Apocrypha

This poem appears in the Summer 2018 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

     Clouds stood like flying buttresses
     against the gray stone of late afternoon.

     It was medieval weather, the weather of crypts
     and obscure cults, disused graveyards,

     seedy gentlemen in string ties with banjos.
     The ice had closed on the river;

     brave souls, foolhardy ones, inched across,
     a step, a sliding step, tempting fate,

     gravity. Furtive innocence, they say.
     Frost, those mornings without pity

     or understanding, lay like a skin disease.
     The slightly pickled look improved the view.

     In the air floated the knock-knock-knock
     of the steam hammer. Was that England

     or America? The rising damp could not be stopped,
     whether foreign or domestic remained to be seen.

William Logan’s most recent book of poems is Rift of Light. His book of long essays on familiar poems, Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, was published in June of this year.