the sound of horses galloping...

William J. Wilgus (1819–53), artist Chromolithograph, c. 1856

knocking down the ninepins

sometimes when you are taking garbage out at night, near Spring, in upstate NY you can hear angels arguing over the bowling scores above the Hudson Valley, sure, you’ve heard that Ichabod Crane was lured into a marriage of convenience with weather changes, all too frequently coming to understand life as death’s lasting wedding gifts from the Van Winkle and Van Rensselaer families

we are all bone collectors of some kind, coming from a past generational debt in flat bottomed skiffs behind stone dykes holding more water than most places know is in the rain

this street is quiet, a peeled back late dinner crowd, easy chair serenade stroll-ville, windows aglow with televisions, I walk out into the evening air seized in the caught city light bouncing off the clouds, this was all woodlands and farmlands once, like rusted banquets and vapor necklaces dark spotting nights on the other sides of things, hung tattered castle tapestries, sewn histories, bowlers of yore, mirror time, for little plots and big tracts, some very fine and some not so fine pieced into tiny lots with cars parked neatly by the curb

Winter is a gasping old man now, like all keglers, nearing Spring, he prepares to roll thunder where the trees are a spine armed still, they are wanting like I am, looking for stands of shapes to knock down, former lovers in the exhales of leaves

there are no good movies on tonight, I think about slow cruising, bottle collecting, going up and down the street, thieving small selections, empty seedy destinies like me, five cents at a time, this is what the kingdom rodentia does best, I only mimic their artistry as I like to bleed them into pieces of eight, into corners of depravity every now and then, imagining I were both feed and fed, not quite alive, not quite dead, a beginning and an end wrapped with electrical pulses and beginning each sentence with a Frankenstein turning of letters into words that say this here poet is another one of those that paints with smells a rat knows to avoid but does not so why wouldn’t I want to savor too, the lonely purposes of life being somebody’s pearled waiting in a plastic bag put out in a bin, knowing even this purpose pours light just like the Dawn can

EJR ©