Single Light

Single light seen through the kitchen window.
I can see it – the only thing in the darkness –
orange and small and up on the hill, a purple halo encircling it. 
 
Take me far away from here –
out through the roof like a ghost with nerve endings still thrumming –
into bracing winter-air.
Take me away, down toward the Cedar River flowing out south of town,
the low-flowing water barely turning the sand,
the bank receding like a hairline on a man grown
tired of days.
 
Take me over the thresholds of once-remembered giants,
noble and great fathers who loved each other and their children,
who stood tall while we watched what it meant to be brave.
 
Take me over the remnants of forests –
sprawling gardens of red oak and black walnut,
of wild plum trees and white pine.
 
Take me over the the small towns and small cities and then over the plains
of southeastern Iowa, across the Des Moines River out of Lee County
and into the old slave-owning state of Missouri.
Take me past the rolling hills of Hannibal,
playing dirt-poor memories of Twain as a boy regarding the flow of the river, or
playing an echo of the tapping melody of Shoeless Joe from Hannibal Mo.
Take me down to Ferguson, the ghosts
of National Guard soldiers gathering at its borders, some five miles away from my son.
 
Allow me a moment to regard the sky, still dark, hopefully
the chance of some stars still twinkling, a reminder
overhead that we have been built up from their dust and will
some millenium return.
Then let me wander down in through the roof of a single apartment
and kiss the forehead of my grown and sleeping son.
 
And now snapping back,
back through the roof, tears sudden and burning,
back over the fading chalk drawing of a fallen body on a city street,
back over the echoes of Nigger Jim’s stories of witches whipping him as two white boys listen, hidden,
one who will eventually become wise while one remains dangerous and foolish, then
back over the border and into Iowa, back over the shadows of two brave fathers,
over the whisper of the Cedar River, and now,
here in my kitchen staring without seeing as my backyard,
draped in snow, slowly emerges from the night,
the light of the morning coming up on a slow
count, the glowing orange streetlight on the hill
no longer solitary, the tears still hot.