Gary LeBel

Between the Pages

Beyond cement stairs, ashes—
its five steps now
lead to Rigel

The Georgia countryside is scattered with them, abandoned houses, trailers, shotgun shacks. Draped in kudzu, sunk in brambles and nettles, they vanish almost entirely into a green confusion of clapboards and creepers.

Occasionally in some small rural town stand the withering ruins of a once-proud manor house with wide stone steps and porches decked with columns, where Spanish moss dangling from its upper windows sways with the smallest breeze. At times when the Dixie sun is highest and hottest, if you stand close enough, you can hear the ache and groan of its timbers in counterpoint with a choir of crickets singing softly in its small sea of grass.

In royal purple
thistledown blooming
between the rails

I sometimes pull over and park, overwhelmed with curiosity for the negative beauty of the once-was, of furniture left behind to hobble into time like wounded animals, of books left to rot and crumble, Dickens, rain-sodden Shakespeare amid Farmers Almanacs and Life Magazines whose famed glossy pictures are stuck together like history itself in an unreadable memoir of a bygone era,

           of mirrors gazing perpetually on the slow-moving siege of their dereliction, the silverware, plates and tumblers of the last meal taken left piled in an iron sink. And all the while wafts a repugnant, mildewed smell of decay, the fragrance of transformation.

Upstairs, often bed frames are left behind, some with fancy brass headboards, if not mold-smeared pillows and moth-eaten blankets where the touch and warmth of intimacy strangely lingers, like wildflowers pressed between the pages of a half-read novel.

Robinsong
before and after
                lovemaking . . .

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About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.