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.
