Fireflies lighting up the wheat like electricity as I drive the length of three generations or one and a half counties, I watch them light the path from beside the highway. Dipping in and out of view like they’re just flipping all their switches. I met a PhD student in a bar once who told me that fireflies could be used to highlight cancer for surgeons and medicines and old family friends. Is there anything bad or unwholesome in those little bugs?
Regardless, They’re making me feel better right now. I’ve curled my fingers around a few of them, breathed into the black, and wished for something big. I should have wished for something small, like them, instead.

I picked a fight

With God and lost

Track of the time

It took for me

To actually talk to him,

Face to face and

Yawning at the lateness

Of the hour. After

he had gone to bed and

HE had floated in

On feathered wings

And golden teeth,

Whispering outside

Of time and space – –

The recipe for the thing

I’d been looking for.

Salivating over truth

And breaking all the

Promises I made to

What I could see and

Touch, I wrote and read

And remembered what

Was said.

I’ve been listening
Out here by the
Lake, in the
Land where cellphones
Go to die, to ring
For the last time
Just below the surface
And lose their photos,
Friends, and addresses.
We’ve lost some things
Ourselves. Our fingers
Spread wide and grasping
As all time stops
And with a splash,
Starts all up again.

 

My family owns some rocks

and the holes underneath them,

dug by the same old man

over the last sixty years, up

just north of Bellefontaine —

Pronounced ‘bell fountain’ —

and downhill from the lake we were

all born to swim in, drinking

almost as much as the whole thing’s

Mass capacity, in the high tide

of summer vacations and growing old

beside six sets of cousins, all at one time

removed and yet returned to be

sitting together while the old man’s trembling

Hands, wracked from years of amber poison,

chisel some names, dates, and sad old

sympathies every time another dies.

And the same hands start the elevator

that Charons the casket down

and over the inky black Styx.

Perseus and his pals found a way

back out, but she still hasn’t, and it’s

been years. Memories will

always get grayer with age, like my

grandfather’s hair, or my hopes for

ever getting another one to come home,

so that they can say goodbye to all the

dead that they have missed, and who have

missed them since taking off to another county

and leaving this one behind, for what we all suppose

to be better, less subterranean obsessions.

You rattle off your stories,

Years ago drinking forties

And taking convertibles

Through the only car wash in town.

Light up another one

And breathe out a smokey tune,

Embracing the web of the old rowboat

You and your best twelve friends smote,

Caused to stop its purpose, its float,

And sink out front your father’s home.

The water rose up to your nostrils,

And breath came slow and bubbly.

Safe and sound and now you ground

To a stop in the middle of a corn field

In that same, soaked Firebird

After losing the cops out on RR 13

And laughing it off every year since.

I’d like to write all of them down

In your own, God-given voice,

But ink doesn’t quite match

The years of laughter, smoke, and booze etched

Into your throat.

We sat, parsing out the thousand

Sounds that croaked and cawed,

Chirped and chickadee’d

Out from the woods behind us.

The fire, low and burning

Lower, was pumpkin skin,

Ever-ripening with the point

Of our stories and our pasts.

Road trip bathrooms in the form

Of shrubs, cups, cans, and pans,

But not yet hands. We one-

Up in extremity. Our voices

Add in and make the forest

A thousand and three croaks,

Caws, chirps, and chickadees.

About yesterday.

I forgot to say

Heads up on a heartbreak,

Hot and heavy,

Ready and deadly.

My God, is the only way to communicate

Through clacking cliche,

Rhythm and alliteration?

Metered out into today’s dosage.

Watch the News Room elegy

For the American Dream.

I watch my line to the outside

Flicker and turn to static,

White noise and swallowed up

By the ticking tracker

Of what is worthy.

A hundred years between us all.

We hum our lives and let feet fall.

She asks me if I know the moves

To jitterbug, the jump of youth,

And goes to teach me,

Hand-in-hand and spinning

Off the decades, wrinkles,

And arthritis. The symbols

Of her teeth begin to seem

Like thirty-two beauty queens,

Give or take, and they tell me

I’m lovely,

With rhythm and heart.

“It’s nice to meet you

After all these years.”

“The pleasure is all mine.

I’m sure, my dear.”

 

I visit that place once more,

Where the boiler has been going

Strong for 50 years and will last

For another 50 with regular

Maintenance and elbow grease.

I found my anxiety in-between

The door frame, in the form of

A great huge German Shepherd,

Fighting off change and visitors.

But soon I calmed him

Pulled on his ears like daisies or

A fire-bell, and looked out

The storm windows, single-paned

And flexible. A line of trees

Far off and green are tempting

Some like a matador,

To run through, fast and far,

Red in their eyes. I’ve done this

Dance. The red slipped to my mind,

And lit up the darkest parts,

Woke them up and brought them

Forward. I’m done with all that.

I’m through with sharpening my teeth,

And sprinting, full-tilt- into an open cage.

The trees still stand there, listening,

And to others, they mean warmth,

Keeping safe and distant

From the Honda factories, skyscrapers,

And all those filled graves.

From the stone bank where I now stand

They are a blanket held up to the light.

Sheet after paper-thin sheet,

Waiting to be written, waiting

For us to see them.

My mother spreads out her arms

Like eagle wings, but I can’t

Hear what she is saying.

I’m drinking now.

I’m thinking now.

The ideas breaking like waves

And waving at me, nothing but

Smiles, as I sit on a porch swing

In the town my family came

From, in the house my father

Came from, in the arms of

No on in particular.

They’re calling me out to the

Water where I will dip my feet

Into the cool green blood that

Soaks into your cells.