and summer always lie
helpless, sprawled
and ripe for sacking.
Numbers of leaves will fall
and cold winds sweep
the land bare and gray.
But that will not be all.
23. And If You Can’t Change Your Life?
Though long gone, he’s still condemned
by the dead poet’s lines to his endless rounds
the thousand-bar stare so rending
for a moment I have to believe
he can still be saved
the bars clawed down
the forest again enfolding...
But then time crowds back in
to number his million paces
to the very last one.
That particular sin is done
and not to be effaced.
24. Trinity Episcopal Church, Built 1845
This church was built of old beaches
carved into blocks and piled high
in tidy layers. Inside those walls
were weddings and funerals
and holy water spilled
over the soft skulls of babes
who then grew up to die
at Cold Harbor or Bull Run.
Bring your eye near the sandstone
and you’ll see older wandering
lifelines braided there: trails
of the trilobites and proto-worms
that traveled across that strand;
a million faint memorials
in a monument that stands
today without comment beneath
this particular gray predawn
November sky.
25. Worth Living
Come Sunday
proud tall clouds
and sunshine, trade wind
bending palm trees
and long grass.
Weekdays all day
I pull electric cable
in Gainesville
forearms hardened
with the work and cabled
with braided veins.
Sundays your fingertip
traces those conduits
sweetly downstream
one by one.
The two of us alone
or maybe three
while wavelets
syncopated
beat on a white beach
again
.....againagain
..........................again
all different always
the same
unexamined
unexamining
exactly right.
####
Retirement Projects
A Burned-Over District
Your Hand, Please. Let’s Walk.
Among the Mandolins
The Inelegant Universe
The Popcorn Dance
Brainstorm on Black Velvet
Comments are always interesting, but please reference a book or poem in the subject line, so I don’t trash the email: silashibb@earthlink.net