by Jéanpaul Ferro

As the sun sets once again over the hills
of Rhode Island,

the stallions go running down in brown blurs
across their Jamestown farms,

that old windmill—the only windmill
left in New England—

glistens in the afterglow of the rain sparkling
in the last seconds of day,

There is a mockingbird on a wire pretending
that he is a cardinal,

there is a man over there, walking home,
pretending that he is another man,

White pine treetops sway in the wind while an
entire field of clover cannot move even one inch
right next to those same trees,

Fitzgerald and Hemingway were brothers, someone
whispers in the doorway of the five & dime back in
town;

no, someone else whispers, it was love and death
that were really brothers and sisters all this time;

The blue water out on Narragansett Bay reflects
clouds pregnant with ocean rain,

A red boat floats adrift up toward the skyscrapers
of Providence,

Jesus is lying there on the sands in front of the tall
grasses north of Quonset,

Do you hear those drums? And do you hear those
planes? And do you hear the sound of all those guns
and bombs firing down upon us?

Stars begin to brighten blue and then silver atop pools
that have formed across the pine forest floor,

In a room in a home on the island, a brunette sits
on a bed with her best friend beside her,

She talks to this ghost who she knows has the
last words that won’t ever let her die,

While a man walks nearby in his mansion wearing
out his favorite red slippers, dreaming of Alexander
Graham Bell,

Everyone waiting for the sun to rise back over
Rhode Island,

the lightly bruised shadows of all-night slowly
fading black into the light-blue of dawn,

the stallions waking up to their stalls, the blue
sky kissing the shoulders of the trees to wake them
to morning—

All the ghosts that we have ever loved now living in a
loneliness so lost that not even God can find them.

Jéanpaul Ferro is a novelist, poet, and short fiction author from Providence, Rhode Island. An 8-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has been featured on National Public Radio, Columbia Review, Emerson Review, Connecticut Review, Contemporary American Voices, Portland Monthly, Hawaii Review, The Providence Journal, and many others. His published works include All The Good Promises (Plowman Press, 1994), Becoming X (BlazeVox Books, 2008), You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (Thumbscrews Press, 2009) Hemispheres (Maverick Duck Press, 2009), and Essendo Morti – Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009), which was nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry.