The Plaines

No silent moments
survive the constant roar of planes.
River crashing,
its wild siege tries to claim the low lands,
the Methodist camp
propped up on popsicle sticks and faith,
hoping to survive another flood.
But nothing stays submerged too long.

33 revolutions stopped at the end of the record,
each one a layer of dust
on a third place bowling trophy.
Absent from dank basement pot lucks,
and missing sets of deviled eggs on folding tables.
They rise to the surface,
or they would if we sat with them long enough.

But it’s not in our nature
to let their ghosts hang
over us thick like bacon smoke
mixing with cigarettes
in the back booths
of The Sugar Bowl.
The river, the incessant trains,
the backyard of the airport:
no peace in these plains.

Their whispered names flow through us
but we instantly forget the details.
That last construction job,
the work worn hard on the hands,
but paychecks summer easy spent.
Flowing rivers of beer bought,
or coerced from older friends,
babbling thoughtless laughter
echoes through the forest preserves.

Now haunting in plain sight.
“How could you not see it” they ask?
The careless makeup never blending.
Even the cigar haze couldn’t cover
the off-gas of catastrophe bubbling up.
So much youth
over-spilled the river bed, unheard.

But we grew up not asking questions,
accepting the menacing rumble as normal.
He was a product of this whole place:
Everywhere, America. Where
we grow our own monsters,
no matter how much we try to separate.
No matter how much we mourn his victims,
their stories never truly escaped.

There’s always a lax first case,
a wrist slap fragment of a long sentence,
to show them how much rope they can take.
And when we finally see his face,
why is it always a white man?
Start with that first unearned break,
a thru line crisscrossing the country
like the constant movement of freight.

It was a time of unasked questions,
empty words stretched thread bare.
We are bonded in our shared
distrust of silence,
no time to contemplate.
And our nightmares grew
out of craving
that low background hum.
Our held breath finally coughed out
with the endless vapor trail of names.

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