Cold Spring

We drove a hundred miles that day To see a Halloween parade Skeletal autumn in Cold Spring Parents holding hands with Pale Death's infants Shivering on the courthouse steps in polyester robes And exposed bone thermals March them down to riverside square Your teeth gnash together as you chew an Excedrin On the way home The empty parkway wound its way back through charred black pine Just like a wormhole Hickory death rattles into stagnant tracts of sky Like warnings whispered Antiphonal stridency that slept for half a century And where are you As lives are punctuated by moons I've never loved you more than when you said "I'm so scared of all the things I risk with kids I never knew existed" Time machine rotors ripping holes over Freehold Constellations rearrange and orbit 'round the steeple of First Presbyterian Church I am Bear Mountain I am entering orbit oh I am Bear Mountain I am entering orbit On the way home The empty parkway wound its way back through charred black pine Just like a wormhole A bridge becomes an island when the ends are disconnected Wind is feedback Antiphonal stridency that slept for half a century And where are you