I choose a corner where the rafters lean,
so near they press the night against my skull;
the joists resist—the timber, tight and mean—
and walls grow thin enough to hear your pulse.
The mountain’s dust has settled in your chest;
you vanish downward—wordless, slow, and deep—
the earth receiving you like stolen breath.
No ladder down. No light to mark the slope.
You disappear the way a door goes dark.
You said: The fire’s near—move from the tribe;
strike flint to keep our worlds apart.
Don’t stay too long in Leadville’s starless night.
Repeat the tale: this town is not your home;
the blood that stains its rocks is yours alone.

The house holds fast the measure of a man:
a beam draws tight, the stair accepts the strain.
Her rocking keeps the upper dark aground,
his voice breaks down to timber, dust, and grain.
She rocks the boys as ballast, not as kin,
their legs gone slack with years they haven’t lived.
The night instructs them how a man comes in
and how his body must at last be moved.
I’ve seen this passage set inside the bone:
the pull from father into son made plain,
a tensile line no hand can call its own,
drawn tight by care, by duty, and by pain.
It held until I felt him start to fall;
no law remained—just balance, weight, and wall.

A large hand opens over me, discreet,
its shadow holding one man tinged with green;
the light holds fast, though altered where we meet,
as moonlight thins the margin of the seen.
I bow. The others keep to hedge and ground,
beyond the garden, measured in their space.
They shape my childhood calmly, without sound,
as if removing something out of place.
It holds to sequence, spare and unadorned:
a pause, a turn, the interval made plain.
We move as sleepwalkers, loosely formed,
our bodies passing through what still remains.
No one explains why they came and did not leave;
on Fountain Street, I stepped from the unseen.

A stray cat purrs in the fireweed beside
my window. I pull my mint-green blanket
close to me, and listen to the open night,
my older brother quiet in his bed.
A Malamute growls in the neighbor’s yard,
rounding a corner, link by link, its chain
raking a shed as it lunges and barks
at a figure sitting in the garden.
The moon throws slanted shadows on the wall:
a hedge-apple tree bent in the wind,
caught under the wire of a telephone pole,
its branches spreading slowly like a hand
in silhouette. It settles to stillness—
long, black fingers folding into a fist.

I.
A plank lies set between the attic beams,
a narrow bridge above the living room.
Your father builds it. Women come by morning,
then one by one withdraw in turn by noon,
the ladder folding neatly in the wall.
One night his leg bursts through the ceiling’s skin—
a sudden limb, a snake, a breach, a fall—
then slips back up, obedient to pain.
Your mother murmurs in the bedroom
with a man whose voice is spare and thin.
A bruise appears, that violet bloom,
on father’s thigh, unfolding under skin.
The house exhales. The body does not sleep.
What breaks the skin has other doors to keep.

II.
A dog the size of weather fills the yard.
Its breathing lifts the house like tidal wood.
The children hover, unadmitted, barred
by what was set in place before it stood.
At night it swells—black lung, black ribs—draws
the dark inside itself, then gives it back.
Its shoulders grind the fence. Its jaw withdraws
no answer from the walls it leans to crack.
Warm breath invades the attic, fogs the beams.
The ceiling bows. Teeth worry through the sheet.
The lamps go dim. The windows lose their seams
as lips slide down them, sealing up the street.
The house holds still. The dog completes its span.
The night has found a body shaped like man.

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.

We moved from town to town, no place to rest,
old griefs receding in the mirror’s black;
the next one waking somewhere in the west,
with Kettenbiel descending at our back.
Our heads were thick with troubled dreams—
a slanted flight that shifts the summer grass;
our mother’s lover tracking us, a pulse of green
through broken stalks, their edges sharp as glass.
The engine failed and left us where it died,
the road a scar where counties split in half;
a water tower rising past the power lines,
where nameless byways narrow into chaff—
we slept inside the car that night, alone;
at dawn we rose and called the town our home.

The mornings gave no rest—just fear again;
we slept, we rose, with eyes still on the road;
no mercy there, just nights that clung like skin,
a faceless time that passed beyond the oaks.
Next winter brought a package to our fence:
a frozen keepsake, some inverted ark
from Kettenbiel, our mother knew at once—
that thing that settled there against the dark.
She counted every car that didn’t turn,
each flickered headlight splintered through the slats
as if a secret lifted miles from her,
the box already open in her hands.
It knew the door. It knew the shape of us.
A red pulse beat, and silence did the rest.

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.

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.

I was raised on a road bent toward a ruin,
in a snake handler’s strange, unraveling breath
and the dust-moted 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?