And heave themselves

Unrealized

Upon the outer rings
Of exit wound
And excavation.

You are always pulling
Upon yourself
That pinprick cloak
Horizon;

The way of yourself;

And your recalling,
Your knowing.

12-17-2013

On muddy fields
turned up same
and black
and ready,

new songs sang themselves
into waiting,

among waiting,

where keys dangled
in seen-comet still.

The singing yet
pulls itself
through
inlet crookedness -
earth crookedness -

to fractal shorelines
straightened,

fractured in their straightening,

poured out,
pressed down,

Their remainders
spilling over the unlit west.

Old December

Its sky,
lightless.

Ending month
of unseen clouds

Or inundating stars -
their ungatherable heat
embered
in the cold
of their own silver light
above ungloved pines.

Its houseless nights
and windowless bends.

Its unbridged straits
and catch-out-to-anywhere murk.

Its brittle taste of juniper.

11-27-2013

Sleep is a place of unlinked fenceposts;
the old message unread, remembered,
dragged by ankle
over wild shines
and left
unopened
between
unmeeting things.

Hands drift
toward doors there,

Traverse and 
unfold,
and give noise
in their unfolding

against
thresholds,
Begging after answer

From rooms behind
strewn with blanket
and cornhusk
and panic.



How to be still,

in those rooms.

How to wait;

How to outlast
ceilings

until the embered stars
alight upon them.

Sills

The oldness in
my legs
unfurls,

Its promises
lengths spent

along the Little Calumet.

That certain sound

Of trains
that makes a song.

The sills
of it
lifted

to my eyes.

Novembers

Confounded language
and aftermath,

leaves
cradled under fences,
edges gathered,
drawn, spun,
lifted up by old light
atop
silhouettes of
high-tension towers
strung over the low,
late-autumn sun.

Six or seven minutes

in all the world
have been hammered
from this slant of light.

And there, maybe,
the delicate erosions of
footfall
in leaf litter
along the Indian Boundary Line,
or in some years
the rusting Wabash,
poured upon, vanished
by wind and dark
and the moments
they define.

I wake up and pray
without ceasing
in that old country,
when it comes near.

Those old, shivering days;

Another earth,
drifting
alongside the old one,

its
dust,
its uttering serpants

spinning slowly away
in rivulets
of silver

in a new skyline
on shores
just over the rise.

Flashlight Mythology

Because I love my children, I have rightfully taught them to honor the Marvel universe above the DC universe. The reasons for this are obvious to the most casual observer. 

Until recently, the one and only exception to this rule was The Dark Knight. Batman, after all, has always been the most Marvel-like hero that DC has to offer. Is this a surprise? Of course not: Batman's story -- from top to bottom -- is the closest DC could ever come to the pathos, irony, and dramatic grit that Marvel's heros bring to the table. Wolverine and Batman could very easily spend a night closing bars together in a way that Aquaman and Iron Man never could. Marvel's evil has always been far more tempting and gray and empathetic than DC's; its good always far more conflicted, precarious, and morally tough. In short, Marvel's universe has always been far more difficult; in a word, real. A mythology that resonates because it knows, authenticates, and mirrors.

The weakest link (ironically) in DC's universe has always been Superman. Here you have an invincible being - impervious to all known weapons - imbued with all imaginable superhuman abilities. Can outrun anything. Can move any object. Can withstand any weapon. Can see, hear, do pretty much anything. A being of omniscience, omnipotence, and (for all practical purposes) omnipresence. His one weakness? Yeah. A green rock that shows up every now and then as the plotline demands.

So imagine my surprise when we watched "Man of Steel" tonight.

Here's a movie that gets very well how the humble comic book -- at best -- captures the flickering, fireside mythos of the ages. And does so without ever once winking at itself or us.

I don't know.

Maybe my expectations were so low that I couldn't help but be pleasantly surprised, but I found the whole exercise to be exhileratingly refreshing, and surprisingly moral.

Weakness as strength, strength as weakness. Grace in restraint, restraint in respect. You know, that sort of thing.

11-10-2013

The night,

The comet.

The
trailhead.

The young, remembered

November;

Old tasks given
by God.

His windowless rooms

Dragging
from between
out-buildings.

His patient
curve,

Giving
shorelines
to maps,

The Calumet City
and
Cline Avenue
ways out
from underneath.

The form of
Testaments
Left upon tables;

The shame of what was traced
In that dust.

The call?

Wailing

After the framing
and the doors have
swelled
beyond all entrance.

A Near-Halloween Story

It's late October. I had made my way back to Marquette by car. Restless, I'd decided to wander around Prairie du Chien. I spent most of the night before smoking cigar after cigar on the roof outside my motel window, with cheap Scotch frying in my gut. Still, the next morning I woke up with the sun. I wandered along the old main street, stepping into small bookstores and cafes, finding nothing. I spent the day smoking and scribbling among the effigies in Pike's Peak State Park. By dusk, I have talked myself into the Phillips 66 gas station/restaurant near the tracks, obvious with a half gallon of water occupying the space in the booth next to me. My olive-green coat. A thick, dirty duffle bag. Suddenly dark, there was time, still: Time for a walk, maybe.

I move out onto a street that finds itself on the outline of a bluff, that finds itself stranded near the Mississippi. It's practically raining leaves. Parties and gatherings and mutterings spill out onto back porches of a Saturday night. It's cold. I'm underdressed, obvious again. There's a silver quad-cab pickup in the dark back at the gas station when I return; and a man, a woman; a small girl; hugs and kisses. I'm inside, next, back at my booth. The man from the quad-cab pickup is walking past, his eye on me. I can see that the people who work here know him. Painfully, I'm a stranger to them.

Outside a train idles alongside the river near the bridge. Barges rust in the current. The year is pulling itself toward winter. I take glances, then stare at the pickup man, unblinking. I do this because he is stopped near me, drilling holes through me or something just over my shoulder, obvious; framed in the fluorescent light like a fat harvest moon. My face feels long, thin. He comes alongside me. I can feel the floor come up under my feet. Some silence travels between us. He's a heavy man, I observe. Weathered. Unshaven. Stuffed with his years. I can hear him breathe as he regards me. I gather my obvious dufflebag into my lap and push my back upward and into the back of the booth and breathe. Quickly, he lifts his right hand up into the air - an exaggerated gesture - and lowers it. He looks away, and up, and lifts up the sleeve on his left arm, begins slapping the face of his black-banded watch rhythmically, slowly with two fingers.

"Fifteen minutes," he says, the words tumbling sloppily past themselves, tiredly, as though uttered from the mouth of an exasperated teacher. "We'll go west for a while. Then almost a stop. A near full stop." I push myself back into my booth and straighten myself, again. "Then waaaaaay north. I'm meaning way north. Right? Straight hours, not minutes." I look down at the table. I put my hands there and study my fingers. "It's mixed," he says. "But it's going pretty much straight through. Get out there now if you're looking for something that won't shake the shit out of you." He walks away, slowly.

And it's getting later. Colder and colder. Darker and darker.

It's nearly November. I find myself back outside. The ground is vibrating. I am walking, blatantly, next to the idling train.

The light from the gas station; The houses; The picnic pavilion; The bridge over the Mississippi; The moon. All that light, so yellow and thin. Like weathered Scotch tape over a neglected photograph.

The river-sounds nose up against the wind in the trees. For a moment I imagine I'm watched, but the moment passes. My coat is too thin, and I'm clenching my teeth, even shaking, the autumn wind peeling its slight edges away from the warmth of my chest. It's clear. It's late to be catching out. Nothing in me honest is up for can-opening another trip north.

And I'm tired.

But a weird obligation hangs heavy in the darkness over me, and I have thrown chains around thick, unseen poles that launch themselves up from bedrock to Polaris.

And so I am, stolen, and framed in a stupid crosshair on a map of Iowa, mining a string of well-mixed freight for a grain car.

And now the Quad-Cab Man is coming along the dim edge of the track. I recognize his pear shape and the borders of his coat. He seems tired.

"Go home," he says, clearly, bluntly.

I slow, and then stop. I'm not in trouble: There isn't a hint of a threat in his voice. But a firmness lives there. He doesn't break his stride, but keeps trudging up the line toward the engine.

"Come on guy. Get yourself home."

Something fatherly in his words disarms me. His eyes look past mine.

"Forget it." He stretches out the word: "Ferrrrrget it." Both of his arms arc slowly up into the cold air.

"Go home! You want to see Thanksgiving, right?"

He passes by me.

"They're gonna find you dead in that coat, guy."

Suddenly my eyelids, my arms, my legs, my duffle bag all seem unbearably heavy. The cold pushes through my jacket, and cuts past the buttons on my shirt to rest against my bare chest. A part of me that hasn't been afraid for a long time is instantly nervous. This is not the first time someone has said this sort of thing to me. But suddenly it feels as if a filter has been lifted off of the lens: Literally. Visually, physically, everything changes. Everything looks dirty and greasy and raw; and the air is ice-cold; and the train stinks; and my stomach goes queasy.

Something darker than the darkness of the descending night seems to ooze and crawl from around the edges of the still, silent railcars looming now more above me than next to me.

The train feels suddenly and strangely unfamiliar. A kind of hostility bubbles up from underneath it.

The cars tower over me -- black, hulking masses -- as if they might collapse in a heap in their great tonnage upon my frail form.

But there's that weird obligation still hanging in the air. So I keep walking along the line, but move a few paces apart from the staring string of freight.

I feel a slow terror begin to grip me, from somewhere outside of myself. I cannot appropriate this train, and yet I am still searching for my grain car.

And now my head is throbbing, and I feel like I must steady myself. And I am beset with what I can only describe as an abject feeling of pure horror; unmitigated dread, as though at any moment the devil himself might lean out from one of the cars and pull me up.

I stumble away from the train, the line, slowly, unable to make myself run.

As I manage to put more space between myself and the tracks, I feel the black dread ease. I keep glancing over my shoulder to reassure myself that the train isn't actually somehow still occupying the space immediately behind me.

I make it to the city park with its bank of picnic tables, and hurl my bag and my water away from me as if some of that weird blackness still clings to them. I throw myself down on a weathered bench, feeling as though I've just sprinted a mile pursued by a twister.

I'm still catching my breath when I hear the slack action ripple down the line of freight, and the train begins to haul itself away.

The night softens again, and I can hear leaves on the pavement; cars crossing over the bridge.

Nearby, laughter and conversation.

Slowly, saved yet again, I return to myself.

October

These ancient nights
Stack close
To the ends of all things
And pour into the earth
Still; again; with
Cold, sturdy edges
Honed against their own forms,

Alone as October

Trees
Returning
To their own, tried darknesses;
Sinking back
Into shadows
That they have brought alongside
Themselves.

And the wind, murmuring
Familiar rounds
Through another year's dusk
Of recalling leaves,

It's sigh
Curling over
Stirred coals

And the old, grasping whisper
Gathered
Against fence line
And threshold.

And late -
In the storied,
Waiting murk -

Winter

Come over the open
Fields of fallen corn
To nose up to the fire.

I remember well
Each and every return.

10-20-2013

These October trees
Grasp hopelessly
After their leaves
In fear of inevitable winter,
Its coming absences,
And wild, empty winds
Screaming over plains.

And the winter will come, and
It's absences,
And the trees will crouch
Naked
On the plains, in the wind,
Leafless and stony and old.

And all night, every night,
They will dream
Of pulling their long roots
Out of the earth's crust
And stumbling, fat-footed
In flight, and wander,
And escape.

But somewhere,
Near the thin sapling still suspended
At the center of what the decades
And the wounds and the weathers
Have calloused and encased,

They know that they
Are purposed
To awaken where they were;
Find themselves where they were.

10-17-2013

When the leaves have fallen
To the last,

There is no
Possibility
Of branch-lifted leaves
Moving
In wind
Against a harvest moon.

And without harvest
The moon is same
As any month,
Leafless
Or otherwise.

Roads are that way,
In their waiting:

The expectations
They lift up
Through themselves;

That path behind the chapel
At college
That quits itself
And becomes
A thick.

That drive home
From
Alongside wreckages.

Yet

When the leaves have fallen
To the last,

The harvest moon
Is uncovered
Easily

From beneath the black wet branches.

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.