Accumulation

The ghosts of everyone who ever died
within this city's boundaries still walks
our streets, transparent, limned by ancient fires
or turn-of-century incandescent lights.
The oldest, wrapped in woolly rhino hide
and seated on a mammoth pelvis, talk
of endless paths beside a sea of ice
and cats with fangs as long as both your arms,
while younger ghosts hang on the singing wires
and read the messages the living write.
A whiff of spruce, of smoke and ginseng, spice
the darkened streets that once led through the farms
built by the wagon-men and prairie-bonnet wives,
an ever-lengthening parade of ghostly lives.

--painting by Rick Mobbs
Collection available! Knocking from Inside