Advent
In the middle of December
to start over
to assume again
an order
at the end
of wonder
to conjure
and then to keep
slow dirty sleet
within its streetlight
Nate Klug
Conjugation
This early the garden’ s bare
but people pay to walk it,
at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,
and stoop to mouth the names —
araucaria
araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something
Japanese — each particular
ridiculous to be.
Kalden's Story
So won a name in this place,
handing off lath strips to a hammer's
measure, seeing the passing girls' slits
in roils of timber grain.
Mountains, barley, scaffold,
dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly
from the hoods of faraway bells
monks emerging like hairless animals.
Parade
As with this Jet Ski family
braiding the lake
with bigger and bigger shocks
until the one
car-sized one
cuts his engine
and, following him, for an instant
they all coast
through silences
of self-made
rain —
how much is required now
to carve,
out of the general
livable quiet,
independence?
True Love
Off rows of windshields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sudden
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with people in them
awaiting people they imagine
hurtling through suburbs
of silver woods
awaiting them. True
love needs interference,
a certain blizzard distance,
for the words to worm through.
Remember Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the sidewalk.
And the sunlight, harder after.
Wisconsin
By new names
and then no names
at all, their laws
will reach your land,
Lorine, to feed
on your much loved
marshy spaces
whose occasional faces
discern a stranger
from far off
but like to take
a break from well
or welding just
to talk. We can-
not extricate
a place from those
it’ s made of, the sounds
it makes. But now
from Blackhawk
Island to Madison
to Washington,
geologies
thin; more things
sound or work