Sydney Lea

Dusk in a Marble Orchard

                                                       There always comes a point– if you live long enough–

                                        when you no longer feel you belong to your time.

                                                                                                              –Marguerite Duras

I only meant to stop here

to get off the road. Or so I thought.

The dead in this patch all lived in nearby houses

now gone to ground amid dark,

encroaching woods. What doomed their hamlet?

Only the headstones endure. The sun concedes

to a gray that might as well

be fog. So something, I sense, is falling,

falling all over. It’s something more than evening.

It seems the cemetery

is seldom seen by anyone.

I judge by its narrow entry lane, all thistles,

and just two stones of the dozen

marked with artificial flowers,

stained cups that have collected all manner of weather

through seasons or maybe years.

I witness four pale geldings too, 

grazing, their heads unaccountably arched over

the wall between the graveyard                                       

and the more exuberant field behind them,

in which I imagine a herd of Jersey cows

until the farmer got old, got done.

Out of nowhere, I recall the reins

and harness slung from a spike in a neighbor’s shed,

never used, just there.

The family had no horse or carriage.

Whoever hung up that leather –already moldy

as death in my distant childhood–

lies somewhere forever forgotten, forgotten

even back then. What can I be looking for,

I wonder, what sort of hope

could anybody muster here?

Or is hope the thing I’m after in this ragged acre?

Hangman’s Moon

I dream of horses on a deep-night road, dead silent riders astride.

The moon would hide if it could when that pallid company travels together

along this lane gone white by its light. You might think the whole world’s asleep.

The horsemen kick free of their stirrups, dismount, mill for a moment, and mutter.

It seems there’s an extra mount. Someone climbs haltingly into its saddle–

someone who thought himself a flower whose petals were destined to last,

someone who all through his gaudy life believed himself bright as blood.

He too turns pale as the ghostly moonlight and gallops off with the rest.