Ruins

 by Brett Rutherford

     Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Passing the gutted neighborhood I think of you.
Your soul is that abandoned factory whose panes
lie shattered on its concrete floors. The pigeons roost
inside the eaves where keystone — and conscience — once held
the bricks into a nobler form. A high fence surrounds
you needlessly, braided with thorns. Yet any would-be
trespasser can see the sky clean through your vacant
casements. Unhindered rain comes through the roof and makes
dim lakes, unrippled glass in which your machinery
hunches, islands in an archipelago of rust.

Your doors hang twisted, the locks no longer deceiving
the feral packs who come to spray obscenities
upon the inner lining of your empty skull.
Rats nest in every orifice and gnaw at you.
The pink squeal of baby rodents fills the raw night;
your ivy beard clogs with their comings and goings.
Today your name. inscribed on the weathered billboard
totters face down upon the veined macadam lot;
today the pimpled scavengers shall peel your walls
of the last of copper and brass and chrome and wire.
They make off in a pickup through a brazen gap
in your fenced perimeter. Love, no one laments
your debasement — like Zion of old, you are stripped
bare of your finery by an unforgiving god.
One last time I pass you in the Boston-bound bus,
remembering vaguely how I once thought I loved you
before the empire of your fatal charm collapsed,
before your edifice of seeming goodness dropped,
before your calamitous default — oh, how you fell! —
no one has wanted you since (small comfort to me)
as you languish for unpaid taxes of the heart.