Among Ruins

"...Old hearsay and spirit talk gone into/The near silence of the place."

Click the play button to listen to Damon read from his poem “Among Ruins”. The full text appears below Tabby’s painting...

“What Speaks Inside These Walls” by Tabby Ivy.

Among Ruins

What is there to make of the house and porch 
Crumbling into ruins, of bindweed grown 
Up through slats of rotted timber, chipped and 
Dismantled by the long harvest of families 
Who could never stay here?  The curtains rent,
Bed iron overturned in the cross-hairs
Of paneless windows and the screen door 
Remarkably intact and just parted   
For us to see the knob missing, the door shut
We guess for years.  These are the signs we think
Of some country we know to be passing.
Old hearsay and spirit talk gone into
The near silence of the place.  Still we stop
To look a little and to wonder some
At the lean of abandonment, at those 
Birds who have stopped with us, gracing now the  
Slopes of spring trees.  What would it mean to go
Forward, to cross this barbed wire strung here?
The wind tap of a tin sign left on the line 
Just where we stand, where others used to be.  

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This work appears in Between Artists, Life in Paintings and Prose, by Damon Falke and Tabby Ivy. You can preorder from the second printing of the “Between Artists” book (the first printing sold out!) at tabbyivy.com/books

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Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

Tabby Ivy is a painter living in Bigfork, Montana. Painting came to her late in life. Her studio is in a converted golf cart garage. It is a sanctuary for painting and reading her vast collection of art books. www.tabbyivy.com