Outside my red barn door sounds the ferryman’s horn.
He smells the stink of my freedom,
his fishers of wo/men casting rods with wormed hooks.
¤
I listen; and,
the automated time operator says, “after the beep it will be eight eleven o’clock.”
¤
I espy,
perched, a corvid in the time of covid.
¤
Together, we watch the casting of lines,
the sinkers dragging down the lures,
bobbers poised to tattle if I bite the bait.
¤
But, I don’t.
Together, we hold still.
Ellipses kissing
¤
{
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□□□■■■
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}
¤
And, when the late afternoon light becomes all a bit too bright,
the bird and I retreat within
to watch my curtains’ shifting as they breathe with the Sound’s breeze
We calculate the curvaceous calculus of the wind’s volume,
inside the cavernous gutted carcass of the scarlet barn.
¤
I ask the oscine passerine a riddle of
equality regarding the allotment of the equine,
“Can you divide a dead, old man’s seventeen horses in proper proportions between his three sons?”
The old crow caws out a throated laugh and asks, “Can you tell me the mathematical significance of the eight of wands?”
¤
It is technically a statement.
It is phrased as a figurative question¿
¤
In the evening, silent, we conspire about
The Great Escape
through the bramble of branches, not the seam of the green where we’d be
upwind and easy for the Dogs.
Shall we carry squeak toys just in case they get a whiff of our freedom¿
WrittenCasey 