Revisionist Poetry – “The Woods with Rust in Their Throat” – A Bit of Goldsworthy & Adams, v.4… in a Tom Waits style lament…

I went down into the little suburban woods
on a day when the sun was hot as a penny on a stove,
and the leaves hung up there
like a room full of old lace
gone brown at the edges.

I was looking for the fallen ones,
the trunks with their collars split open,
the branches thrown out wide
like a drunk telling the truth
for the first time in years.

And the ground, well, it gave a little under me—
crunched and sighed,
all dry bones and cigarette ash,
all that summer dust
whispering through my shoes.

The standing trees kept to themselves,
tall as church pipes,
quiet as a warning,
but the broken ones—
oh, they had the good sense to lie down
and make a masterpiece of it.

There was one twisted limb
hooked through another like a fast prayer,
one pale trunk stretched out in the light
like it had been photographed by moonlight
and left out to dry.

Goldsworthy would have smiled at that,
I reckon,
the way the world stacks itself up
without asking permission.
And Adams—
he would have caught the shadow of it,
that black-and-white holiness
hidden in the grain,
the blaze in the bark,
the little sermon of light.

I stood there a while
with the heat on my neck
and the smell of sap gone sour in the air,
watching time pick at the wood
with its slow, clever fingers.

Because there is a strange kind of beauty
in a thing coming apart politely.
A kind of jazz in the collapse.
A kind of gold in the rot.

And the woods, those old tricksters,
they keep making art
out of whatever the day leaves behind—
all broken branches, bent shadows,
and one long, cracked note
drifting up through the leaves.