Afterimage

You and I, we've known the feeling

of stumbling across black and depthless woods

towards where a fire still churns listless smoke

into a pallid, dusky sky, 

chairs left empty moments before,

some tipped over as if in sudden flight.

Or, the lasting sense of disturbance

after all the players have left 

the baseball field,

and the last machine having towed its burden 

of shattered wreckage from

the cold nightmare of the highway accident. 

A bare intuition that something has happened

just moments before your graceless intrusion, 

now left haunted and lingering in

currents of force at the unsettled margins. 

This is what Burlington feels like in November.