Decline and Fall

Comments

1. job says

   August 24, 2008 at 7:27 pm

   Matthew,

   Pittsville has a glorious cemetery which looks similar to the second shot on your posting.

   Enjoy,

   JOB

   Pittsville Cemetery

   The geographic center of Wisconsin is located in Pittsville.

   At any given time, Pittsville is a becoming town
   Of two towns, each with its avenues well walked
   And each peopled by those who speak aloud
   To those who never hear. But now it better becomes
   The town to keep its own peace as streetlights
   And lawns glaze over, attentive. But for a while yet
   Night will be mistaken for morning; the stars
   Puzzle their own vigilance; a peace officer probes
   At the outskirts of town, cruising Pittsville
   With all the interior logic of a lurking supicion.
   The dry witherings have been swept up at last,
   But not by hand of man, eye of artist nor wish of gods.
   It’s only the wind doing what wind always will.
   And the cemetery in Pittsville seems to say just the same:
   “Let me fold up time and times; let’s tidy today’s
   Flowers on a grave; let the woods whisper immortality
   Falling clean and sure, remaining out nothing.” So,
   The wild deer will mount the fog at a pale hour near dawn
   In the pine woods. So, the cemetery’s cypresses
   Make their points there in pensive green shadows by day
   But stay mute, except for slight sighs, at night.
   And see the churchless churchyard hone its teeth
   In a slip of moonlight? It is then that fog moves,
   Like breath upon glass, above the Yellow River, pluming
   From its banks, dough mushrooming in a pan,
   Spilt into yards, cloaking the shiny yellow eyes of houses
   And hiding the small steps of children’s nightmares.
   The gravestones shine like a hoved-in smile, upright, log-
   Split by rain, or inched asunder by frost, some laying
   Flat to pay improved homage through simulacrum
   To their long-standing occupants. Then moon-
   Light makes a desperate chase through the shadows,
   Stumbling onto the markers, turning them into
   Baleen combs winnowing the fog into neat loaves
   Set aside for the sun. With the chalky pink of
   Dawn’s coils not far off, the stones grin-crack out of all measure.
   The Yellow River grinds the town down past
   The brown water; the hem-slip of its past shows in
   Rude bone shards and a casket hinge which sticks
   Out from eroding banks, counting residents on the wind
   And naming their gravamens in stony gravure:
   Widow Whithers who lived above the hardware store
   In burning moments of smoke-filled privacy.
   The Liperts who farmed along the choice river-bottom
   Practicing seasonal burial and restoration.
   Esquire Chasteen who invested lives with notary
   And inscribed their names on Law’s plumb line.
   Laura (last name lost) whose life was the little café (now
   Closed) at the bisection of dirt roads and dead-ends.
   Yes, dry witherings have been put in piles no less
   Than the fog that is a glimmer-shot of Pittsville;
   At the town pump, if there is one, the town gathers
   In a hermenuetical blend of fact and fiction;
   To some the message is for carrying homeward, forward,
   For some to give to those who have not heard,
   And with some it just falls back to earth, seeping past
   Sandy grass, retreating to the Pittsville which splits
   Its time and name between the lived-out and the dead.
   Where the buck beds down, the cemetery sees all;
   The fog resurrects reality in the doe’s slowed breath.
   And now Pittsville begins to wake just as the wind
   That always comes just before the dawn. Its great exhale
   Of what remained undreamt the night before
   Escapes down the main streets and out the alleyways
   Whispering up and down along the telephone wires,
   Crank calling garbage cans lids and slipping beneath
   The window blinds above Pittsville into a shut room
   Where Mrs. Whithers once lit up for the first time each day
   As she settled the kettle above a blue plume of flame,
   Looking at the dead air between the calendar and her eye.
   When she noticed the wind – shuddering the pilot light
   With a wince, a gasp, as it tried to right itself
   Before hissing out – the wind would speak as it spoke
   To her when she was a child playing down by the river.
   But now it speaks with a coolness across her mound,
   Across the sunken and the raised, the vaulted and
   The buried at the center of the center of everything –
   Down through her soil, mapping and surveying Pittsville
   On the crooked river of her disintegrating spine.
   The rest of Pittsville is at the center of what continues
   To hold – so the townsfolk think. The wind blows.
   “I’ll be back soon,” it says. “Even before you know it.”

   Reply
2. Cubeland Mystic says

   August 25, 2008 at 3:19 pm

   JOB

   Have you published any of your works? I really like your writing.

   Reply
3. job says

   August 25, 2008 at 6:33 pm

   CM,

   Next time you visit Butterfly Street, hunt around for a somewhat hefty beige vanity volume of verse with my name on it when the host isn’t looking and pull an Abbie Hoffman…

   And thanks for the booster!

   JOB

   Reply
4. cubeland Mystic says

   August 25, 2008 at 8:39 pm

   I like the one your wrote about Wisconsin a long time ago. I think you wrote one about your wife once maybe two years back. The themes stuck with me. It might have been the same poem. You got a gift. I like all of them really. The last one you wrote about Matt failing was brilliant. I read it 3 or 4 times maybe more. A lot meaning packed into a tight space. It was really good. It’s like good code, or a well formed mathematical sentence. Everything is in it’s place. Very elegant.

   Since you’re giving it away, if you ever assemble some, and the host feels like playing post man, email old mystic some verse. I’ll buy you a forty.

   Reply
5. job says

   August 26, 2008 at 6:01 am

   CM,

   Again, too kind.

   I’ll take you up on that – although ’round these parts we call 40er a “silo” – fittingly enough.

   Mind if I get your email from Matthew? I’ll send direct, then.

   PBR or Old Style, please.

   JOB

   Reply