The Gates
I.
There were wrought-iron gates by the riverside-
salvaged bits of a grandeur left untouched,
save for the bloody, hardened frost of untold years of creeping rust-
holding fast to shifting dirt, fascinating urban folk
and adding fuel to village lore, the mystic cause of children lost:
"Bodies pried from off the shores! victims of its demon claws
which wayward men invoked": this is the stuff of fairy tales,
which aging men stuff into tomes like photos into old shoeboxes.
So when young eyes were shied away in houses,
and hunchbacked trees bent about these gates-
in the days of dying that define the autumn;
the opaque days of winters lost to the beating down
of uncouth weathers-
shuttered sunlight rolling down past leaves
blasted flakes of those gates' splintering red metal
to soothe over churning riverbed sediment,
crumbling into metallic stones smoothed over
from the glancing graces of thousands upon thousands of watery hands;
and cracking crayfish on the bellies of otters did these old relics sink
into blue Egyptian silt with the bones of their old possessors---
stirred in and bellowing with the riverside tides
of the earth's foreign sentiments,
where tumble and glide the endless confessors
of the silent and placid seas.
(and thus so it went,
that in the every minute which from it followed came a minute more, one...
two...
...and three hundred years would slowly pass
as the great ambitions of great-souled men
with all the wears of work and wine
would acquiesce to their too many days
let by them fly as purely wasted;
with altogether too many dreams,
expectations and aspirations
let slowly simmer to smoldering regret.)
TSE
for parts II-IV
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http://www.box.net/shared/oxfsya3j5d
