Epithalamium with Rust

By Brandon Kreitler

I remember the dream of rust on its own vague terms:
dredging the canal as though it were oneself,
hoping for trinkets that fix life to a landscape of flowers and trash,
and settling for bothering the levee with a stick,
notching my time card in the holy city.

In the margins of sky and dust­­­­­––distance specific to the dream of distance––
the thought of water comes on like vanity.  It is error,
as are the certainties of children, to make much of the dumb bend of sun
on copper, to heed what God writes in the sand with his pretty little feet.

Crows flood from the factory shell and out over trump ground,
into the easy marriage of actuality and nothingness that is the long patina
of days, drunk on lawn seed and disquiet.
I remember it again, but differently.  Archipelagos of debris and glow,
stars fashioning what light benefits the dead…

This poem is a public submission created for Red Room Poetry's THEthe Poetry project.