Friday, March 11, 2016

get right church (the poem)

the morning train’s commotion in 3:00 a.m. fog the
zinc sulfide ghost glow & the whistle announcing
November like a foregone conclusion, like knowing
death is coming in those instants before giving everything
over to sleep & the cottonwood’s forked limbs gone
gray-white in moonshine not to mention the
scraping of skate blades on barely frozen mud, the
scraping of tires on fallen leaves on the sidestreet,
this brass slide’s whining note without a home to call its
own, that sense of flying above the smokestacks
on frantic mechanical wings, a toboggan
mired in any October orchard where these dropped
Red Delicious rot brown as these chestnut leaves rot
smearing sidewalks & gnarled cherry trees gleam pigment
green moss without any sun as the church bell tones
hollow B-natural notes across the street from a
waterlogged autumn ballfield: the note comes
back & comes back & comes back in the thudding
hooves of two white horses because that evening train
might be too late that evening train might be too late


Jack Hayes
©
2016

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