I love the way a voice evaporates into a cathedral
only to return, a fidgeting nerve, to its ghost.
Echo simulates reassurance in the grand hall of questions
& silly answers. On the altar a silver chalice
overflows with bubblegum. All the bent arms
of genuflection, all those saints coming down
off their haloes. How many electronics
can fit on the head of a pin? Will autumn leave us
reeling & empty? We try to celebrate
the nights swelling up like hand grenades.
The neighbors have the idea. Greedily, a skeleton
leaning against their mailbox reaches for candy or post.
By the entrance to the haunted corn maze one town over
a two-week-old jack-o’-lantern melts
over a fencepost, grinning all the way down. Within
the jigsawed rows: a funeral procession of wailing children,
novelty caskets & rubber masks. Pairs of unlaced sneakers
peek out from beneath the costume horse
a toothless chainsaw rips through. Weekends have you
on the lawn dancing with a rake in your hand,
&, after the rake shatters, a shovel as more leaves
burst off the hickory. Above, seed-threads
haze the sun with even more light, their shadows
too poor to crowd the soup kitchen of the mottled lawn.
This continues for months & then one night
an orange lampshade drags over the city: snowfall.
Every hour, bells fall out of the church steeple,
tapping each window with golden light.
This storm will end the world, but you should stay over
while the buildings crumble into bone-white drifts.
Add another entry into the asylum of stolen moments.
If I live after I die, I want to be the soft voice
after, a whisper in the dark. I fill this room
with the voice I have. I could do this forever.
–
Duncan Campbell lives in Vermont. His poems have appeared most recently in Barnstorm, Ghost City Review, Northern New England Review, and Outlook Springs. He can be found on Twitter, where he occasionally likes things but is otherwise completely silent, @DuncanDCampbel.