Abigail

Abigail, the shore is frozen

Our tar trails have been bulldozin' down

Your sharpened frown

Once had me possessed

Do you recall the crippled summer?

Your fam'ly all was in deep slumber

And oh how I loved their ways

When Leland's haze still lingered

On my shadow

Your brother he didn't have to die

Your mother she didn't have to cry

Your father didn't have to ask why

Summer was on your chest

As your eyes glow

All our drugstore lawns blew cool so fast

The mill was never built to last

The tort'rous thrill of sweating grass

Is this town's only sorrowed

Trampled blanket

And if I was branded to your foyer

Through passing carpenters and lawyers

Agrarians and God's own soldiers

I would never make it

Do you still dream of dangerous hotels

Wrapped in glares and daffodil smells

With your barefeet buried in weeds?

I still dream of snarled backyards

And being chased through nighttime's discards

Where my fence reddens, rusts, and bleeds

And the curbs are haunted by the killers

Of memories of your back pillars

Where nothing wakens as it seems

All our rooms are hopeful mornings

Left like tombs when nights are swarming

And branching feathers fan our dreams

And your star was the saddest symbol

Flickered with your mother's thimble

Pitiful and sunsoaked soggy

Beautiful inside the muggy

Ashamed of our bodies in the stream

Ah but Spring's dumbed voice is just like yours

And if I had a choice I'd do my chores

And my work would dumbfound

The restlessness found in you

And no one else could understand the truth

Of the soil burning back to youth

It's just something that we found

But now it all thaws damp around you

And the streets are dry and bare, but they're humming

The rooftops where the air stops coming down

To listen for the sound

Of the tests that surround you

Abigail

I said, "Abigal the shore is frozen!"

Our tar trails, they're all bulldozen now

Your bygone sounds are cidada-bound,

They're so shrilling, and night-smoke tarry,

You should spill them into the starry,

They are children, and no one's sorry.