North Lane Home is north,
where sun arcs south.

Home is land
carved by glaciers.

Home is winter
with below-zero wind chill.

Home is blue
between snow and lightning.

Home is green
when fronts rip funnels.

Home is memory
wherever I will be.

Home is me.

Reine Kowalk a glacial river
steeps words
between generations

time bleeds
as we breathe
tilled earth

alfalfa
thick milk
hay

see how great grandpa bridles horses
hear grandpa cuss horse shit
smell grandma's classrooms

reach down to rub grease
on the ford's floorboards
as grandpa warns
don't lock doors

taste the south pacific
in wartime letters penned
by a tomboy called carrot top
and a farmer's son schooled
six years in one room

the table is set
with great grandma's butter
and frozen words flow
before birth after senility
as jerseys follow grandpa's call
come boss

great grandpa's death on the land
taken by his own hands
neck of snapped breath on the land
worked by his own hands
on the land who remembers
deer blood run
by arrow and hide cut
by sharp stone
on the land who remembers
blood let
by bodies spent
by age and birth
the land who remembers
hands cracked against a cheek
and a back stabbed
in angry heat
on the land
where blood and memory roll
down hills to wetlands
where blood and memory sew
weeping willows
where blood and memory fill
long arms of leaves
where wind carries the scent
of life and death

Stone Memories are buried
in graves at Hurd Cemetery.
The Kowalk name

chiseled on stone
fixed in clay
grounded by glaciers

until ice fled north
releasing the earth's mantle,
trailing snakes of

sediment and
gouging marshes
as edges of hills.

Pudding stones surface
where no map marked
a river to run,

before Northwest Territory was ordained,
before Michigan became the twenty-sixth state
or Clinton County had land plats.

*

A row of plots are reserved
for my relations at Hurd,
DeWitt Township's cemetery.

A skeleton lies in a suit in a box
the height Grandpa stood
after cancer ate his manhood,

and Grandma's ashes lie
in an urn chosen by
her first born, a girl.

Headstones mark the marital pair
and a third yet to die,
the youngest and the only boy,

today declared
incompetent to stand
trial for arson,

after he baked clothes,
the aftermath of
The County's abandonment

of this twice ex-con
diagnosed schizophrenic
twenty-years long.

*

Hurd's future lies
in zoning along its side,
three-hundred ten acres

to become World Headquarters
for Auto Owners
at an unknown time,

when final Kowalk plots
may hold remains
of my descendents.

But now glaciers break
into forty-mile floes,
stranding polar bears,

and someday the Great Lakes basin
may baptize cul de sacs
named after things killed

on this clay shaped by retreat,
on this land cut strip by strip,
on this mantle still rising.

Black Walnut What do I see in the clay?

Lilacs
heavy with May,

black walnut branches
as midwives,

plums
unloved by my mother as a child,

a field
where grandfathers led cows
and now deer feast on fallen apples,

sumacs
planted by sparrows

alders
circled by hawks.

The clay
is stuck with pine needles,
Arctic winds, songs of cicadas,

my uncle
unearthing stone instruments
shaped by agile hands,

virgins
felled by homesteaders,

the Anishinabeg
migrating,

the glaciers
retreating.

I see my ancestor.

Highway US-27 rumbles and reminds me of detours to grade school. Through dusty windows, I witnessed a bridge raised between two hills ridden a century ago by German farmers. I studied an abandoned house, where Grandma bought goat's milk for her eldest unable to drink from heifers. After the bridge-to-be, the bus passed another hill occupied by widow Olga Roberts, whose view due east of West Clark Road spanned the Kowalk farm, where my mother and grandfather became adults and I grew into an adolescent.

I am in Lansing where US-27 and a fence sandwich crab-apple trees. Round flesh falls from limbs, reminding me of apples I picked last summer in the north field, where deer have gathered for nearly thirty years, where I dread one day to see L.D. Clark Construction Company carve lots and thrash blackberry bushes fed by a slim creek of the Looking Glass River, tributary of the Grand.

I detour Lansing's iced sidewalks and hear cicadas serenade sweet hay. Somewhere I know a brick-red wooden fence halts snow, howled by the north wind across gravel drives into New Year's, April Fool's, and sometimes Easter. I know that May bulbs rest to resurrect when the fence is returned to the barn full of square bales, when green days sprout tart weeds, when bees kiss wild violets and salty skin.

Beneath this US-27 overpass, I hear Old German sung from Emmanuel Methodist Church. The hymns bounce between imagined walls of the Kroger store intended to be built kitty-corner from the hill where Olga's house stood. In January, the month of Grandpa's death, I inhale the live marshmallow of milkweed pods and play the blade of grass between my thumbs. Fireflies dance on the dusk stage set for constellations circling the northern horizon from Prussia to my childhood on land unsheathed when mammoths died and the retreating Saginaw Lobe birthed the Great Lakes basin.