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.