Consider what centuries do to forests—
a kind of strengthening of the muscles,
a thickening of bones, but old homes—
they crumble stone by ported stone.
And ghosts may come and go
like humming birds in the afternoon,
strumming through glassless windows,
lingering under arches where someone
passed daily in and out of shelter.
It was probably hard here, coaxing
a life among sharp edges, winter air
thin as bible pages. Each spring
the creek rose to take half
the valley and each summer sedges
shrank to seeps only worms
could live off. Now, a hundred
and a half years later, some reason
for what they made here, for breaking
oneself against the land until it breaks.
And a rightness too, for what remains—
four crumbling walls, the hearth where
fires hushed winter back, now
retreat into hellfetter’s tangle,
ruins on the one hand,
succession on the other.
–
Grant Clauser is the author of several books, including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. He won the 2023 Verse Daily Poem Prize. He lives in Pennsylvania where he works as an editor for a media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College.