Come all ye winter brigands,
Strip these tainted fairland woods
Of their baubles and wares.
Take what plump fruits remain
In glistened fists and bind,
Bind the spruce tightly -
Such prideful beasts these trees.

Come mock these captive summers,
Taunt them white in the forest,
White in the glade and fled,
To the shrill and fluted wind,
To crackling beats on wire and limb.
Such a wagged and giddy pilfer,
Leave them lap on brittle leaves.

Come ye winter brigands,
Strip the burdened hoards,
The cone and gray gem juniper,
The blackened berry, the wild blue phlox,
The painted trillium stem.
Vanity in such soft profligate pendants -
What need have we of these?

It was something else entirely.
It was not the ripped yellow t-shirt
I pulled from between the boulders
Where the lake met Chicago.
It was not the penny or the wasted
Gull feather. Nor was it the child’s shoe
That no longer flickered as she ran.
It was not the rusted corkscrew that
Faintly read Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
By the gold and chipped cowboy
Tall in the saddle,
Nor the green and brown shards
Of empty glass, nor the used
And smoothed shells of mollusks.
It was not the bits of blottered pages
Whose inks no longer spoke of hands
But water and dissolution.
It was not the lensless knock-off
Rayban’s - severed at the temple. No,
It was something else entirely,
There, hidden in the rocks,
Where the water beats upon us.

Sun go down in boxcar blue
Swing arm crank go down them dew
Flash eye drag with horn and load
Coupling break for sorra’ stowed
Side dump **** and tank car ****
Jag the night-black knuckle jump
Jump the rise and run the moon
Next town down be falling soon
Loco Pilot spark them strikes
Wrest the ties out from them spikes
Second howl coyote song
Mayday brake air long ere long

Which river to cross -
The shallow brook of faith,
Tepid in the slow run to God, or
That which drains into the oily pits
Of loss, tormented though alive
In sure and certain combustion?

Give me fire and hard current,
Give me love and rounding stone,
Give me rasping scale and snag,
Jagged rapid bends,
And the black swamp moccasin
Bite into my fat ripe shin.
For that is where I’ll meet you.

And what is more sacred
Than knowing true pain,
The poison of it -
The broken limb, the broken heart,
The breaking rind and taking,
Taking that what is broken
And breaking,
Into a broken hand
And tying pain to pain
And thus healing
As long slow scabs
Conceal the wounds.

I will not confess my sins, no,
But burn them in the river to Hell.
I will struggle - with you -
the orange-tongued waters,
Grit-toothed and unburdened,
Dragged a half-mile down,
Until we reach the ashed
And muddied bank and fall
In the gray and muck of living -
Laughing that we tried at all.

...Sleep conjured a small dog
with a granite eye, mats and mange,
Three legs and a vagrant tongue
That hung from the left of its snout,
A viscous drool that strung without
Shame, without breaking to the floor.
And I, though broken in a dream,
Shorn of hands,
Less a body than a thought,
Became a dream for a stone-eye dog
Who rolled belly up to offer its scars
And plump tumors.
We were one then.
We were one -
A broken man and a broken dog
For once thus calm in a dream.

Smelted down,
A pool of rendered gristle,
Slick on the floor,
That’s what a day leaves us,

After the tethered heaves
Of this most sought production,
Blendered the dawn news,
The hooved mews, cool dews,
And all that smelled like gravy.

A slump line to the drink
Of old business not attended,
Piles as laundry, clean and otherwise,
Crowding the table, the floor,
And all the chipped dishes between
The sink and my mother.

But now, after all is taken away,
The fingers curl
Between the heel and the ****,
And crisp leeks yield to the edge,
Celery snaps and rains -
Carrot - thin as harvest moon
And a fume of crushed garlic.

What next? You may ask.
The permutations of evening
And stew are yours to taste,
To take and wander -
To simmer and wonder -
To plunder what soothes
On the tongue
And melts the fat of wages.

For what, then, do we trod
The husks of dead men,
And for whom?
Is it the trinkets improved?
For we are no larger than the beast -
And there the judgement - the beast
That fashioned the first *****,
Turned the first soil,
Laid the first seed,
Sure in the touch
Of sun, water and repercussion.
No, perhaps diminished, reduced
Upon that self-same soil,
To seek, beyond the seed,
Beyond the shoot and bloom,
Beyond the very grain of dulling truth
That all is not forsaken.

I tell you this.
Bone has fashioned socket.
And in that socket - an eye.
And in that eye, and in those eyes
Each a burden falls.
Look not to the lover or fool, fair prince,
But gaze upon the beggar
And find there inheritance -
Find there, centered in the iris,
The black pool of our communion.

And no greater is the elm
Than the hand.
For the one that prospers light to soil
Is the same as that which turns it,
Is the same as that which yearns
Beyond the follies,
But takes one into another -
Cupped and held -
Flesh over bone -
Calloused but braced by the other,
Alone, no, never alone.