What is song but silk strung
between one tremulous life
and another?
Michael Lauchlan’s recent collections are Trumbull Ave. (Wayne State University Press, 2015) and Running Lights (Cornerstone Press, 2026). In addition to Innisfree, he has contributed to many publications, including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore, and Lake Effect. His poems have been included in anthologies from WSU Press, MSU Press, and Oxford University Press. He was awarded the 2011 Consequence Prize for Poetry. He is currently Poet in Residence at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Rivering
L’avenir est comme le reste: il n’est plus ce qu’il était.
—Paul Valery
I thought I understood time,
how a day began at five,
how I began in 1954
after the war and before
the war and during the war
my father fought alone each night,
like everyone else—
how day began while night
still rang in our heads--how night
rushed us to close up roofs
before the gray above
exploded furious and wet.
Night promised so much.
I thought time rivered on
under my little raft,
thought to wash up
midway in the journey
on some post industrial isle
to confront three beasts
and be saved by Beauty—
or ride out into the gales
of the wide lakes where
great ships seek the sea.
I thought, like everyone else,
to see grandchildren enter a world.
But time preys on small craft
and fills arteries and rots
cartilage and scrambles the words
by which we’d make a claim
on all the floods to come.
Gravity
I’d never really used a torch before,
but David called wanting help
scrapping a rusted fire escape
on a building he needed to save.
A good cause, he told me.
Bring ropes, too, he said—
heavy ones so we can tie off
each story and lower everything
gently. This seemed nuts,
even to twenty-year-old me,
but I borrowed a van and showed up
with oxygen and acetylene tanks,
with a torch, a medieval mask,
and great oily coils.
We started on the top floor,
looping a rope around a pillar
and tuning the flame to blue.
David had friends standing outside
keeping tension on lines
and watching the grand event.
Through a visor, I saw the iron
go red and then orange,
then begin to stream away.
I leaned into the air
and dropped each railing as though
I knew what was what,
then started cutting flanges
that held the platform to bricks
forty feet above the alley.
David took the torch and I took
his spot inside, anchoring a team
of singularly bored helpers.
He called from the fire exit
and then I was airborne.
I was still holding on
when I hit the pillar, my body
providing its few newtons
of resistance to slow the descent.
Outside, a window pane
shrieked, and sounds rose
from the alley to our doorway
in the sky, and they hang still
in another precipitous century—
the cries of terror and awe.
Hearing Horace Silver
I ravel, emitting threads sufficient
to weave a span, as a spider has,
between two pines near my house.
You can only see it at dusk
and only from a certain angle
unless you happen upon her
suspended over nothing, as though
frozen in flight. You might walk
unawares through a week's labor.
She must begin again.
***
For years, I've heard “Song
for My Father” in bar sets
and concerts and felt—what?
Faux nostalgia? Phantom grief?
Is she vertiginous between
the pine limbs, a thousand
leg-spans from earth? Maybe
she rests easy on a filament
that vibrates above the void.
***
In Silver’s intervals—a tribute
and longing, like the gap between
a mercy that might have been
and what, instead, was.
We also sing who know
only the shape of father, only
where one might have stood.
Of course, I had many fathers,
even dad, himself, doing
what he could. Coaches
fathered me, and my brothers,
nudging me into a torn world.
***
What is song but silk strung
between one tremulous life
and another? On a momentary strand
we feel the wind, the hum
of the turning earth, the feet
of all who pass near.
And what fathers, what
mothers? What tethers us,
pushes forth, releases, pulls,
connects? Sometimes at dusk
it resolves into view.
Landing
If the back stairs of the old flat
constitute a gray container for time,
my father still snoring on the upper porch
and the downstairs tenant cursing from her kitchen
and me both 10 years old
and 70, suspended on a landing between,
maybe the onions and potatoes and meat
no longer simmering but now
annealed to a pot my father
has forgotten on the stove,
maybe that stench that really can’t
be called a cooking smell mixes
with the ash of a house fire of a store
burning of the latest bombs falling
and films my tongue even when I laugh,
and maybe everyone I pass crossing
the busiest street is carrying a stairway
and if we could see them teetering
like Chaplin’s stacked-up burdens
in manic silent movies, we might
wonder how traffic ever gets past
such tangles of stringers and treads
such clouds of falling soot.
Denied Entry to a Prison
for a writers’ group, I fidget
in a molded plastic seat.
Wait-listed to get inside a place
everyone wants to leave, I stare
across the room at a thin woman,
who’s brushed her long hair,
put on her best blouse and driven
fifty miles. Now she perches
on a blue chair, waiting to get
patted and probed, to walk through
glass doors that hum open
and close again. I smile at her
like the vacant fool I am.
A middle-aged couple emerges
from the sliding doors. They ask
questions at the desk, then huddle
together conferring. A prisoner rolls
a mop-bucket into the john.
Everything is quite routine.
Men in our group spend decades
waiting out parole boards.
A name is called and the lithe woman
strides toward the barrier.
I’m watching. I’m not watching. I’m
reading. I’m checking the clock.
Almost an hour now. Locked up
as a teen, a man in our group
has been inside one hundred
ninety two thousand seven
hundred and twenty hours.
The couple sidles toward an exit
after an hour with a boy
who once ran the point
on his eighth grade team.
Bats Where I Worked
When the bats came through their end
of St. Francis Home, where one boy
playing an endless game of eight ball
raised a cue before I could speak
and plucked the bat from the air,
he turned a quick, nearly invisible thing
into a falling towel, into a small mophead
dropping from a hook with a dull thud,
into a folded leathery lump to be scooped
with a dustpan into whatever can was close.
The game might be going on still,
rack by rack, unless he finally snapped and lifted
a cue ball right into the face of some
later, meaner version of me. Or the boy
might have sunk into his own hollow chest
and been lowered, maybe with taps and flag,
maybe in a cheap box with no one at all
standing sadly by, and his last thoughts
—as thought arcs backward toward a ground—
might have leapt to a gray, falling form.
Captcha
This may take a few seconds.
Can you identify images containing traffic signs?
Can you identify traffic? Can you
recognize that—in your smart
little car with its magnesium wheels—
you are part of an endless flow
part of a teeming web of traffic
borne across the Bering Sea and around lakes
that once seemed the world itself
borne across the ocean bound or loose
or stuffed in steerage or across the steppes
after the fire the quake the war
the flood all the way back
to the rift valley and the veldt?
Can you find a quicker way home?
No one can. This may take
an hour or so. Or maybe weeks.
Can you recognize signs of distress
in a child–say a kid who got
turned around on a street corner
who speaks a language known by billions
on another continent? You may get lost
in the rush of sound he offers once
and then again with greater urgency.
Can you read your lover’s eyes
when they go a little dead after
a day’s hourly grief? This may take
a few months. Do you recognize
the shape beneath a sheet on a sidewalk?
Even in grainy footage it might
if it weren’t so very thin
remind you of your daughter
curled under a make-believe tent
in your living room.
Thinking of Wormholes
and entanglement and spooky action at a distance,
I’m sure I comprehend little of the world,
the underpinnings of my life, and of all I claim
to know. Even gravity remains a mystery, though
I’ve had experience falling, once
from a ladder in a leaky bathroom,
a reciprocating saw still reciprocating as,
together, we dropped toward a ceramic conjunction.
Gravity is convincing. I may grasp,
but don’t quite understand how
the large mass of earth pulls on the small
mass of me. I take it on faith and inhabit
a realm of apprehending and being apprehended.
A woman kissed me one night in the front room
of an old house she rented, the lights of the bridge
to Canada winking at us through her windows
while a force in the spinning electrons of her lips
tore open a cosmic clock so that forty years,
replete with children, grandchildren, and jobs, could
tumble by. So it seems. Particles of the past
change each time we visit them.
Aside Myself
My mind is not itself.
—Henri Cole
During your heart attack
I wore a mask in the waiting room
watching as the capitol was breached
while they drew blood
and stuck terminals to your skin.
They beat a cop with a flag and
it wasn’t in the end a heart attack
though the capitol fell and kept
falling and still falls. Now,
I’m waiting in another hospital
reading an old New Yorker
report on Iceland. So much
lava and ruin and cortisol, but
I’m no longer really reading.
My eyes trace lines, words,
letters until I’m only waiting,
thinking of Cole’s line. Nor
mine, I hear my voice answer.
Nor even my voice.
How little remains (I say
softly to a wall-mounted screen
where a couple discuss
granite countertops).
Fulcrum
You have to dislodge a stone,
a brick, or maybe a chunk of concrete
from the throat of a footing
you’re digging for a new porch
on an old house. You know
what you need: a stronger back.
Also leverage and purchase.
I’m no help at all,
sitting at a desk, thirty years on.
Though I’d like to claim
some deft insight, how
stepping back can reveal
a solution hidden in plain view,
you know better. Sometimes
we have to hammer at things
until our hands bleed.
Cussing, you widen the hole,
beat on the block with a pinch bar
until it chips, shifts, cracks.
When you prize fragments from the deep
and straighten in triumph, the sky
has turned a sullen shade.
Night is nosing onto the street
and you have posts to set, and kids
at home to story toward sleep.
Wind
When we shared a house with your sister
we slept for a time in a half finished attic
with visqueen stapled over insulation
and during storms the plastic would pop
and contract like a great lung. In the whale,
Jonah might have heard such sounds.
I finally screwed boards onto the rafters,
and I suppose we slept better. I remember
staring at the low front windows one night after love
while you breathed so evenly and streetlights
brightened the frozen panes of glass.
Now, we’re elsewhere, swept out by sirens
or restless leg syndrome or some
version of what moves everyone.
If it’s quiet there tonight, maybe
a wind shapes the dreams of lovers
in those rooms. For us, the wind stirs
a few maples and a tall pine that worries you
when it bends and groans during storms.
I love that dancing tree’s thousand arms,
but tonight I want to crawl back in time
to wait near windows on a haloed street
while blankets rise and fall and rise.
Blades and Mercy
Rain in winter/began first in the mind of God
—Philip Levine
You knew how our horizontal snow
seems to carry metal shavings while
we stuff hands into pockets and plod
to work. But maybe rain is worse,
flattening our hats and washing up
behind buses we’ve just missed,
leaving us late, soaked, and frozen
as well as broke. Because of snow
and the rain that came before
in the isolation tanks of these months,
I’m playing Joe Zawinul’s tune
Mercy, Mercy, Mercy
with Cannonball Adderly out front.
You probably heard them live
in a westside bar while Unamuno
drifted through your heart. I think
mercy began in some ancient mind
as a curling gust that makes us
forget for a moment who it was
we wanted to slash open and why.
In 1966, I was searching the grass
of a hot Detroit field, looking
for a baseball, when I met another boy
holding the ball and a switchblade
and looking pissed off. I guess
he had his reasons. The breeze died
while we inhaled the burned smell
from the local coffee plant. Then he flicked
his knife closed, tossed me the ball,
and we went on. Perhaps he, too,
now has grandchildren. Why not?
Mercy silvers through time, right
alongside the butchery and even God
can’t untangle them. Maybe
mercy began as a thought in the hand
of a woman touching a child’s shoulder,
or began as a baker’s fist in the dough,
with flour motes riding the morning light.
Mercy even swims backward sometimes,
a cataract of forgiveness releasing stone
from its molecular strictures. We can’t
go back, though we swirl, uproot,
and embark. But the wind that cuts
is not the only wind.
Running Lights
The wet gray blear, lights around
the semi trailers, night stretched
across mountains, the trash and stench
and even the fluorescence of a rest stop
where there’s precious little rest.
Mystical in sleep encrusted eyes–
dash lights, jazz pouring from speakers,
a swirl of flakes on asphalt, the tunnel
of their falling and the tunnel of high beams.
Once blood flow dwindles and our legs
cramp and the last shreds of wakefulness
fall away, all is visible, all is real.
We can only take so much of this
unless, like Delmore Schwartz
and John of the Cross, we started out
as long haul truckers. When late shift
cashiers see the hands and cheeks
of the damned and peer into caverns
carved by roads, they set down
cups of darkness and the soft clicks
sound like gates opening on green
backyards that yawn in our hearts
as we wish they might again,
as we wish they really had.
The Old Heavy in the Parking Lot
has been sitting there for years I guess most
mornings like a smoker who goes out for a pack
even after he’s quit and I just never noticed him
in his big old Ford like something Gene Hackman
would demolish while tracking heroin and brutalizing
Harlem until a few days after George Floyd died
when I heard him yelling into his phone about
demonstrators–Shoot them Just kill them all
and maybe he saw me glaring at his jowls
or maybe he noticed a sign on my porch but
now he makes a point of watching me while
I’m walking, reading news on the phone
or reading a poem aloud to the dog (her tastes
are discerning but eclectic) and I of course
am watching him wondering whether he’s armed
whether he’s calling a retired crony whether
he thinks he’s on patrol and whether he once was
in just such an eight cylinder cruiser back
when gas was cheap and no one cared much
if you used your club. I’m obsessing I know
about his rage his mornings and my sand grain
role in his cosmos as he flits through my dim
awareness like a vast beige butterfly and before
I’ve picked up after my dog he’s been supplanted
by other distractions and I’ve been stitched
into the fabric of his talk radio rant or perhaps
obliterated completely as he catches sight
of a neighbor’s disarming smile why not
we’re so strange this way hating straight ahead
and then loving from the corner of our eyes
what actually finally enters and fills us.
Road to Jackson
Not lost but weary, I open a map
and find a railroad stop and a prison and a town
named for a Scotch-Irish slaver who forced
Choctaw and Cherokee families to march west.
And took their land. Because he could.
Hands loose on the wheel, I wend past
the Sargent Road construction zone.
Along the way, thousands froze. Thousands
starved. How unsurprising to find
Jackson lodged between Chicago and Detroit,
to find it again in Mississippi. Roads
and rails and planes drop us on tarmacs
and driveways, forgetful, with our luggage
and our own griefs. What shocks me
almost awake as I barrel through
Michigan in my cool, metallic heart:
recalling how the refugees built
homes in desolate Oklahoma, then
scoured their scant reserves to send
famine relief to Ireland.
After a Fracture
I use a cane a crutch
passing rails and chairbacks
and hop from there to here
like a weary three-legged dog
at the end of a walk that’s not
really a walk I can’t walk
for now so I lunge one-footed
careening through the house knocking
plates and cups and papers
from every surface It was easy—
walking the dog walking the floor
walking my baby back home
the walking blues And feet in lines
of iambs trip nicely off the tongue
even while walking back a lie
Since the Rift Valley it’s so
human strolling through a park
or meandering down the dairy aisle
or dragging a cart bearing a few
possessions and fleeing a new
round of bombing Soon
it will be warm and I’ll lean
on my left and then on my right
—a miracle of human mechanics—
propelling myself at will
in search of a place to strike
a posture of repose
“Thinking of Wormholes,” “Fulcrum,” “Wind,” “Blades and Mercy,” “Running Lights,” “The Old Heavy in the Parking Lot,” “Road to Jackson” are from Running Lights, Cornerstone Press. Thanks to Bellingham Review, Tar River Review, Lake Effect, Anacapa, Poet Lore, Louisville Review, Cloudbank, and Rawhead, where other poems were first published.
Innisfree 43
A Closer Look: