Towers by Askold Skalsky

Arriving late in Chincoteague, watching

your eyes when you mentioned a decade

had already passed, it's so simple, I thought,

like tossing in the first unformed waves of chill,

a glorious eight-bar modulation poured into

our autumn's lap, and we stranded in an empty

summer’s shack while the ground under us

remained faithful to its turn of leaves and leavings.

By the thin bracket of a lamp I glanced at myself

beside you and let our only room settle

into its cul de sac, the past mending its silence

like a spider slowly descending the bright filament

at the mercy of a little wind. We imagined

our hands touching on the white sands

of lighthouse lots, one last chance out of many

after we drove three hours, trusting the small

flat-roofed cottages were still there, slowly

displaying their brown-gray destiny of loss

where people outlived their days on porches

past which we would ride our clumsy bikes.

Save the photographs, you had said,

and I stored these episodes, carefully indexed

and unfinished in the middle of our sleep,

like tall laborious towers we had climbed and stopped,

now that we knew they were for jumping off.

Askold Skalsky, born in Ukraine, currently resides in Hagerstown, Maryland. His poems have appeared in over 300 magazines and online journals in the USA as well as in literary publications in Canada, England, Ireland, mainland Europe, Turkey, Australia, and Bangladesh. A first collection, The Ponies of Chuang Tzu, was published in 2011 by Horizon Tracts in New York City.