L. WARD ABEL

Across the ragged field
green at ground level
but with distance
running a color of wheat
to the forest
wall—here barn fragments
and bones of long-gone farmers
scatter across
last year’s planting.

The fence line
remembers its cattle
and angled rocks
their broken plows.
Timbering.
Trash
along a crease of fallen leaves
near columns
planked
needing paint.

I need paint.

I’m clapboard, plastic panes and
gray lumber flapping.
I lean, I teeter, I dissipate
shack-torn by easy raining
a bare hardwood edge
disheveled beside the parcel
that’s now a faded
yardish
patch.
Other wings
lose no departure
in beautiful
ruin.
My stay dulls
into a later

leaving.

L. WARD ABEL’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, The Worcester Review, Riverbed Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The Main Street Rag, others), including two recent nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and he is the author of four full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry, including American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (erbacce-Press, 2016), and his latest collection, Green Shoulders: New and Selected Poems 2003–2023 (Silver Bow, 2023). He is a retired lawyer and teacher of literature, and he composes and plays music (Abel and Rawls). Abel resides in rural Georgia.