[Author’s Note: Poetry is in the air and, as a lapsed poet, it seems like an opportune moment to reconnect with an art form that has felt rather distant from me over the past few years. This is the first in a series of poems, still in progress.]

Lotus Pond
1. The Secret of Crossroads

Silvered stillness; ruin paints
the ghost fen. A funeral
fog sighs and sidles an old
jagged mute mount. Lone errant
gothic – abyssal shroud, lamp-
light skull, imperative staff –
communes with the slow arcane
moment of crossroads. Blood-wood
grove, looming left, swallowing
shade? Or rightward cobblestone,
serpentine to city, past
a tinker’s split, weed-claimed cart?