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

I should have worn my gloves and a down vest.

Between Big Hill and Cherryvale, I stare

across the reservoir’s glistening crest,

the moon bisected by its marble slope.

As a child, I undressed behind the shed

whose blanched docks arced down to the metal boats

anchored for the winter at the lake’s edge.

I come every year to retrace those steps—

I descend from the drifts and the deadwood

to where the thin ice buckles underfoot

and the blackened water travels like blood

down the frozen ankles of my youth,

pouring in the vestibules of my shoes.

 

 

 

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

–Lin Tsi

My father bought a suit, cut his long hair

then hitchhiked into Wichita, looking

for a new wife. We moved to a trailer

on Chicken Hill, where the steep roads would freeze

solid every winter. He sent money,

we waited. I would lay in bed dreaming

of him walking alone by a highway,

a thick paperback Bhagavad Gita

jutting from his rucksack, the low sun

suspended in his breath, his left hand stretched

out to the road below the horizon,

the Vitarka mudra. I pretended

it was a myth. He saw it as penance.

Our mother told us it was cowardice.

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

I was raised on a road bent toward a ruin,

in a snake handler’s strange, unraveling breath

and the ashen rows of clergymen—

an oracle, a fool, a ghost of death.

I prayed before I touched myself, as though

one errant thought might tilt the kingdom’s frame;

each Wednesday hauled my records down below,

afraid that Hendrix backward stirred some name

that dust remembers—Baal, something kin,

a faceless thing that rose because it could,

that slouched from Kansas fields and prairie winds,

knee-deep in human excrement and blood.

The Whore of Babylon opines:

is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?

Dangerous men shaped me when I was young,

they taught me to shovel snow in winter

without wearing a hat, coat, or gloves.

And they ran after me in the summer,

tearing off my swimsuit, then dragging me

to the gravel road, naked. The lessons

were too innumerable and severe

to forget now that I’ve become a man.

Sometimes I remember them in my dreams

and cradle their graying heads in my arms

to demonstrate the value of weeping,

as my lips separate like an old scar

to reveal a wound deeper than their own,

screaming into the darkness of my homes.

 

 

 

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

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

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.

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.

for Troy Gustafson

If you’re standing within swinging distance,

you’re standing too close, you’d say, shoulders squared.

But you were all bluster. In Nebraska parlance,

it really meant I want to embrace you as a brother.

You knew the same back roads I traveled and forgot,

those gravel barrens leading mostly nowhere,

to overgrown cul-de-sacs or abandoned feed lots,

the kind urbane folk rightfully fear.

To say we held debates would be a slander.

You would only offer: Speak plain. You’d say:

With your words, you could bring many over

to Christ. I was too arrogant in those days

to parse my pain from my avarice,

too cocksure to accept what was

the deepest embrace: the promise beyond

brotherhood—of stewardship and sacrifice.

Your death has only hardened what was wrong

when I left my church in that corner of Kansas

too afraid to claim myself, too young

and unwilling to forgive my family

for their imperfections. One by one,

they are crossing over; any lingering grief—

any doubt their corporeal bodies

resurrect to light in paradise—

could now only be construed as mocking

the dead, or a disregard for the righteous—

or worse yet, a violation of the faith

you put in me with your embrace.

Outside of Boise, four black horses bolt
quickly past my window, slow to a trot,
then pull away, their obsidian coats
shimmering like sunlight on the blacktop.
I am barely awake. The night before,
in the panhandle of Oklahoma,
I fixed a flat tire in a lightning storm,
watching the dense nerves of light branch over
the blue nimbus clouds in the northern sky.
There was no sound, other than the engine.
On such a night, Saul may have held his knife
closer to his chest—by morning, the sun
nothing more than a warm breath on his cheek,
his horse leading him into the city.