The process: the chipped
paint-frayed window screens, the wasp nests of last year
that don’t have a purpose, the tufts of old-man-gray
dusting the yard; all and more toll a passing.
It attracts a glassy eye.
Rare clarity has the
opposite effect of a circling drain, putting back and
into commission precedent things, ones that still live and
ones to come, only because they’re given life and infuse
an idea.
Consider the words:
memories follow like shadows painted on
a page, never completely erased even when
the bone-house is gone.
Not quite a Grecian urn—
more an unfrozen scattering: unbeautiful, untrue
mirror-flashes from the smallest of all hours.
But no museum can hold these leavings. Only
a mind-sized universe can.
L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in Rattle, The Reader, The Istanbul Review, The Worcester Review, The Honest Ulsterman, hundreds of others, and he is the author of three full collections and ten 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), The Rainflock Sings Again (Unsolicited Press, 2019), Floodlit (Beakful, 2019), and The Width of Here (Silver Bow, 2021).
