I.
On the way up to the lake house,
the back of the vehicle jammed
with things of this earth:
snacks, casseroles, a snowboard,
three pairs of snow pants, a snow shovel for the ice rink,
skates, sleeping bags, water,
wine –
and after passing barn upon barn,
acre upon acre
of crumbling stone and faded red paint
in the deepening twilight,
Suamico to Pulaski to Gillet to Suring
we pass one of the new kind of barns
that look like a huge tent, a cylinder on its side,
shaved off at the bottom so it doesn’t
roll away across the fields, bouncing
across the Midwest,
filled with nothing but light, as though if
pierced by telephone poles or church steeples
the light from the inside would wind
into the black frigid night like smoke,
bright swirling ropes
to tether the stars.
II.
I don’t pretend to understand that light
is a particle and a wave, a thing and an action
but the I know that barn is a belly,
pregnant with light
in the winter blackness –
though I carry this body forward, onward,
nearing fifty years on the planet but now
there will be no more copies of me, just those
already out in the world,
and in this vehicle hurtling across the frozen ground,
and those in the ground;
I once heard that some languages have no way
to express what could have been – it is or it is not,
it happened or it did not,
but even without words I know those mothers
with children lost think about
their may-have-been faces and their
could-have-been dreams,
and what it would be like to embrace them some day
when they would come home for Thanksgiving,
stamping their feet on the rug
to shake off the snow, someone shy
waiting behind,
and I know they also wonder
what would become of those
that would not have been.
III.
On the drive home with leftovers, unfolded clothes,
and wet boots thrown carelessly into the back –
without wine but with added memories and bruises,
snow comes down in slanting sheets:
Townsend, Lakewood, Crivitz,
so that there is no road ahead at all,
only the headlights catching a
conical cross-section of light
in the starless night,
particle or wave, thing or action,
its job is the same –
my middle almost-driving son
sits buckled next to me while I feign complete calm
as oncoming snowplows obliterate the windshield,
and the edge of the road pulls at my tires;
he selects music
and hands me the coffee from
the gas station, a beacon of swirling white light
along the highway far behind us already –
this son who may not even have been at all,
had Jacob lived, he is my version of Seth
after Abel was killed by Cain, though
Jacob never cried out
at all.
Can a person be
replaced? It’s ridiculous to even say,
but as far as I can tell,
there is no diminution of light
unlike the red paint fading and cracking and peeling
on the barns I cannot see –
whether particle or wave it
persists – and though I was pierced once,
the light, escaping,
doubled,
then tripled,
and I just didn’t see,
couldn’t see,
cannot yet see
where some of it
waits
for me.
Halfway North 