Pine Rows and Squadrons
A move through late morning
a road between rows,
the pulpwood blinks
across my eyes
and a breeze breaks the rules
of summer on the way
to where—without a roof—
only walls have survived
a thousand millings.
Questions about the hands
that placed these bricks
completing a space that’s
now incomplete
evade those few minutes,
spark to flame and they’re gone.
But entering the green rooms—
full, cool, sky overhead there
along the road,
rooms as old as today as gone
as a world, the empty windows’ breeze
blurring leaves, lines of verdant
point to plane
beside the tar leading home—I become
caretaker, frozen
like the squadrons
bouncing on imagined string
above me where a ceiling
used to be.
L. Ward Abel
L. Ward Abel, poet, composer,
teacher, retired lawyer, lives in rural Georgia, has been published hundreds of times in
print and online, including Snow Jewel, The Reader, Yale Anglers' Journal,
Versal, Words for the Wild, After the Pause, Istanbul Review, others, and
is the author of one full collection and eleven chapbooks
of poetry, including Jonesing For Byzantium (UKA Press,
2006), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Little
Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (erbacce-Press, 2016), Digby
Roundabout (Kelsay Books, 2017), and The Rainflock Sings Again (Unsolicited
Press, 2019).
Tags:
Poetry