Decorations by Kate Northrop

February 3, 2015   Decorations   Kate Northrop

(tired and high-pitched) Ghosts have been tied into the trees. At dawn they pivot In the wind slowly. Where the moon windows in I am of those Who can’t stand it Kept awake, humming with trucks While anything lunar Won’t rut, ruminates.  Overhead, uh-hunh— Days, the neighbor’s girl plays a game: what is? What is dusk, she says, as the sky ends it begins. I play myself. What is death?  What’s poetry?  What Is time?  Time needs no hanky, time blows by the Kleenex flowers.  Or time’s so slow, starry-cold, even is cold               and sure, little admonishments.                              . Were you awake all night? I was.  I was awake all night.            Copyright © 2015 by Kate Northrop. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I wrote a draft of this poem after taking my dog for a pre-dawn walk during which the predictable had looked strange, especially those ghosts that go up in the trees around Halloween. I wrote the poem to get closer to those ghosts, to think through the image of them, although the speaker of the poem tries (unsuccessfully, I think) to get away from them.” —Kate Northrop   Kate Northrop is the author of Clean(Persea Books, 2011). She teaches at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie, Wyoming. Most Recent Book by Northrop   Clean (Persea Books, 2011) "Night" by Carsten René Nielsen "Last" by Maxine Scates "Radar Data #12" by Lytton Smith Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.