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Contributors' notes

Edison Jennings

Ruin

Close to Spoon Gap Road, a fieldstone hearth
and chimney-stub poke through a berry-snarl
spilling from the flue, blacksmithed pot-hook curled
like a come-here finger, but the rest is gone:
mud-chinked chesnut walls, froe-cut shingle roof.
In easy view from where the doorway
might have been, several generations lie
beneath a hill topped with snaggled headstones
tilted by a hundred years of freeze and thaw,
where love's observance long ago succumbed
to underbrush and new-growth oak and grief's
alphabet weathered to a palimpsest
on lichen-freckled slates.                   
                          You could rest here
couched in ferns and moss, while old disasters
deliquesce to text of branch and leaf.