Poem: "Clapboard Apparitions"
This poem came out of the October 4, 2011 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from eseme who pointed to photos in a post by asakiyume. It was sponsored by Shirley & Anthony Barrette.
Clapboard Apparitions
These houses are not haunted
but rather haunts themselves,
clapboard apparitions
that appear and disappear
through the gray felt of fog.
The slate of their roofing
has long since slipped its nails
and returned to the ground
from whence it came,
forsaking the sky to be a floor
to mice and ants and small green ferns.
The whitewash of the walls
has been washed away
by that quiet maid, the rain.
She has left them as sleek and gray
as the shining tresses of her hair.
The barns, too, have fallen to ruin,
their bright sides faded from red to brown,
their broad beams sagging
like the swayed backs of old horses.
Forgotten is the lowing of cows,
replaced now by the cooing of doves
and the shrill skeet-skeet of barnswallows.
The sweet hay that once fed the cows
has been ground down to dust and straw,
left only for the lining of nests.
Even the fences have given up the ghost,
gnarled fingers of ironwood
sticking up through drifts of leaves,
coils of wire wrapped around quite large trees
that were seedlings when once the wire was new.
The things that man has made
outlive his fleeting desires
and the short skit of his life,
cast against the lazy curtain
of the long summer days
where nature plays out her patient script.