forgive my geography, it’s true i’m obsessed
with maps. with flags. a Starbucks on the block
means migration. any restaurant with bulletproof glass
is a homecoming. underneath my gym shoes
is a trail of salt. that last sentence is a test.
does the poet mean:
(a) grief
(b) winter
(c) diaspora
(d) this is the wrong question
(e) all of the above
i’m always out south
of somewhere. i know the sun rises
in Lake Michigan and sets out west.
i got primos i’ve never met. there’s a word
for that. (where did they go?) all the steel mills shuttering up
like conquered forts. one day, there will be an urban tour
through South Chicago. picture the soy cappuccino-
sipping cool kids wearing Chicago Over Everything-
branded hoodies taking selfies in front of machines
that once breathed fire. pretending the bones
are the real thing.

Tracks are all that define these voices,
hungry lives pulsing sacred ground.
We are a journey of distressed shapes,
red essence on parchment, occupying a life.
We look for the fated four-legged that paced
this way, a tested and well-worn path
among storms, mud, into this shared hidden
brush. Coyote, slipping by through old
winter grass, warns in a pagan tongue,
licking after our scent. We pick up pace,
tighten our careless reins, snap back at the
yellow-eyed clown with throat hunger,
that gnawing bone that drives us on. Quieted,
we hear the heart beating. A desperate breath
crashes through dry branches, a silhouette
give away. In an instant we let go
of weapons and invite a quick death. We
watch our knives glistening. Obsidian
works for us. What image of blood on flesh,
odor of iron. A vermilion sun heavy with
spring looks upon reflections of death
in hard visions, our favorable hunt—
whitetail not quick enough for downwind
lessons. Our horses burdened, deer shadows
left on landscape, we push forward.
These tracks ours now. Game will heal all.
Our offspring dance, Grandmother prepares a
fire and sharpens another knife. During the
feast we thank any god absent from our table.

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they've read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
"My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste
for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine."
They're not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
that they're the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.

When you move away, you see how much depends
on the pace of the days—how much
depended on the haze we waded through
each summer, visible heat, wavy and discursive
as the lazy track of the snake in the dusty road;
and on the habit in town of porches thatched in vines,
and in the country long dense promenades, the way
we sacrificed the yards to shade.
It was partly the heat that made my father
plant so many trees—two maples marking the site
for the house, two elms on either side when it was done;
mimosa by the fence, and as it failed, fast-growing chestnuts,
loblolly pines; and dogwood, redbud, ornamental crab.
On the farm, everything else he grew
something could eat, but this
would be a permanent mark of his industry,
a glade established in the open field. Or so it seemed.
Looking back at the empty house from across the hill,
I see how well the house is camouflaged, see how
that porous fence of saplings, their later
scrim of foliage, thickened around it,
and still he chinked and mortared, planting more.
Last summer, although he’d lost all tolerance for heat,
he backed the truck in at the family grave
and stood in the truckbed all afternoon, pruning
the landmark oak, repairing recent damage by a wind;
then he came home and hung a swing
in one of the horse-chestnuts for my visit.
The heat was a hand at his throat,
a fist to his weak heart. But it made a triumph
of the cooler air inside, in the bedroom,
in the maple bedstead where he slept,
in the brick house nearly swamped by leaves.