Peter Handke’s refrain for Wim Wenders’ angels—Als das Kind Kind war, when the child was a child—describes a state of consciousness before the self knows it is a self, before the boundary between body and world has been enforced, before the puddle understands it is not the sea. Low Country is the education that ends that state, arriving not as instruction but as weather: ambient, patient, installing itself in the body below the threshold where it could be named or refused. The damage is epistemological rather than physical—the instrument of knowing bent before it can be calibrated, everything that follows filtered through that distortion.
Merleau-Ponty argued that the body knows before the mind does, that perception is somatic rather than cognitive. The ghost sonnet operates on this principle: the rhetorical skeleton concealed beneath unbroken lineation, the volta a tonal shift rather than a declared turn, the mythological and oneiric entering without filtration alongside the documentary because the developing consciousness has not yet built the membrane between them—what a clinician would code and a mythologist would archive, the child experiences as the texture of existence, calcium and nightmare indistinguishable in the bone.
What the chapter installs varies by poem but never by method: the father’s syncretic cosmology pressed into the child on a lap in Kansas, the farm years’ theology of surveillance drilling damnation into the body’s appetites, and elsewhere the quieter formations—grief arriving as season, loss arriving as landscape, the self shaped by what it stood beside without understanding.
The Magic Blanket of Laura Vicuña
A Chilean girl dying at thirteen invents a theology from a tattered blanket—the only architecture of protection available to a child who cannot name what is being done to her. The Magic Blanket of Laura Vicuña moves through two apparent confirmations of the blanket's power before the flood takes it and the couplet collapses the system: the same hand that caressed the child's feet is caressing the mother's face. The Church beatified her suffering; the poem returns it to the moment before interpretation.
The Magic Blanket of Laura Vicuña
As a child, my blanket shielded me
from dangerous men, or so I thought.
When Señor Mora caressed my feet
I made a prayer to that tattered cloth
to make him leave my room, and he did.
When rebel bandits burst through our door
to threaten my family, I hid
under its soft skin with my sister
until they left the estancia.
On the day the Chimehuin River
flooded its banks, my blanket vanished—
later that night, I would discover
mother whispering by the fireplace,
Señor Mora caressing her face.
Laura Vicuña was a Chilean girl born in 1891 who spent most of her short life in Argentina, where her widowed mother had entered into a relationship with Manuel Mora, a landowner whose shelter came with terms. His behavior toward Laura is consistently described as sexual coercion; when she resisted him, he beat her. She died in 1904 at thirteen, weakened by tuberculosis and what she had endured, having asked her mother to leave the man. The Church beatified her—taking the same facts of coercion, violence, and a child’s resistance and reorganizing them into a narrative of purity and sacrifice, her suffering converted into virtue, the unbearable given a shape that could be held at a distance and venerated. That reorganization is its own violence: the Church’s account requires the child’s experience to be legible as chosen, her endurance as spiritual rather than structural, the tattered blanket and the improvised prayers evidence of sanctity rather than of a child working with whatever came to hand. The poem returns to the moment before that conversion, where nothing has yet been interpreted and nothing can be redeemed, stripping the sanctity away and returning the experience to the point where belief is improvised and survival depends on whatever structure the child can invent quickly enough to endure what she cannot stop.
As a child, my blanket shielded me / from dangerous men, or so I thought—the opening couplet carries the whole arc in retrospect, the belief named and qualified simultaneously, the child’s improvised logic held intact and exposed in the same breath. The or so I thought is the poem’s epistemic hinge, declaring unreliability at the outset, the adult’s hindsight folded into the child’s voice before the first scene begins. What follows enacts the belief before dismantling it: When Señor Mora caressed my feet / I made a prayer to that tattered cloth / to make him leave my room, and he did. The enjambment between caressed my feet and I made a prayer produces the flinch the poem requires—cause and effect running on magical rather than rational logic, the child transferring agency to the object because the object is the only thing available. The blanket is already tattered, already worn, the faith placed in something degraded before it was ever consecrated. And the dramatic irony that governs the entire poem lives in and he did: the blanket did not save her—Mora decided to stop, the child misread the system, and the system let her.
When rebel bandits burst through our door / to threaten my family, I hid / under its soft skin with my sister / until they left the estancia—the second scene scales the threat outward from private violation to communal danger, the blanket working again, the child’s cosmology corroborated by another apparent confirmation. Soft skin is a childlike phrase whose second register is already legible to the adult reader: the blanket as body, the body as the boundary the poem has already established is porous. Estancia grounds the scene geographically and tonally, the Argentine frontier carrying its own mythology of exposure and distance. The pattern holds—the appearances confirm it—and for a child, confirmation is indistinguishable from truth, the blanket present at each crisis and the crisis passing, the theology of the object consolidating with every repetition.
On the day the Chimehuin River / flooded its banks, my blanket vanished— / later that night, I would discover: the volta arrives as natural rupture, the talisman removed by flood rather than by any human agency, the object gone before the revelation that makes its absence legible. The blanket was always the surface onto which meaning had been fixed rather than the source of protection itself, and once it disappears the pattern remains but cannot sustain the same explanation. What had once felt like a private exchange between the child and the world begins to show its indifference—timing hardens where answer was expected, coincidence hardens where intervention was believed, the structure beneath revealing itself as one that was never hers to begin with. The final image makes that recognition irreversible without announcing it: mother whispering by the fireplace, / Señor Mora caressing her face. Mora is present again, unchanged, caressing laid down twice without alteration—first on the child’s body, then on the mother’s face. The difference is in the permissions that surround the act, permissions that were never visible to the child and therefore never part of the belief she built. The same hand moves across both scenes, and what once felt like interruption reveals itself as something that was never about her, never interrupted for her, never governed by anything she could reach.
A con man enters a household carrying music the way a priest carries vestments—Ry Cooder on the turntable, mariachis doubling their tempo around the corner, an entire culture worn as costume by a man with a thief's instincts and a connoisseur's ear. The banjo he stole ascends into dream, suspended in a red oak tree, where grief and admiration become indistinguishable—because the man who broke the instrument and the man who opened the child's ear to what music could carry were never two different men. Day of the Dead is ekphrasis turned inside out: the Día de los Muertos folk art on the album cover does not illustrate the poem so much as the poem assembles its altar from the image, setting theft and affection on the same surface and letting the corrido refrain—O La Pistola y El Corazón, twice, the way a wound confirms itself—hold the pistol and the heart together because the grammar of that household never separated them. A Shakespearean sonnet with an extended corrido refrain.
Day of the Dead
The skeleton with a tan sombrero
copulates with a swollen woman.
There are five houses with broken windows,
behind them a rainbow fence, two mountains.
This is a portrait of you together,
the empty houses you have left behind,
the fence between you and the deep river,
the black mountains you escaped to at night.
I still remember you, señor, fondly,
the moribund thief from a shanty town
stalking my family in the dry streets—
who shook the shards of my banjo down
from the red oak tree, as I stood there dazed
behind the house— while at dusk, drunk gringos
licked their lips and mariachis played
double-time around the corner, cantando:
O La Pistola y El Corazón
O La Pistola y El Corazón.
Day of the Dead opens in italics, which means it opens in ekphrasis—the speaker describing the cover art of Chicken Skin Music by Ry Cooder, John’s favorite album: the skeleton with the tan sombrero copulating with a swollen woman, the five houses with broken windows, the rainbow fence, the two mountains. This is reported iconography, something that hung in the household, something the child grew up inside. The album art drew on Día de los Muertos folk imagery, and John—the white con man the mother married, the moribund thief from a shanty town—carried it the way the father in Chicken Hill carried the Bhagavad Gita: as an announcement of the self he had decided to perform. He was a white man who fetishized Mexican culture while the mother, half-Mexican, rejected hers. The child grew up in the borderzone of that paradox—culturally peripheral to both, watching a man claim an inheritance that was not his while the woman who held it by blood turned away.
The italics of the artifact give way to the roman address of memory at This is a portrait of you together—the distance of the described image collapsing into the intimacy of you. The speaker constructs a portrait of John from the elements the album art has already organized: the empty houses he has left behind, the fence between you and the deep river, the black mountains you escaped to at night. These are the topographical facts of a life that never stayed—a man who could be in a household and already fleeing it, already in the mountains, already elsewhere.
I still remember you, señor, fondly—and fondly echoes Mark Antony’s they are all honorable men: the word offered sincerely, accumulating irony with everything the poem places beside it until it has reversed its own charge without ever being withdrawn. John had impeccable taste in music and shaped the speaker’s aesthetic inheritance—the Ry Cooder album, the mariachis, O La Pistola y El Corazón as the theme song of the household—while also hawking the banjo at a local pawn shop, while also stalking my family in the dry streets. Affection and fear are coiled together, inseparable, because the man arrived as someone who could be admired, perhaps even loved, and that bond does not get cleaned by what came after. Fondly is the only honest word available for what remains—the most corrosive word in the poem.
The mangled banjo in a tree arrived from a dream—but the dream had documentary roots. John stole the banjo; it was recovered later at the pawn shop. The dream lifted the theft into the red oak tree, above reach, above sense, where the shards already hang before the man shakes them down. Who shook the shards of my banjo down / from the red oak tree, as I stood there dazed / behind the house—the instrument already broken and aloft, John completing the dispersal, raining splinters down on a child standing dazed in the yard. The object matters because it makes sound, carries voice, is handled and played and possessed. To break it is to interrupt that continuity—childhood trauma lifted into myth, suspended in the branches of memory until the mind is ready to retrieve it.
The world continues without acknowledgment. At dusk, drunk gringos / licked their lips and mariachis played / double-time around the corner—the appetitive gaze of the spectators, the acceleration of the music against the child’s stillness. The gringos are tourists in a culture that surrounds the child from both sides: his mother’s inheritance, which she has rejected, and his stepfather’s performance, which he has stolen. The child stands between them, dazed behind the house, belonging fully to neither.
The refrain that closes the poem is both title and incantation: O La Pistola y El Corazón, repeated twice, the way a corrido repeats its central truth until the body has absorbed it. The pistol and the heart are the poem’s two governing registers—violence and feeling, the weapon and the attachment, inseparable in the grammar of the household the child grew up inside. John is the pistol and the heart simultaneously: the man who stole the banjo and the man whose album taught the speaker what music could carry. The refrain does not resolve that contradiction. It sings it, in Spanish, around the corner, while the child stands dazed and the shards rain down and the gringos lick their lips and the mountains wait in the dark for whoever needs to escape to them next.
A father and child drift at midnight over a drowned world—the reservoir concealing submerged farms and rock quarries beneath its surface, the boat suspended between fireflies above and minnows below. The father never speaks, never acknowledges what lies underneath, his competence and his silence the same instruction. Fall River at Midnight is a ghost sonnet in second person: the child is inhabited rather than observed, learning without being taught how to live over what has already been lost.
Fall River at Midnight
Fireflies brighten the grass by the shore
as you pass under the low-hanging trees
in your father’s green aluminum boat, the oars
resting above submerged farms and rock quarries;
setting the lines on the branches, the leaves
just skimming the surface, you navigate
through an alcove, then settle in between
the bait cooler and the motor to wait.
At times, you see a faint light reflected
from the lamp on a small school of minnows
like silver coins flipping end over end,
disappearing in the darkness below,
while your father gathers a large white net
and casts it out, as if making a bed.
Fireflies brighten the grass by the shore / as you pass under the low-hanging trees / in your father’s green aluminum boat, the oars / resting above submerged farms and rock quarries—the opening image establishes the poem’s governing vertical axis before anything else enters: fireflies above, drowned farms below, the boat and the child suspended between them. The bioluminescent opening finds its corollary in the closing: silver coins flipping end over end, / disappearing in the darkness below—light glimpsed and lost, above and below the surface that separates the living world from what it has sealed underneath, the child between them inhabiting a world organized by the principle of the glimpsed and the lost. A ghost sonnet with no declared volta, the rhetorical skeleton concealed beneath unbroken lineation, the turn happening below the surface the way everything in the poem happens below the surface. Addressed in second person—you pass under the low-hanging trees, you navigate / through an alcove, you settle in between / the bait cooler and the motor to wait—the child is inhabited rather than observed, which means the father’s silence—he never speaks, never explains the submerged farms, never acknowledges the world beneath the boat—is experienced from within rather than witnessed from a safe remove.
Everything beneath the boat used to be inhabited—submerged farms and rock quarries, structures built for use and the handing-down of things, whole arrangements of human life sealed under a thin reflective skin—and this is offered once and passed over, as if it is simply part of the landscape, as unremarkable as the low-hanging branches or the bait cooler. A farm is work, routine, inheritance—the specific material form that continuity takes—and here it sits under water, intact enough to be imagined, gone enough to be unreachable. The lake—a reservoir, a river dammed and flooded over—is treated as if it has always been a lake, the father already knowing this and having made his peace with it long before the child arrived.
The father moves through it with the ease of someone who has already absorbed erasure into competence—setting the lines on the branches, the leaves / just skimming the surface, performing each act with the fluency of a man who has been here before and will be here again. The oars rest above it all: the instruments of passage suspended over the drowned world, held above what can no longer be reached. He does not acknowledge what lies beneath them because he has already converted it into habit. Your father gathers a large white net / and casts it out, as if making a bed—a bed made over quarried rock, over the sealed remains of other people’s entire lives, the domestic gesture of the body’s most habitual preparation for rest performed over the irrecoverable, the net going out the way it always goes out, the surface accepting it without interruption.
At times, you see a faint light reflected / from the lamp on a small school of minnows—arriving from below the way the fireflies arrived from above, the structural rhyme completing itself across the poem’s vertical axis. Where the fireflies opened into the whole landscape of the night, the minnows refuse to accumulate, never staying long enough to be held. The coin simile—like silver coins flipping end over end—names value that flickers and disappears, what is below glimpsed only in pieces that refuse to cohere, the water reflecting what it covers badly and intermittently, the way a memory reflects something it cannot fully reconstruct. What the child is learning has no name yet in his experience: how to live over something already lost, how to participate in a world that continues calmly over the remains of what used to be there, how to accept a surface that conceals more than it reveals without requiring explanation or acknowledgment. The father models this with his entire body, and the second-person address installs it in whoever occupies that you. Once the submerged farms have been named, even once, the quiet of the scene carries that knowledge underneath it.
A child counts telephone poles on a Kansas interstate until the poles become crosses and the crosses become the Via Appia — the road to Wichita revealing itself as the same road it has always been underneath. Driving Through Salina is a ghost sonnet built around the father's lap: Zen Buddhism, Christian iconography, and Hindu dissolution pressed into a child through truck-stop paperbacks and a verse the father wrote in the military, the void between boxcars a working model of time, the town of Angelus passing the window as both a Kansas coordinate and a prayer.
Driving Through Salina
I counted the telephone poles as fast
as the horizon could generate them.
Anything to ease the boredom: a vast
row of crosses passing along the edge
of the Kansas interstate—Spartacus
and his defeated men decorating
the Via Appia. There was a verse
my father wrote in the military:
six million miniature Jesuses
marching into the distance. As a boy,
I would sit on his lap to Angelus
as he read from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. The void
is the hitch between those boxcars, he said,
connecting one brief moment to the next.
I counted the telephone poles as fast / as the horizon could generate them. / Anything to ease the boredom: a vast / row of crosses passing along the edge / of the Kansas interstate—the child’s attempt to keep the landscape measurable, countable, scaled to boredom, collapses under the weight of what his father has already installed in him. The poles become crosses in a long accumulating line stretching into the horizon, the Kansas interstate beginning to resemble the Via Appia: Spartacus / and his defeated men decorating / the Via Appia—decorating the empire’s register, punishment rendered as civic aesthetic, warning maintained the way you maintain a boulevard. The crosses are vertical anchors, points where the visible world is pierced and held in place, something closer to an axis than a symbol—the place where everything converges and breaks apart simultaneously, the horizontal sweep of the highway meeting the vertical insistence of the cross until the road to Wichita and the road to annihilation occupy the same ground. Perception has been overtaken by inheritance, something the child has been absorbing without knowing it, that will not allow the ordinary to remain intact.
There was a verse / my father wrote in the military—his own composition, intimate in a way borrowed vision cannot be: six million miniature Jesuses / marching into the distance. The image multiplies suffering past the point of individual accounting until it becomes indistinguishable from the horizon itself, a procession tied to no single event or single body. The roadside is saturated with a suffering the child has been given no framework to process—only a father’s voice, a lap, and the accumulated weight of books opened and abandoned and returned to, each one pressing in the same direction: that what we take to be reality is only a surface laid over something that cannot be named.
As a boy, / I would sit on his lap to Angelus / as he read from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones—the child within reach of his voice, inside the atmosphere the books create around him, each one pressing toward the dissolution of every boundary he is still trying to maintain between the countable and the uncountable, the pole and the cross, the road and the execution ground. The father is a man with a destination he cannot yet name, dismantling his own defenses against the absolute with the same deliberateness he brings to everything, and the child on his lap is close enough to feel the current without knowing where it runs.
Angelus is a real Kansas town on the road to Wichita—a name on a sign, a coordinate on a flat stretch of interstate. It is also the prayer: the thrice-daily interruption of labor and ordinary time, the bell that marks the moment when the divine is said to have entered the world through a body. The child is physically inside the town and physically inside the prayer simultaneously, both held at once because the father holds both. The void he names is closer to Brahman than to emptiness—what precedes naming, what cannot be captured in any form without immediately exceeding that form, what remains when everything else has been stripped away. And yet the father prays to a face—a specific human face, the one that promises the personal and the divine are compatible. He has spent years trying to hold that face and the void behind it in the same field of vision.
The void is the hitch between those boxcars, he said, connecting one brief moment to the next—a working model of time offered to a child as casually as pointing out a hawk on a fence post. The hitch is the interval, the smallest cut in continuity, the place where one world ends and the next has not yet begun. Each boxcar is reality, assembled for an instant and then replaced—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva compressed into the mechanics of a freight train passing a Kansas overpass, each coupling a pulse, each pulse a world appearing and vanishing before the child can register the loss.
A Kansas town at night observed with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be—oil pumps feeding like mosquitoes on a sleeping man's arm, a radio phasing between Mr. Sandman and a faint foreign voice, boys reduced to shadows on white silos, headlights cresting the hill and withdrawing without arrival. Burns, Kansas is a ghost sonnet: the rhetorical skeleton concealed, no volta declared, the form ending where it ends because this is a place where the structure of resolution is present and the resolution never fires.
Burns, Kansas
Oil pumps rock steadily on the long ridge
like mosquitoes on a sleeping man’s arm
while behind the power plant, frogs emerge
from the black pond. Near a neighboring farm,
an antique radio phases between
Mr. Sandman and a faint foreign voice,
occasionally crackling into brief
periods of silence. The older boys
smoke cigarettes underneath a streetlight,
their shadows splayed across the white silos
in the feed lot. Every few hours, headlights
burst over the hill like a flare, a gold
penumbra on the horizon that fades
to a narrow beam above the highway.
Oil pumps rock steadily on the long ridge / like mosquitoes on a sleeping man’s arm—the pumps arrive as simile before they arrive as fact, and the comparison specifies a condition before it specifies a landscape. The man is asleep, the feeding happening without resistance, without witness, without the victim’s knowledge—the kind of extraction that requires unconsciousness to operate. What is being taken from the land is being taken in small, persistent increments that never rise to the level of interruption, because the land, like the man, does not wake. The motion is almost gentle, and the gentleness is what the simile indicts. While behind the power plant, frogs emerge / from the black pond—without announcement, entering a landscape that offers no distinction between natural and contaminated. Black is the pond’s only descriptor, a color that forecloses depth, swallowing what it covers rather than reflecting it. Whatever the frogs are surfacing into goes unnamed, the scene moving outward with the same absence of comment it brought to the pumps: observation without interpretation, presence without verdict.
Near a neighboring farm, / an antique radio phases between / “Mr. Sandman” and a faint foreign voice, / occasionally crackling into brief / periods of silence—the radio is the poem’s most concentrated image of a town’s interior life. Mr. Sandman is a song that asks to be put to sleep into something better, to be delivered into an idealized dream on demand. It phases between that wish and a faint foreign voice that cannot be placed, crackling into brief silence before the cycle resumes. The familiar song keeps losing its signal, interrupted by something that won’t resolve into language, then dropping into silence that feels less like absence than like another transmission cutting through. Mr. Sandman against the foreign voice is the town’s own frequency—a desire for elsewhere, for dream—intercepted by something from outside the frame that it cannot name and cannot silence.
The older boys / smoke cigarettes underneath a streetlight, / their shadows splayed across the white silos / in the feed lot—the boys should anchor the poem in human presence, but what the streetlight produces is projection. Their shadows are enlarged, flattened, detached from the bodies that cast them. The silos are white; the shadows are the only darkness on that surface. The boys are more legible as distortion than as people. Whatever distinguishes them—whatever history, whatever damage belongs to them individually—has been absorbed into outline, into the shape a body makes when light comes from behind it and the surface in front is large enough to hold the enlargement.
Every few hours, headlights / burst over the hill like a flare, a gold / penumbra on the horizon that fades / to a narrow beam above the highway—reaching for distress, for signal, for the emergency vocabulary of something that announces itself against darkness. The gold penumbra expands and then contracts, and whatever was coming never arrives at the space the poem occupies. The light declares itself and withdraws, and will keep doing so every few hours with the same procedural indifference as the pumps and the phasing radio.
The poem is a ghost sonnet that abolishes its own volta. Fourteen lines, the architecture concealed, but where the couplet should pivot—should deliver the turn that concentrates everything into resolution or reversal—the highway beam simply narrows and the poem ends. The form has promised a hinge and delivered more catalogue, which is the argument: Burns, Kansas is a place where the structure of resolution is present but the resolution never fires. The pumps keep rocking, the radio keeps phasing, the headlights keep appearing and withdrawing—the world persisting, and what persists is the continuous low-grade awareness that whatever is happening here will not declare itself in terms that allow it to be resolved.
An uncle carrying the rope-scars of his own boyhood drives two children to a frozen reservoir and breaks the ice with a hammer. Baptism is a Shakespearean sonnet extended by a quatrain, closing on a couplet that removes the speaker from his own act—A boy consents. The ice proceeds—the shift from I to A boy the formal record of what obedience produces when refusal is structurally unavailable. The cold and the silence are the instruction.
My uncle watched that tree all winter long—its patient bark,
the rope-scars catching dusk like half-closed eyes;
his boyhood ended there—a narrow pasture marked
by hooves and harm, where lashing is a sign.
He drove us out where ice replaced the shore,
a mirror set against the world’s return;
my brother paled—hands frozen to the door,
the windows starred with snow; the cedars blurred.
We shed our clothes, the snow received our weight,
then wiped our footprints clean as if we’d never come.
John cut a path the storm could not erase
and led us to the shoulder of the pond.
He walked the ice and summoned me alone,
his hammer fixed above the winter skin—
the wind returned; the cattails bent in rows,
my brother watching from the snowbank’s rim.
I held my place; the heavens offered no reprieve—
A boy consents. The ice proceeds.
The poem’s first word is My—a possessive that binds what follows to the speaker before the uncle can even appear. What comes into view is an inheritance: a man the speaker belongs to, whose past is already the speaker’s past before either of them has moved. My uncle watched that tree all winter long—its patient bark, / the rope-scars catching dusk like half-closed eyes—he has been sustaining attention through an entire season, the way a man watches something that holds a piece of him he has never recovered. The rope-scars describe a site that never finished its original event, a wound that went on looking. His boyhood ended there is all the poem gives, and it gives it flatly, the way a man states something he has made peace with by converting it into stone. The pasture is marked by hooves and harm, where lashing is a sign—a grammar, a language the uncle learned young and has been fluent in for decades. By the time he drives the children out to the reservoir, he carries it the way other men carry religion.
The drive out reads as procession. The shore has already been replaced by ice, a mirror set against the world’s return—a surface that gives back nothing useful, that reflects without warmth, that conceals what it covers. The brother reads the moment before the speaker does: hands frozen to the door, / the windows starred with snow; the cedars blurred—his body knows, but that knowledge confirms what has already been decided rather than interrupting the movement. The procession continues without interruption to the moment the clothes come off and the snow receives their weight, it does what the uncle will not: wipes their footprints clean as if we’d never come. That line holds the logic of what initiation of this kind produces—an event that will exist only in the body that undergoes it, leaving no external trace, no mark that can be returned to or contested.
Then the name arrives: John. A man’s name, used the way a man uses it when he is doing something that requires the full weight of a person behind it. John cut a path the storm could not erase / and led us to the shoulder of the pond—the resonance with the Baptist is unmistakable, but the poem gives it no consecration. No river, no promise, no voice descending—only a man cutting a line through snow toward frozen water and leading children toward it, the way someone who has already been to a threshold and come back believes, without tenderness, that arriving at the edge is something that must be done.
He walked the ice and summoned me alone—the brother stays at the rim, my brother watching from the snowbank’s rim, and the summons is singular. His hammer fixed above the winter skin—held above ice, by a man about to break through a surface so that a child can enter water no child would enter by choice. The wind returned; the cattails bent in rows—the landscape registering the event with the same procedural indifference as everything else in the poem, weather continuing its business while a child holds his place. The image is Abraham without the angel: the blow lands, the heavens stay silent. I held my place; the heavens offered no reprieve—they are present only to confirm their silence. The couplet closes on compression that is necessity: A boy consents. The ice proceeds. The shift from I to A boy is the removal of the self from the act in order for the act to be completed—I consent would imply agency, where A boy consents describes what happens when obedience has no alternative, when the self steps aside and lets a figure complete an action the individual could not authorize. Consent here is the form submission takes when refusal is structurally unavailable, and then the ice: impersonal, declarative, indifferent.
Proceeds carries its weight as continuation—the ice working according to its own logic, regardless of what the boy is feeling. What the uncle passes on is the only thing he knows how to pass on. He is a man who has been to his own threshold, who knows what it costs to approach annihilation and come back, and who believes, with the conviction of someone shaped by a landscape where lashing is a sign, that this knowledge must be transmitted bodily. The rope-scars on the tree were his instruction; the ice is the child’s. The method finds a new surface and a new hand to hold the hammer, the grammar of authority and threshold installed in the body and carried forward without being asked—the cold, the hammer, and the silent sky are what the speaker holds in his body when the poem ends. The threshold does not require the one who made it to remain. The shift from I to A boy in the closing couplet is where the poem’s deepest argument lives. To say I consent would require agency; A boy consents describes what the body does when the self has stepped aside to let the act complete itself. That grammatical move—self evacuated, figure substituted—is what initiation of this kind produces: the body entered and shaped by a system that precedes it, the self not required for its own formation, the ice proceeding because proceeding is what it does.
A child alone at night breaks ice with a hatchet so a horse can drink—the fence still holding white hairs in its barbs from a previous encounter, the fear still present, the dark still cold. Ice Breaking is a Shakespearean sonnet in trimeter, its spare tight lines answering Baptism directly: where John broke ice with a hammer so a child would go under, the child here breaks ice so an animal can drink, the same grammar of frozen surface and threshold crossed, but this time by choice, without instruction, the stroke his own. The couplet delivers what the form promises: her hips shift; she glides down / across the frozen ground—the act completed, the animal moving toward water, the child on the right side of what he came to do.
Ice Breaking
Across the wires, white hairs rest,
caught in red on the barbs.
Her scent lingers near the fence,
worked through stake and spars.
I lift the axe to the moon,
a circle rests in the blade,
hangs there like a pale rune
before the stroke is made.
She stares behind a tree,
snow gives beneath her weight:
she sees the ice break free,
beneath the moonless blade.
Her hips shift; she glides down
across the frozen ground.
Across the wires, white hairs rest, / caught in red on the barbs—the poem begins after the damage, the fence’s record of whatever has already passed through it and paid present before the child, the horse, or the hatchet appear. Her scent lingers near the fence, / worked through stake and spars—the horse’s presence registered through smell before sight, distributed through the perimeter itself, something that has already proven it can throw him and drive him into the same wire that still holds its evidence. The child carries a hatchet instead of saying any of this, and the fear is structural: it is in the compressed lines, the short breath of the form, the refusal to give any moment more space than it requires.
I lift the axe to the moon, / a circle rests in the blade, / hangs there like a pale rune / before the stroke is made—the poem’s only stillness. A rune is pre-Christian script, a character used for divination, for reading what the night will permit — the child holding a language older than the church that almost baptized him, asking the dark whether what he is about to do is sanctioned. The circle hangs one moment longer than the task requires, then the stroke is made, the rune dissolves, and what is left is a moonless blade — the act stripped of whatever frame briefly held it, reduced to force and consequence.
She stares behind a tree, / snow gives beneath her weight: / she sees the ice break free, / beneath the moonless blade. / Her hips shift; she glides down / across the frozen ground—her body held in tension until the condition is met, then moving toward the water with the specific physics of an animal whose need has been released from its constraint. She was waiting for this, and he was the one who had to make it possible. In Baptism, John broke ice with a hammer so a child would go under — threshold imposed from outside, consent extracted by a structure that left no alternative. Here the child breaks ice with a hatchet so an animal can drink — threshold crossed by choice, competence enacted alone, at night, without instruction.
A child holds his ear against the glass and parses an approaching car in pieces—engine, gravel, axles, frame, wheels—because as long as the arrival remains a list it cannot become a person, and as long as it cannot become a person it cannot disappoint. Cherryvale is a ghost sonnet without a closing period, the sentence still moving past the last word: the porch receives a stranger's face that becomes mother with each step, and the child folds into her long blue dress—the only moment in the poem where the body acts rather than waits, the survival protocol releasing when there is finally something it cannot fake.
Cherryvale
I place my ear against the glass,
cicadas chirr in sorghum rows—
a sidewind moves the brittle grass,
a dust cloud lifts above the road
until the headlights burn it thin.
An engine labors up the grade,
gravel snaps the chassis skin—
axles creak, then comes the frame,
then wheels align outside the yard.
A hinge resists, a door gives way.
A strip of yellow splits the dark;
the porch receives a stranger’s face
becoming mother with each step:
I fold into her long blue dress
I place my ear against the glass, / cicadas chirr in sorghum rows— / a sidewind moves the brittle grass, / a dust cloud lifts above the road / until the headlights burn it thin—the child’s first act is to place his ear against the glass, the body selecting the ear over the eye because sound can be processed at a distance, held at arm’s length, parsed without committing to what it means. What is approaching has not yet become anything—still signal, still deniable—and the ear is how the child keeps it that way for as long as the distance allows. The landscape fills the waiting without resolving it: cicadas, sorghum, sidewind, brittle grass—ambient tension, the texture of a summer evening that continues indifferently while the child holds his breath. The dust cloud lifts, the headlights burn it thin, and what emerges is one layer of obstruction peeled back to reveal the next.
The vehicle arrives in sequence, never whole: An engine labors up the grade, / gravel snaps the chassis skin— / axles creak, then comes the frame, / then wheels align outside the yard. Each element held separate before the next can be allowed—a defensive operation. As long as the car remains a list, it cannot become a thing, and as long as it cannot become a thing, what it carries cannot become a person. Gravel snaps the chassis skin and axles creak are percussive, bodily—the machine registering its own passage through a landscape that resists it. The child listens for evidence that has not yet arrived at meaning.
A hinge resists, a door gives way. / A strip of yellow splits the dark—the language stays mechanical because meaning has not yet been authorized, light arriving as event, dividing rather than filling. What enters through that division is announced with the maximum possible remove: the porch receives a stranger’s face. The porch receives—the architecture accepts a stranger impersonally, the way a building accepts whatever crosses its threshold. The child is still at the glass, still withholding commitment, still permitting the arrival to be something other than what he needs it to be. Then the turn: becoming mother with each step. Identity assembled in motion, accruing with proximity the way the car assembled itself out of separate sounds—a process of verification the body conducts because it cannot afford to trust in advance.
The poem is a ghost sonnet that refuses closure. Fourteen lines, no period at the end, no couplet’s resolving click—the sentence keeps moving past the last word, the body still folding as the page ends. The volta arrives at the porch receives a stranger’s face and delivers instead a stranger, the turn withholding what a sonnet traditionally produces at that hinge. I fold into her long blue dress is the only moment where the body acts rather than listens, waits, or parses—contact recorded, the sequence collapsing into fabric, warmth, and the particular gravity of someone folding back.
A child wedges himself into an attic corner where the rafters press closest, replicating underground what his father is doing underground—the mine and the attic the same structure, the one he can reach standing in for the one he cannot follow. Leadville is a ghost sonnet that pivots on a colon: You said:—and from that hinge through the final couplet the father's voice speaks from inside the imagined burial, warning the child not to enter the place he is already vanishing into, the prohibition issued from within its own territory. The blood that stains the rocks is named as the child's alone, and the child cannot tell if it belongs to him or to his father, because Leadville has made them the same body.
Leadville
I choose a corner where the rafters lean,
so near they press the night against my skull;
the joists resist—the timber, tight and mean—
and walls grow thin enough to hear your pulse.
The mountain’s dust has settled in your chest;
you vanish downward—wordless, slow, and deep—
the earth receiving you like stolen breath.
No ladder down. No light to mark the slope.
You disappear the way a door goes dark.
You said: The fire’s near—move from the tribe;
strike flint to keep our worlds apart.
Don’t stay too long in Leadville’s starless night.
Repeat the tale: this town is not your home;
the blood that stains its rocks is yours alone.
I choose a corner where the rafters lean, / so near they press the night against my skull; / the joists resist—the timber, tight and mean— / and walls grow thin enough to hear your pulse—the child chooses the corner where the rafters lean closest because of the pressure, the timber tight against the skull, the walls thin enough to hear a pulse that isn’t there. The enclosure is the condition the imagination requires: a space that narrows, that bears down, that replicates below ground what the father is doing below ground, so that the mind can follow him somewhere the body cannot go. The attic and the mine become the same structure, and the child fits himself into the one he can reach.
What the imagination produces is not comfort. The mountain’s dust has settled in your chest—labor and suffocation made indistinguishable, the mine’s material already inside the father’s body, the boundary between working underground and being enclosed by it already dissolved. You vanish downward—wordless, slow, and deep— / the earth receiving you like stolen breath—taken breath, the kind that doesn’t return. No ladder down. No light to mark the slope. The child is describing a disappearance that the mine makes possible, a descent with no architecture of return. You disappear the way a door goes dark—a door that goes dark loses its light until it is no longer findable in the wall, its surface absorbed into everything around it, the opening become solid. And it is at exactly this moment, inside the imagined disappearance, that the father’s voice arrives.
You said:—the colon is a hinge. From that pivot through the final couplet, every remaining line is the father speaking from within the present tense of the imagined burial, already vanishing downward and still giving instruction, both true at once. The ghost sonnet form makes this possible: the father’s voice is neither flashback nor hallucination but a structural feature of the poem’s architecture, the way the concealed volta allows two temporal planes to occupy the same line without either displacing the other. The voice that enters is his cosmological voice, the same one that reads Zen koans outside of Angelus: The fire’s near—move from the tribe; / strike flint to keep our worlds apart—delivering the instruction to maintain separation between the living and the dead from inside the place he is warning the child not to enter.
Don’t stay too long in Leadville’s starless night—the prohibition addressed from within its own territory, the warning already too late for the one issuing it. The couplet closes on the father still speaking: Repeat the tale: this town is not your home; / the blood that stains its rocks is yours alone—the denial made ritual, something performed repeatedly to hold back what keeps trying to become true, the father claiming the blood in the rocks in the same breath he uses to tell the child to disavow the place that holds it. That the blood is named as the child’s alone does not settle the question of ownership but deepens it—the possessive landing as inheritance, already his alone.
Locust Street at alpenglow — that hypnagogic purple cast where something unsettling has either happened, is happening, or is about to, and the poem refuses to say which. Elders watch from windows, boys grow larger season by season without anyone intervening, a child orbits a locust tree with arms flung wide until the jackdaws finish what the gesture started — the whole scene running on the logic of a David Lynch small town, menace ambient and undeclared. Alpenglow is a Spenserian sonnet whose chain rhyme holds everything in solution until the couplet reaches beneath the street, beneath the social world, to the darkness that was there before any of it had a name.
Alpenglow
The windows flare—then gutter—glass
throws out the elders’ watchful faces;
boys loom larger as they pass
each year from thaw to summer solstice.
Past the street the shore retraces
mottled trails—mud-soaked shoes;
low voices caught in open spaces,
the moon a cut, the sun a bruise.
Past alpenglow—a boy at play
whirls hard around the locust bole;
arms flung wide—then dropped away—
jackdaws rake the evening whole.
Before the street had sound
the trees lay black. The sky pressed down.
The windows flare—then gutter—glass / throws out the elders’ watchful faces—the first presence in the poem is the elders held in the windows rather than the boys, their faces thrown outward by the glass. They are watching without entering—adulthood here frames what is coming, witnesses it, lets it proceed rather than interrupting it. Boys loom larger as they pass / each year from thaw to summer solstice—the enlargement tracked seasonally, year over year, the watchers in the glass registering the growth without arresting it. The opening quatrain turns on abdication rather than menace: the custodians can see and still do not move.
Past the street, the civic world loses its coherence. Past the street the shore retraces / mottled trails—mud-soaked shoes; / low voices caught in open spaces—mud holding the print of bodies without preserving them, voices caught where nothing contains them. The moon a cut, the sun a bruise—both light sources converted into wounds, injury already in the sky before the alpenglow arrives. Whatever follows is read under that sign: the very sources of visibility are damaged, and what they illuminate carries the damage with them. Past alpenglow—a boy at play / whirls hard around the locust bole—the tree the street is named for, the child orbiting the poem’s own etymology, fixed to one point, circling it, the motion simultaneously play and pattern. Arms flung wide—then dropped away— / jackdaws rake the evening whole—corvids, augury birds, the landscape’s own interpretive faculty completing at sky-scale what the boy’s body began at human scale. The jackdaws don’t simply mirror the gesture; they read it, the way augurs read entrails, the way the author in this collection reads omens in roadside landscapes, the evening raked open and whatever was diffuse in the air concentrated in that tearing.
The poem is Spenserian—ABAB BCBC CDCD EE—the interlocking chain rhyme binding each quatrain to the next, no stanza closing cleanly before it bleeds a sound into what follows. The form enacts saturation: nothing seals, everything bleeds forward, the whole poem held in continuous solution until the couplet drops. The couplet does not concentrate the poem’s argument so much as excavate beneath it: Before the street had sound / the trees lay black. The sky pressed down. This is what dusk uncovers rather than what it produces—the condition present before the boys, before the elders, before the seasonal rhythm of thaw to solstice, before Locust Street had its name. The Spenserian couplet traditionally closes; here it opens downward, into prior darkness, into the substrate the poem has been resting on the whole time without declaring it.
The kinship with Burns, Kansas is clear: in both poems the landscape is condition rather than backdrop, the menace ambient rather than dramatic, the world configured to receive what has not yet arrived.
Hollows turns the Appalachian night hunt into a theory of consciousness: a world where the body registers disturbance long before the mind can assign it shape, the unseen quarry remaining more inscrutable because it never fully materializes. The tar-paper shacks, orange coats, headlamps, and blackened slopes create a rural American underworld where meaning is constantly assembling and dissolving, the final constellation of lights on the ground exposing the human instinct to impose order on darkness even when the darkness refuses to yield an answer.
Hollows
In rhododendrons, something wakes and stirs.
Tar-paper shacks on blackened slopes incline
toward wind; the dogs go rigid, ears upturned—
their master tilts his lamp, a narrow shine.
Their orange coats quiver in the hollow;
their howls pour downward, spill through trees.
A pine bows under weight it cannot follow—
some unseen quarry shifting in the canopy.
The grass at field’s edge ripples, breaks, reforms
in waves and eddies; stillness, then again.
The dogs regroup beneath the brush, their forms
held taut between recall, scent and strain.
The moon rolls past the clouds without a sound—
headlamps form a constellation on the ground.
In rhododendrons, something wakes and stirs—the threat left at the edge of the perceptual field, unnamed because naming it would be less accurate than leaving it there. What the children of Low Country have been educated into—through attic planks and gravel roads and fists forming in silhouette and names that dust remembers—is exactly this: that the most significant pressures register in the body before they can be processed by the mind, that danger’s most formative version is the one that never fully declares itself.
The landscape is social before it is natural. Tar-paper shacks on blackened slopes incline / toward wind—the chapter’s human structures in final form, all the trailers and failed houses and cars stranded on split roads reduced to paper and tar on a hillside, already organized into postures of submission by forces they cannot resist. The dogs go rigid, ears upturned— / their master tilts his lamp, a narrow shine. / Their orange coats quiver in the hollow—the only warm color in the poem, burning against the black slopes, the human presence purely instrumental, a mechanism for directing light, present and purposeful and not in control.
Their howls pour downward, spill through trees—obeying gravity rather than intention. A pine bows under weight it cannot follow— / some unseen quarry shifting in the canopy—the tree as seismograph, bending under a force that passes through it without pausing to be identified, registering what it cannot track or name. Shifting is weight without motive, presence without psychology, the thing the chapter has been building toward: the understanding that the most formative pressures are the ones that never fully materialize into event.
The grass at field’s edge ripples, breaks, reforms / in waves and eddies; stillness, then again—the syntax of interruption and resumption describing what sustained vigilance actually feels like in the body, the constant cycling between alertness and its lapse, signal and the silence that follows. The dogs regroup beneath the brush, their forms / held taut between recall, scent and strain—three nouns distributing the psychological portrait across memory, body, and tension, none sufficient alone, all three together naming the condition of a creature trained to respond to something that has not yet revealed itself.
The couplet removes human mediation entirely. The moon rolls past the clouds without a sound— / headlamps form a constellation on the ground. The moon proceeds without any relationship to what is happening below, and the headlamps form a constellation on the ground—constellation normally the human insistence on assigning story to arrangement, the habit of making random scatter mean something beyond itself. Here the word is invoked only to be grounded, the stars pulled down to the dirt where they lose their gods and their narratives and become lights arranged by the accident of a search pattern. The hunters have found no quarry, named nothing, resolved nothing. Their lights describe a shape on the ground that resembles meaning without producing it, and the chapter ends there—in that resemblance, holding the tension between pattern and significance without releasing it into either.
What the chapter’s education produces, finally, is a set of senses calibrated to the edge of the visible, a body held taut between what it remembers and what it can still smell, waiting in the dark for something that may or may not arrive, organizing the available light into the best pattern it can manage. Low Country’s ghost sonnets kept that form buried—structure operating below the surface, unnamed, the architecture present without declaring itself. Here it surfaces: the sonnet fully audible, the constellation formed on the ground, the quarry still in the canopy and not coming down.
A child witnesses both parents' infidelities in the same night without the language to know what either means—the father's plank between the attic beams, the mother murmuring with a spare-voiced man in the bedroom, the violet bruise on the father's thigh. Infidelity is a diptych about damage absorbed before it can be named: the first sonnet treats betrayal as carpentry, the second answers in atmospheric scale, the dog the size of weather filling the yard, the children barred by arrangements older than their own lives. Sonnet I gives the machinery; Sonnet II gives what the machinery breeds in the dark.
Infidelity
I.
A plank lies set between the attic beams,
a narrow bridge above the living room.
Your father builds it. Women come by morning,
then one by one withdraw in turn by noon,
the ladder folding neatly in the wall.
One night his leg bursts through the ceiling’s skin—
a sudden limb, a snake, a breach, a fall—
then slips back up, obedient to pain.
Your mother murmurs in the bedroom
with a man whose voice is spare and thin.
A bruise appears, that violet bloom,
on father’s thigh, unfolding under skin.
The house exhales. The body does not sleep.
What breaks the skin has other doors to keep.
II.
A dog the size of weather fills the yard.
Its breathing lifts the house like tidal wood.
The children hover, unadmitted, barred
by what was set in place before it stood.
At night it swells—black lung, black ribs—draws
the dark inside itself, then gives it back.
Its shoulders grind the fence. Its jaw withdraws
no answer from the walls it leans to crack.
Warm breath invades the attic, fogs the beams.
The ceiling bows. Teeth worry through the sheet.
The lamps go dim. The windows lose their seams
as lips slide down them, sealing up the street.
The house holds still. The dog completes its span.
The night has found a body shaped like man.
A plank lies set between the attic beams, / a narrow bridge above the living room. / Your father builds it—the first sonnet treats betrayal as carpentry, secrecy installed in the structure itself rather than smuggled past it. The verb is deliberate, the act made rather than committed. Women come by morning, / then one by one withdraw in turn by noon, / the ladder folding neatly in the wall—with the regularity of any other domestic routine, the house returning to innocence the moment the act is finished. The architecture agrees with all of it, and that agreement is the first horror: the house has been designed to accommodate what it contains.
The rupture, when it comes, is physical and immediate and instantly suppressed. One night his leg bursts through the ceiling’s skin— / a sudden limb, a snake, a breach, a fall— / then slips back up, obedient to pain—four nouns in sequence, each one reframing the same event, the mind cycling through registers trying to hold what the body has produced. The house returns to its surface, the breach closes, nothing is confessed. The child has seen through the ceiling into the hidden life above, and the ceiling has sealed itself again. Downstairs, simultaneously, your mother murmurs in the bedroom / with a man whose voice is spare and thin—both betrayals in the same moment, without ranking, without deciding which is cause and which is response, the child unable to sort one wound from another because no sorting is available. A bruise appears, that violet bloom, / on father’s thigh, unfolding under skin—beauty as the skin’s own record of what passed through it, damage flowering in the tissue. The house exhales.
The couplet names what the poem has been building toward: What breaks the skin has other doors to keep. The skin that breaks is the ceiling’s skin, the father’s skin, the surface of every threshold in the poem that has already been crossed—breaks becoming doors, openings held permanent by the fact of having been made, the house now a structure of thresholds rather than walls, each breach a new passage the child must learn to account for.
The second sonnet shifts person and scale simultaneously. Sonnet I addressed the child directly—your father, your mother—the speaker inside the memory, the intimacy of second person holding the child inside the event as it is reconstructed. Sonnet II steps back: A dog the size of weather fills the yard, the child now one of several, the intimacy replaced by atmospheric distance. The scale has to change because what the child is perceiving is no longer containable in human proportion—ordinary language having failed to hold what the house has become, the imagination answering with an animal large enough to carry the whole atmospheric weight of it.
Its breathing lifts the house like tidal wood—the house no longer house but driftwood, already uprooted, already floating on a current stronger than the people inside it. The children hover, unadmitted, barred / by what was set in place before it stood—excluded by precedent, by arrangements laid down before they arrived, by a logic older than their own lives. At night it swells—black lung, black ribs—draws / the dark inside itself, then gives it back. / Its shoulders grind the fence. Its jaw withdraws / no answer from the walls it leans to crack—the house that agreed with the father’s architecture refuses the dog’s interrogation. Warm breath invades the attic, fogs the beams. / The ceiling bows. Teeth worry through the sheet. / The lamps go dim. The windows lose their seams / as lips slide down them, sealing up the street—the same beams the plank crossed, the same attic where the ladder folded into the wall, every surface that held in Sonnet I now permeable, the house entering itself.
Then the couplet stills everything: The house holds still. The dog completes its span. / The night has found a body shaped like man. After twelve lines of breathing and grinding and fogging and bowing, the house suddenly stops. The dog’s span is completed—its full reach across the structure measured and finished. And the night, having moved through all of it, has found a human shape at the end: the form that appetite, secrecy, and the child’s sleepless knowledge together make when the house has become what it is. The mother’s room is in it, the attic is in it, the violet bruise is in it, the breach that sealed itself is in it. What the diptych preserves is the child’s initiation into a domestic world where fidelity, law, privacy, and protection have already broken down—where the mind must answer that breakdown with something larger, blacker, and more feral than the adults would ever admit to being. Sonnet I gives the machinery; Sonnet II gives what the machinery breeds in the dark. The child does not intervene, does not speak, does not move from the place the night has assigned.
The poem opens with a completed fact—dangerous men shaped me when I was young—and delivers the evidence in a single unbroken sentence that runs eight lines without pause, the calm syntax enacting the same continuity the men brought to what they did. What they installed was a curriculum: a relation to the world in which protection is neither expected nor available, the body's signals replaced with compliance so thoroughly that the speaker teaches the lesson in reverse—cradling their graying heads in dreams, the instrument of instruction becoming the instrument of witness. Dangerous Men is a ghost sonnet whose buried rhyme scheme holds the formation together formally, the wound in the couplet screaming into the darkness of every home he has built since.
Dangerous Men
Dangerous men shaped me when I was young,
they taught me to shovel snow in winter
without wearing a hat, coat, or gloves.
And they ran after me in the summer,
tearing off my swimsuit, then dragging me
to the gravel road, naked. The lessons
were too innumerable and severe
to forget now that I’ve become a man.
Sometimes I remember them in my dreams
and cradle their graying heads in my arms
to demonstrate the value of weeping,
as my lips separate like an old scar
to reveal a wound deeper than their own,
screaming into the darkness of my homes.
Dangerous men shaped me when I was young—eight words, a completed fact, the condition fixed before anything else begins. Then a single sentence runs through the remaining thirteen lines without stopping: they taught me to shovel snow in winter / without wearing a hat, coat, or gloves. / And they ran after me in the summer, / tearing off my swimsuit, then dragging me / to the gravel road, naked. The lessons / were too innumerable and severe / to forget now that I’ve become a man. The long sentence is the lesson’s own form and the sonnet’s ghost architecture at once—the rhyme scheme buried, the structure durable and operative below the surface, holding without declaring itself, the way the men’s lessons held. It does not pause, does not offer exit, moves from act to act with the same calm continuity the men brought to what they did. What the long sentence accumulates is proof rather than narrative. Snow without gloves, summer without cover, gravel as ground—each act discrete, repeatable, legible as lesson. Taught governs the entire field, binding intention to act without requiring justification or eruption. The men operate without pause, exposure replacing shelter, the body’s signals overridden and replaced with compliance, and what is installed is a relation to the world in which protection is neither expected nor recognized as available. The lessons were too innumerable and severe to forget: stated as fact, the way a man states something that has stopped being debatable.
At the volta the speaker receives the men in dreams in the same physical configuration they once imposed on him: Sometimes I remember them in my dreams / and cradle their graying heads in my arms / to demonstrate the value of weeping—their bodies reduced, aged, held by the body they once exposed. Demonstrate preserves the original frame of instruction while reversing its direction. The structure holds with the current turned, the body’s capacity to register its own injury, withheld from him then, given back to them now—the act confirming what was done rather than undoing it, the lesson so fully absorbed that the speaker can now teach.
As my lips separate like an old scar—the body opening along the original seam, the skin remembering before the mind does where it was first split and how far it can be pulled back. What shows beneath has been sealed in since the gravel road, waiting for pressure to return it to the surface. The couplet closes as the ghost sonnet always intended: to reveal a wound deeper than their own, / screaming into the darkness of my homes. The plural homes is structural—the house where it began has followed into every house after, showing up in other rooms, in the way space feels before anything happens, in the way the body waits even when nothing is there yet. The wound is more complete than the men intended, the scream running through every interior the speaker has built to live inside.
A mother's lover pursues her and her children across the Midwest with the patience of something that has no other appointment—town to town, exhaustion eventually naming a stranded car and a nowhere exit home. Agee knew this territory; so did Laughton and McCarthy—the implacable pursuer, the children with nothing between themselves and what follows. He arrives in winter as a package at the fence, sealed because whatever it contains already holds the exact shape of their vulnerability. Kettenbiel is a diptych of Shakespearean sonnets, the tracker's green pulse answered by the body's red alarm, the silence after the final line the condition of a family that never stopped watching the road.
We moved from town to town, no place to rest,
old griefs receding in the mirror’s black;
the next one waking somewhere in the west,
with Kettenbiel descending at our back.
Our heads were thick with troubled dreams—
a slanted flight that shifts the summer grass;
our mother’s lover tracking us, a pulse of green
through broken stalks, their edges sharp as glass.
The engine failed and left us where it died,
the road a scar where counties split in half;
a water tower rising past the power lines,
where nameless byways narrow into chaff—
we slept inside the car that night, alone;
at dawn we rose and called the town our home.
The mornings gave no rest—just fear again;
we slept, we rose, with eyes still on the road;
no mercy there, just nights that clung like skin,
a faceless time that passed beyond the oaks.
Next winter brought a package to our fence:
a frozen keepsake, some inverted ark
from Kettenbiel, our mother knew at once—
that thing that settled there against the dark.
She counted every car that didn’t turn,
each flickered headlight splintered through the slats
as if a secret lifted miles from her,
the box already open in her hands.
It knew the door. It knew the shape of us.
A red pulse beat, and silence did the rest.
The title’s first violence is that it sounds like a place—a forgotten Midwestern exit on a highway nobody takes twice—before it resolves into a person and then into something that exceeds both categories: a fate with a face, a force wearing the shape of a man who knows your address and uses that knowledge the way weather uses a coastline, with the patience of something that has no other appointment. The poem is a diptych of Shakespearean sonnets, each moving toward a couplet that fixes rather than resolves—the first closing on an act of sheer willed naming, the second on a silence that completes what the pulse began. Together they trace the full arc of a pursued life: flight, exhaustion, the provisional shelter of naming a stranded car home, and then the arrival of proof that no distance functioned as distance at all.
We moved from town to town, no place to rest, / old griefs receding in the mirror’s black—the first sonnet organizes itself around the rear-view mirror rather than any logic of destination, the children moving away from something that moves faster than they do, old griefs swallowed into the mirror’s black, a surface that absorbs the past rather than returning it. With Kettenbiel descending at our back—the word carries the mass of something already in range, lowering itself the final distance. He arrives in the sestet as signal before he arrives as figure: our mother’s lover tracking us, a pulse of green / through broken stalks, their edges sharp as glass—the register of the hunted child, perceiving a pursuing adult as a disturbance in the field, a signal the body catches before the mind can name it.
The engine failure pivots the sonnet from flight to arrival—the road a scar where counties split in half; / a water tower rising past the power lines, / where nameless byways narrow into chaff—the landscape contracting around the family until the road ends. The couplet belongs to the children’s answer to that ending: we slept inside the car that night, alone; / at dawn we rose and called the town our home. Home assigned by exhaustion and the absence of alternatives, claimed by children who understand that naming is the one form of agency requiring nothing but breath—the claim necessity, and necessity held long enough becoming indistinguishable from fact.
The second sonnet opens in the aftermath of that claim: The mornings gave no rest—just fear again; / we slept, we rose, with eyes still on the road; / no mercy there, just nights that clung like skin, / a faceless time that passed beyond the oaks—fear returned with the morning, time going faceless, the family still organized around the road they cannot stop watching. Then the package arrives at the fence: a frozen keepsake, some inverted ark / from Kettenbiel, our mother knew at once— / that thing that settled there against the dark. The object stays sealed on the page—or opens offscreen, the way the Ark opens offscreen, the force in the arrival itself: that it knew the door, that it knew the shape of the family before anyone touched the latch. Named, the contents would become inventory, the object shrunk to its dimensions. Unnamed, it retains the force of an ark—the original container of presence, of something that reorganizes everyone near it without requiring inspection.
She counted every car that didn’t turn, / each flickered headlight splintered through the slats / as if a secret lifted miles from her, / the box already open in her hands—sustained fear abolishing the interval between apprehension and event, training the body to live permanently in the moment just before, the mother’s knowing already in her hands before she opens it, recognition and anticipation collapsed into the same gesture. It knew the door. It knew the shape of us—Kettenbiel’s understanding of the family already inside the fence, already complete before the latch gives, the exact contours of their vulnerability held in whatever the package carries. A red pulse beat, and silence did the rest—the green pulse that announced him in the first sonnet returning as red, the same signal at a different frequency, the tracker’s disturbance in the field answered by the body’s own alarm. Between the two pulses the entire diptych runs, the silence that follows the condition after a mechanism has finished its work: still counting cars, still reading headlights through the fence slats, the family permanently in the moment just before, long after the pulse has gone quiet.
The lineage behind Kettenbiel is the American literature of the implacable pursuer—Agee’s sharecropper families, Laughton’s Preacher Powell, McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh—figures who do not hurry because hurrying would imply the possibility of failure. Kettenbiel remains entirely local to one family’s geography of flight: the Midwest, the mirror’s black, the water tower past the power lines, the pursuer announcing himself only through the green pulse moving through broken stalks and the package that arrives already knowing the door.
Chicken Hill is a Rashomon story: a father leaves, and three people who were there hold three incompatible accounts of why—myth, penance, cowardice. The poem builds the father into a devotional figure and dismantles him across the final tercet, the mother's verdict landing last without apology. The child's myth requires the most labor—the rucksack, the Gita, the low sun suspended in the breath, the Vitarka mudra assembling the father into a thangka—while the mother's single word requires none, arriving with the authority of someone who stayed and watched the roads freeze and the money arrive from a distance. A ghost sonnet governed by a Zen koan about destroying the authority figures the mind constructs, each verdict exact, none conclusive, the same departure seen from three irreconcilable distances.
Chicken Hill
“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
— Linji Yixuan
My father bought a suit, cut his long hair
then hitchhiked into Wichita, looking
for a new wife. We moved to a trailer
on Chicken Hill, where the steep roads would freeze
solid every winter. He sent money,
we waited. I would lay in bed dreaming
of him walking alone by a highway,
a thick paperback Bhagavad Gita
jutting from his rucksack, the low sun
suspended in his breath, his left hand stretched
out to the road below the horizon,
the Vitarka mudra. I pretended
it was a myth. He saw it as penance.
Our mother told us it was cowardice.
Linji Yixuan’s instruction governs everything: if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Any figure of authority constructed by the mind is already a projection, and attachment to it blocks rather than transmits understanding. The poem’s work is to build the Buddha carefully—the father as wandering teacher, gesture raised, low sun suspended in his breath—and then dismantle him across the final tercet by the only means available: three versions of the same departure, held simultaneously, none granted authority over the others.
The poem is a ghost sonnet, the rhyme scheme present as whisper rather than signal—structure installed below the surface and operating without declaring itself. My father bought a suit, cut his long hair / then hitchhiked into Wichita, looking / for a new wife. We moved to a trailer / on Chicken Hill, where the steep roads would freeze / solid every winter. He sent money, / we waited—the opening is flat to the point of blankness, the suit and the haircut outward reconstitution, the self remade before departure, the new life costumed in advance. The flatness is the register of a child reporting facts too large to be assigned emotional weight, the tone of someone who has held this information a long time without being able to decide what it means. The father’s motion outward generates the family’s stasis, and the poem holds both without bridging them.
The dream the child constructs in bed is devotional art: I would lay in bed dreaming / of him walking alone by a highway, / a thick paperback Bhagavad Gita / jutting from his rucksack, the low sun / suspended in his breath, his left hand stretched / out to the road below the horizon, / the Vitarka mudra. The Gita carried rather than settled into, its posture angular and insistent against the body that carries it, the low sun suspended in his breath organizing the figure against a landscape backdrop. The Vitarka mudra—left hand raised, fingers extended, palm outward—is the gesture of a teacher transmitting dharma, the hand that holds and passes on truth. The child has placed the father inside a thangka, a devotional frame, and assigned him the posture of someone who left because he had somewhere larger to be.
Then the tercet: I pretended / it was a myth. He saw it as penance. / Our mother told us it was cowardice. Three verdicts, each carrying the full weight of the position from which it was formed. The child names the construction as myth—acknowledging both its necessity and its distance from fact, the pretending honest about the pretending. The father reframes his departure as penance, assigning moral purpose to what he chose, making the leaving a form of payment rather than escape. The mother, stationed inside the material reality of frozen roads and money sent from a distance, names it cowardice with a directness that resists both mythologizing and justification. The poem holds all three without arbitration, each verdict exacting in its own register. This is the killing Linji prescribed—conducted across three lines, without drama, by accumulation. The father as Buddha on the road is built across the sonnet’s middle and then placed alongside the penance-reading and the cowardice-reading until no single version can hold the field. The child’s myth, the father’s self-justification, and the mother’s verdict are the road’s three travelers, and the Buddha standing among them cannot survive all three simultaneously—what remains the structure of perception itself, the same figure seen from three irreconcilable distances, each distance exact, none conclusive.
Chicken Hill belongs to a cluster of poems that set Eastern cosmology against the flat, undecorated Midwest—the Bhagavad Gita on a Kansas highway, the blue Suzuki dissolving into chakra geography in The Road to Anandamarga, mala beads counted against a vanity mirror in Two Rosaries, the Arjuna moment arrived at on an interstate in Driving Through Salina, the father moving through landscapes that never agreed to host him.
A child raised inside Pentecostal dread hauls his Hendrix records to Wednesday church to be destroyed, the congregation's first exhibit of backward-masked Satanism being Purple Haze, lest the music summon Baal from the Kansas dust. Rapture is a ghost sonnet whose buried rhyme scheme holds the incoherent theological world together formally even as the poem reveals it cannot—the faceless thing rising indifferent to the child's vigilance, the Whore of Babylon closing the poem by quoting Hendrix back at him from the front rather than the back, the contamination always already present in what he loved.
Rapture
I was raised on a road bent toward a ruin,
in a snake handler’s strange, unraveling breath
and the dust-moted rows of clergymen—
an oracle, a fool, a ghost of death.
I prayed before I touched myself, as though
one errant thought might tilt the kingdom’s frame;
each Wednesday hauled my records down below,
afraid that Hendrix backward stirred some name
that dust remembers—Baal, something kin,
a faceless thing that rose because it could;
that slouched from Kansas fields and prairie winds,
knee-deep in human excrement and blood.
The Whore of Babylon opines:
is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?
I was raised on a road bent toward a ruin, / in a snake handler’s strange, unraveling breath / and the dust-moted rows of clergymen— / an oracle, a fool, a ghost of death—the destination is given before the journey, the endpoint already visible in the road’s geometry, the direction of formation already aimed at collapse. The religious authorities arrayed along that road constitute a taxonomy of incoherence, multiple unstable forms of spiritual authority that share the same landscape without resolving into a system. Doctrine here is atmospheric, breathed in before it can be examined, the environment itself theological before any single belief can be chosen or refused.
I prayed before I touched myself, as though / one errant thought might tilt the kingdom’s frame—the body made a site of cosmic risk, the child assuming that private desire has the structural capacity to destabilize divine order. The scale of responsibility is total and disproportionate: a single errant thought, the whole kingdom’s frame. The surveillance is internal, the monitoring constant, the mechanism tasked with preventing catastrophe through vigilance over sensation and thought. Each Wednesday hauled my records down below, / afraid that Hendrix backward stirred some name / that dust remembers—Baal, something kin—the records brought to church for destruction, the congregation’s first exhibit of backward-masked Satanism being Purple Haze, the child afraid that music played backward might stir what the dust already carries. Baal is the Canaanite storm deity, Yahweh’s oldest rival, the god the Hebrew prophets spent centuries trying to exterminate from Israelite religion and kept failing to exterminate because the landscape kept producing him. Something kin extends the dread beyond Baal to the whole family of pre-monotheistic presence the Kansas fields might still carry—something older than the child, older than the culture that pressed the record, latent in the dust itself. The ghost sonnet works the same way: the rhyme scheme buried, the Shakespearean architecture holding the theological world together formally even as the theology is revealed as incoherent, the form persisting below the surface the way Baal persists below every purge.
The futility surfaces in the sestet’s a faceless thing that rose because it could; / that slouched from Kansas fields and prairie winds, / knee-deep in human excrement and blood—the absence of motive the most unsettling detail. The child’s vigilance assumed a causal relationship between behavior and consequence, that discipline might prevent eruption. The faceless thing has no such relationship: it rises from the landscape the child actually inhabits, already here in the fields, in the wind, in the dust that remembers older names. Yeats’s rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem; here it slouches out of the Kansas fields, the Second Coming local weather rather than distant event. The entire system of self-policing is revealed as structurally incapable of preventing what it fears.
Then the Whore of Babylon opines—the verb the poem’s tonal signature, casual, conversational, almost offhand, the apocalypse delivered as a remark rather than a proclamation. And the remark she delivers is a Jimi Hendrix lyric: is it tomorrow, or just the end of time? The child who hauled the Hendrix records to church every Wednesday, afraid that music played backward might activate something ancient and latent in the dust, has spent the whole poem fearing a contamination that was always already present in what he loved—and the poem closes by having scripture’s figure of ultimate catastrophe quote the record back to him, from the front rather than the back. The question itself collapses the distinction between immediate expectation and ultimate conclusion, holding both in suspension without deciding between them: the child’s condition rendered as prophecy, permanent anticipation of rupture without a stable sense of when or how it arrives.
Summer Camp strips childhood formation to its oldest tribal grammar: boys taught to split wood, gut snakes, burn nests, and finally pray, the progression moving so cleanly from labor to violence to liturgy that the prayer arrives already contaminated. The hand learns the axe, the knife, the gasoline long before the mouth learns doctrine—and by the time the vespid architecture blooms in flame, the children have been initiated into the aesthetic satisfaction of annihilation itself, faith and communal order balanced atop invisible accumulations of death the way entire civilizations always have been.
Summer Camp
We learned to stack a cord of wood by sound,
the wedge set where the log confessed its seam;
a single stroke would open it—a weakness found,
the grain split true along its rings.
We learned to gut a snake, to coax the wet
machinery from its sleeve—the venom sac
a charm of sorts, an olive amulet
that dangled from its open neck.
We learned to burn the vespid’s rooms,
we tilted gas into their paper keep—
a match, and all their architecture bloomed
then vanished in the heat.
And then we learned to pray. Though no one said
why every word was balanced on the dead.
We learned to stack a cord of wood by sound, / the wedge set where the log confessed its seam; / a single stroke would open it—a weakness found, / the grain split true along its rings—the opening quatrain establishes the curriculum’s governing logic before anything else enters: find the weakness, apply force at the correct angle, and the thing opens along its own structure. The log does not resist; it confesses. The language of the wood is already theological, the seam a disclosure, the grain a truth waiting to be split along its own lines. What the boys are learning is diagnosis before destruction—how to read a material for the place where it will yield.
We learned to gut a snake, to coax the wet / machinery from its sleeve—the venom sac / a charm of sorts, an olive amulet / that dangled from its open neck—the snake stanza converts danger into relic by the same logic a church applies to a martyr: the gutted body becoming the sacred object, mastery over threat the mechanism of consecration. The venom sac extracted and worn is the danger preserved and domesticated, its power transferred to the one who removed it. Olive amulet carries the double freight of the Mediterranean world—the olive branch of peace, the amulet of protection—collapsed into a single object that is neither, that is something older: a trophy, a talisman, a proof of having reached into danger and come back holding it.
We learned to burn the vespid’s rooms, / we tilted gas into their paper keep— / a match, and all their architecture bloomed / then vanished in the heat—the vespid nest as civilization in miniature: paper walls, organized rooms, a social order built by collective labor into a structure that can be destroyed in a single gesture. Paper keep names the nest as a fortification, a castle built from processed material, the wasps’ architecture as legible and purposeful as any human construction. Bloomed arrives at the exact junction of destruction and flowering—the architecture achieving its most complete form in the moment of its annihilation. The boys have been taught that the most satisfying destruction is the kind that first reveals what it destroys.
And then we learned to pray. Though no one said / why every word was balanced on the dead—the anaphora breaks here: And then rather than We learned, the conjunction marking the curriculum’s hinge, the moment the sequence admits its own direction. Prayer arrives as the natural terminus of what preceded it, the final lesson in a progression from splitting to gutting to burning, the mouth learning what the hands have already absorbed. The couplet’s final line withholds the explanation that would make the whole sequence legible—why every word of prayer rests on invisible accumulations of death—leaving the connection between the violence and the devotion exactly where the poem found it: installed in the body before it could be questioned, felt before it could be named, passed forward in exactly the form it was received.
The Visitor / Fountain Street / The Visitation
Three poems, one breach—approached from outside, inhabited from within, dissolved into the body's own recording of what it could not name. In The Visitor the figure sits in the garden identified only by what reacts to it; in Fountain Street the hand has opened and the event proceeds with the calm inevitability of something already decided; in The Visitation the grey arms press without a face, the room contracts, a child face down in sand. Hands and arms are the triptych's governing anatomy: the fist that closes in the first poem, the hand that opens in the second, the arms that press in the third.
The Visitor
A stray cat purrs in the fireweed beside
my window. I pull my mint-green blanket
close to me, and listen to the open night,
my older brother quiet in his bed.
A Malamute growls in the neighbor’s yard,
rounding a corner, link by link, its chain
raking a shed as it lunges and barks
at a figure sitting in the garden.
The moon throws slanted shadows on the wall:
a hedge-apple tree bent in the wind,
caught under the wire of a telephone pole,
its branches spreading slowly like a hand
in silhouette. It settles to stillness—
long, black fingers folding into a fist.
A stray cat purrs in the fireweed beside / my window—the poem opens in the peripheral, the cat in the fireweed registering a night that is already charged before the child has looked directly at anything. The child pulls the mint-green blanket close, listens to the open night, notes the brother quiet in his bed—the body already in a defensive arrangement, the listening already oriented outward.
A Malamute growls in the neighbor’s yard, / rounding a corner, link by link, its chain / raking a shed as it lunges and barks / at a figure sitting in the garden—the figure arrives through the dog’s response, identified by what it provokes before it is seen. The chain is the poem’s first governing image: metal link by metal link, the animal pulling toward something that sits still enough to be pulled toward. The figure sits still enough to be pulled toward, absorbing the dog’s response without acknowledging it, present in the garden the way a fact is present before anyone has named it.
The moon throws slanted shadows on the wall: / a hedge-apple tree bent in the wind, / caught under the wire of a telephone pole, / its branches spreading slowly like a hand / in silhouette—the shadow reading is the child’s defensive operation, converting what cannot be looked at directly into its projection on a wall. The tree is caught under the wire, its branches spreading like a hand—the poem’s first hand, still botanical, still deniable as metaphor. The shadow on the wall is the mind’s last available screen, the surface onto which the unacceptable is projected and held at one remove, the child working to keep the figure in the garden from becoming what it already is by reading it as landscape, as weather, as the ordinary drama of wind and wire. The hedge-apple tree is real—it is in the neighbor’s yard, it bends in the wind, it is caught under the telephone wire—and the poem allows it to be real right up until the moment it cannot be. It settles to stillness— / long, black fingers folding into a fist—the simile completing itself, the hand becoming a fist in the final two words, the image locking shut around what the child has been trying to keep as shadow and wind and tree. The parenthetical of landscape falls away, the tree and the branches and the simile all stripped back until only the hand remains, black, long-fingered, closed—the defensive reading collapsed by its own internal logic, the figure in the garden and the shape on the wall the same thing at last.
Fountain Street
A large hand opens over me, discreet,
its shadow holding one man tinged with green;
the light holds fast, though altered where we meet,
as moonlight thins the margin of the seen.
I bow. The others keep to hedge and ground,
beyond the garden, measured in their space.
They shape my childhood calmly, without sound,
as if removing something out of place.
It holds to sequence, spare and unadorned:
a pause, a turn, the interval made plain.
We move as sleepwalkers, loosely formed,
our bodies passing through what still remains.
No one explains why they came and did not leave;
on Fountain Street, I stepped from the unseen.
A large hand opens over me, discreet—the hand that was a fist in The Visitor has opened, and it opens over the child, and it opens discreetly. Discreet is the poem’s governing word: the event proceeds without announcement, without drama, with the measured calm of something that has already been absorbed into the social fabric of the place. Its shadow holding one man tinged with green—the green of The Visitor‘s fireweed, the color of the peripheral and the ambient, now held in the shadow of the hand. The light holds fast, though altered where we meet, / as moonlight thins the margin of the seen—the visible world contracting at the edges, the margin of what can be seen thinning precisely where the encounter occurs.
I bow. The others keep to hedge and ground, / beyond the garden, measured in their space—the child bows, which is the poem’s most compressed image of what compliance looks like when it has been made structural. The others measure their distance with precision, staying at the hedge where the Malamute was straining in the previous poem. They shape my childhood calmly, without sound, / as if removing something out of place—the shaping is quiet, procedural, the grammar of removal rather than addition. It holds to sequence, spare and unadorned: / a pause, a turn, the interval made plain. / We move as sleepwalkers, loosely formed, / our bodies passing through what still remains—the sequence is the event’s own architecture, the child’s body moving through it the way a body moves through what it cannot wake from. No one explains why they came and did not leave; / on Fountain Street, I stepped from the unseen—the couplet closing on the child’s emergence from the invisible into the visible, the stepping-out the poem’s final act, the unseen named at the moment of leaving it.
The couplet does not resolve what it names. I stepped from the unseen places the event in the past tense and in the first person but refuses the grammar of escape—stepping from something is not the same as leaving it, and the unseen carried forward in the body is still the unseen, renamed but not departed. What the triptych’s center panel establishes is the event’s continuity: the childhood shaped by what moved through it calmly and without sound, the pattern already entered before the child possessed the language to refuse it, the crossing completed in the interval between The Visitor‘s anticipation and The Visitation‘s reconstruction twenty-seven years later.
The Visitation
The grey arms press—as gravity
insists—a figure bearing down:
the room contracts, a body
forms around what comes undone,
as fabric keeps what holding left,
not burden, more a sinking through—
the way earth holds a body, cleft
and closed again: the dark fills you,
a child face down in sand—what pours
into the mold is space beneath
the valleys on an ocean floor.
The grey arms reach: a wreath
of smoke, like unstrung pearls,
falling on the naked shoals.
Where The Visitor held the figure at the window and Fountain Street moved the hand over the child in the grammar of sequence and compliance, The Visitation abandons spatial narrative entirely. There is no room, no garden, no street—only the grey arms pressing as gravity insists, the figure bearing down, the room contracting around what comes undone. The poem has moved inward past the point where the event can be described from outside it. The grey arms press—as gravity / insists—the em dash splitting the line, the parenthetical insistence of gravity as the poem’s governing physical law: what presses does so because pressing is what mass does, the force impersonal, structural, prior to intention.
A body / forms around what comes undone—the body as mold, shaped by the negative space of what it receives. As fabric keeps what holding left, / not burden, more a sinking through— / the way earth holds a body, cleft / and closed again—the earth analogy dropping the poem into burial register, the cleft and closed again the compression of the grave’s two acts. The dark fills you, / a child face down in sand—the second person collapsing the distance between the poem and the reader at exactly the moment the image reaches its most exposed point, the child face down, the sand receiving the impression of the body, the dark filling what the body cannot fill itself.
What pours / into the mold is space beneath / the valleys on an ocean floor—the aquatic pressure of fathoms, the weight of the water column above, the valleys on the ocean floor the deepest available geography of the submerged. The triptych has descended from garden to room to ocean floor, from figure in silhouette to grey arms to the pressure of depth. The grey arms reach: a wreath / of smoke, like unstrung pearls, / falling on the naked shoals—the smoke that in an earlier draft belonged to a second figure has been compressed into a single image: a wreath, like unstrung pearls, falling on the naked shoals. The breach completed, the pearls dispersed, the smoke settling where the water is shallowest, the evidence of what happened distributed across the shoals in the form of what cannot be gathered back into a strand.
The triptych ends here, in the shallows, the deepest event recorded at the surface level, the body’s knowledge held in the form of an image that resists retrieval. The three poems were written across decades and in different states of awareness—the first approaching obliquely, the second inhabiting the event in a fugue state that concealed what it recorded, the third constructed twenty-seven years later when the formal compression finally removed every word standing between the event and its name. The ghost system had been operating the whole time, the wound load-bearing long before it was legible, the formal architecture holding what the conscious mind could not yet carry.
jaznoblog 