and she sang again. This time I knew it was her. The lengthening of syntax like rainwater spilling.
I wish I could grasp her song, and hold it without keeping. In that continental breadth, like a tower in Amarillo, that wideness that weighs absolutely nothing, I hum along.
There’s no need to write the song down, because I prefer it being gone but for the wine buzz she leaves behind. Sound travels through walls of my prairie. I cannot remain neutral
within such residue.
L. Ward Abel
| ON the old covered bridge there’s a line drawn some ten to fifteen feet above the creek; a watermark from ’94 when the flood took half of the piedmont down into the Gulf through arteries then brown, red, submerging low parts of Macon, Oglethorpe, Hawkinsville, Sprewell’s Bluff and Albany (where coffins shot like missiles from purgatory). To this day that line remains seared above banks all down the Ocmulgee and Flint, where everyone knows that water is blood and the devil sometimes chooses the river over the road just to keep us honest.
L. Ward Abel
| like curtains half way up the sky, were before me. Clouds can be like that, and purple, in an otherwise scarlet setting.
And scarlet is of the heart. As I crest a slope some would call gentle for a moment I could imagine myself
approaching the Front Range or seeing the Wind River peaks from a distance. But soon enough it was all gone:
jagged uplift withering in the face of my own breathing.
L. Ward Abel
|