After the Auction, Poem Example

Going back sunlight failed to leave the stumps

of what used to be my father’s forest.

The new parking was sunbeams and tar.

A few serious-looking crows ballooned

overhead, mysterious as spies.

The kneeling barn peeled

emptily — the missing horses were ghosts

and all the missing cows like fading memories.

I had thoughts tough as mud, rich as manes

that crowded me as I saw iron utensils:

a hatchet, a crow-bar, a hammer and tongs.

Slim  like a snake, the auctioneer

sold everything right down to the soil.

My inheritance of night-crawlers

hooked me straight to the beuracacy

of hell, selling my father’s house, car,

pastures and trees. Everything ended up paper.

And finally, two trailers bright as tin

went up where collies used to play,

where Appaloosas strutted, crowned

by the monarch and the horse-fly,

where people so much richer than ourselves

kissed and loved each other more than dollars,

blindly smiled into Kodaks

stuffed in trunks, into boxes of fallen pine.