The First Four Life Sentences for Michael Macklin

by Stephen Petroff

“the melody
  is memory itself ”

I lay for the night on the yellow roadside,
in a deep field of curving gourds,
across from the dark ploughing ground.

Four steps inside the woods, a stone wall had long been
hidden, and behind it, an old farm dump, with a forgotten
kitchen midden beneath it, where he found a medicine
bottle, small and made of glass, colored cobalt blue.

Everything that had meaning to him, everything that had
ever been of value all numinosity he had found
there, in the comfort zone.

Mist coiled, uncoiled, and coiled again, the length
of the ravine, following the stream that carved
these terraces.

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