Wraith
I never walk past that gate I don’t recall a rifle butt, two sharp yelps,
the smell, oddly enough, of corncobs. Hush now. And this: like
something seen through a fire’s yanked sparks: the lime-green
truck, a pencil nub in the glove compartment, and beyond, the
winter dark scraping its antlers at the passenger window, and out of
pitchlessness cattle, suddenly, smoke-breathed, jostling, this side of
the pipe-gate, the road-side. They won’t hurt you. Staples, hogwire, a
bent t-post. You just think they will, and the old man, already a ghost
in the idling headlights, following a line of metal thorns with his
pliers.
