I used to lay in the dark with this wild idea
that great celestial beings stood guard at the
corners of my room, shrouded in ten-thousand
unblinking eyes and milk-white fire, deputized
by Christ to keep Satan and his supporters from
scratching at the window and pulling my card.
I would ask God to look after me and those I loved
and those I didn’t understand, and if I couldn’t sleep,
be it youthful regret or the shadowed chimera at
the foot of the bed, I would open a gospel and
thumb for red letters. Now I close my eyes and
breathe deeply, picture myself in Northern California
fishing the Sierra Nevadas with Dad and all the dogs
we ever had. I picture sitting at the dinner table with
Mom and my sister, laughing as the record skips,
our feet in the cool sand watching boiler steam
from the Ludington ferry stretch clear to Wisconsin
as if tethered to the purview. I search both sand dune
and marram grass for new angles to old ideas,
the answer high in rafters, with the sweet, painful
reminder that all roads end – mine a thinning two-track
weaving in and out, past valleys and over hillsides before
tapering off into row after row of eastern white pine.
And with it comes the night, and the dark we all
succumb to. Then I dream.
Evening Panoply 