Ghostlands

Fred Heidinger farm, near Kulm, North Dakota, Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, NDSU Libraries, Fargo (110.116)

By Tim Ralston

Sculpted curve and curl aglee

Stilly lap white

Cap silent flat shivering white

Upon an endless white sea

-

Open blank windows yaw

Sucked of warmth by empty winds

Heedlessly plying in and out.

First the wallpaper peeled,

Then the stale plaster cracked.

Little beady eyes stopped but found nothing here

and scurried.

-

Blizzard beliefs silently built

Until a pillow drift lies across

Rusting bedsprings

Of the loving bed

The borning bed

The snoring bed

The boring bed

The dying bed

The laughing bed

Knowing only rust

Creaks one last time

-

Abandoned meanings.

Stories never again known.

Forever untold,

Reside, desolate.

Of gentle nuzzle

And mumbling kiss

Rousing to walk crying babies

by hissing gaslight

Warmly looking out a frost flowered window

At an ice cracking dawn

And shivering within.

-

Of last beers piled on a table

While Thor and Les argued and fought

Over and over slurring the same

And swearing at the same

Angry and yelling at the lonely

The stillness...

When they go back to being bachelor neighbors

-

The crackling main timbers part

And fire falls down through.

The dirt is filled in

With grass planted atop.

(In accordance with the old man’s will. The last of 5

generations in the same home, his way of saying “No more.”)

-

Silent solitary gravestones attend

Wallowing in unmown hay

Far from their urban descendants.

The rural folk have died away;

Strong souls passed.

TIM RALSTON grew up on a farm north of Petersburg, North Dakota. He passed away in 2010 in Bismarck, North Dakota. This poem is excerpted from Tributaries, © 2016 by Buffalo Commons Tavern, LLP