Backdrop of the Fled

It’s Colorado, it’s winter.
The trees have been deserted.
Standing as statues to their former selves.
Their spirits having been sucked back to the caverns
of introversion, down into the earth, hovering
around the roots and their fungi. Or having fluttered off
with the migrating birds, only to return when life returns,
when the flowers stretch, and the leaves burst, but until then…
The houses will be lined up as they are in single file, on either side
of the wide streets—rows of empty skulls, as spiritless
as the trees, this town,
with only the appearance of life, cars moving like zombies
in caravans, then groaning to nothing in the distance,
a man’s silhouette, crossing down the road,
in the corners of our eyes, from the grocery store, a shadow passing
over asphalt. There is a desolation
in how it all adds up, something emptier than a wasteland, the people
in their living rooms half asleep in TV patterns, having fluttered off
into fantasies of the past, regret configurations, families having failed,
the once passionate having failed to live, the houses: monuments to lives
not lived, to lives living on in imaginations…Walk down these streets
where the crows perch in empty branches, and then fly off…Walk down
these streets, where there’s a great hollowness that floods the plain and
all of the street lamps and the city building façades and the ambulances
and the grocery store clerks, their shadowy prospects, a hollowness
drowning everything that we can’t speak, that everything speaks,
so we take solace in each other when we can, playing ping pong
in the basement at midnight, hoping for a moment that feels right,
to remember, against the backdrop of the fled, its endless winter.