Cold Spring

We drove a hundred miles that day

To see a Halloween parade

Skeletal autumn in Cold Spring

Parents holding hands with Pale Death's infants

Shivering on the courthouse steps in polyester robes

And exposed bone thermals

March them down to riverside square

Your teeth gnash together as you chew an Excedrin

On the way home

The empty parkway wound its way back through charred black pine

Just like a wormhole

Hickory death rattles into stagnant tracts of sky

Like warnings whispered

Antiphonal stridency that slept for half a century

And where are you

As lives are punctuated by moons

I've never loved you more than when you said

"I'm so scared of all the things I risk with kids I never knew existed"

Time machine rotors ripping holes over Freehold

Constellations rearrange and orbit 'round the steeple of First Presbyterian Church

I am Bear Mountain

I am entering orbit oh

I am Bear Mountain

I am entering orbit

On the way home

The empty parkway wound its way back through charred black pine

Just like a wormhole

A bridge becomes an island when the ends are disconnected

Wind is feedback

Antiphonal stridency that slept for half a century

And where are you