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

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

Dangerous men shaped me when I was young,
they taught me to shovel snow in winter
without wearing a hat, coat, or gloves.
And they ran after me in the summer,
tearing off my swimsuit, then dragging me
to the gravel road, naked. The lessons
were too innumerable and severe
to forget now that I’ve become a man.
Sometimes I remember them in my dreams
and cradle their graying heads in my arms
to demonstrate the value of weeping,
as my lips separate like an old scar
to reveal a wound deeper than their own,
screaming into the darkness of my homes.

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

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

It’s cold, my hands are numb in the night air—
I should have worn my gloves and a down vest.
Between Big Hill and Cherryvale, I stare
across the reservoir’s glistening crest,
the moon bisected by its marble slope.
As a child, I undressed behind the shed
whose blanched docks arced down to the metal boats
anchored for the winter at the lake’s edge.
I come every year to retrace those steps—
I descend from the drifts and the deadwood
to where the thin ice buckles underfoot
and the blackened water travels like blood
down the frozen ankles of my youth,
pouring in the vestibules of my shoes.

My father bought a suit, cut his long hair
then hitchhiked into Wichita, looking
for a new wife. We moved to a trailer
on Chicken Hill, where the steep roads would freeze
solid every winter. He sent money,
we waited. I would lay in bed dreaming
of him walking alone by a highway,
a thick paperback Bhagavad Gita
jutting from his rucksack, the low sun
suspended in his breath, his left hand stretched
out to the road below the horizon,
the Vitarka mudra. I pretended
it was a myth. He saw it as penance.
Our mother told us it was cowardice.

I was raised on a road bent toward a ruin,
in a snake handler’s strange, unraveling breath
and the dust-moted rows of clergymen—
an oracle, a fool, a ghost of death.
I prayed before I touched myself, as though
one errant thought might tilt the kingdom’s frame;
each Wednesday hauled my records down below,
afraid that Hendrix backward stirred some name
that dust remembers—Baal, something kin,
a faceless thing that rose because it could;
that slouched from Kansas fields and prairie winds,
knee-deep in human excrement and blood.
The Whore of Babylon opines:
is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?

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.

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.