Leuchtturm 3-22-2016

In this dream
I am tasked with choosing
A piece of farmland.

It's easy
Because I
Remember an inheritance

That includes
Great iron swaths of
Longitude,

Subjugated blast furnaces

That slip from unfathomably far beneath the sunset

And merge into the Loop
At daybreak.

Leuchtturm 3-9-2016

I do not know what led to it:

I dreamt an inland sea
Aside scavenged offices,

And I set a tree on fire.

A town that once had been familiar to me
Awoke,
Put on the dawn,

Embarrassed necklace,
And rushed to my encampment.

I remembered,
And for them,

The sudden gasp of cold spring
Over untilled fields;

The unintended nature
Of the jungle yes,
Pearl within all no.

2-22-2016

I should thank
It is the middle of

The long, and I am must,
And beautiful, first

Impossible
Straight blade,
Walkway night that

You know me,
Such that I cannot say
So you are infathomed,
And I should go,

My shoulders along
The rows of corn

And bones below.

I should say
I've been a shadow,
The middle of.

Leuchtturm 5

Wheat,
    Burnt gold.

That sudden crash
    In the kitchen
    In the middle of the night;

        The fumbling after deadbolt;

        The panicked heal
        Hooked over spike-lip
        Beneath the shaking steel door.

What is it for, worth, when the last light

    Moving over fields
    Is final, same
    As the dreaded miles,

    And the way through 
    That was beaten down
        Again, again,

            Is grown over every morning?

Leuchtturm 4

We found the lightless floor at 2AM,
Our old legs
In that house in Michigan,

Near that lake:
    Shallow; trudged for days
    Until the green-gray drop-off.

We opened two sets of sliding doors

And winter poured in -
Christmas,
Blinding and
Same as the year my
Great-Grandfather died:

My young body caught pneumonia;
Nearly his death.

The stars there are slowly melting spring-steel:
A great, feral grace
Crawling
Over the rush of the world
Passing beneath it,

And all the earth's deer
Hanged from all the earth's branches -

    The night's great horizon
    Rushing, breathless -
    The world of it receding
    Over unseen edges
    And taking us, and the children

    When we lean too far
    Through open doors
    Into the dark.

The snow
Against our necks
Saws our
Breath;

The
Safety we have promised
I could never give.

And so it goes molten.
Perfect. Beautiful.

Leuchtturm 3

Remembering,
Keys on bent coat hanger
Worn silver against gold,

Mock Orange
And Ditch-Apple Osage leaves

Hushing each other
In shadow.

From underneath all things,
From where
The low sun pours through
All faults,

Black walls go porous,
And the forward
Spin of years stills.

Leuchtturm 2

You ask me, our children safe behind us,
About the rocks in Pennsylvania
When I was lost and
Near-lifeless, among cornrows --
Sleeping in empty-church twilight,
Waiting for any freight.

When I was terrified;

When rocks piled by strangers
At my head, my feet,
Were the whole of the world,

You ask, our children not safe
Behind us,
About the house in Pennsylvania,

And I am discovered by

What would answer us both,

That boy,
Stood up, dumb,
In audacious grace.

Leuchtturm 1

What we treasure;
The remainders,

    When there is nothing to know
    But mud piling up
    Along the canal.
    The long list,
    The knife of fathers,
    Comets observed,
    Remembered.

We pull alongside that
Decade-thick list of only words
And understand the long legs
We find beneath us
By the falls.

    One more remembered lake-path;
    One more jungled abstinence;
    One more set of
    Childless nights
    Along the palisades
    And effigies.

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.