The river smokes into the tree line
sun burning through the shoulders of the hills,
A clouded eye, a white sky
undying mayflies strafe still water, endless
There is the body of a town,
Sprawled and white on the mud-bank.
Brick faces of old hostelries, of boarding houses .
Boarded windows and crumbling facades remember Julia Marlowe .
Rock hilltops jut above the green.
studded with silent Radio towers,
empty churches strain the light through colored teeth
mute giants brooding over a boneyard
stone angels with mossy eyes and evergreen
stand over men who hauled away the forest
the old houses lean and whisper together
of rain and fire, of the day the town awaits
the train tracks rust in the sun, the
bricks falling slowly to a red dust,
grass grows between the cobbles
the shuttered shops are filled with useless things
old photographs yellowing in milk crates,
unspun records and dry-rotting millinery
rusted tools with forgotten names
the clotted river dreams among the stones
the hawks circle above the corn on the rising warmth
in the tall grass generations of rabbits
have their miniscule terrors
in the softly grumbling houses, the children
of settlers have forgotten the use of this place
the heaped earth of mounds under grass and roads,
bone beads mixed in gravel, damp with morning
the streets unused till the moon shines on them
bonedust in a china plate
Beware “The Five Poisons”!
2 weeks ago
During the settlement of the American mid-West in the late 19th Century a large number of buffalo bones, artifacts of an earlier extinction campaign, were a nuisance to the new inhabitants. One way to dispose of them was to sell them for industrial use for around $10 per ton. The payment to bone pickers was often for goods or services rather than cash.
ReplyDeleteBy the end of the 1890s there were fewer remaining buffalo bones and so bone pickers began to raid Indian burial grounds. This practice was eventually stopped after some controversy.[5]