TONIGHT


ten years ago today


Tonight, here, on the edge of the West,
we are sweating in a bistro, drinking
iced cider and doughuts as the leaves
fall down around us in the hot wind.
Lightning glistens off the windows
and surrounds us in dramatic flashes--
it's just so damned big out here,
so open, no place to hide in all this
flatness, this is everything we're
afraid of, and love, the darkness,
all of this October heat, the wind,
all the withered trees rattling husks,
and driving here all day, in the dying
afternoon haze, the highway lined
with skunks and bloated deer and the lovely
smell of decay, and then, in the grove
of birch we saw a rolled car and medics
kneeling in deep grass over a body.
All around us, the world was
turning lavender and rust, bending
to the wind, and in the hills, the cattle
were slowly coming home. The sky wheeled
with hawks, as if what was happening here,
here of all places, mattered, and I thought back
to how ten years ago my father died,
how these things come to matter in ways
we can never really know.

PELIGROSO


written in Minneapolis, October 6


At Ludington we'd been walking
the pier just like always, the sun

fresh and full on our faces, the wind
gusting up the waves in heaving

sprays, and so we ventured into
the deep, dancing between billows

of green, then blue, then oil-slick black.
The swells sucked and swallowed the rocks,

then flooded the air with rain and
mist, cold foam, delicious agony!

We knelt behind the salacious
lighthouse where the wind sullied our

souls and small boats dallied and dipped
indecently. We hid there in

our lee cove and necked til our bones
chilled in the summer sun, ridiculous,

and headed back for avacados
and gouda cheese, back through the

swells and the gusts and the heaving
waves and all the vertiginous

sway when we spotted the skinny lads
in red trunks, all ribs and tanned flesh

running along the pier, several
diving in, and one red rescue boat

bobbing up and down in the green
shallows, banging against the rocks

and the DANGER/PELIGROSO
sign, it happens so fast, someone

strayed too close to the pier or was
pulled out by the rip tide and now

standing on the shore a family
of Mexicans, their black hair pasted

wet on their foreheads, shivering,
staring out at the malevolence

of the world, at the boys diving,
deaf to all of the shouts drowned out

by the wind and waves crashing
at their cold, shriveled feet. It is

so hard to love in this world of
terrors, something we must always

learn, something that seems to wash
over us again and again.