Sean Patrick Hill
Whether We Are Mended
to my wife
Our dreams, handfuls of snow on a stove.
Our childhoods in boxes of crayon drawings the rain leafs through.
Our faces a lattice of loose threads, like roots dreaming beyond the drains in the pot.
I watch you at the mirror, penciling your eyelids, drawing powder across your face.
Mining Town
Right before the heat kicks in, the electric radiator starts knocking like some backwater table rapper.
I used to think it was ghosts, but the graves are so overgrown they’d never get out in one piece.
At the Merry Widow Health Mine they say sitting a bit underground will cure any pain. Imagine how little death must hurt.
All the creeks here, I swear, run brown. Anything can rust at this altitude.
Up Cataract Creek, a whole chassis was laid in state over a waterfall. I don’t know how in hell it made it that far up canyon.
Snow keeps quiet as it undermines the shafts. Once collapsed, air pipes peer out like periscopes.
People keep propane tanks around like headache capsules.
On the shelf, a General Electric clock radio is tangled in its own wire. It’s so old it only remembers AM radio. It still believes it’s not quite midnight.
The mercantile wall—now it’s a bar— still wants you to USE REX FLOUR. The hardware store has gone soft in the head.
The hardwood floors have held out. Funny, everything looks better with stain.
The dump has a sign: Up For Grabs. Someone spray painted: God Loves All Creatures. But the wall wants you to believe that REX IS KING.
The Elkhorn Fraternity Hall
The ticket booth is permanently closed, but someone penciled directions: Ghosts upstairs.
On a quiet day, when the wind has better places to be, you can hear one loose board on the stage croon each time you shift your boot.
Birds in the rafters clap. Mourning doves. You can tell by the way they whisper in the wings, like a breeze over the lip of a dirty jug.
Staring through windows, the mountain says nothing.
The room must have felt this hollow when diphtheria rained down on their children like judgment, when the tongue of the school bell stopped clapping.
Silver ran dry. Two men fought here over what music the band ought to play. The squaredancer shot the waltzer dead. They hung him for it.
Up in the graveyard, yellow bells hang their heads in disbelief.
When wind decides on a new direction, the whole frame shifts its weight.
When doves get restless, even their wings start to whistle.
The wall groans. The writing is there:
if your curiosity brings you this far I’ll let you see right this way→
|