By Button Poetry
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.
Michael Lee, performing at Icehouse in Minneapolis, MN.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
For Don.
00:06
I float home across the plains over this dark thread of road,
00:12
past the lights along the Minnesota River,
00:16
golden nails fastening shut the horizon,
00:19
past the snow-covered fields reflecting the moon’s wet light
00:23
until we can no longer tell what is land, or water, or sky.
00:28
And we cannot tell which our brother rests in now.
00:31
Everything to the east darkens,
00:33
and the whole country closes around the heart of the Midwest,
00:37
around its churches and its silos,
00:40
its pilgrims journeying before death to kneel and kiss its winding fingers,
00:45
its noble silence spreading between the Mississippi and the Rust Belt
00:49
like a moth-torn quilt,
00:51
a eulogy left unsaid at the edge of the lips.
00:54
Death, though it is final, is also hesitant and unsure.
01:00
It is the persistent silence which follows
01:03
that convinces us this boy in the ground was the one.
01:06
This land, too,
01:08
these factories and these barges, sunning themselves in the gray light
01:13
as if they might dip beneath the water
01:16
and reemerge, glistening and alive,
01:18
these docks and these cranes,
01:20
these warehouses angling into the shadows,
01:23
preserved in a deathlike geometry, though tenuous.
01:26
As if if we clap and summon the Lord,
01:30
if we stomp our feet until we cannot smell what keeps the body here,
01:34
until the body shakes,
01:35
then might these songs wake him?
01:37
Might these factories turn and light like a bulb screwed in?
01:41
Might we be sentence-like,
01:43
not final, but running on forever through the grammar of mourning,
01:48
the grammar of laughter when laughter is all we have left,
01:51
until all that is left is his skin and his bones
01:55
and we, who buried him,
01:57
our only stories are ash on our grandchildren’s mantles
02:00
and his name, spray painted on the Oak Park wall, is painted over,
02:05
or chips off and washes into the dirt,
02:08
and his bones, too, become earth,
02:11
and the bullet lodged in his leg is all that remain,
02:16
and rests, a small black seed opening in his coffin.
02:22
(cheers and applause)
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
