Incubation
I wanted to stay there forever,
beyond the sunset where we wasted
ourselves, our youthful energy floating
in the field. After dark, we savored the light
stretching from the porch, but our shadows there,
in the growing darkness changed us, our fear
replaced by an unexpected bravado. Any fear
of what could happen to our ideas of forever
faltered amidst the nascent buzzes there
in the field. That first thwack. Wasted
like drunks on opportunity, elated and light
with vigor borne from sin, a vapor floating
like untethered cobwebs. Our spectral floating
lasted until the gray dawn when our fear
reemerged in the first bud of morning light.
Until then, my Wiffleball bat, forever
a symbol of what was to come, wasted
and cracked from its infernal purpose. There
were so many of those bugs, there
were too many of those bugs floating
and buzzing to the porchlight, wasted
and clumsy from birth, unaware of the fear
to which they flew, their deathly forever:
If we didn’t get them, the light
would. Clink off the porchlight, the light
that guided fresh junebugs there
in the dark, and forever
we swung at them so hard it felt like floating
in dark water, that chasm between fun and fear.
Our bats were stained like chicken pox from wasted
bodies. Then, our balked violence, our wasted
chuckles fueled by ignorance and a light
in our eyes powered by fear
finished. Crickets hollered there
in the woods. A moth’s shadow fluttered. Floating
eyes watched from black trees, brooding forever.
In the game of forever, purgatory is fear,
our prayers are wasted, salvation is stuck there
in our floating world, shriveling in the light.
On the 686 Downeaster
Three-and-a-half hours of glances
into openly secret lives of strangers,
like that memory game that gives you ten
seconds to remember as much as possible
before homogenizing
into a kaleidoscope of green. Treehouses,
forgotten boxcars splattered with profane
graffiti, tired RVs underneath
a blanket of pine needles, concrete steps
rough with age leading nowhere, miles
and miles of forest, old stacks of firewood
under shredded tarps pinned down by split
cinderblocks, dark smoke from a burnpile
a shirtless man prods with a rake, metal
trampoline frames as brown as dead
leaves, and what looked like miles
and miles of forest. I saw the other stuff,
too, the college town, busy sidewalks
on the perimeter of brick buildings
and pretty farmhouses and Main Streets
halted just for us. Little girls waved
to us in Dover. They couldn’t see me.
I imagined their cheerful cries, their call
for acknowledgement like fireworks
heard from a mountaintop.
Somewhere on the line, in some field,
a solar farm flickers, and at our speed,
in our timely haste along the rail,
it shimmers at us: reflective rows
of fresh headstones, and then it, too,
is forgotten.
Adam Chabot is the English Department Chair at Kents Hill School, a private, independent high school located in central Maine. His other poetry has been recently featured in rough diamond poetry, Livina Press, and Selcouth Station, among others. He can be found on Twitter @adam_chabot.