FROM HERE TO THERE

My father wrestles with the chain, slams it

tangled toward the truckbed where it catches

tailgate, slither-clangs to a heap beneath

his feet.  Like a serpent of heavy links.

Like the unwieldy weight his bogus life

has been, his trying to move it from here

to there.  He curses God, who made him fail.

He turns, commands me pick up what I can.

I do: his stubborn will, his quiet code,

the all day bouts of walking through the yard

to find out what the moles have thieved.  The stare.

The muscle pulled.  The knife slammed down to hush

the dinner talk.  I’ve heaved to get to here,

mid-life, his life, to pack it up for good.

FOLLOWING AFTER

Along the backroads, I test the curves thrown wide

then stitched back in,

                                    rising toward the hills,

toward the ghost shapes of pine,

orderly, existential.

Paper mill country.

                                 Twenty years then pulp.

Trucks going in and trucks coming out.

This dusk finds me desultory, shucked-off.

The road’s unreachable even when we’re on it.

It goes toward its focus

                                          and hauls us behind.

Its form is composed of the jumbled and scattered,

what somehow still

                                 gets us near the sublime.

Barn.  Ditch.  Ford Fairlane on blocks.

Middle Bridge looming,

                                          scaffolding the flow.

Something through the brush, out of range, out of range.

I’ve chased the years the way my father did,

slow crawl past Joe Love’s store,

gear jerk

              over the bridge to Piney,

the roads arterial, coated with county dust.

Same old narrative as his,

                                    a little moonlight thrown in,

river smell breeze-lodged and constant.

The old man knew his stiff, they say,

could steer through the channel from memory alone,

take the head of the barge

                                        and nudge it, ease it,

all the way in without touching the lock wall,

in the deep deep dull of 3 a.m.,

Whitley in the background,

                                   no stranger to the rain.

I’m following after in my own quiet way,

doing my part

                        in the family’s loose lineage.

Nudge a word here.  Steer toward the deep.

Thirty years behind

                                      and a little too Lethean.

Be we don’t get the road map ever in time.

Only later.  Only after—after and always only after.

We get the monotone

                                      of life’s swift answer,

gut-stabbed, wedged where we can’t grab a hold.

I’ve spent the years tracing back

to my father’s slow ways,

born from the river,

                                  its driftwood, its distance,

from his watching, for a living, the ease-past and dazzle.

Dusk has its own course, a daily deduction.

These wheels give it hell

                                     and a merciful hush.

I’ve fought with the devil, got down on his level.

But through it all, I go where I’m going.

I know what I know,

                                     and I want to know more.