(Off The Map)

 In a small town
the cemeteries stretch out
with the afternoon shadows.

A sadness collects like newspapers
in the driveways of the ailing,
like leaves in the gutters of great aunts.

FOR SALEs scrawled in white shoe polish
in the dead windows of abandoned gas stations,
on the cardboard signs propped in empty
beauty shop rocket ship hair dryers.

Only the sun comes round
and the high moon like a one-eyed coyote
looping over the corn and the black rivers
          of asphalt roads.

This town is nothing now but taillights and ghosts,
old swings knocking the clapboards loose.
It is held together by the gossip of cornstalks,
 

the hunger of feral cats.
Grown so tiny it’s been dropped from the maps.
A courthouse clock that marks only the hours we
        lose in sleep.
Close your eyes and you’ll miss it.
Blink too long and it’s gone, wavering
in a rearview mirror.

(back)