Fredericksburg, Virginia

 Living Here

The Muleshoe Salient is still imprinted on the land in the fields and woods

of Spotslyvania Courthouse.  The mounds of dirt they dug

in haste for cover

are low now and covered with moss, twigs,

grasses nibbled on by the deer and rabbits.

Longstreet Drive, Jackson Street, Ewell Lane,

new roads with token names, a nod to what?  Restless dreams

and flags. 

Layer after layer of fall leaves laid in now cover the dead.

Curried golf courses and battlefields mowed every fall. 

Chancellorsville, First Day, preserved.

The scrub woods that was the horror

of Wilderness has grown up.

It veils new subdivisions hidden back in the woods. 

Stories float among us of misty dawn ghost soldiers in the road

I half believe them.

In the fall the shadows get longer,

the sky bluer.   Visitors come here to remember a few days in May.

Like the deer and moss and new trees,

living on mostly we forget. 

photo by Susan Krieg

small poem

       Grinding exactitudes
       parsing ever finer
       flowering outward with smaller
       and smaller branches
       until meaning
       is lost.

pastel sketch for the next painting

 

 

 

 

 

sketching on Washington Avenue in Fredericksburg, VA

poem

Driving the highway home

at night from Washington, DC

to Fredericksburg,

the heavy traffic snakes in the dark

along on unseen paths.

Northbound, a diamond necklace of headlights,

and southbound poured out like rubies

on a blanket of black velvet.

Day time around town

I see the cars like pooh sticks

flowing under the overpasses. 

In my bedroom

when its really quiet,

two am, awake,

staring at the clock I can hear it,

trucks grinding, the low constant hum,

a river with insomnia.