new poem : " plain outside and ghosts within"
plain outside and ghosts within
I’ve heard of a hardscrabble life and now
hear there’s a Hardscrabble Cemetery
so I guess there’s also a hardscrabble
death. some things don’t take well to
polish, they are best left alone, set up
as they prop themselves up : alone, yet
still in their own voices they sing peace
to my breast.
I have a litany unfit for any church, a
jumble of junk things unready for life
modern and concise : a weedy lot of
tupentine stills and coal yards, hymnals
with mouse-chewed covers and reed organs
rotted from their insides out. empty winds
flowing through open back porches and pages
of newspapers blown out to the deer-ravaged
garden. the rust on a hydraulic ram, the dark
of the frost-fronted night in Novemeber, the
calf lost to the cold, born early, left alone.