Carters Lake on A Last Summer Weekend.

The amish people were in faded blues like a sky over an empty corn field at the end of summer when the harvest has left only dust and heat in the middle of nowhere.

The women had on hats and long dresses, boots laced up past their ankles. The girls walked almost along the edge of the water but they never touched it. They rippled away from the lake like little waves, becoming in themselves water, as if to remain separate from the external element itself. How strange it must feel to be in the world but not of it.

Fragments of blue dresses and sky disappear into the trees and I can hear an entire thirsty world wrestling against the breeze, not knowing where it is coming from but knowing where they are going.

After they are gone, the empty beach is a deserted cornfield. Crows fly in like thieves dropped from a plane in a secret location. They exchange a few fragments of thought. There is nothing there for them to steal but crumbs of sin and purity that were left behind.

Talking after running

Translations from the English

The heart after running is less likely
to lose itself to ledge or leap. It has

Asserted resolve over a measurable distance.
So if the heart leaps after running, it is more

Than a magnitude of muscle memory. Doesn’t
The steady heart know the world’s greatest

Victories are like fireflies in a July field
I walk across after the night’s mile has cooled

Me down? Steadier than these glimpses
Of what threads through us, across time

And space. Yet it leaps as though into the light
for words it might wander toward

If this path did not already describe it best.

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home after dark

eventually we will catch up to ourselves.

the fireflies will be messengers to tell us of all of the things we have missed in our absence.

we prodigal sons waiting at the gate of our father’s home will be let in.

and the lamps will burn.

and the music will play.

and everyone we’ve ever loved will be smiling by the firelight waiting to greet us with open arms.