PERMISSION

The weather here is its own permission. Ice slight
on rear windshields must be cracked away
or warmed in strips by wire. Family is a gathering
of birds in hunting season. A collection plate of names
that sound like sound and wound. Whose name
on paper would you need to legitimize
to legislate to larceny
your story? We could mine all of Lake Superior out
for salt and strip the earth of the death of ore,
and leave blood behind defined by litter and cave-in,
air blast and drill malfunction, loss of job or hearing.
Loot out the bodies when you find them
buried in the snowdrift. Craft
word from wood and burn it with the lens
from your mother’s hottie Buddy Holly glasses.

Turn that concentrate of light on your thumb,
and smoke it off. Or tattoo yourself with sun.
Eye up to eclipse. Make your dioramas
how you like without regard for gravity
or the smell of shit you used for shit
for realism in your scene.

Everything is scene is screen, is actors in glass, is gas
propane grilling, is motive or motif
is What and is Is,
and What is an emotion a glossary
of the Pacific as you imagine it—California-close
as myth, and all you can conceive
of limitlessness. Snow this time of year
seems endless, too, which renders shovels moot
and cider the one solution to hands
friction-rich and lip-chap and redcheek.

This hearth is your birth, and North
is both direction and compulsion
up above the suspension bridge
where a Yugo was blown off in a storm
and stone-sank to the base of the lake,
as your father always intones
when you cross it,
and you find this little woe
reassuring so you squeeze his back