Saturday, January 25, 2014

The Permanent Departures

This silent elegy is fashioned 
from bones dissolved in a sanguine summer field,
and bits of cold metal rusting in a pallid rain,
stitched idly by spider webs and thick bird's nests, 
these ancient, lurking ruins. 

Or torn seat fabric singed with black flame,
now half-submerged in the reedy bog,
the once sun-shimmer of seatbelt buckles
now rubbed and scratched bare 
beneath these patient currents. 

Here, where the news crews trampled 
their way to the grimmest of scoops,
where dazed passengers wandered 
bloodied and torn-clothed in the grass, 
shrieking, batting at halos of sparks 
in their tangled hair,
there's still jet fuel staining the land,
a harrowing old memorial.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Polar Vortex, 2014

To dust and ashes, the late season's gusts,
whipping about the house as if feverishly
seeking out some mystery tucked beneath its beams,
whistling through the upstairs halls
to stitch a veil of chill along the posts and the staircase. 

This end-of-day blue at the curtain of our southern sky
is stretched taut like old paper over the night swelling beneath,
bleeding like a bruise capsizes worried bones,
a stain of wine pooling on a littered tablecloth.

These are the half-awake days,
grasping for purpose and reasoning
in fogged alleys between the mills
and down the shattered cobblestones,
a bourgeoning of something pale and shadowed
and gathering like magpies on the traffic lights. 

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Continental Divide

How long until this winter's over? 
Last week it seemed the streets
bled dust like forgotten attic trapdoors,
a grit so solid that a thousand 
lawn sprinklers failed to carve its surface.

Now the streets run cold and black-ice slick
clear out to a snow-hill'd horizon, 
all ribbons of frost like the powdered ash
of ancient mammoth volcanos,
far out beyond this corridor of sagging 
houses and tangled, crumbled fields,
sleepwalking like a trance into an aether.