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—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 consequences of early choices now structural, indistinguishable from character itself. 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. 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 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. He served as a Green Beret medic, ran special ops in the tropics, contracted amoebic dysentery, and came home with 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. He grew his hair, built a commune in Leadville, dabbled with free love, drugs, and Wittgenstein. 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—and the commune in Leadville, the free love, the Wittgenstein, were not satire but accurate record.
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 has the weight of something geological, the sense of an outcome 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. What the exemption finally discloses is not relief but longing—the sons who were not called into the grinding system looking back at it with something uncomfortably close to desire, 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.
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, the moment of crisis practiced rather than singular.
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 elegy’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. If you’re standing within swinging distance, / you’re standing too close, you’d say, shoulders squared. / But you were all bluster. 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 gap between the signal and the meaning is held open long enough for the reader to understand that the speaker missed it in real time—which is what the elegy is circling.
The shared geography—you knew the same back roads I traveled and forgot, / those gravel barrens leading mostly nowhere, / to overgrown cul-de-sacs or abandoned feed lots, / the kind urbane folk rightfully fear—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 kept at the poem’s edge are 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. This is the diagnostic moment, where elegy tips into confession. I was too arrogant in those days / to parse my pain from my avarice—a spiritual hoarding of the self against the cost Troy was naming. 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. Your death has only hardened what was wrong / when I left my church in that corner of Kansas / too afraid to claim myself, too young / and unwilling to forgive my family / for 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 final movement turns on a theological claim 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. 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 elegy 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.
Outside of Boise, four black horses bolt / quickly past my window, slow to a trot, / then pull away, their obsidian coats / shimmering like sunlight on the blacktop. 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 night before, in the panhandle of Oklahoma, he fixed a flat tire in a lightning storm—watching the dense nerves of light branch over / the blue nimbus clouds in the northern sky. / There was no sound, other than the engine. The storm rendered without thunder 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—a man in a mythic storm doing something utterly mechanical, the body continuing its practical work while the sky goes apocalyptic overhead.
On such a night, Saul may have held his knife / closer to his chest—by morning, the sun / nothing more than a warm breath on his cheek, / his horse leading him into the city. 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, unable to guarantee what morning will bring. 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. It is 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. 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 but reorganized it—and the speaker on Highway 84 is headed toward reinvention knowing that reinvention and erasure are not the same thing, 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.
What do I tell her—Do I fill her head / with secrets, or brush the truth like dander / from my hair? The question names a condition rather than seeking an answer: 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, / this is not manna, nor gossamer flakes / from desiccated saints whose frozen ash / melts on my 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. It is 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 legible signs, of a world that can be read, of arrival that means something fixed and interpretable, scattered by the plain fact of morning. The speaker has been reading signs since Oklahoma, constructing an itinerary of meaning out of horses and lightning and scripture, and the crow moves through the landscape on its own logic, indifferent to the interpretive weight being placed on it—it wings irrespective of my vision, / angling lightly over Washington.
Fireweed
In spring, fireweed sprouts above Puget Sound, / rose-tipped cairns that lure a flock of seagulls / downward, winter-worn, to form a hill’s crown. 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 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 turns south, taking a fix / on the basalt cliffs at the shoreline’s rim, / the chalk-white shelves collapsed above the rocks—taking a fix carrying its double load, the navigator’s term for establishing position by sighting a landmark and the addict’s term for the dose that makes the damage bearable, both meanings active simultaneously. 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 concealed subject surfaces, still encoded. 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 now spiraling upward like ash—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 closing line does not mourn directly. It observes with the attention 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 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, / a swollen court convened 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, a mark that does not ask—impresses as light, as stamp, as coercion, three operations in a single verb, authority without consent, inscription without negotiation. As if the field had staged her silently / with milkweed stalks and hydrangea husks—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 final line delivers its own verdict without metaphor: pure self, consuming what it cannot feel. 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 indictment, if it is one, is blunted by the veracity of the speaker’s position—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 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.
Your sins, random in youth, now interlace / as latticework in time you cannot leave. / You feel the warp and weft secure their place, / a frame that learns your shape by odd degrees. 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 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.
Branch braided into limb, vine into nerve, / misjoined, yet fastening the life you own— / a blighted map you follow, swerve by swerve, / to hollows cupped beneath the oldest stone. 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.
A scold of jays flutters just behind your ears, / their cries dispersed throughout the evening air; / the canopy comes loose. You stand and hear / your years let go, like leaves, like thinning hair. 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 crown gives way. What sang departs the head. / You keep the frame. The body learns instead. The crown gives way—not catastrophically, but by the same slow process of release that the leaves and the hair have modeled. 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.
Black Widow
There is a tradition in American poetry of the dramatic monologue—Browning’s murderers and obsessives speaking in their own voices, Berryman’s Henry, Lowell’s confessionals—but what makes Black Widow formally unusual is that the speaker did not consent to being a poem so much as collaborate with the conceit. In October 2015, his nephew wrote to him: There’s a hint of Kerouac in your stream-of-consciousness emails…I might just write you into my novel. A family member replied immediately that Kerouac was their seventh through eleventh cousin—the comparison landing with genealogical weight Don would not have missed. What followed in the correspondence had the quality of a man who had been given permission to perform, the dispatches growing more elaborate, the cadences more deliberate, the ideology pushed to its most extreme register in the weeks that followed. Don had already designated his nephew as the keeper of the family record—Jason understands most the family history, he wrote, my nephew Jason the toughest smartest on earth demands his family history—and the emails, in their redundancy and accumulation, functioned less as messages than as deposits, contributions to a record that must outlast the sender.
By rights, Donald Francoeur should be credited as co-writer of these poems, in the same way that R.B. Francoeur collaborated on Fountain Street through the commentary that shaped its making—one man supplying the raw material and the other the formal container, the distinction between source and author blurring under the pressure of that particular intimacy. His nephew read the emails, recognized the terza rima latent in their structure, and built two poems from the material with minimal intervention. The editorial discipline was not arrangement but restraint—the governing principle being that the language was already doing what poetry does, and any improvement would be a dilution. This matters for how the explication reads the poems: not as imaginative constructions but as documentary artifacts in formal containers, the way a geologist reads strata, the form not imposed on the voice but discovered inside it—and in some measure, knowingly performed for it.
The first poem opens at 9 AM, January, which is not morning for a dialysis patient on a 3 AM schedule—it is mid-afternoon of the spirit, the hour after the body has stabilized enough to transmit. It’s 9 AM. I fill my light blue coffee pot and listen—the domestic detail is load-bearing. The light blue coffee pot is not decoration. It is the last object of ordinary life before the transmission begins, the thing that says: I am still a man in a kitchen before I am a prophet decoding the end times. Light blue rather than blue—the diminutive carrying something about the tenderness still operating underneath the cosmology, the man who chose that pot, who fills it every morning, who listens.
What follows is the cosmology itself, rendered in terza rima’s interlocking descent. Deagle says that China has its missiles poised from Venezuela—Dr. Deagle, the conspiracy broadcaster whose radio program Don listened to in the dark, arrives named in the poem’s second line. Not they say or I heard but Deagle says—the source cited with the confidence of a man who considers this journalism. The terza rima chain pulls forward: Venezuela feeds into the Korea/Sea/Fukushima tercet, which feeds into the scheme/float/bleached tercet, each rhyme group a new station in the conspiracy’s geography, the chain moving east across the Pacific the way the cold current actually moves.
I bought canned oysters—that cold current spares Korea, / runs northwest through the Bering Sea, / those cans untouched, clean of Fukushima—Don served in the Navy during Vietnam, navigating through the Bering Strait, seeing Scotland, moving through waters most Americans only know from maps. He never saw action in the Gulf of Tonkin, but he came home with a sailor’s authority about the sea—the currents, the routes, the contamination patterns that follow them. When he maps the Fukushima radius against the Korean Strait and the Bering Sea and makes a purchasing decision based on that mapping, the oceanographic reasoning is sound—the cold current does run northwest and Korea sits above the contamination radius. The tragedy is not that his mind stopped working but that it kept working, rigorously, within a system of premises that had been corrupted at the source—the Navy giving him the oceanographic authority, the RBN giving him the framework in which to deploy it.
The conspiracy chain escalates through Daniel and Revelation until it arrives at the poem’s most baroque station: an asteroid off the Venezuelan coast / turns our axis, throws up land and mountains / just to free the Gold—with seven billion avatars created, / parasites to eat the oil slicks, replace the humans. The planetary reset is not random catastrophe but deliberate mechanism—the asteroid loosed by the Masonry Priesthood to shift the earth’s axis, raise new land masses, release sequestered gold, and replace the human population with engineered biological agents designed to clean up the petrochemical wreckage. The avatars are not digital, they are post-human replacements, purpose-built for a world the current population was never meant to survive. This is Don’s cosmology at full extension: not paranoia about shadowy figures manipulating markets but a complete eschatology in which the current world is a temporary substrate being cleared for the next. The Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida—Edward Leedskalnin, who claimed to have rediscovered how the Egyptians moved the pyramid blocks—arrives as proof of suppressed anti-gravitics technology, evidence that the Masonry Priesthood already possessed the means of the reset and had been holding them in reserve. Secrets lost in the land of the dead: / Gravitics—just Google that. My work is done. The citation is also a dismissal, the prophet’s sign-off, the transmission declared complete—the information is out there, his part of the work has been done, whether anyone received it correctly is no longer his problem.
II. March moves the camera to 5 AM—earlier in the morning, the flooding house, the body in crisis. It’s 5 AM and the house is flooding—Don’s house sat between dikes in Wichita, and the flooding was real, and the first thing he does is read it correctly: I go room to room by sound—electric pops / in walls, same current Grandad taught, upending—the master electrician reading the house by sound, the professional competence that precedes ideology, the knowledge that lives in the hands before it lives in the head. Same current Grandad taught brings Francoeur Electric into the poem in five words—the family trade, the current that runs through the whole cycle.
This rain / no accident—the solar flares burned / all of Wichita to dust, Black Sunday—the conspiracy logic reasserts itself immediately: the flooding is not weather but conspiracy, 1935 and 2019 as the same solar event, the Dust Bowl and the flooded dike-house as continuous. Then the poem’s most explicit ideological signal: 1935. Too cold to riot now, but They’ll return / the first hot day. The capitalized They is not a weather prediction. In Don’s framework the riot that arrives on the first hot day is racial insurgency, the return of the threat that the cold temporarily suppresses. Don’s racial beliefs did not originate with his isolation or his injury—they were planted early, first by a grandmother intolerant of non-whites, then fertilized by eugenics literature about Nordic profiles and brachycephalic head shapes. When a fall from a lift at Cessna in 1981 broke every bone in his body and ended his career as a master electrician, the settlement money that followed removed him from the world permanently and the isolation gave those beliefs a greenhouse. The terza rima simply continues its descent, one link requiring the next, the form enacting the mind’s own logic without editorial distance.
Dialysis is hard, dear nephew, Grandma Verla’s end / now mine, much colder than the flood / and going under, week by week, and then—the ideology drops away and what remains is the body. Grandma Verla did not die of kidney disease. She chose to stop dialysis. There was a living wake. When her nephew last saw her, she had perhaps a week remaining—she was saying her goodbyes, navigating the distance between the living and the dead with the deliberateness of a woman who had decided. Don watched his mother make that choice and understood from the inside what his own dialysis meant, what the trajectory looked like, where the math was going. Going under, week by week carries the clinical weight of a man who had watched the same descent from the other side and recognized where he was on the slope.
The aftermath—Arby’s and three Seagrams in the blood / with speakers on the RBN, my weather radar green, / my Ruger 9 still cooling on the Nova’s hood—three objects, three registers of Don’s last years. The Arby’s is survival calories and self-medication simultaneously. The RBN—Republic Broadcasting Network, home of Stormfront and its affiliates—is the voice in the dark, the company he kept after the family list emptied. The weather radar is the last instrument of control, the one thing still giving him accurate information about the physical world. The Ruger 9 cooling on the Nova’s hood—the gun and the car together, but the gun was not merely a possession. He answered the door with Black Widow more than once, drunk, with it in his hand, Paint It Black blasting at full volume behind him on eternal repeat, the Rolling Stones cycling through their own insistence on negation while the man at the threshold held the thing the poem names in its title. Before the Cessna tragedy, the gun and the Nova were artifacts of a man who had been someone in the world. He tried to sell the Nova and could not bring himself to do it—the car and the house and the gun the remaining evidence of that life, before the world contracted to a house between dikes and a 3 AM computer screen.
The trees bud right on time to give us shade; it’s spring, / our people cooled in cellars then, before the Bowl, / like spirits kneeling in the dark, like carnies—the ancestors arrive, and our people is doing the same work as the capitalized They three stanzas earlier, only from the other side of the racial line. The Kansas settlers, the wheat farmers who sheltered in cellars before the Bowl—in Don’s cosmology our people names a racial category as specifically as They does, the people sealed in cellars white, the people returning on the first hot day not. The poem carries both phrases without commentary, letting them mean exactly what they mean in Don’s mouth, the terza rima descending through the ideology the way it descends through everything else—without pause, without judgment, one link requiring the next.
nephew—I mean canaries— / in the winter coal—the malapropism is the poem’s formal and emotional center. In one of his actual emails, Don wrote I see myself as the carny in the coal mine—the slip already present in the source, the carny and the canary already confused in his own mind. The poem does not correct the confusion but lets it stand and then lets Don correct himself—I mean canaries—a correction that has already been undone by the moment it arrives, because the poem has established that carnies was the right word before the correction reaches the page. The carny and the canary are the same man: the warning signal who is also the showman, the pitchman, the man with the trick, the man in the dark mine who is the first to know when the air is going bad.
In the winter coal closes the poem on the literal—coal was stored in Kansas cellars, the same hole that sheltered the ancestors, the same dark the canary descends into. Don’s kidneys failed not from inherited disease but from decades of drinking that destroyed the organs one after another until dialysis was the only remaining option, and dialysis after a binge was a death sentence written in installments. Alone in the house forty years inhabited, transmitting at an uncommon hour to a list that had nearly emptied, he was the canary he named himself—the one who goes in first, the one whose silence eventually tells the others what the air has been doing all along. The poem receives the transmission and holds it in terza rima’s chain, the form that cannot stop, that can only run out of links.
I. January gives us the system at full extension—the world decoded, the prophet’s work complete, the transmission signed off and released into the dark. II. March strips the system away and leaves the body: the house flooding between the dikes, the blood carrying three Seagrams, the circuit failing in the walls the same current Grandad taught. The same man runs through both—the one who read the Pacific currents correctly and the one going under week by week, the master electrician who could diagnose a house by sound and the man who could not be reached by the people who loved him, the prophet who said my work is done and the canary who already knew what the air was doing. In the winter coal—the chain runs out.
Cut Shop / The Road to Anandamarga
Robert Pirsig spent three hundred pages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on a problem that sounds simple and isn’t: the motorcycle is not a metaphor for freedom but freedom itself, and the reason nobody can write about it in verse without collapsing into sentimentality or machismo is that verse, like the romantic mind Pirsig diagnoses, wants the gestalt—the beautiful whole, the open road, the wind. What he understood is that the motorcycle resists the gestalt because it is a system of interdependent parts, none autonomous, each one meaningful only in relation to the others. The throttle feeds the engine. The engine drives the needle. The needle measures the flats. Remove any one component and the system doesn’t degrade—it ceases. What Pirsig calls Quality—the pre-intellectual recognition that precedes the split between romantic and classical understanding—is what emerges when the parts are running in concert and the rider stops experiencing the machine as an object and starts experiencing it as an extension of their own nervous system. The siphonophore is the biological version of this: a colonial organism that appears to be a single creature but is a community of specialized individuals, none capable of independent survival, the whole something that cannot be reduced to the inventory of its parts. These two poems are attempting to render that emergent reality—the smaller parts working in concert to produce something the blazon can catalogue but cannot contain.
The motorcycle arrived in American consciousness as the outlaw’s vehicle—Marlon Brando in The Wild One, the Hell’s Angels turning the postwar highway into tribal territory, Easy Rider making the open road into a eulogy for the counterculture before the counterculture knew it needed one. By 1973 in Wichita, Kansas the motorcycle meant all of this simultaneously: freedom, danger, the lone wolf’s refusal of the pack. Robert Francoeur was emphatically not a Hell’s Angel. He was a man who read D.T. Suzuki and counted mala beads and took his three-year-old son to an Ananda Marga preschool on the back of a bike while tripping on acid. The counterculture’s most reckless gesture and its most earnest aspiration in the same morning, the same machine, the same Kansas road dissolving into clouds.
Fast forward to 2018. Eric Swangstu was a painter—work in the New York Times, Artforum, the Library of Congress—who in his penultimate year of life took a vintage Yamaha to the Bonneville Salt Flats and ran 81.572 mph in the M-CG 250cc class. A man approaching fifty on a vintage bike, fixing the relationship between age and speed, between the body’s accumulation and the machine’s refusal to accumulate. He had a show in 2013 called Transportation & Transfixion. Swangstu died in January 2019, the same year as Robert Francoeur, a heart attack taking a man who worked out every day. The world that produces painters who set land speed records on vintage motorcycles is the same world that produces mystics who treat the morning commute as a vehicle for ego dissolution—the world in which the machine is not a hobby but a cosmology, the ride not recreation but method.
Cut Shop enters the diptych first. Swangstu alone at Bonneville, the throttle pulled wide. Salt hisses past, the throttle pulling wide, / your engine pitched past comfort into heat—sensation before image, the body receiving information before the mind has processed it. The Bonneville Salt Flats function as a modern desert: featureless, punishing, a surface on which everything extraneous has been stripped away and only the essential remains. The poem’s first eight lines constitute a blazon of the machine itself, each part catalogued in the order speed reveals it: throttle first because that’s where it begins, engine because that’s what the throttle feeds, needle because that’s how you read the engine, flats because that’s what the needle measures against. The needle buried, flats erased to white—the salt flat and the painter’s flat brush in the same word, the Bonneville course becoming a canvas that speed is erasing to the same white that Wichita dissolves into in the companion poem: Wichita dissolving at the edges, burning white. Two different machines, two different eras, the same erasure—speed and acid arriving at identical perceptual territory from opposite directions.
In chrome, a house shifts backward— / windows flashing color as they slide: / cobalt burning wrong, blues thinned and blurred—the chrome as mirror, the domestic world smearing in the slipstream, the painter’s eye registering color relationships the way a studio painter registers what happens when the medium is too thin. The house retreating in the chrome is not simply the domestic world left behind—it is the father’s house specifically, the site where the pedagogy was administered, memory returning in fragments distorted by motion, the origin receding without being gone. Then the Cronenbergian logic asserts itself: your jacket rips, the tank scars at the thigh. The machine marking the body, leaving its signature on the flesh—the scar at the thigh is the machine claiming territory, the point where the machine’s geometry has been pressed into the body’s surface and held.
Then the father arrives without arriving. Your hands stay closed. He taught them so—the closed hands carrying a pedagogy of fists that the body has converted into technique, the absent presence running the grip the way a ghost runs a machine. The dark that named you never learned to sleep—the inheritance still operating at speed, the shaping force running underneath the voluntary one. A bounding deer—pure chest—detonates the sun—the blazon of speed terminated by the purest possible interruption. 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 reductive logic 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 force. The rider is not escaping into freedom but moving deeper into the formation the father installed, the motorcycle his armor and his prison simultaneously, the machine extension until it was the instrument of the fall. The dark that never learned to sleep does not save the man it named.
The Road to Anandamarga moves the camera inside the skull. Wichita, 1973. A man on a motorcycle with his three-year-old son on the back and LSD running the operation. The three-year-old cannot make that calculation. The child is holding on, sensing in the way children sense these things that the road has disappeared and the man in front is flying through clouds, the thin arms gripping harder as danger arrives without language to name it. D.T. Suzuki—whose Essays in Zen Buddhism were on the father’s shelf—wrote that when traveling is made too easy and comfortable its spiritual meaning is lost. This ride is spiritually maximal.
Where Cut Shop’s biomechanical merger happens through kinetic damage—the machine marking the body as it absorbs speed— The Road to Anandamarga’s merger happens through chemistry before the ride begins. I am the spiral, cannot stop—pitch forward—the acid has already dissolved the boundary between rider and machine. No violence of contact, no scar at the thigh. The violence is the impossibility of separation. The child’s arms on the father’s back are the one point where the human refuses the merger—thin arms at my back, holding like a cord—the cord that keeps the siphonophore from full dissolution into its own motion.
The form is reversed because the hallucinating mind cannot move forward. A conventional Shakespearean sonnet builds toward a closing couplet. This poem opens on that couplet-condition—the spiral named, the impossibility of stopping declared—and descends through its evidence afterward. You cannot tell this story forward. Within that reversed structure two Ghost Blazons operate simultaneously—unannounced, felt—the formal replication of acid: concurrent perceptual layers moving through the same dissolving Kansas morning. The first is the motorcycle blazon, catalogued crown to root: seat (the child), handlebars (the wrists speaking to the steering), headlamp (eating what it illuminates), exhaust (unthreading the return), boots (the machine’s last contact with the road). The second maps these stations through the descending chakra system: Sahasrara at the seat, Anahata at the handlebars where love and recklessness collapse into the same gesture, Ajna at the headlamp, where the blacktop folds into what lies between—Vishuddha at the exhaust, Muladhara at the boots.
My boots the only knowledge of the floor is where the two poems find each other across forty-five years of salt and asphalt. In Cut Shop, your hands stay closed, he taught them so—the body knowing what the mind cannot instruct, the training that survives the moment when everything else dissolves. In The Road to Anandamarga, the boots know the floor while Wichita dissolves and the blacktop folds. Flats erased to white / Wichita dissolving at the edges, burning white—speed and acid producing the same annihilation of the visible world, the same need for the body to know something the mind no longer can.
The blue Suzuki smoking from the throat—the motorcycle and the philosopher share a name, and the acid has collapsed the distinction. D.T. Suzuki’s central argument is that the self which believes it is studying Zen is precisely what Zen destroys—the boundary between the knower and the known was never real, only a habit of perception so deeply grooved it feels like fact. For a man whose Special Forces training depended on the absolute separation of the agent from the object—the charge from the bridge, the operative from the operation, the self from what the self destroys—Suzuki arrived as a different order of detonation. The mala beads, the swamis, the dissertation: the long work of undoing what the covert years had built, the same precision turned inward, applied now to the load-bearing walls of the self. The acid on the motorcycle is where the two projects meet without resolving—the chemical dissolution arriving without being earned, the exhaust threading blue into the morning, a three-year-old gripping the leather at his back. The withdrawal impossible. The child the one fact that cannot be detonated.
The acid running everything I burn, / the root still sounding out its lowest note—the Reversed Sonnet with the ghost blazons closes in the lowest frequency the body produces, Muladhara, the engine’s fundamental tone. The Om, the child felt in the chest on the way to Anandamarga, sustained. Cut Shop ends on detonation—the deer and the sun and the impact in the same instant, the biomechanical merger terminated by the body’s encounter with what it cannot absorb. The Road to Anandamarga ends on vibration—the root sounding, the frequency sustained, the ride without terminus, the child’s arms still holding on.
Which brings us back to Pirsig. What he called Quality—the emergent thing that arises when the parts are running in concert, when the rider has stopped experiencing the machine as an object and started experiencing it as an extension of their own nervous system—is what both poems are reaching for and neither can quite name. The blazon catalogues the parts. The chakra system maps the body’s energy through those parts. The Cronenbergian merger fuses the parts with the flesh. But what the siphonophore demonstrates, and what Pirsig spent three hundred pages approaching, is that the colony is not the sum of its zooids—it is something that emerges from their concert that has no name in the vocabulary of the individual parts. The throttle feeds the engine, the engine drives the needle, the needle measures the flats, the flats receive the boots, the boots hold the floor while the acid holds everything else—none autonomous, each meaningful only in relation to the others, the whole something that cannot be reduced to the inventory of its stations. That emergent thing—the rider dissolved into the ride, the Quality beneath the romantic and the classical, the Om before it becomes sound—is what the child felt in the chest on the way to Anandamarga and has been trying to name ever since.
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, relieved, went back to its career / of working slowly through us, day by day. 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. My daughter wakes. The room is thick with care— / the kind that counts, corrects, anticipates. 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, / a set of habits posing as her fate—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. 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.
She has my look—the 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, inheriting the look the way she inherits a cheekbone.
I see my life already in her way 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 built the corridor not by intention but by existing.
She’s my stark mirror, shimmering in time / like silver wrapping paper catching light—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.
Two Rosaries
Here is what nobody tells you about the rosary: it is not Christian. It arrived in Europe the way everything good arrived in medieval Europe—through the back door, in the hands of merchants and crusaders and Sufi mystics who had been counting beads toward God for two thousand years before Dominic of Caleruega supposedly received it in a vision from the Virgin Mary in 1214. The Virgin had nothing to do with it. The mala did. And if you want to know what a tradition looks like when it absorbs a technology from another tradition and then forgets it did, look at a Catholic holding a rosary. Look at the hands.
Joseph Campbell saw it immediately. In 1988, sitting across from Bill Moyers in the Lucasfilm library in California—the last conversations of his life, recorded in the years before his death—he watched Moyers fold his hands in the familiar Western gesture of prayer and said: that’s the Anjali. That’s what they greet you with in India. They’re greeting the god that’s in you. Not the god above you. Not the god judging you from a cloud. The god in you, which is the god in them, which is the same god, which is the only god there ever was—the one that the Gospel of Thomas knew about before the Council of Nicaea voted it out of the canon for being too inconvenient. I praise the god in you. Heresy in 325 AD. Mudra in India since before writing.
Albrecht Dürer drew those hands in 1508—and they hung as doctrine in the household of the poem’s dedicatee, not as piety but as argument. His mother placed them there, and Dürer’s worn knuckles and rope-tendoned fingers presided over everything that followed in his adult life: the swamis passing through, the mala beads, the dissertation that argued language itself could dismantle the walls between traditions. Campbell had already identified those hands as the Anjali mudra, the gesture of greeting the god within, and the man who grew up beneath them absorbed that convergence before he had the vocabulary to name it. He would spend the rest of his life mediating his spiritual practice through Christian icons and Buddhist beads and Vedantic dissolution simultaneously—the Dürer the fixed point around which all of it rotated—without his philosophical disposition ever demanding that the traditions choose sides. The image held what the philosophy kept opening.
Two Rosaries opens where he always opened—with an object held in the hands, attended to until it became something else. I hold each mala bead to light and find that the bead occludes the bulb the way the moon occludes the sun: the domestic object briefly becoming the astronomical object, the scale sliding without announcement. The Vedic astronomers who fixed the mala’s count at 108 had observed that the moon sits approximately 108 moon-diameters from the earth, and the sun approximately 108 sun-diameters from the earth—which is why, from the earth’s surface, the moon and sun appear to be exactly the same size, which is why total solar eclipses are possible, which is why a bead held at the right distance from the eye can occlude a lamp the way a moon occludes a star. The bead in the speaker’s hand is not a symbol of the cosmos. It is the cosmos, at a different scale, and 108 is where the scales meet—in the Vedic count, in the double stitches of a regulation Major League baseball standardized in 1934, in the convergences that traditions keep arriving at without consulting each other because the cosmos has been leaving the same clues everywhere all along.
One hundred eight. They push up every night / since she went down. She died. The poem will not say so directly because to say so directly would be to replace grief with information, and grief is not information. Went down carries the body’s final direction—into the earth, into the ground where the mala is eventually set—while push up every night establishes the count as the countering gesture, upward against the irreversible downward fact. The prayer runs like clockwork in reverse: not forward toward the next occasion but backward toward the original moment, the altar on the vanity, the woman whose devotional count differs from the speaker’s by exactly forty-nine.
Forty-nine, seven times seven. The number that keeps appearing at the threshold between one state and the next in every tradition that has ever tried to account for what happens when the self releases its grip on itself. Buddhist commentarial tradition holds that Siddhartha Gautama sat for forty-nine days beneath the Bodhi tree before enlightenment arrived—seven weeks of sitting while the self dissolved and reformed and dissolved again until it dissolved for good into what was always already there. The Tibetan Book of the Dead—the Bardo Thodol, which is not a book about death but a book about the nature of mind, death being merely the occasion when the mind’s nature becomes impossible to ignore—prescribes forty-nine days of the lama reading the text of liberation into the consciousness of the recently dead. The dead are read to. This is the tradition’s central and most radical claim: that hearing, even after the body has stopped, is still possible, and that the right words entering at the right moment can spring the consciousness loose from the wheel. In the Christian liturgical calendar, forty-nine days is Eastertide minus one—the interval from Easter to the eve of Pentecost, when the disciples sat in the upper room waiting for a fire they could not summon and did not know was coming. Three traditions, three versions of the same forty-nine days. The poem lays them in sequence without commentary and trusts the number to carry what explanation would collapse.
She sleeps / beneath the Bodhi tree while the Bardo reads / each line into the dark — the dead woman in the posture of Siddhartha, the intermediate state as the field in which the lama reads to her, the forty-nine days of the bardo running concurrent with the forty-nine days of the Eastertide, all of it happening in the same dark the speaker counts through with the mala pushing upward against her descent. One day short / of Eastertide—always one day short, the fiftieth never arriving, the Spirit blowing as fire / from Easter to the Pentecost on a day that the speaker will not reach because he courts no final round, sets the mala down before the last bead, stops at Sumeru.
Sumeru is the guru bead—the large bead at the mala’s junction, named for the cosmic mountain at the axis of the Hindu universe, the still point around which everything turns. You do not cross the guru bead. You approach it, touch it, reverse. The rosary has its own Sumeru: the crucifix. The count begins there, moves away from it through all five decades, and returns—but does not cross. You do not pray past the crucifix. It is the terminal point, the place the count deposits you, the object you hold at the moment when counting becomes something else. The guru bead and the crucifix are the same instruction in two traditions: stop here. What comes next cannot be counted toward: every tradition has this threshold—the place that cannot be entered by effort, only by grace, only by the fiftieth day arriving of its own accord. The dissertation that stops one chapter short of its conclusion. The prayer that sets itself down before the final round. The count that remains one bead short of everything because everything cannot be counted toward. It can only be arrived at, and then only by stopping.
Her altar on the vanity—all three registers of the word active simultaneously without announcing themselves. A vanity is a dressing table, the surface where a woman assembles her appearance before meeting the world. It is vanitas vanitatum, the Ecclesiastes preacher’s insistence that everything dissolves, that all striving is smoke. And it is vanity in its oldest moral sense—the ego’s investment in its own form, the self’s attachment to its own continuity, the precise thing that Pari Nirvana dissolves and the forty-nine days of the bardo burn away. The altar placed on the vanity is devotion set directly on top of the ego’s last stronghold—the rosary laid across the mirror, the sacred object on the surface of the transient, the practice of release placed on the very thing it aims to release. Dürer’s hands presiding over all three.
The closing couplet is Pari Nirvana as grammar. To the last bead down, around her frame: / two rosaries descend without a name—the colon functioning as the guru bead, the threshold before which the poem stops and releases what it has been holding. The name withheld is the name of what both counts were counting toward—the thing Campbell spent his life arguing the traditions all approached from different angles and none of them could say directly. The Anjali hands open. The Dürer hands open. The rosary and the mala release into the same silence, which is not emptiness but what the Bardo Thodol calls the dharmata—the fundamental nature of reality, briefly visible between one form and the next, in the forty-nine days of wandering, in the dark where the lama reads, in the gap between the last bead and the guru bead where the count runs out and everything remains.
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.
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 yet 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 is biographical before it is academic—these are the father’s own words, his own lexicon returning through his son’s mouth, the poem 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: yet also to find in him / such boundless joy among the Aspen and evergreen. The iniquity is never named. The poem does not litigate it, does not describe it, does not place it in context or offer it as explanation. What is omitted has mass. The withholding is the confession—the reader feels the weight of something unspeakable pressed against the line without ever being told what it is. The wound and the wonder inhabit the same body, the childhood lost and the boundless joy among the aspens coexisting without resolution, neither canceling 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 dream sequence follows. I still see him / when I dream, driving an empty bus, his hands / curled about the door handle like Charon on his return / from the River Styx, ferrying me and my daughter from the earth / across the threshold. The bus is liminal, industrial, emptied of passengers—a purgatorial vehicle driven by a man whose vocation in waking life was to carry others across danger, and the myth rises from the gesture without announcement, Charon not imposed on the image but latent in it, waiting in the curl of the hands around the door handle.
Sometimes he vows we will be safe on our journey; in other dreams, he vows nothing, but is consigned to the end, rolling onto his left / side in silence like St. Lawrence on hot coals, the earth / finally collapsing in around him. St. Lawrence is a figure of spectacular suffering—the deacon burned on a gridiron who, tradition holds, told his executioners to turn him over, that he was done on one side. What the poem takes from him is not the bravado but what lies beneath it: the body continuing to manage its own dissolution, making its adjustments, tending to its end with the same procedural calm it brought to living. The father rolling onto his left side in silence is not performing courage—he is tending to his own dissolution, body making its final adjustments, the acceptance of an end that cannot be argued with.
He was a martyr even among the living. 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, and to vow / this is not all that is left of him. 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. The poem does not transcend the father’s absence; it lives inside it.
Offering
The Aztecs did not mourn their dead; they fed them. The Ofrenda is not a monument erected against forgetting but a table set for a guest who has changed address—marigold paths, sugar skulls, the favorite foods left out because the dead get hungry too, because the membrane between the living and the dead is thinner than the Church ever wanted to admit and the indigenous traditions always knew it. Offering arrives in this lineage: three Shakespearean sonnets addressed to a father whose ashes waited on a window ledge for dispersal into the Colorado Rockies, the poem not an elegy that mourns but an Ofrenda that releases — the living completing the transfer the dead have already begun.
Part of my voice died with you—halted, thin, / abrupt as aspens cut at timberline—the severance is not metaphor in any decorative sense. 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 trail repeats, then fails, then disappears; / the line gives way beneath accumulated years—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. We ate raw rhubarb high on Bristolhead, / panned pyrite out of Gunnison’s cold run, / took quartz and petrified wood, long dead, / from scabbed-out peaks that blistered in the sun—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. 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. You bore your scars like maps the body keeps, / learned without words, folded under skin—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.
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 offering lifts and thins itself to heaven—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 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
In nineteen-ten they woke to thunderlight / at Windy Mountain. 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. Thunderlight fuses sound and illumination into a single pressure, naming the meteorological condition that preceded the avalanche while compressing it into one word. 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 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 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 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—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 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. You brought me here among the dead, / among the names fixed at the rim— / a nurse, a child, a writer gone to bed. 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 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—the physical fact of holding something under tension at altitude, and an echo of Ariadne’s thread running through the labyrinth in Filum Sicarii: Theseus follows the thread out of the cave toward the living; the speaker follows it in, toward the dead, the direction of the myth inverted. 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 our own catastrophes / shed 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. Shed 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.
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