Timing

It’s quiet in this open field
where crows all drone
their tales of nightly conquests,
but in voices not much louder
than a discrete conversation.

That is until some late night
kids in striped blue patterned
shirts pick them slowly
off the metal fence
with rocks they all withdrew
from garden beds.

They don’t watch out for headlights
when they break out of the graveyard,
and the train cars disconnected
from the engine fly backward
down the hill, and at the moment
they are crossing over tracks
they are collided with and carried off
for miles.

This ends within the first ten yards
of a distant bridge where a half gone
shattered bone is wedged within
a gap between the railing.
A drop of blood falls the full distance
into the woods below, where it connects with
the forehead of a woman on her way
to see her son.

She wipes it off mistaking it for rain,
and doesn’t even see the train cars
burning from the friction up above her.
She knows he’s in a cabin somewhere
just along this trail, and it has been so long
since they have even spoken.

She arrives there as the sun is rolling over
all the trees, and he is sitting on the front porch
looking out at her afraid of what she might be there
to say.
They save it for another day, and just spend the one
they have like it was money made for nothing
and the hourglass was finally on their side.