Having excavated the apocalypse, noting a careful sedimentation with trowels and toothbrushes,
I stumbled on the end.
They said it would. End. Some of my friends had put away so they could eat at a rapturous
banquet.
And many days I felt as if I should listen to the horses listen to the water to the rails
for reverb
but I always found myself taking deep breaths and remembering things associated
with being grounded.
—
Auden’s Icarus
There precarium march with no roots to bury seem certain of something,
seem fixed on thin air.
The smell of pine twisting, the hill where it crossed over, belie lines of power
whom they still believe.
—
Macon, 1967
It was October. The front room was full of people. At that time, older men still wore hats when they
were dressed in their best
suits. This occasion was a funeral. Conversation was somewhat hushed, and there was food in
the kitchen where some
old women whispered. There he sat well across the room, in a formal gold padded chair. I
could smell the paper
mill. The sun came in at an angle that lit only his left shoulder, and he motioned for me to come
over. In that crowded
room, he sat me in his lap facing away and, placing his hand upon my head, my father cried
inconsolably.
—
The Night Comes Like Clouds
The night comes like clouds; LaGrange and the nearness of tragedy
all in threes.
A red plant fades after Christmas like an image of orange coveralls; roiling EMT’s gather up the rough
the splayed.
Tell me about the Luftwaffe, about things that string veiny over and across.
And I can be seen from space.
—
Rabun Branch Road
Green tufted the great, gray wall of hardwood peaks south southeast with reddening here there blushes from the spectacle to come, when it will almost
never cool.
Roots of the Atlas Range are exiled from these hills. A bright yellow shopping bag now waves in a hemlock like a standard or sign, its oval path exactly
a year
and a hundred yards away. It makes me recall watching the Masters network feed lamenting the utter loss of empire by a black wet field that was just
planted.
—
© L. Ward Abel
Poet, composer and performer of music, teacher, retired lawyer, lives in rural Georgia, has been published hundreds of times in print and online, and is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), Torn Sky Bleeding Blue (erbacce-Press, 2010), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Cousins Over Colder Fields (Finishing Line Press, 2013), Roseorange (Flutter Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Little Town gods (Folded Word Press).
