Fireflies brighten the grass by the shore

as you pass under the low-hanging trees

in your father’s green aluminum boat

above the submerged farms and rock quarries;

setting the lines on the branches, the leaves

just skimming the surface, you navigate

through an alcove, then settle in between

the bait cooler and the motor to wait.

At times, you see a faint light reflected

from the lamp on a small school of minnows

like silver coins flipping end over end,

disappearing in the darkness below,

while your father gathers a large white net

and casts it out, as if making a bed.

 

 

 Oil pumps rock steadily on the long ridge

like mosquitoes on a sleeping man’s arm

while behind the power plant, frogs emerge

from the black pond. Near a neighboring farm,

an antique radio phases between

“Mr. Sandman” and a faint foreign voice,

occasionally crackling into brief

periods of silence. The older boys

smoke cigarettes underneath a streetlight,

their shadows splayed across the white silos

in the feed lot. Every few hours, headlights

burst over the hill like a flare, a gold

penumbra on the horizon that fades

to a narrow beam above the highway.

I counted the telephone poles as fast

as the horizon could generate them.

Anything to ease the boredom: a vast

row of crosses passing along the edge

of the Kansas interstate—Spartacus

and his defeated men decorating

the Via Appia. There was a verse

my father wrote in the military:

six million miniature Jesuses

marching into the distance. As a boy,

I would sit on his lap to Angelus

as he read from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. The void

is the hitch between those boxcars, he said,

connecting one brief moment to the next.

My uncle watched that tree all winter long—its patient bark,
the rope-scars catching dusk like half-closed eyes;
his boyhood ended there—a narrow pasture marked
by hooves and harm, where lashing is a sign.
He drove us out where ice replaced the shore,
a mirror set against the world’s return;
my brother paled—hands frozen to the door,
the windows starred with snow; the cedars blurred.
We shed our clothes, the snow received our weight,
then wiped our footprints clean as if we’d never come.
John cut a path the storm could not erase
and led us to the shoulder of the pond.
He walked the ice and summoned me alone,
his hammer fixed above the winter skin—
the wind returned; the cattails bent in rows,
my brother watching from the snowbank’s rim.
I held my place; the heavens offered no reprieve—
A boy consents. The ice proceeds.

It’s cold, my hands are numb in the night air—

I should have worn my gloves and a down vest.

Between Big Hill and Cherryvale, I stare

across the reservoir’s glistening crest,

the moon bisected by its marble slope.

As a child, I undressed behind the shed

whose blanched docks arced down to the metal boats

anchored for the winter at the lake’s edge.

I come every year to retrace those steps—

I descend from the drifts and the deadwood

to where the thin ice buckles underfoot

and the blackened water travels like blood

down the frozen ankles of my youth,

pouring in the vestibules of my shoes.

 

 

 

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

–Lin Tsi

My father bought a suit, cut his long hair

then hitchhiked into Wichita, looking

for a new wife. We moved to a trailer

on Chicken Hill, where the steep roads would freeze

solid every winter. He sent money,

we waited. I would lay in bed dreaming

of him walking alone by a highway,

a thick paperback Bhagavad Gita

jutting from his rucksack, the low sun

suspended in his breath, his left hand stretched

out to the road below the horizon,

the Vitarka mudra. I pretended

it was a myth. He saw it as penance.

Our mother told us it was cowardice.

We learned to stack a cord of wood by sound,
the wedge set where the log confessed its seam;
a single stroke would open it—a weakness found,
the grain split true along its rings.
We learned to gut a snake, to coax the wet
machinery from its sleeve—the venom sac
a charm of sorts, an olive amulet
that dangled from its open neck.
We learned to burn the vespid’s rooms,
we tilted gas into their paper keep—
a match, and all their architecture bloomed
then vanished in the heat.
And then we learned to pray. Though no one said
why every word was balanced on the dead.

I was raised on a road bent toward a ruin,

in a snake handler’s strange, unraveling breath

and the ashen rows of clergymen—

an oracle, a fool, a ghost of death.

I prayed before I touched myself, as though

one errant thought might tilt the kingdom’s frame;

each Wednesday hauled my records down below,

afraid that Hendrix backward stirred some name

that dust remembers—Baal, something kin,

a faceless thing that rose because it could,

that slouched from Kansas fields and prairie winds,

knee-deep in human excrement and blood.

The Whore of Babylon opines:

is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?

Dangerous men shaped me when I was young,

they taught me to shovel snow in winter

without wearing a hat, coat, or gloves.

And they ran after me in the summer,

tearing off my swimsuit, then dragging me

to the gravel road, naked. The lessons

were too innumerable and severe

to forget now that I’ve become a man.

Sometimes I remember them in my dreams

and cradle their graying heads in my arms

to demonstrate the value of weeping,

as my lips separate like an old scar

to reveal a wound deeper than their own,

screaming into the darkness of my homes.

 

 

 

The sun is dragging low inside your breath.
Each step you take sounds brittle in the shale—
a knock of bone on slate, the quiet death
of cartilage that’s learned it cannot heal.
The plain beneath us scraped to something bare,
a sheet of iron hammered past the breaking form;
your weight slips once; your hand rakes empty air,
then hooks the rock, the threshold rough and worn.

Son, we came here to name our ruin,
not mend it. Past the tree line’s ragged mark,
the wounds you carried into me lie strewn
in talus. All that’s left of men grows stark
and simple—bone and weather, breath and dune.
Take what remains. The mountain keeps the dark.