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