Wraiths

In youth there were days of such blinding splendor

that in each scratched and faded photograph we're wincing,

as if we were all staring at the sun in our backyards, 

collectively waiting for some fantastic rapture to descend.

In those times I knew every fire road like my own skin,

every bone and vein of those rutted secret trails

carving at the forests beyond the neighborhood.

This was my topography, our permanent abandon.

Now those lines have trailed away into hovering mist

between bent branches, disappearing beneath leaves and logs

or ensnared in the rusted teeth of bear traps yawning metallically.

Now the timber paths have sung their last refrain,

and haunted, shrink softly into the horizon.

Memory Oval

As time defeats its half-life,

the already opaque shades darker,

a shadowed tree on gray and snowy land,

bordered in the depths of a mirror made of mercury,

ornate golden edges crumbling against 

a disappeared realm of peeling wall-roses,

in a room where seconds dissolve like hours,

and the years seem hollow and unfathomable,

all dust and ash and corroded tarnish,

without human whispers to support them.

Early April, Burlington

Winter's bitter grasp has receded now,

though lines of faded light still haunt 

the distant hills at evening's close,

and the trees remain gray configurations of bones

in the deepening green of waking backyards. 

There's still traces of earth and cold lingering in these walls, 

territories of candied frost along windowsills and steps,

and though the birds have grown bolder in their stirrings,

we remember the silent cast of snow on unlit streets,

and the rattle of plows traversing the neighborhood.

Yesterday, the cat brought me a rabbit,

young and soft as a fallen feather,

a single claw piercing its heart, staining the 

fresh white fur with the deepest cloak of red. 

At day's, end, she had felled another 

and left it on the porch threshold where we ate,

and it seemed spring's magnetic orbits 

of birth and death were there with us,

like a feastbound ghost floating in the margins.