231 years later---

A grown man with jeans dirtier than his face,

but not as dirty as the overcast sky, just this side of rain,

pushes a bike with an old stroller tied to the back

as a trailer down the busiest street in town.

My grandfather is fitted for a hearing aid

at the V.A. Hospital

64 years after riding a battlecruiser

around the Pacific Rim.

Three years I walked unsighted and silent

Through small towns and backcountry dust

While wonders unremarkably blew by.

Three years I laughed and tied my hope to sand

And chased with mortal, calloused hands

Those dream-built palaces soon to arise.

For three years I watched as my slow soul grew

Worn and wise, waiting, undistilled.

Were we just filled with some crowd-pleasing lines?

Awake, unable, abandoned again.

Sweet sleep sidesteps my soul, and it’s raining

On Jerusalem since midday Friday.

The palaces have tumbled from their perch.

A blood-red brow beckons my curse.

Three years disappear.  I’ll mourn my curse on Sunday.

Describe how heaven was when you first saw it

or heard of it.  Now describe how heaven makes the earth come green

in the spring when the soil is always soft from melting frost

and much too much rain, so that the earth is as moist as humidity

and has everything in common with a damp, midsummer evening.

Describe what is pagan and gets you kicked out

and what you can get away with and still get in;

why perennials can be planted once in the soft spring soil

and return new each year

as though proof that they are reverent,

and though colorful, not pagan. 

Then describe how you would ask all this of,

which means to pray to,

God who, for fear our frail bodies

and souls would give way,

never says his own name to us,

pronounced with light

and oceans of salt

and earth's own soul

and birth and death all at once.

Why make such slippery and breakable things

that cannot even hear a name

and remain whole

or come new again in spring

like the maple trees

I fathered and watered in my grandfather's

front yard?

I have a friend, who's a fisherman,
short and unathletic,
with a goatee that is well meant
but never trimmed.
He wants me to fish, to love
lures and tactics for luring.
Love scales and gills the way he does.
And he can't swim, never has.
I joke with him saying he is jealous of the fish,
who swim without him.
I tell him I don't have time to fish
before the lakes and creeks become sheet ice
for the winter, but maybe next year.
Honestly, I don't love fish enough
to want to look them in the eye, or fry them,
eating around each little plastic bone.
Mostly I am jealous of how they are lifted
and then released by the competing currents,
like it was their own creation, the water moving
with them and for them.
I cannot bring myself
to pull them from their own world
to the softer, hollow air that won't respond
like the currents of water,
even when they take to thrashing it
with their whole bodies like they do
hanging from a line.
That is when they remind me
the most of myself, and is why
I don't fish.