the salvage yard (written last autumn)

I am
Split ends
Frayed thread
Torn rope
The dust of a Halloween bonfire
The pool of wax when a candle’s burnt out
The worn-out paper when the pencil-marks have been erased.
And in my
Patchwork pocket-holes
I keep:
one old burnished copper penny (1942)
one bent bobby pin – picked many a lock, sir, yes, sir
one small key to nothing or a secret bramble-garden
two smudged, torn scraps of paper
No sir you don’t have to read them I will tell you hold on I will tell you
Here let me one moment let me unfold them
One says “never mind”
And the other “seek and find”

I live in a salvage yard
with stray dogs who chew on stray bones.
I dine on top of sea-chests with the attic ghosts.
The wild wind is chill here –
It cries over the landscape of discarded things
stirring all the lost dreams, lost lies and lost lives.
And I chase the wind and pick them up
as it unravels my sleeves and tangles my dirty hair.

The only rule in the salvage yard is this:
if you wish to leave your shoes, you can only leave one of a pair.
It’s sad that it has to be that way
but no one has ever found two of the same shoe
(it might go to his head you see, sir, sir)

I write down dreams with fading-ink pens
- one night I fell down the rain-gutter
- one night I lost my black glove
- one night I found one small broken star in a rusty garbage can.
I miscount the days on a broken watch.
I’ve been counting them wrong for years
so that now there are no years
and I have been here forever.
And

When I fall down in the river mud, I am cousin to
the cigarette butts in the gutter, how they’re
burning out with final tired sparks of fire.
But when I stand up on the riverside
with the flat tires and hubcaps and broken bottles -
I usually find something worth keeping
and it’s always broken
bent
scattered
bruised
and half-lost,
But I tie it to the frayed end
of a thread unraveling from my coat sleeve
and hope it will not fall off on the way home