Residual Haunting

Remember now the fraying of shadows,

the transparency of hours witnessed through a veil

stitched tightly with wandering forgottens.

Time lifts languidly past towered waves 

that roar blackly against sorrow's sands,

like tears and scratches on the lost attic film,

or wounded hands clasped against the darkfall.

Now remain indoors, the storm has descended

this snow-wreath'd mountaintop,

and no headlights dare cut the gloom

as you steer your crumbled way across

your map of worn, indulgent nostalgia,

thrust into the arms of regret, of towns

with stray-dog borders and 

wayward allegiances devouring

along fire-carved hillsides.

There's gravity in these harrowed fields,

these slow sleeping buildings and interstates, 

and the glow through the collapsed birches

where the sun decays its abject half-life,

a land swept apart by candles in windows

and hex signs scrawled in chalk on barn doors, 

the whisper of shorelines and skiffs unsailed,

and the songbird's most desolate call.

Night Work

Your signal fires are paling now, 

all that luminescent vitriol

sputtering back to the earth like

spent catherine wheels 

in the half-lit summer chill,

or the blossoming of fireworks

flowers over the high school fields

of this half-shadowed youth,

pines lingering beyond the goalposts

and the looming levees,

their jagged black spires 

like knives aimed towards 

impossibly distant stars,

a receding gloom of embers

as the rusting years commence.

An Incantation

Gather and join hands together,
this is the autumn of our mountain.
The blindfold is thin protection
against the black winds raging
from the snowcapped peaks
through the hollow eaves of the valley.

This void stands, precariously balanced
in the talons of shadowy birds,
hunting the gray skies as the
crops erode into dust,
and the windows are shuttered
against the promise of a darkened dawn.

Scratch each name across a clouded mirror,
and draw an X through every one.
This is the blood season of last things,
and last words to recall them by.

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. 

Forest Fire, Linville Falls, 2007

How these dark flames lick at the branches of thorn

on the trembling hot eve of summer,

and whittle them to broken gray ash

with sparks showering orange pinpoints in the gloom,

each tree cowered helpless before the conflagration. 

This horizon was a jagged collection of black spikes

halo'd with pulsing columns of fire, 

striking lakes to pools of hell and murk,

instantly fossilizing the quicksilver of life beneath.

There is only open country 

and worried stars beyond this fevered blaze,

and the frame houses where rural faces float worried

at yellow-washed kitchen windows, 

the pair of us looming in the sour air 

at the threshold of a church parking lot

as the mountain crumbles and burns,

a swath of furious red, 

as if an airliner made an unscheduled landing

in the depths of these woods,

and burst into pieces upon arrival.

Fathoms

Now the seasons cast their worried stones against this wall

where we're burnished gold by a drunken, sagging sun.

Here's the glow that haunts our celestial acreage, 

darkening, quickening, a knife's edge pressed against 

the trembling hands of descending dusk.

These are seawashed bones upon a foreign shore,

where sand and soot plot passages away from tumbling waves,

and pine-tops crumble like the dust they secretly 

know they are, the weight of a hawk settling with 

furious, beating wings, hazarding a view of a distant expanse. 

I am alone at last with little but light and thought to keep me,

time for few regrets and to muse upon even less, 

an outpost untroubled by spirits or more earthly concerns,

beyond the rocks, beyond the stacks of burning sulfur, 

with only the fog for companionship's sake at my table.

February Burlington Lament

Oh, smallest hint of spring in the wayward currents,

pause for awhile in our brick and winter-battered town,

light upon branches with the softest breath of warmth and hazy sun, 

so that we might endure the grim finality of these grayest months,

and how they strike out with frozen fury at the houses and the street-corners 

where we pile space-heaters and blankets 

as battlements against the fierce young year.

Earliest sign of approaching gentler seasons, 

walk with us through the black pine and sumac trail, 

and stir them to sing with your yellow-green fingertips; 

this winter's been so cold, we seek your kind reprieve,

so cast down your lot in our little city, 

that we might emerge from paralyzed sleep once more.

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.

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. 

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. 

The Outsourcing

Now I have joined you, fair fortune,

a last wandering descent 

through a netherworld of 

fast-fallen summer days, 

blank as an avalanche against 

gray-swept hillsides of years and youth,

in a thousand June backyards struck 

beneath the weight of soft ambitions.

We have been found wanting,

fallow, misshapen souls

floating the tree-lines and jagged roofs

of our dread cutout wilderness,

our blood which stains the blade

in the rust and tarnish of black centuries 

and off-years, moments spent 

wandering lost behind 

the Interstate noise-wall.

This saltwater in our ragged lungs,

it stings like the thoughtless fury

of phalanxes of dark-faced hornets, 

an outpost along the edges of endless outskirts.

These days remain in malformed erasure,

not even static to bless the bones of the weary house,

or the tangled sheets on a sour-stained mattress. 

We, wounded immortals, 

who flung rocks against the barricades

and expected all of Babylon to drop 

to quivering knees at our approach!

We who clasped hands with spirits in sleep,

only to release them in curse and spell-craft

in the washed-out sun of regretful dawn.

I find I still have eyes to see with,

fingers that still grace skin,

or the torn vinyl of the frozen car seat.

Our lives cracked like a luck-starved mirror,

at the very tremble of half-touched hearts

in the weight of all these ashen mountains.

These were the finest hours,

traced with thin gold lace and amethyst,

but now they're burned through

by candles tipped against the windows,

the wax rotting away the the thread,

the glass warping and melting 

in miniature inferno.

And the spires and stacks of this 

aching nest of city streets

sliced the sky like solemn knives,

beaten back by the arctic glare

of a billion aching stars,

of light pollution lingering around 

the blinking code of radio towers.

You whom I've known since childhood,

you whose serpent's breath 

and doubled-over mirth 

had swept me in your tempest,

do you not stand today amongst

the graves and gallows of a 

haunted continent,

and shout at me from

topographies unimagined?

Dusk catches us sleepwalking again

and follows us home,

showing up in the dead hiss of 

tape recordings or the howling shift 

of images lurking in the VHS.

Sometimes, beyond the flames

that lick and jump in anxious fervor,

there's a face without expression,

wrapped in solace and in shadow.

Breathless and struck, we still continue, 

with memories strewn behind abandoned.

Ask: what will map our silent crossings when we're gone?

Last night the crows fell like a shroud on wings

of brutalist charcoal, 

and swallowed the barn whole in their icy cries.

This doorstep is peeling away like a false awakening,

a wake held beneath the churning waves of spent woodgrain.

Oh, how the painted yesterdays sway with drunken footfalls,

entwined in heady mist of spilled wine and hoarse cheers,

as we, scythe-like, mow apart the autumn age of remembering.

There is no more distant wavering shoreline,

no lapping surf to hide your clawing wants,

they are leaving in a line towards the veiled orange gloom,

and they will not soon be returning.

Whatever was loved is permanently sunstruck,

statuesque and paralyzed, left to devour away 

on a tide of furrowed countenances,

of heads glancing backwards in sorrow recognition,

of hands dragged beneath the surface of a love 

that never found its shining season,

and lays drunk and dazed, half-alive,

in the vined ruins of a disappeared evening.

Solstice On Twin Mountain Road

Old friends, winter has arrived 

pale and shivering 

on our splintered gray doorstep,

brushing bits of snow from his sorrow cloak 

with red-raw, gnarled hands,

black eyes gazing inward

through frosted fields of stalks and wire,

and contrails traced through 

the piercing yawn of Christmas skies.

Let's wander these wooded labyrinths 

beyond the house's reach,

the thrum of the far-off cars reaching us

like trapped spirits lingering past our vision,

and press frozen arms around the limbs 

of the trees we find most haunting,

with their freight of abandoned

squirrel's nests in a rafter 

of brown-clustered branches.

We'll watch that somber evening blue descend 

like a sudden silence each evening, 

and mark the house-lights

through the evergreens across the meadows,

bathing the scarred earth in golden shadow. 

Sofa Set On Fire Beside A Derelict Warehouse

A tattered sofa in gray-burnished winter

collapses softly into itself near 

the boarded-up warehouse, 

unmoored in a nest of untidy shadows,

yellow stuffing hemorrhaging through 

the split seams in filthy cushions,

stained by generations of unnameable 

ghost drinks and fluids,

discarded decaying in the faded entropy 

of the Queen Anne's Lace,

with the styrofoam scraps and the shattered glass.

The seizing electric flames lick chemicals 

from the combustible surfaces,

sending pillars of exotic spectrums 

and vivid smoke skyward,

through frosted dusk air,

to evaporate into a black starless void. 

The Weight Of Years

The weight of years

all collapsed and broken in the yard,

left to corrode in a ruinous winter rain

between many draping stalks,

all stuffing-sprung and leaking

days months hours like black-tipped toxins, 

to ferment along the crumbling

banks of the drained and fallow stream-bed,

evaporates to fine dust when touched,

yet lingers like a hand pressed against

a curve of shoulder at the blue hour. 

Across Causeways

I have left you behind, old ocean,

blithely erased your midnight churnings 

from down wind-tipped streets

of empty wood-panelled sandboxes, 

like typing a fence-line of black X's 

across a misspelled word on the page. 

These were summer nights

where bright-banded constellations 

seemed vast enough

to swallow our youth whole,

as we lazed drunk and bewildered

in the rickety lifeguard watch-stands. 

Or the blue mornings of February

walking to the corner for the bus,

rifles booming hollow and black

from the duck blinds out in the reeds.

Past hundreds of miles of 

snake-crawled swamp and 

woods and yawning fields,

I still wake sometimes and feel

you lapping your fragmented shore,
somewhere out in all that darkness.

Lonely Places

The wind-whistled Siberia of mall parking lot

that stands vacant and weed-strewn 

save for shopping holidays,

and where it meets vast tides of 

gray fields racing into a distant nowhere.

A pool crusted over by a billowing tarp

in the seasons of staying indoors, 

crumpled leaves clinging to the rusted cyclone fence,

the blue fabric flapping like a dazed ghost

as the gust lazily stirs its edges. 

The sense of absence between two homes, 

glancing resigned over your shoulder at 

whatever you're treading away from,

rather than a future's beckoning. 

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.

Gravitational Pull

I have felt a weight 

like a collapsing house pouring down around me,

littering its splintered doors and 

jagged runners of glass in my hair, 

opening veins for blood to seep 

through clutched hands into a darkening nowhere.

This quiet inertia will eventually pull the stars from their 

fixed coordinates, 

drag the very sky itself into the black hollows of the earth,

to disappear beneath an undisturbed surface

with me at its center,

dazed by flaming years too bright to see directly.