1-27-2016

The wrist goes still

and springs are unfed,

A few nights
pored over

Januaries,

Hands found in
morning coals,

Nights black as

The county,
flood warnings
ladled about the Kankakee,

And the way across
clear, still not possible,

Half-accomplished.

1-5-2016

Even when I was that child,
One leg in the Calumet,

I am here,
Nearer to
The way all things nosedive

Lifeless

Into snowbanks
In the end.

Even as I pulled my
Pockets empty each
Into seething winter
Rivers,
Hope
Clawed past my shoulders to find
My children.

And when I despair,
I remember
All my needed knives,

Gone from me
To depths of great lakes
By my own hand,

And careen around the sunless bends
With all that is required to keep careening.

1-1-2016

The angles
Found alongside,

The fire, the worries.

12-18-2015

Things are not
The way they were,
And have not been

Since we read about
The Mississippi valley,

The way the ancient people there
Bent saplings,

Twisted trunks to angles
Bowed
Along their trails.

Trees;
Not quite trees,

The way you woke up in a town called Wauconda,

Which is a fiction,

And decided to drive into the old city
At 3 AM
To shop for records.

Is that left lying somewhere,
Still,
A terrible dream?

The impossibly tall pines,
Empty roads?

Things are not
The way you remember
The sounds your feet made
Moving through snow,
Head angled up to
The tops of trees,
Not quite trees,
Owl suspended
On the dropped-flour moon.

Things surround themselves, sometimes,

Seeking the engine
Of their own curvature,

And God nudges new matter
Into the void.

12-11-2015

What will you do
when you understand you were never taught
how to cross rivers
given suddenly to the way forward?
When you are called to defend
the way you explain hope?
When the wide sky
circles the dying fire
and says,
"I am a great thing
among only a few,"
and tells you it knows
there is no difference to be made
in crossing, or remaining.

Maybe,
you can learn to answer
with decades of productive silence

jungled on the advancing bank,

moving onward,

chasing the retreating river,

never crossing.

12-2-2015

Far north Illinois

turned fields,

shelters

grinning on the

old weather,

corner

carved from War of 1812 borders,

jurisdictions dreamt

after

the paint factory shuttered

and all that freight bundled up

like bees without a queen.

And

you

strained

tumbled shatterings

from briefest shores,

wishing for Michigan, 

or better yet Winnipeg, 

or better still the world

that has not yet learned

to suffer you as phantom limb.

11-24-2015

These leagues

Among whom I engine still

Incidental
Fires,

And recall
Aurora
Amidst all things,

Still give
Birch-tops
Whittled thin,

Shavings offered up to the stars,

Paved roads
Paid in debt to unapproved.

They glow,

And this scant light,
Heat,
I pour
Into the house
I find around me.

11-15-2015

I dreamed library windows
Pored over with snows;

Dehydration;

Diplomacy taking the shapes of
Owls;

Tops of
Wooden
Telegraph poles
Alight

With Orion;

Lungs of Queen Anne's War
Beneath a list of knives

Gracious as
Unlit horizon

Unexplored,
Purchased,
Recalling fires
And stacks of wool
And high-carbon steel.

We are
Wrapped in
Things that sound
Like creeks,

And in the one great night,
The dark
About the present house
A tried plain

That remembers feet,

The way north.

11-1-2015

I am still as young as
What I smell in Autumn,

And as old, work-tempered
As sugar maples

Out back;

Limerent
Leaves

Holding and

Sheathing, and

Wandering

In dreams

Streets
That late November
Ladles over the counties.

I've been counting windows
All night.

I've been realizing, knowing
Again, again.

11/13/2014

The better part of so many.

The negative space of bridges.

The sleet-slurried red lights

Lofted over never

Held water.

The unbought house’s

Doorframes

Spilled with unharvested corn.

In the way the Ford’s headlights

Move upon the face of the early dark,

We have been outlived by the age,

And put

Too many ways across and upon.

One last set of embarrassed evenings

Spent upon

The banks I’ve dragged behind me,

And the stars will

Trace sprocket-turns and spirals

On the bedroom walls

Of all these strangers.