When People Come Knocking With Words to Say

Even the roads are silent at the stoplights

in the husk of dark. And I am doomed to my

own strange foliage inside my head, kicking

up the dirt with shoes, wondering what other

names were buried there. And the oceans that

        I swim,

hearing bells across the land. People stand

at the shores in new fashions, in red winter

coats and fine gloves; their tuned silence, in wooly

hordes, ushers me further out, further out to be 
alone with the gory foams. Down Avondale Road,

backyard fires rent, like gunsmoke, gorges in the air.

And I,

what do I do but drive past signposts telling me

to slow down, while bells crash symbols across

the land. The bells! The bells! ringing through the radio

while he tells me that “all the trees of the field will clap

their hands” and the sky will shudder like a moose in the

grey dawn

of day. And I am doomed to wander the strange

foliage inside my head, and sneak off into

wide-eyed shadows when people come knocking

with bread in their arms and words to say.