Once

there was smoke coiling the sky, dust and rubbish windblown in an alley, a light rain beginning to fall, once a black Cadillac rusted in a field of milkweed, October snow come down over Lake Huron, once a young man disappeared and was found days later a hundred and fifty miles away alone weeping near the railroad tracks in Carey, Ohio, those thoughts, those days, consciousness expended determining the value of wage labor, the long-eared owl in the red maple watches a father in his living room chair weeping, furies and Molochs, hot-eyed comedies, the shy and kind one’s mercies redeem me, old-souled premonitions, eternities repeated in a red and black flow.