The chapter’s title is a military term before it is anything else. High ground is the position from which you can see the entire field—where the enemy is, where your own lines are, what is coming. The soldiers who hold it have the advantage of vision and the disadvantage of exposure. They can see everything and they can be seen. High Ground operates precisely on that paradox: the poems occupy the vantage point of adult retrospection, where the long view is finally available, where the genealogy of damage is visible as a system rather than a sequence of incidents, where the father’s life and the uncle’s life and the grandfather’s life can be read as a single argument about what America does to the men it conscripts into its machinery—and none of this vision changes anything. The speaker arrived at the elevation too late. The damage is already geological, already a matter of formation rather than event, and seeing it clearly is the only thing left to do.
Robert Bly’s Iron John identified the mechanism that Graveyard Shift catalogs with the compression of a casualty list: the men who returned from the Second World War, from Korea, from the Pacific theater, came back to a civilization that had no container for what they carried. They transmitted their damage not through speech but through its absence—Hayden’s chronic angers of that house, love expressed as early rising and a banked fire, affection so transactional it barely registered as such. What the stoic grandfathers did not understand was that silence is not containment but compression. The pressure they refused to release did not dissipate; it passed forward. You don’t get Easy Rider without Iwo Jima. The counterculture was not a repudiation of American values but their logical detonation—the sons of men who could not speak their damage becoming men who could not stop moving, who grew their hair and built communes and read Wittgenstein and called the explosion liberation. The existential conditions had been assembling for a decade: The Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK, Robert Kennedy, King, Vietnam, Watergate—a systematic demolition of every institution the culture had asked its citizens to trust. The cinema that followed was a civilization auditing its own mythology and finding the account overdrawn: Midnight Cowboy through Apocalypse Now, Peckinpah’s ritualized bloodletting, Network’s prophetic howl. The Western died in those years because the myth it had been selling was finally priced.
The father of these poems is not the stoic of that prior generation but its explosion: Green Beret to commune-builder to Climax mine, who was too drug-addled at one point to stand between his sons and the world—not cruelty but a broken pedagogy, the instruments of transmission themselves damaged, toughness indistinguishable from the wound it was meant to prevent. Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, a foreign director pressing his finger on the American Zeitgeist with the precision available only to the outside observer, understood that the bacchanal of the seventies was not freedom but the counterculture metabolizing its own contradictions, the liberation ethic curdling into a different species of harm. The speaker inherits neither the grandfather’s stoicism nor the father’s rebellion but the volatile gap between them—the knowledge that both positions failed, already embedded in the body before the mind has words for it, the initiation that never formally concluded because no one alive knew how to conclude it.
The road poems at the chapter’s center carry the full mythological freight of the American highway—Whitman’s open road, Kerouac’s centrifugal momentum, every gunslinger and outlaw and refugee who ever pointed a car west and called it reinvention. In On Photography, Sontag traced the American compulsion to certify experience rather than inhabit it, the camera as proof of having been somewhere rather than evidence of having stayed; the road operates on the same logic, the self in permanent transit as the closest thing the culture offers to identity. What the myth withholds is the price: every country the speaker has inhabited since maintains the extended family as social infrastructure, the safety net of proximity and obligation that America traded for the open road. The dissolution is structural, not personal, and it runs deeper than most Americans can afford to acknowledge because acknowledging it would mean pricing the myth. The crow outside Moses Lake that wings irrespective of the speaker’s vision, angling lightly over Washington, indifferent to what he carries, is the chapter’s answer to the mythology of arrival: the landscape does not reorganize itself around reinvention.
What the road delivers the speaker back to is himself—the same formation, the same gap, now visible in a daughter’s face on a Christmas morning when the world declined to end. The middle poems of the chapter are the speaker conducting the audit that High Ground requires: not the father’s damage or the grandfather’s silence, but his own replication of the trajectory he crossed three states to escape, the sins of youth interlacing over time into latticework, a frame that learns your shape by odd degrees. Two deaths arrive in the same year—Troy Gustafson, whose swinging-distance tenderness the speaker was too arrogant to receive; Eric Swangstu, whose motorcycle runs straight into the poem’s annihilating final image—and then the father follows, and then the losses accumulate to the scale of Dead Man’s Slide, where six significant people in a single pre-pandemic year are carried to a ravine in the Cascades and placed alongside ninety-six dead from 1910. The speaker brings no relics, no sacred residue from any tradition equipped to console what cannot be consoled—only the ash of his own catastrophes, shook from the severed veil and scattered along the Iron Goat Trail. Every tradition that has tried to formalize this moment—the parable of the Prodigal Son, the fatted calf and the best robe, the architecture of homecoming and return—assumes a father’s house still standing. The speaker of High Ground returns to find the father already in the mountains, already ash, already scattered. He does not take anything from Dead Man’s Slide. He leaves something there, involuntarily, in the act of passing through.
Graveyard Shift
Graveyard Shift is a genealogy, but genealogy in the American military sense means something specific and brutal: not inheritance of property or name but inheritance of damage, each generation handed a theater of war and returned from it altered in ways that then become the atmosphere the next generation breathes. The diptych catalogs this inheritance with the compression of a casualty list and the tonal control of someone who has been living inside the mythology long enough to know where the bodies are, literally and otherwise. The structure is the argument. Seven figures cross the poem in rapid succession—great-uncle Harry, grandma, granddad, Uncle Don, Uncle Jerry, the father, Uncle John—each receiving one or two lines, enough to mark the wound and move on. This is not carelessness. It is the formal enactment of how trauma functions in family systems: you get the headline, not the story, and you are expected to absorb the headline and keep moving. The poem does not pause to grieve because the family did not pause to grieve. The compression is the content.
What prevents the catalog from flattening into arithmetic—military service equals trauma, multiplied by seven—is the specificity of each wound. Great-uncle Harry is scarred by a kamikaze attack. Grandma worked to decode the Enigma and was buried with honors. Granddad sailed the Indianapolis—a ship whose fate every American reader carries somewhere in the body—and came home to die at a family picnic, drunk, skull broken on a rock, the ocean war replaced by a domestic one he lost just as completely. Uncle Jerry was forced to walk point / after he had twice refused to carry / a gun, and went crazy. Each entry is a different variety of the same catastrophe, the specificity ensuring that the reader cannot generalize, cannot stand at a comfortable distance and receive the poem as theme rather than fact.
The father’s arc is the poem’s engine, even though he appears only at the end. Green Berets. Medic. Special ops in the tropics. Amoebic dysentery. Part of his colon removed. The body is always the site where institutional violence finally lands, and the colon is not a heroic wound—it is the body failing at the cellular level under conditions it was never designed to survive. What follows is the poem’s tonal shock, its moment of dark comedy and sorrow simultaneously: he grew his hair, built a commune in Leadville, dabbled with free love, drugs, and Wittgenstein. The juxtaposition is not satirical. It is accurate. The counterculture was, among other things, a veterans’ flight path, a way out of one mythology into another that promised to be gentler and proved only to be differently punishing.
Climax is the name of a molybdenum mine in the Colorado Rockies, one of the largest underground mines in the world, and the graveyard shift is the shift that runs from midnight to dawn. The poem does not annotate this; it does not need to. The man who went to war, who had his body surgically reduced, who built a commune and read Wittgenstein and pursued free love, ends up underground, in the dark, working the shift named for death. The irony is not cruel. It is geological. It has the weight of something that was always going to happen, that the whole poem was moving toward without knowing it.
The volta is the penultimate movement: Me and J.P. never served our country / were never asked to sacrifice our health / for any cause. The speaker’s exemption from the machine is not presented as relief. It is presented as a kind of amputation from meaning, an exclusion from the only rite of passage the family recognized as real. There is guilt here, but also something stranger—the recognition that the machine itself was the problem, that what it produced was granddad dying on a rock at a picnic and Uncle Jerry going crazy after refusing to carry a gun, and yet its absence from one’s own life feels like a deprivation rather than an escape. This is the poem’s psychological center: the sons who were not called into the grinding system look back at it with something uncomfortably close to longing, because the system, however destructive, was also the only source of legible identity the culture offered men.
The title operates on three registers simultaneously and the poem attempts to earn all three. There is the literal graveyard shift at Climax mine. There is the family business, which is tending the dead. And there is the poet’s own labor—taking the overnight shift at the graveyard of inherited mythology, sitting with what was buried there, keeping watch.
The Missouri Basin
The Missouri Basin is a poem spoken to a dying man until, at the turn, it becomes one spoken by him—which in this context amounts to the same thing only after that transfer of voice has occurred. The father’s voice arrives already reduced to its essentials—not wisdom exactly, but something harder and more useful than wisdom, the kind of knowledge that only becomes available once the body has been worn past the point of pretense. What he offers his son is not comfort and not counsel in any conventional sense. It is a reckoning, delivered at altitude, in the vocabulary of geology and physical attrition, because those are the only languages left that haven’t lied to him.
The poem opens inside the father’s body before it opens inside any landscape, but this interior is first rendered by the son, not spoken by the father himself. The sun is dragging low inside your breath—the line refuses the ordinary separation between atmosphere and organism. The sun is not outside, warming the air; it is inside the breath, dragging, low, already failing. The body and the world share a single thermodynamic system, and both are cooling. What follows confirms this: the shale sounds brittle underfoot, bone knocking on slate, cartilage that has learned it cannot heal. The music is percussive and hard-consonantal throughout—the language makes the fracture felt in the mouth, its weight registering in sound before meaning can mediate.
The second quatrain shifts from sound to precariousness. The plain is described as iron hammered past its breaking point—not broken, but past the form that breaking would have given it, beyond even the shape of catastrophe into something more absolute. When the weight slips and the hand rakes empty air before catching rock, the moment is not designed as drama. It is narrated the way a man narrates something he has survived too many times to find remarkable—though here that narration still belongs to the observing son. The threshold is rough and worn—worn by use, by repetition, by all the hands that have caught themselves at this same edge before. This is not a unique moment of crisis. It is a practiced one, which is worse.
The volta arrives at Son—one of the load-bearing words in the poem, because it names the relationship that has been implicit in every preceding line and marks the point at which the father takes over the speaking position. The poem turns on a direct address that is also a disclosure: we came here to name our ruin / not mend it. This sentence closes off one reading of the poem—the hike as survivalist lesson, the father teaching endurance—and opens another: the hike as ritual acknowledgment, the father transmitting the only honest inheritance he has. There is no therapeutic intention here, no arc toward healing. The mountain is not a site of recovery. It is a site of recognition.
What follows is the poem’s metaphysical center: the wounds you carried into me lie strewn / in talus. The direction of inheritance is reversed, and it is the father who names that reversal. The son’s wounds are inside the father—not the other way around, not the father’s damage passed down, but the son’s suffering absorbed upward into the parent’s body and now scattered across the scree. The debris field of a family’s history is visible in the landscape underfoot. Talus is the accumulated rubble at the base of a cliff face, the material that falls when the rock above fractures. What has broken loose from the son has come to rest here, in the father’s body and in this terrain, indistinguishable from each other.
The closing movement strips everything back to its irreducible components. All that’s left of men grows stark / and simple—ash and weather, breath and dune. Ash operates on two frequencies simultaneously: geological and liturgical. It is combustion, residue, what survives the burning—distinct from the poem’s earlier vocabulary of bone and fracture, which belongs to breaking rather than consumption. The Missouri Basin does contain dune fields; the geology is not decorative. And ash carries the liturgical weight of mortality in its oldest formulations—what you are made of and what you will become, two traditions of reckoning with human limitation naming each other in a single word.
Take what remains. The mountain keeps the dark. The final couplet refuses the consolation of an image. It offers instead two declarative sentences, the second of which is not a metaphor but a geological statement of fact that is also a theological one. The mountain does keep the dark—physically, in its hollows and north faces, in the mine shafts that go down where light cannot follow. And it keeps it in the other sense too: holds it, retains it, will not give it back. What the son is asked to take is not specified, because specification would diminish it. He takes what remains after the naming, which is not nothing but is not healing either. It is simply what is left after two people have stood in the same place and agreed, without sentimentality, on what they are.
The Embrace
The Embrace is an elegy in which the speaker cannot mourn cleanly because the grief is entangled with guilt, and the guilt is entangled with theology, and the theology is the thing he walked away from when he was young enough to mistake pride for discernment. The dedicatee is Troy Gustafson, and the poem’s first act is to restore him—not to sentimentalize him, but to recover what the speaker failed to receive when Troy was alive to offer it.
The opening is a piece of behavioral translation. Troy’s warning—if you’re standing within swinging distance, you’re standing too close—arrives in the poem already decoded: in Nebraska parlance, it really meant I want to embrace you as a brother. The aggressive posture was a container for affection that could not be delivered directly, because the culture that formed both men did not have a grammar for direct tenderness between them. The poem does not apologize for this or diagnose it. It simply names the gap between the signal and the meaning, and holds that gap open long enough for the reader to understand that the speaker missed it in real time, which is the wound the poem circles.
The shared geography—gravel barrens, overgrown cul-de-sacs, abandoned feed lots—is not backdrop. It is the specific terrain of a shared formation, the landscape that produced both men and gave them the same coordinates for reading the world. The urbane folk who rightfully fear this terrain are kept at the poem’s edge as a reminder of what the speaker has become in the intervening years, the life he chose over the one Troy represented. The back roads are also the routes of the faith—they lead mostly nowhere by secular measure, which is precisely the point.
Troy’s invitation is rendered in two imperatives that carry the full weight of his pedagogy: Speak plain. And then the offer inside the plain speaking: With your words, you could bring many over / to Christ. He saw in the speaker a capacity the speaker was not yet willing to acknowledge as a calling, and he named it without ceremony, in the idiom available to him. The speaker’s response was arrogance—not the ordinary social variety, but something more precise and more damaging: the inability to parse his pain from his avarice. This is the poem’s diagnostic line, the place where it stops being elegy and becomes confession. The speaker could not tell the difference between what hurt him and what he wanted, and that confusion cost him the deepest embrace Troy was offering—stewardship and sacrifice, which is to say a life organized around something other than the self.
The second movement enters the present tense of the grief, which is not peaceful. Troy’s death has hardened what was already wrong when the speaker left his church in that corner of Kansas—too afraid, too young, too unwilling to forgive his family their imperfections. The leaving is named as a failure of courage rather than an act of intellectual honesty, which is a significant revision of the story a person tells himself when he walks away from faith. The speaker is not claiming that Troy was right and he was wrong about doctrine. He is claiming something more unsettling: that he left for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time, in the wrong spirit, and that he can no longer locate a clean line between legitimate doubt and self-protective flight.
The poem’s final movement turns on a theological precision that cannot be softened without losing its meaning. One by one, the dead are crossing over. Any lingering grief— / any doubt that their corporeal bodies / resurrect to light in paradise / could now only be construed as mocking / the dead—a disregard for the righteous, and worse, a violation of the faith Troy put in the speaker with his embrace. The word corporeal is doing essential work here. This is not metaphorical resurrection, not spiritual continuity, not the soft consolation of memory persisting in those who loved you. This is the doctrine Troy held and the speaker could not: that the body itself rises, that matter is redeemed, that the flesh is not abandoned in the passage. To doubt this now, when the people who believed it are dying, is to insult them twice—once by leaving, and again by continuing to disbelieve after they are gone.
The poem closes by folding back to its title with the full weight of what has accumulated. The embrace was physical, in Troy’s way of offering it—a threat-shaped tenderness, shoulders squared, swinging distance. It was theological—brotherhood, stewardship, sacrifice, the promise beyond ordinary friendship. And it was an act of faith in the speaker himself, a belief that the speaker had something worth offering to others, if he could find the courage and the plainness to offer it. The violation the speaker now fears is not doctrinal. It is relational—a betrayal of someone who believed in him when he could not yet believe in himself, and who is no longer present to receive whatever belated acknowledgment the speaker might finally be capable of making.
Highway 84
Highway 84 is a poem about a man writing his own legend in real time, and knowing it. What he is leaving behind constitutes the full architecture of a life—work, marriage, friendship, music, a city—and the leaving was not clean. The road trip to Seattle is rebirth by necessity rather than by choice, the future being the only direction that remains open. What the poem does with this is not confess it but mythologize it, and then hold that mythologizing up to its own light.
The lightning storm in the Oklahoma panhandle was real. The four black horses were real. The poem takes both and does what the speaker has always done: weaves liturgical and apocalyptic imagery over the actual until the actual becomes something the imagination can survive. The horses are not simply horses. They are riderless, bolting, their obsidian coats shimmering like sunlight on blacktop—the horses of the apocalypse without their riders, which means the catastrophe has already happened and what remains is the aftermath moving through the landscape at speed. The speaker is barely awake, which is the honest condition of someone who has driven through the night away from everything that constituted his life. The lightning storm is rendered without thunder—dense nerves of light branching over blue nimbus clouds, the engine the only sound. This is not a naturalistic storm. It is the storm as sign, the sky performing a violence that cannot yet be heard, light without the confirmation that sound would provide. The speaker stands in it changing a tire, which is the poem’s most grounded detail: a man in a mythic storm doing something utterly mechanical, the body continuing its practical work while the sky goes apocalyptic overhead.
The Saul turn is where the poem becomes more honest about what it is doing. The speaker conflates himself with Saul on the road to Damascus—but not with the Saul of the conversion, the blinding, the fall. With the Saul of the night before: knife held closer to the chest, the sun by morning nothing more than a warm breath on his cheek, the horse leading him into the city. This is a moment that precedes the transformation and therefore cannot guarantee it. More crucially, Saul becomes Paul—the man who does not simply convert but constructs an entire theological system in the epistles, a wanton creation that may have more to do with the maker’s psychology than with the event that supposedly generated it. To identify with Saul is to identify with the unreliable narrator of Christianity itself, the man whose version of events is the version that survived and colonized everything that came after.
The speaker understands this about himself. He is writing his own legend, organizing what was in fact a compacted sequence of losses into something that carries the shape of a biblical departure. The storm without thunder, the riderless horses, the flat tire changed in the dark—these are real events selected and arranged by a consciousness that needs them to mean something larger than circumstance. The poem does not expose this as dishonest. It holds it as the condition of the self under pressure: that we narrate our ruins into something we can move forward from, and that the narration is neither true nor false but necessary, and that the transgression at the center of it is not erased by the epiphany the road trip is supposed to represent. This is what the Saul identification finally delivers. Saul had his transformation and became Paul and built an edifice on it. But Paul’s letters carry the traces of the man before the road—the zealot, the one who held the coats while Stephen was stoned, the one whose violence was redirected rather than extinguished. The conversion did not erase what preceded it. It reorganized it. The speaker on Highway 84 is headed toward reinvention, and the poem knows that reinvention and erasure are not the same thing, and that the horse leading him into the city is leading him forward but not clean.
I will arrive in Seattle tonight
I will arrive in Seattle tonight is the second movement of what Highway 84 began—the same journey, now approaching its destination, the mythologizing impulse still running but complicated by what waits at the end of the road. Where the previous poem held the self in transit and withheld the specifics of arrival, this one enters the moral weather of the destination directly, which turns out to be considerably more turbulent than any Oklahoma thunderstorm.
The opening is a declaration that immediately becomes a question. The speaker will arrive—this is certain, the itinerary is fixed—but what he will do when he gets there is not. The bed of an old lover is named without ceremony. What do I tell her. The question does not end with a question mark, which removes the expectation of an answer. It is not a genuine interrogative. It is the expression of a condition: the speaker arriving at a threshold he has been traveling toward and finding that he does not know what he intends, or knows and cannot say it plainly, which amounts to the same evasion.
The alternative to plain speech is theology, and the speaker reaches for it immediately. There is no balm in Gilead—the biblical disavowal lands with the weight of something the speaker has been carrying since before he left, the Jeremiah passage invoking a wound that cannot be healed by the available remedies. This is not manna, nor gossamer flakes from desiccated saints whose frozen ash melts on the tongue. The litany of rejections is also a catalog of what the speaker wishes the arrival could be: miraculous sustenance, holy contact, the dissolution of something penitential into something nourishing. He is refusing these consolations in the act of invoking them, which is the theological cover story desire tells when it cannot speak in its own name.
What it actually is—the thing the poem substitutes for all the rejected sacraments—is weather. The Cascade’s / autumn wind blowing through Snoqualmie Pass / shaking the white crowns from the evergreen. The pivot from desiccated saints to mountain wind is abrupt and exact, the landscape arriving as a corrective to the liturgical. This is a man coming from the heat and flatness of Florida into a country of snow and pine and altitude, and the beauty of it is genuine and slightly disorienting—not the landscape he knows, not the landscape of his formation, but something cleaner and more indifferent than the world he has been living in. There is something of the father in this reaching toward new terrain—the younger man who escaped to Colorado when the life he had built became unlivable, who found in western landscape a freedom the domestic world could not provide. The speaker is doing the same thing, in the same family tradition, heading toward undiscovered country as though geography could resolve what psychology cannot.
The crow on the outskirts of Moses Lake does what the horses did in the previous poem—it arrives as omen and immediately undermines its own augury. Like an augur’s dream / scattered by daylight on the open road. The dream of the augur is the dream of legible signs, of a world that can be read, of arrival that means something fixed and interpretable. Daylight scatters it. The crow wings irrespective of the speaker’s vision, angling lightly over Washington—indifferent to what the speaker needs it to signify, following its own logic across a landscape that does not organize itself around anyone’s arrival or intention. The bird is real and it refuses to be a symbol. The speaker has been reading signs since Oklahoma, constructing an itinerary of meaning out of horses and lightning and scripture, and the crow declines to participate. It angles lightly onward, and the poem ends in that lightness—not resolution, not revelation, just a bird moving over the state the speaker is entering, indifferent to what he carries and what he has come
Fireweed
Fireweed is an elegy written as a landscape poem, which is to say it conceals its subject inside the natural world with enough precision that the concealment functions as its own kind of disclosure. The poem never names what it is about. It does not need to. Every image is doing double work—the coastline and the body, the botanical and the diagnostic, the captain navigating and the man descending—and the two registers run parallel throughout until the final line brings them together in a single image that is both natural phenomenon and epitaph.
Fireweed is a disturbance plant. It blooms after fire, after clearcut, after the kind of damage that strips the ground to bare mineral. The rose-tipped cairns it forms above Puget Sound are beautiful and are also markers—the landscape signaling where something has been destroyed and is now, perhaps, beginning the long process of covering itself over. The seagulls drawn downward to form a hill’s crown complete the image: the birds crowning the hill the way blood cells gather at a wound, circulating, winter-worn, working the damaged site with the tireless attention of things that know where the openings are.
The tugboat arrives in the second movement. The hull severs the slack water like black fabric—the verb is surgical, the simile tailoring rather than tearing, the damage controlled and procedural. The prop-wash opens as a fan, oil-green, the physics of the wake precise and almost decorative in its geometry. The captain navigates this with the practiced ease of a man whose professional competence is total and whose life outside that competence is another matter entirely. He flicks his cigarette against the ship’s wheel and takes a fix on the basalt cliffs, the chalk-white shelves collapsed above the rocks. He charts his course by the damage already visible on the shoreline—the collapsed geology, the rock exposed beneath the fallen chalk—as if ruin were the most reliable landmark available.
The final tercet is where the poem’s concealed subject surfaces, still encoded but unmistakable once seen. He charts a constellation on his arm / the face of a hill which blooms in a rash. The constellation is the pattern of needle tracks, mapped across the skin the way a navigator maps stars—systematically, repeatedly, each point fixed in relation to the others. The rash that blooms across the face of a hill is the fireweed completing its circuit: the plant that signals disturbance has now moved from the landscape into the body, the inflammation externalized and then reabsorbed, the wound wearing the same face as the beauty that grew over it. The captain is steering his ship into the rocks he is using as his fix—the damage is both his landmark and his destination.
The birds spiral upward like ash in the closing line—not ignited but consumed, not reborn but dispersed. Ash as the end state of fireweed after the secondary burning, the plant that blooms after fire and then burns again; and ash as what remains of a body used up, the hill’s crown dissolving upward into smoke. The poem does not mourn this directly. It observes it with the precision of someone who has watched the descent in real time and understood that the navigation was always heading here, that the constellation was always being charted toward this conclusion, and that the landscape was always going to outlast the man moving through it.
Grassy Bald
Grassy Bald began as a poem called Solipsism, and the original title remains the more accurate diagnosis, even if the published title carries the weight of place and personal history that gives the poem its grounding. The landscape is real—a specific site charged with memory, the kind of location that accumulates significance through repeated return until it becomes almost mythological in private geography. The poem takes that charged site and places inside it a figure who cannot receive what it offers, not because she is indifferent to beauty but because her perceptual apparatus is turned entirely inward, the world arriving only as a surface on which her own cognition projects itself.
The first quatrain establishes the poem’s governing metaphor. The grass takes skin / as payment—not a caress, not a welcome, but a transaction in which the landscape extracts its toll from the body that moves through it. Thought swells past its given size and convenes as a court to discipline the body it inhabits and denies. The shift from the original’s distended thoughts that barely govern to a swollen court convened to discipline is a shift in the nature of the tyranny: not weak governance but active coercion, the mind presiding over the body with the cold proceduralism of an institution that has already decided the verdict. The body is both subject and defendant, inhabited and denied simultaneously.
The second quatrain moves the jurisdiction outward. The sun impresses dull authority / upon her cheek—impresses as light, as stamp, as coercion, three operations in a single verb. The mark it leaves does not ask, which is the poem’s quiet continuation of its legal logic: authority without consent, inscription without negotiation. The field has staged her silently with milkweed stalks and hydrangea husks, the word staged doing the crucial work of theatricality without agency—she has been arranged in the landscape rather than placed there by any act of her own will or the world’s intention. The husks close the life-cycle implication without announcing it: what bloomed has already dried, the beauty available only in its residual form.
The two sovereignties the poem has established—internal and external, mind and sun—meet in the third quatrain at the site of breath. She flares her nostrils. The gesture is involuntary and animal, a reminder that the body persists beneath the court’s jurisdiction with its own logic. But the mind immediately absorbs the breath into metaphor: thread pulled thin toward nothing she can see / or cloudstuff waiting, stalled and undefined. Both images are deferral—the thread unraveling toward an invisible terminus, the cloud suspended before it acquires form. The self that generates these metaphors is not engaging with the world but substituting for it, replacing the actual with analogy, the sensory with the conceptual, the open field with the interior room where every window looks inward.
The sun, exact in appetite, burns through the afternoon without appeal—the word appeal completing the poem’s juridical circuit while simultaneously closing it off. There is no appeal from the sun’s verdict. It operates with pure appetite, consuming what it cannot feel, self-sufficient and entirely indifferent to the proceedings of the swollen court taking place beneath it. Where she generates metaphors of dissolution and deferred form, the sun simply burns. The contrast is not between warmth and coldness, or presence and absence, but between two modes of being—one that turns everything into the occasion for self-reflection, and one that is purely, mercilessly itself. The poem does not adjudicate between them. It places them in the same field and observes what the juxtaposition discloses.
The indictment, if it is one, is blunted by the veracity of the speaker’s position—which is to say the poem knows that the capacity to observe solipsism from the outside does not exempt the observer from his own variety of it. The poem was written at a site of personal significance, about a figure observed through the lens of a relationship already straining, by a speaker whose own feelings at the time were not entirely to be trusted. What remains after all of that is not a verdict but a portrait: a woman in a field, the sun burning, the grass taking its payment, the birds or the cloudstuff or the thread unraveling toward nothing she can see.
Stone Prairie
Stone Prairie is a poem about the structure that sin builds over time, not the acts themselves but the architecture they produce—the lattice of consequence and character that hardens around a life until it becomes indistinguishable from the life itself. The landscape of the title carries its meaning in its contradiction: a prairie is open, generative, the ground of possibility, but stone is what forecloses growth, what resists the seed, what endures past the point of usefulness. The name of the place is the condition of the speaker.
The first quatrain establishes the poem’s central metaphor. The sins of youth were random—not organized, not intentional in their cumulative effect—but they have interlaced over time into latticework, a structure so thoroughly integrated with the life it has grown through that leaving it is no longer possible. The warp and weft secure their place / a frame that learns the body’s shape by odd degrees—the fabric and the body have adapted to each other, the containment becoming custom-fitted through long mutual accommodation. This is not punishment in any external sense. It is the natural consequence of how pattern accumulates: the frame learns you, and what it has learned, it holds.
The second quatrain descends into the specific textures of that entanglement. Branch braided into limb / vine into nerve—the organic and the botanical have grown together past the point of separation, the distinction between the self and what has grown through it no longer recoverable. The map is blighted but it is the only map available, and the speaker follows it swerve by swerve, each deviation from a straight line the product of an earlier deviation, the path shaped by its own accumulated deformations. It leads to hollows cupped beneath the oldest stone—the deepest and most sheltered recesses of the self, the places formed by the longest pressure, where the stone has been wearing its shape into the ground below it for longer than the speaker has been alive.
The third quatrain introduces the natural world as choral commentary. A scold of jays—the collective noun unsparing, a scold being both a group and a rebuke—disperses its cries through the evening air without address or intention, simply sounding. The canopy comes loose. What the poem has been building toward is not revelation but release of a different and more diminishing kind: the years let go like leaves / like thinning hair, the losses biological and incremental, the kind that happen without a single decisive moment, the kind that are only visible in accumulation.
The couplet delivers the poem’s final accounting in two short declarative sentences that operate as cause and consequence. The crown gives way—not catastrophically, but by the same slow process of release that the leaves and the hair have modeled. What sang departs the head. The song is gone, the lyric capacity, the thing that made the mind feel continuous with something larger than its own history. What remains is the frame—the latticework built from decades of interlaced consequence—and the body, which learns instead. Learns what the mind can no longer carry, learns in the way bodies learn, through repetition and adaptation and the long accommodation to what cannot be changed. The poem ends in a condition of diminished but undeceived survival: the frame holds, the body continues, and what has been lost is named without elegy.
Cut Shop
Cut Shop is dedicated to a man whose name appears once and then recedes into the machinery of the poem, because the poem is not about him so much as about what he represents—the son who inherited a particular pedagogy of speed and hardness, who climbed into the motorcycle as into an extension of that inheritance, and who discovers at the poem’s end that the machine and the man are not the same thing after all.
The salt flats—Bonneville, implied by the terrain—function as a modern desert: featureless, punishing, a surface on which everything extraneous has been stripped away and only the essential remains. The throttle pulling wide / your engine pitched past comfort into heat / the needle buried, flats erased to white / markers peeling off beneath your feet—the opening moves with the breathless compression of someone who has left the ordinary world behind and entered a zone where the only measure is velocity. The flats are erased to white, which is not emptiness but saturation, the landscape bleached past the point where individual features register. The rider is inside a field of pure sensation without interpretation.
The chrome mirror returns a house shifting backward—windows flashing color as they slide / cobalt burning wrong, blues thinned and blurred. This is memory behaving the way memory does at speed: present in fragments, distorted by motion, the domestic world retreating in the rearview without being gone. The jacket rips. The tank scars at the thigh. The body is being marked by the machine it is inside, the contact leaving its record on flesh the way the father’s instruction left its record on the son. In an earlier version of the poem, the wind scrapes down to nerve—not skin, not muscle, but nerve, the level below sensation where response is involuntary and the body can no longer mediate between stimulus and reaction.
Your hands stay closed. He taught them so. / The dark that named you never learned to sleep. The closed hands are the father’s inheritance—the grip trained into the body as law, the refusal to release that was transmitted as virtue. The father is not present on the salt; he is present in the hands, in the refusal, in the dark that persists without rest. The dark that named the son is the same dark that formed the father—the bellicose inheritance, the pain-as-love pedagogy, the armor that the machine has become an extension of. The rider is not escaping into freedom. He is escaping into his own past, the motorcycle his armor and his prison simultaneously, the speed carrying him not away from the father but deeper into the formation the father installed.
All forward breaks, the steel lets go. / What named you once now cuts its channel deep. The structural failure is mechanical before it is metaphorical—traction gone, the forward pull revoked, the momentum that had been the poem’s governing god suddenly absent. The merger of man and machine holds only as long as the machine holds. When the steel lets go, the distinction between rider and instrument reasserts itself with brutal clarity. The armor betrays its wearer at exactly the moment it would have been most needed.
The wheels slip. The forward pull is gone—the dash suspending causality, opening the void between intention and consequence—and then: a bounding deer—pure chest—detonates the sun. The deer enters as mass, not symbol: no antlers, no eyes, no pastoral innocence, only the densest and most vulnerable part of a living body presented as impact surface. Pure chest mirrors the reduction the poem has applied to the rider throughout—spine as lever, muscle as rod, body as apparatus—and turns it back on the system with annihilating effect. Speed had earlier opened God; now collision explodes the central light. The sun is not dimmed or eclipsed but detonated, the theology of force destroying its own illumination on contact with the real. The father’s voice ensured that catastrophe would be met without hesitation. It could not ensure survival. The machine was armor until it was the instrument of the fall, and the dark that never learned to sleep does not save the man it named.
Christmas
Christmas begins with the wrong kind of ending. 2012 arrives not as apocalypse but as anticlimax—the Mayan calendar turns over, the clocks continue, and history, that great bureaucratic machinery, simply resumes its career. The word career demystifies what theological and eschatological traditions have always tried to mystify. History is not fate, not providence, not punishment—it is a job, and the job is moving through us. That preposition is the poem’s first ethical commitment. History is not external catastrophe visited upon the body. It is metabolized. It proceeds through—digestive, incremental, cellular. The apocalypse that failed to appear is replaced by something more patient and more certain: the daily work of time inside flesh.
Into that resumed, unheroic continuity, a child enters. The daughter’s waking in line five is the poem’s true event—and the poem refuses to celebrate it. The room is thick with care will not call this love. Care here is surveillance: it counts, corrects, anticipates. The triad is clinical in its exactitude—three active verbs arranged in escalating abstraction, from the arithmetic of counting to the geometry of correction to the prescience of anticipation. This is the grammar of a mind at war with the future, calibrating against damage it cannot yet name. The parent is already an augur, already reading signs, already afraid. The Mayan priests in the opening lines were professional worriers; so, the poem quietly proposes, is every parent.
I feel my past arranged behind her stare—arranged, not located, not lurking. The syntax implies deliberate placement, furniture moved into position, and yet the arranger is absent. The past organizes itself. What the speaker perceives in the child’s gaze is not the child’s interiority but his own history, marshaled and deployed by whatever force inheritance constitutes. A set of habits posing as her fate is the poem’s philosophical thesis, delivered with no emphasis at all—which is the only register in which so radical a claim survives. Fate, that grand theological apparatus, is unmasked as rehearsal. The destiny that appears inevitable is merely pattern—old behavior wearing new clothes, standing behind a child’s eyes and calling itself the future. The verb posing implies masquerade, bad faith, imitation of the real. What looks foreordained is only remembered.
The sestet compresses the dread into portraiture. She has my look is stated with the flatness of a clinical observation, but it is anything but neutral. What follows specifies the uncomfortable inheritance: practiced doubt, the strain of weighing kindness always for its cost. These are not vices in any melodramatic sense. They are middle-class adaptations—the emotional economies of someone who has learned not to trust generosity, not to extend it without auditing its price. The word practiced carries everything: this is doubt that has been trained, drilled, refined into habit. And now the child wears it. Not because she was taught it consciously but because she looked long enough into the face that carried it. This is transmission of character through proximity, the parent inscribing the child not through language but through being. The child does not learn the look. She inherits it the way she inherits a cheekbone.
I see my life already in her way is the poem’s syntactic trap, and it works as a trap should: you are inside it before you notice the mechanism. The phrase allows two simultaneous readings—her way of moving, her manner, which already mirrors the father’s; and the father’s life laid in her way, as obstacle, as narrowing. Both readings are true. Both must be held simultaneously. A path laid narrow, difficult to cross confirms the second reading but does not cancel the first. The path is the speaker’s life become the child’s circumstance—the narrowing that inheritance produces, the corridor that someone else’s experience forces a subsequent person to navigate. He did not intend to build the corridor. He built it by existing.
The couplet refuses catharsis. She’s my stark mirror, shimmering in time—stark and shimmering hold each other in tension, the unadorned and the luminous coexisting in the same object. Wrapping paper is reflective, not radiant—it catches light from elsewhere and gives it back diffused, altered, softer. The child does not generate warmth or resolution. She returns what the father brought into the room, made briefly beautiful by the occasion’s sanctioned glamour. And wrapping paper is designed to be torn. The shimmer is not permanent. Christmas is a pressure system with a built-in expiration—gifts will be opened, paper will be discarded, and underneath will be whatever the year has actually brought.
The Vow
The Vow begins in the plural. We—not I—remitted the father to the earth, and that first word carries everything the poem will need to sustain: grief as communal obligation, elegy as shared ritual, the son refusing to privatize what belongs to the whole of the living. The verb remitted is Latinate, procedural, almost legal—a word from the administrative vocabulary of the church and the court, not the vocabulary of sentiment. The body has been processed. The paperwork of death has been filed. And the earth that receives him is nameless—not sacred, not mythologized, not waiting with arms open. The poem refuses the comfort of a known afterlife before it has even completed its first breath.
Into that secular ground, the poem immediately establishes what is not present: no gods churn the ground with their invisible hands / and no resurrected form retains his strange acuity. The double negation is purposeful. We are inside the poem before we realize we have been denied the consolations theology typically provides. The strange acuity—slightly clinical—names not just intelligence but penetration, the quality of a mind that sees through surfaces. It is already an elegy for a way of seeing, before it becomes an elegy for the man who saw.
The turn to the practical follows: We eulogized him / then went about our business, dazed for a time. The flat affect here is not indifference—it is the physiological truth of grief’s first hours, when the body continues its functions because it has no other instruction. The daze is named and dismissed in the same phrase, because life insists. What follows is the poem’s first vow—not metaphysical but domestic, the promise to scatter his ashes where he and his wife had left their disparate passions. The word disparate does quiet biographical work. The passions are not unified. The marriage held two different gravitational centers. The poem does not pursue this—it cannot, given the sestina’s formal constraints—but it leaves the word standing, a small door left ajar.
The second stanza opens the philosophical register that will define the poem’s intellectual architecture. The business of the living is named: to return / the memories of the dead to a verbal corpus and to return / their myths to a physical place on the earth. The phrase verbal corpus would read as academic diction in another poem. Here it is biographical—these are the father’s own words, his own lexicon returning through his son’s mouth. The poem is already performing its stated purpose before it has finished articulating it. The elegy begins its work in the act of naming the work.
Then, among the abstraction: My hands / tremble at this thought. The line break isolates the body from the argument. Hands enter the poem as grief, and as the poem’s central recurring totem—inherited, trembling, curled, bound, fashioned, finally pressed once more upon a shoulder. And immediately beneath the trembling: the vow / to ascribe meaning to a meaningless death, to vow to forget in him / a terrible iniquity and thus a childhood lost. The word terrible carries the moral weight of what was carried. The poem does not name the iniquity. The architecture of withholding is itself the confession. What is omitted has mass. And immediately, without pause: yet also to find in him / such boundless joy among the Aspen and evergreen. The juxtaposition is the emotional truth of complicated grief—not sequential, not resolved, but simultaneous. The wound and the wonder inhabit the same body and neither cancels the other.
The mythic scaffolding that follows is not ornamental. The return to the garden, before temptation and Adam’s vow, before he rose from God’s cruel breath—the cruelty is specific and theological without being doctrinal. This is Genesis rewritten as biography. Before the fall, before the knowledge that ruins, before the nakedness that carries shame—before all of it, there was a man in Colorado among the aspens, reading Blake and Arnold, carrying joy alongside whatever damage he would eventually pass forward. The poem does not sentimentalize that earlier self. It simply acknowledges that he existed, that he preceded his own undoing, as all of us do.
The dream sequence follows. The father behind the wheel of an empty bus, his hands / curled about the door handle like Charon on his return / from the River Styx, ferrying me and my daughter across the threshold—this image has the logic of the unconscious, which is always more accurate than argument. The bus is liminal, industrial, emptied of passengers—a purgatorial vehicle driven by a man who was, in waking life, a soldier, a poet, and a father: someone whose vocation was to carry others across danger. The myth rises from the gesture. Charon does not impose himself on the image. He is the image.
Sometimes he vows / we will be safe on our journey; in other dreams, he vows / nothing. The father’s afterlife does not offer consistent consolation. Some nights he promises. Some nights he is simply there, consigned, rolling onto his left side in silence like St. Lawrence on hot coals, the earth finally collapsing around him. St. Lawrence is a figure of spectacular suffering—the deacon burned on a gridiron—but what the poem takes from him is not the spectacle. It is the silence. The turning of the body. The acceptance of an end that cannot be argued with.
He was a martyr even among the living. The line does not romanticize, it diagnoses. A man who carried suffering as an identity, whose deterioration was witnessed incrementally by those who loved him and could not intervene, whose descent was prophesied by his own nature. Our hands / bound by his prophecy—when someone’s end feels forewritten, the witnesses become immobilized, holding a script they did not write and cannot revise. Against that binding, the poem places the freedom of the father’s own hands—summarily free to fashion his end. The military echo in summarily is not accidental. It carries the authority of a command, the finality of a court decision, and the clarity of a man who understood what he was doing.
The final movement is the vow kept in the act of keeping it. In these words he will return / if only for a moment from the edge of that darkling plain, where he left / Blake and Arnold to confer with him / under the shadow of the Earth. The allusion to Arnold’s Dover Beach is the father’s allusion—his obsession, his diction, his cosmology—returned to him by the son who inherited it. The poem gives the father back his intellectual companions. He is not alone in the afterlife the poem imagines. He is in the company he kept in life, the poets he loved, the tradition he belonged to, and the great darkling plain of moral uncertainty that Arnold named and that the father spent his life walking.
The final gesture refuses grandeur. To feel his hands / once more upon my shoulder as I walk the earth. After all the mythic scaffolding—after Charon and St. Lawrence and Adam and Arnold and Blake—the poem ends with a hand on a shoulder. The most ordinary of gestures. The most irreplaceable. The vow that closes the sestina is not triumphant—it is corrective: this is not all that is left of him. The poem itself is the proof. The words are the return. The formal obsession—the relentless cycling of earth, hands, him, vow, left, return—is not a poetic exercise. It is the structure of grief, which also circles back, also insists, also refuses to let the end-words rest.
The poem was written in a fugue state, as eulogy, in the form of a sestina. That those three conditions converged is not coincidence. The sestina was the right container precisely because grief does not progress—it rotates. It returns. It finds the same six words at the end of every line and must discover new meaning in them, again and again, until the meaning is not discovered but inhabited. But the poem carries a second recurrence beneath the formal one. It opens with the churning of earth—gods who do not churn it, the nameless ground that receives him—and then begins a slow uncovering: the iniquity unnamed, the joy among the aspens, the man before his fall, the trembling hands that limned what they loved. Then the earth closes again. The dream buries him. St. Lawrence disappears into the collapsing ground. The martyr descends; the hands are bound. What the sestina’s rotating end-words enact formally, the poem’s imagery enacts physically—covering and uncovering, burial and excavation, immurement and return—the same motion grief makes when it arrives not as a single wave but as a tide that recedes and crashes and recedes again, each time exposing something different on the same shoreline. The poem does not transcend the father’s absence; it lives inside it.
Offering
Offering opens on a severed voice, and that severance is not metaphor in any decorative sense. The voice halted, thin, abrupt as aspens cut at timberline—the simile is geological before it is elegiac, the tree not dying of age or weather but cut, the action deliberate, the exposure sudden. What timberline enacts is the removal of shelter at altitude, the point above which nothing grows, where the wind has full authority and the body is on its own. The father dies at that line. Everything below it is what the son carries forward.
The talus that snow keeps working down to stone is the poem’s first governing image, and it recurs because it earns recurrence. Talus is not simply rubble; it is the accumulated debris of fracture, the material that falls when the face above it gives way. Snow does not carry it violently; it works it, incrementally, by the same patient pressure that grief applies to memory—not destroying but displacing, moving what cannot be moved all at once by moving it continuously over time. The ridge stripped to bone by frost and brine is what remains after that process has completed its first pass. The second quatrain of the first sonnet refuses consolation in the register consolation usually occupies. The father’s brooding eyes, the timbre of his voice—these are named in their absence, not recovered. The brook’s cold mouth taken in a tin canteen beneath the blunt insistence of the wind places the act of drinking at altitude inside submission to something indifferent and ongoing. The wind does not stop for grief. It insists.
You’ve become enjambment is the poem’s most concentrated claim, and it carries the full weight of the Ofrenda form that contains it. Enjambment is the line that does not close, the syntax that runs over into what follows, the meaning that cannot be completed in the space allotted. The father has become that structural condition—not a memory that can be fixed and set down, but a pressure that continues into the next line, the next chamber, the next year. Memory’s ridge / mountain and scar—these are not images appended to the metaphor. They are the metaphor extended into landscape, the father distributed across the terrain the son still moves through. The floral markers, blue columbine and monkshood at the edge, function as thresholds rather than decoration: columbine is the native mountain flower, monkshood is poisonous, and both grow at the boundary where the maintained trail gives way to something less governed. The doubling back where judgment breaks its lines is where the poem locates itself—not at the summit, not at the trailhead, but at the place where the path becomes unreliable. The first sonnet closes on failure. The trail repeats, then fails, then disappears / the line gives way beneath accumulated years. Neither sentence offers the epigrammatic snap the form conventionally delivers. The closure is erosion, not verdict—the couplet performing the same process the talus performs, the structure giving way under the weight it has been asked to carry.
The second sonnet drops from threshold to inhabited world, and the shift is physical before it is tonal. Raw rhubarb on Bristolhead, pyrite panned from Gunnison’s cold run, quartz and petrified wood from scabbed-out peaks—the specificity is insistence, the named places and named acts filling the memorial space the way the living fill it, through the body’s record of what it did in proximity to another body. The father’s Buddha calm is the sestet’s fulcrum: the son was too young to read it correctly, taking the cocked eyebrow for ease or charm when it was skepticism honed and sharpened grim. The misreading is not reproach. It is the exact condition of knowing someone before you have the instruments to know them, which is the condition of every childhood in proximity to a complicated parent.
Still, anguish moved behind your steady gaze—and the word still carries double freight, temporal and adversarial, meaning both nevertheless and despite the surface. The brown eyes held what ghosts refuse to flee—the father’s grief did not resolve during his lifetime, and the son watched it without being able to name it, mourning him then, though blind to what must be. The second couplet performs the same compression the first did, but from inside rather than above: grief came before the words to fix its name—arriving as condition before arriving as language, the way the body knows before the mind does. The house going down and the heat remaining the same ties the literal fire of the father’s scars to whatever it was that burned in the family before the fire had a physical form.
The third sonnet opens where the second ended, inside the body’s record. The scars borne like maps the body keeps, learned without words, folded under skin—this is inheritance rendered as cartography, the father’s damage inscribed on tissue rather than transmitted through speech, the son reading what was never said by reading what was left on the surface and what was held beneath it. The fire that took flesh in ordered sweeps is the same fire that has been moving through the sequence since the first sonnet’s timberline, now given its literal form: the father who survived the burn, whose body bore that survival forward, and who carried fire farther than the rest when the sequence of his life finally closed.
The ashes waiting beside a conqueror’s cairn, a folded flag, the window’s narrow ledge—the objects are not symbolic. They are the actual instruments of what the poem is preparing to do. Mt. Holy Cross, the Great Divide, past brink and edge—the planned dispersal of ashes into that landscape is the Ofrenda’s central action, the offering that gives the poem its title and its form. An Ofrenda is not a monument; it is a transfer, the movement of the dead from one plane into another, accomplished through deliberate ritual rather than passive memory. The poem has been building toward this act across three chambers, and when it arrives it does not announce itself. It is simply stated, the ashes crossing the mountain, going into the divide, the action completed in syntax that does not pause for emphasis.
The cremation was his wish—no grave, no fixed location, no stone to which grief must return. His wife’s ashes are already remitted to the same mountains, noted in The Vow. What Graveyard Shift records as escape—the Green Beret who surfaced from war, grew his hair, built a commune in Leadville, found in western landscape a freedom the domestic world denied him—Offering completes as return. The mountains that received him living now receive what remains. The Great Divide is not chosen for its symbolism. It is chosen because he already belonged to it.
Snow works the talus down against its will—the return of the poem’s governing image in the third sonnet’s sestet is not repetition but completion. What was established in the first sonnet as the process of grief now becomes the process of the earth itself, operating on the same material, by the same incremental force, beyond anyone’s will to stop or direct it. The ridge accepts what will not be confessed—and what will not be confessed is not named, because naming it would reduce it, and the poem has understood from the beginning that its subject exceeds what can be fixed in language.
No voice survives intact what must be given—the line absorbs the opening image of the halted voice and extends it into something larger: the voice does not survive the offering not because it is silenced but because the act of giving requires that it change, thin, become something other than what it was. The offering lifts and thins itself to heaven—and the thinning is not loss but the final form of what has been moving through the sequence since the first line, the voice distributed into landscape, into altitude, into the same air that works the talus, that strips the ridge, that insists beneath the blunt authority of the wind at timberline.
Dead Man’s Slide
Dead Man’s Slide opens not with witness but with archive. The first sonnet does not belong to anyone present; it belongs to 1910, to the ledger, to the physical record of what snow and iron did in the dark. In nineteen-ten they woke to thunderlight / at Windy Mountain—the compound thunderlight does double work before the poem has drawn a second breath, naming the precise meteorological condition that preceded the avalanche while fusing sound and illumination into a single pressure. Snow sheared from its shelf: the verb is mechanical, not violent. The avalanche does not surge or roar; it shears, the way metal fatigues and separates along a stress line. What follows is a sequence of took—Bailets Hotel, the track, the cars, the men, the mailbags—the anaphora carrying the flat impersonality of seizure, the snow acquiring nothing, intending nothing, simply taking what stands in its path. The mailbags matter. They ground the abstraction of catastrophe in the ordinary continuity of human systems—correspondence in transit, a world that was still operating on schedule minutes before.
The Spokane Express was torn apart, undone. The sentence does not allow the train agency in its own destruction; it was acted upon, its state summarized in a past participial that names the condition without narrating the event. The sun rose on a valley filled with wrecked degrees of iron—and wrecked degrees is the first image that exceeds documentary function without abandoning it. Degrees implies measurement, angle, engineering; what is being named is not chaos but the precise record of catastrophic force distributed through metal: boilers split, pistons bent / sandpipes cinched tight around the standing pines, the machinery of locomotion now indistinguishable from the landscape it was driven through. Ninety-six dead are counted, laid along the lines, sent down on sleds—and here the only deliberate movement in the poem is introduced. Dead Man’s Slide is not the avalanche. It is the human response to the avalanche, the controlled descent of the dead by rope and sled to the valley below. Nature provides gravity; people provide the sleds. The mountain held the rest; the river held what bled and cooled. Two limits, no will, one accounting. The repeated held is not echo but structural symmetry: mountain and river as parallel boundaries, neither carrying anything away, neither intending anything, simply present at the edge of what the human effort could reach.
The second sonnet enters the terrain of contingency without explaining it. Two lawyers jumped from Train Twenty-Five and lived—the blunt declarative strips survival of any moral content. They slid the switchbacks under Cascade Tunnel, came down end over end and rose half-given / to breathe again, the phrase half-given compressing borrowed life, provisional return, conditional survival into two syllables. Below them lay the funnel of dark and quiet—and the names arrive in the middle of that dark, Jesseph and Merritt among the snow packed into their cuffs, the flask going round, the proof passed hand to hand, where proof carries its triple freight of alcohol content, evidence, and survival as argument against fate. Yet just below, Ms. Starrett pinned in the wreck, her infant silent beneath her breast, her second son cut free with blood along his teeth and a stick drawn from his head, the work done by lanternlight. The poem does not call this Providence, though the original prose account does. What it calls it is work: procedural, completed, technical. The snow came down anew and covered what the night let through—the closing couplet refuses narrative closure by describing erasure. The night does not release; it merely fails to contain. The snow resumes; the ledger does not add up.
The third sonnet crosses into the present tense of the speaker’s own reckoning, and the crossing is announced without ceremony: You brought me here among the dead. The second person is not invoked for tenderness but for accountability. Someone made this choice, brought the speaker to this site, knew what weight he carried. The names fixed at the rim—a nurse, a child, a writer gone to bed—are compressed into the sign at the edge of the ravine that lists the victims from both cars, and gone to bed strips mortality of its drama, rendering death as the most ordinary of transitions, the final domestic act. The wire burns between the speaker’s hands—tactile, grounding, the physical fact of holding something under tension at altitude—and above, the cliff where alder closes over ruin. Alder is a disturbance plant, one of the first species to return after slide and clearcut; it does not commemorate, it stabilizes soil, it grows back densely over wreckage and closes sightlines. The ruin is not preserved. It is merely covered over, the way wounds close without healing.
The speaker refuses relics. No leaf from Bhutan / no cuspid from Siddhartha’s mouth / nor canine splinters lifted from the rood of Calvary—the catalog of mythic artifacts from three theological traditions, all of which claim access to sacred residue, all refused in succession. What the speaker offers instead is not nothing but almost nothing: the ice-tipped thorns of Whitebark pine, the ash of the catastrophes he and whoever brought him here have already lived through, shook from the severed veil and scattered along the Iron Goat Trail. Whitebark pine is high-elevation, avalanche-country, ecologically precarious; its thorns are not warm; the ice-tipped modifier removes whatever botanical beauty might soften the offering. The ash is aftermath, residue, what remains after burning—not the ash of the avalanche dead but the ash of a personal catastrophe carried to a site of historical catastrophe, the private ruin finding its scale only in proximity to the ninety-six. Shook from the severed veil names the physics of secondary release: the veil was already torn; what follows is what falls free after the rupture, residue dislodged by aftershock rather than cut loose by intention. Scattered along the Iron Goat Trail—not carried, not placed, but distributed by motion, the way debris distributes itself. No pilgrimage logic, no ascent toward illumination. The Trail runs through the site of the disaster and the speaker moves along it, carrying the ash downward, not up.
The triptych’s arc is not redemptive. The first sonnet establishes catastrophe as impersonal distribution—nature as accountant, not villain. The second establishes human contingency as morally uninterpretable—survival without virtue, death without sacrifice, triage without meaning. The third refuses to convert either into instruction or consolation, offering instead the only honest gesture available: the recognition that the private catastrophe and the historical one are not analogous, not equivalent, but inhabit the same ground, and that standing in that ground with the ash of your own ruin is not the same as understanding it. The poem ends in dispersal, not possession. The speaker does not take anything from Dead Man’s Slide. He leaves something there, involuntarily, in the act of passing through.
jaznoblog 