Old Clothes
by L. Ward Abel
I live in woods
like old clothes draped over
rocks the size of towns
sky-facing, totemic
some worn away by water.
The angle falls
like fall-line slate.
It gives into sand
still two-hundred miles
up from the gulf. There
my tunneled flesh
occurs to me
as being mostly mind
but less a knowing—
the con-job
of thought
plus breathing.
Too full of soul
for a house
of flint
my dreams spill into sunrise—
dreams like rain
on dry ground—form a wash
kin to dying.
A rivulet presumes. Then
the piedmont sweats. I churn,
I wear the water, the woods,
the stone. A ritual.
About the author
L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in Rattle, The Reader, The Istanbul Review, Snow Jewel, The Honest Ulsterman, hundreds of others, and he is the author of two full collections and eleven chapbooks of poetry, including Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (erbacce-Press, 2016), The Rainflock Sings Again (Unsolicited Press, 2019), and his latest full collection, Floodlit (Beakful, 2019).
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