They’ve trained us so well
we believe in midnight
magic, a dividing line.
After a while we cannot recall
that the mind
makes midnight, not the world.
No different than
2:47 AM, it moves
all around the earth. Call it 
a boundary because you need one.
Only reason. It makes you feel
heroic to breach it or to 
honor it, depending on 
what you desire. Fly in
across that line to stop 
a bomb, a train, a love
affair. Fly in across
that line to advance
a dream, a peace, a war
on hammering sound and
thickened old blood. 
Time is one of those things
that’s real but not
as we have been led to
imagine; that fact sounds
so pedestrian it might get killed
as it crosses the street toward
midnight. Toward what we 
have been taught to believe.
The body, the belief lingering 
between life and death. You lie 
there thinking interstitially
right up to 2:47 AM when 
you finally fall asleep, flat
on your back, mouth open,
inhaling, exhaling, hanging
out of time completely. 

It’s a project. Doorways. Walking backwards through.
Not like entering, not like leaving.
Ghosts know this: not all passages
lead somewhere. Who you are 
and where you’re going are sometimes
unrelated. Where you’ve been might be
the only place you can know. The walls
become exhausted here from holding up
lights, so they go dark. Easier to hold up
mystery than fact, journey than destination. 
This is a doorway and you are halfway here,
halfway there. Peekaboo, darling I’m home,
now I’m here, now I’m there. This is how
loss never ends. Doorways out of interiors.
Interiors glimpsed from doorways, from 
exteriors. Wilderness everywhere. Tired
of assuming civilization’s in there, and
uncivilized is out there. You lean against
the doorjamb, sleep
standing up halfway between.
Walking backwards exhausted, 
a guilty party behind you, or before you. 
How to describe this world 
that endlessly holds its past at arm’s length
and won’t enter its present for fear
of walls enthralled to ghosts forever,
leaving no distance between us
that suspends us in doorways
between what is allegedly safe and 
what’s drowned in flop sweat? Don’t bother,
walk backwards, keep quiet, stay alive
if not free, if not either in or out.

What it will take you
to be present now,
this deep in time
from your starting point,
is the willingness
to chase presence
along ruts in your road
until it stands still
for you. For you,

it will pull off
the trail
and watch until 
you see it and then
it will gesture.
To see it and respond
you will have to 
stop. Stop

and step away 
from the too-worn trail
for a moment and walk 
(don’t run) into 
the clearing where it
stands and say,
hello or namaste
or whatever moves you;
it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter

if it answers you
in your own language
or with words you’ve
never heard or even if
you do not understand
them as not much
about this
is about understanding.

Understanding is 
your boogeyman,
your feared beast,
your somehow
still-longed-for handcuff;
if you’d given that up
long ago
and relied on just 
standing there with
what you’re currently
facing, what’s always
been ahead of you,
you would have known
all along the truth 
of your presence and
how to hold it close,
what it would take.

Consider the long work of the men of industry:

these steps
carved with
tools of stone,
bronze. iron,
steel;

the rails alongside
carved from wood
with tools of stone, 
bronze, iron,
steel;

all the fires
used to forge 
the tools,

all fueled
with wood peat
coal and oil of whale
shale and the blackened
deep raised from beneath
our feet.

They’ve been building for so long.

How much higher 
does the monument
have to tower
over the stench
for them to be able
to stand on top,
breathe deep of the smoke
and carnage below, 
and call it good?

Snow tomorrow,
not first snow but
first plowable depth.

At some point tomorrow
you’ll be seated,
chin in hand, 

trying to guess
how bad the roads are
while regretting

unpurchased hot cocoa 
that would have made
for complete comfort

and safety in the living room
from which you watch 
a world slowly changing.

As things disappear into 
humps under snow
you will shake your head

at unprepared cars
slipping down hills
and around corners,

and you will feel again
the ancient fear:
what of everything I most love

will not reemerge
when this snow is gone,
when the winter is gone?

measuring my weeks

sifting through days
as if they were
lumps in a sugar bowl

examining the texture
of each rock
of particulate sweetness
hoping for a spoonful
to cure what ails me

selflessness
is so sour

not that I would know that
except in theory

as I am so offensive
and rank with my
own decades of
misguided self care

nothing tastes sweet

hidden at my core 
is a small, dim light
what you see is just my shell
going through the motions

everything that looks sincere
as well as
everything that looks
faked or false

everything that seems solid or fluid
everything that seems remotely static
that shows I’m settled for life
into the nest of my identity

every cuddly blink
all the sighs and furtive glances
at thighs and backsides
all the human moves through the fair

all that action and lust
it’s all just
a package of motions
I’m going through

every rage at insult real or imagined
every dangled bait to draw attack
every sneer and morseled-out hateful offering
to war-doctors and high priests of the blinding

just going through the motions
so the world won’t notice
the dead lamp within
still stale and cold

everything I do out here
is motion — is lies
masturbatory once
now tedious hideous and old

dim light within like
a salt lamp rimed with dust
I tried to shine brightly once
but failed and started this pantomime

now and then thinking
my motions have become me
and I them
I’ve begun to forget my light 

it remains within 
and continues to dim 
but now and then it flares
I cannot predict or explain when

but when it does happen
I stop moving for a short time
and try to remember which I am 
the shadows of my motions or the light 

slow misstepping

arrhythmic
plodding to
the near-end

saying 
it all 
by saying nothing
directly

this is 
how it’s done

and it is

You are going to be fine,
they tell you; you are going
to find the bridge inside you
and cross your gaps. You are
about to see stones in the stream
before you and perceive all at once
that there is a path across
with only a few scary leaps. 

You are going to be fine,
they tell you; between
the appearance of the bridge
and the revelation of the stones
your agony must stem
from a choice you made
to have it in your life
as a lesson, as pain for gain
to help you find the path.

You are going to be fine,
they tell you; they say
you are in all the right places
at once: on this side of the stream,
with the bridge and the wet stones
between you and the far bank;
already through the worst of it
and on the other bank, weakly
dancing; with your pain holding you 
tight as you make the journey
no matter which way you choose.

You are going to be fine,
they tell you. You fall down
writhing on the cold floor
of your bathroom. That’s it,
they say. Dance it out. You roll
over on your back and stare 
at the peeling ceiling. That’s 
the way of this, they say. 
That’s the joy of the struggle.
You freeze there and can’t move.
That’s it, they say. You are
going to be fine. You hold on to that,
they say. No pain without gain,
they say, as you try not to cry.