Paused freight hums on the trestle.
Weak light like it's coming through
an auto body shop's smoky panes.
Windchimes clang like they're pissed
almost as ripped as the frantic flap
of two ragged American flags chained
to the back of an F150's cab.
Vultures nest atop powerline poles.
Who'd join a Masonic lodge
with such crooked brickwork?
Yard statuettes are all
lugubrious little plaster captives.
Even the lusty piping satyr is pale & limp
waiting for his lawyer to call him back.
I drive past the Redemption Center
but they keep piling up in my mud room
garbage bags bulging
with what I've emptied
left unredeemed.
The path I hacked in June down
the embankment to the Deerfield
overgrown with strangling bittersweet
& fat bars of knotweed.
A wailing in the woods, getting closer
a frayed bow sawing, parched for rosin.
Daniel Hales
Daniel Hales is the author of the hybrid novel, Run Story (Shape&Nature), ¿Cómo Hacer Preguntas? or How To Make Questions: 69 Instructional Poems (Frayed Edge), and three poetry chapbooks. He makes music with The Frost Heaves & Hales, The Ambiguities, and Umbral.
