Southern
Gothic: A Romance after Sally Mann:
Antietam (Black Sun)
Your eyes want
to supply
colour to a
black sun setting
over a field of
black:
phantom reds
assaulting
a splayed
horizon leaking
orange turning
yellow
at the edges
where the darkness
is now, where
colour is meant to die.
Southern
Gothic: A Romance after Sally Mann:
“Pensive as the dead gazing” (“The
Turn”)
The
maybe-sleeping man walks
as if entranced
toward receding
lake shore;
wavelets breeze riffled
at dusk. Though
solid, he seems
amorphous as a
smear of cloud
marring the
image, threatening
to engulf the
man and all the unreal
objects
cluttering the shallow banks.
Southern Gothic: A Romance after Sally Mann:
“Blackwater”
Blackwater
under overhanging
canopy of cypress.
Branches and
moss wreathes
like crepe cloaks
sparring in the
crepuscular light
to be seen. You
can almost smell
the rot of it:
the vegetal/animal stench
ever present as
memories
of the lost
ones fade; the maroons,
so long ago
drowned and forgotten.
Southern
Gothic: A Romance after Sally Mann:
Blackwater (“Valentine Windsor”)
At dusk the
waning, washed out
sky becomes a
stretched canvas
the waking dead
inscribe their
names on.
Blackwater seeps between
sagging peers,
the wasted pillars
of a burned-out
manor home;
the slave
quarters not even a memory now.
Alan Catlin has been publishing for parts of six decades Forthcoming is a chapbook from Gitter Snob, Satan's Kiss and a full-length book of movie poems from Kelsay, Exterminating Angels.
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