The cornfields look the way they do
in my dreams, but they are not mine.
Those fields are gone, as are the days
of getting myself lost and then finding
myself five miles down the road,
along with the mud stuck in the crevices
of the soles of my sneakers
that inevitably left marks
on my mother's freshly mopped
linoleum. That creature I could have
been, the one I maybe should have
been, he is gone too. I barely know
his face anymore when I see him
in syncopated dreams.
The bathtub is clogged
with 50 years of hair and spit and grime
and the dishes rot in the sink
because I can't convince myself
to lift my arms to wash them.
The windows are all open
to let in the autumn air
along with fugue of other people's children
playing in piles of leaves at the behest
of nostalgic grandparents who, but for
the aching in their bones, would run
and jump in the pile and laugh
the way they used to laugh
before the old ochre filled their throats
and coated their lungs
and clouded their eyes.
Somewhere,
at this very moment,
local politicians are huddling
in some unobtrusive backroom
with day old donuts and the dug up corpses
of dead ideas, gnashing their teeth
and playing pinocle for the souls of their children
while their wives tend bonfires at home
with the kindling left behind
when their neighbors up and
disappeared one day. Rumor has it
the rapture has come, and some
of those who remain
wander the crumbling back streets
in search of some more reasonable explanation:
there is nothing in any of the papers
on the television news
that offers a more soothing answer
than crop circles and disease ridden spinach
and tainted eggs. The old farmers are mystified
because their roosters crow at sunset
and the children, instead of playing
in piles of leaves, would rather set them on fire
and cry when someone has the sense
to dowse the flames with water
we dare not drink.
The only solution I have
is to close the windows and hope
for an early winter.