L. Ward Abel
The Killdeer Wheel
The killdeer wheel in plain
sight, like seabirds they
nest in the road with equinox
just beyond some trees.
La Mer plays on a device
curtains billow in a March of
twenty-four seven.
I put up
a fence of old cut timber
between me and a tall walnut,
planted dogwoods just behind
it. Losing topsoil at the speed
of slope of drop of scrub
the sea is where it
goes. Someday tree roots
will drain all piedmont lakes.
Rubicon
Having fallen asleep in holy lands
where the roads tell the weather
I awaken to footprints in dew I can see
trespass from the porch I can hear music
under these baritone hills all at once
major and minor chords fill a sideways tilt
and there are clarinets like coyotes
not trumpets like they said there’d be
another bubble another stone.
The Road to Hamilton
There’s an ethnicity of fields; they accompany
the way down to Hamilton.
Remainings line the road.
Crofts are mum like whippoorwills.
The effort that cleared them to the wood line
is so so gone. It still amazes me how shade
is jagged like endings, and how living
is the hitch.
A Tilt, Not a Tumbler
Caloosahatchee
Clouds billow way past the river.
Here it’s as wide as the Tennessee
or the Mississippi, but width is
deceiving
as this one has a shallow blackwater
tilt, not a tumbler
of rolling cataracts.
Along shores of the like there are losers,
yes losers and those who will soon lose
whether youth is what fades or beauty
or both but a wasting away manifests
in the ruddiness and in eyes that leak
and scarred foreheads in these longest
of nights. A bleeding is here.
A drunken gash is here. On the edge
of what was recently wilderness
it’s too dark, something made in offices
dominates, becomes brackish
as we sit around and wait for
sheetflowing.
