The Shambles

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

     The station at York curved
     like a broken back, the flooded
     river tumbling under the ghost
     of the old bridge. In foxed plates,

     a nest of beams propped up
     ramshackle houses lining the arches.
     We searched for something not missing,
     that long-ago fall we wound our way

     north minster by minster
     to that fell country whose signposts
     marked the rune stones. Every village boasted
     a thatched windmill or tipped-over ruin.

     Those were our compass points,
     not the unfamiliar colors of the money
     or the signs shouting COURAGE.
     Even the birds rang out barbarian notes.

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.