Her Smile Etched In Dew

[Robert Crisman]

It's funny how mud that churned through the town seems now to bubble at night as the moon remains full behind endless, translucent clouds.

Daytime, meanwhile, has erased all the paint from the buildings on Main, which dips to the lake and the old dance hall where he took her.

The tree uprooted there in the lake by some unknown force grips with dead tendrils a carcass, the spavined brown gelding that pitched off the road late in June.

The man wore black boots, dusty in mud, as was the hem of his coat which trailed and swirled as he walked to the dance hall that night, and it seems that my memory has shrouded his eyes in that dust as she rested her feet and looked across at the water.

I know that he quoted the Bible, that his voice kissed like fog, and planted that moon and drew the clouds over, and that, as the crickets all chirruped, she asked him to dance, her face bathed in dew.

Her smile, a secret etching the dew on the lake as September echoes and time laps around me...

[Robert Crisman]

Dylan's "Man In the Long Black Coat" got to me the other night so I wrote this, in homage I guess...

[Jamie Hogan]

There's ghosts in this. It's haunted. I wonder if he was really a man? He seems almost a force of nature. Stirring stuff, man.