The Bygones

Eroding names on long-faced headstones, a small graveyard marooned on a patch of past; long rooted and confined while beside it 2022 blares unseeing past the forgotten lot. An old-fangled America right there forgotten crypts tucked between gas station and strip mall, a small deposit of once horse-drawn bones amid a modern thoroughfare. A haze of traffic emissions half-hides the secreted, the tucked away, yet, there are whispers on mossy mounds, mouthless echoes of forked-over farmers, matrons of dispersed parishes, tanners wrapped in musty mule skins. An olden daze leans toward us, tilts into the present, slides sideways into a ‘Wendy's’ car-park. Voices sweat into the skin of a biker filling his tank; beneath his dew rag they wetly whisper. He shudders in the warm sunlight, thinks about a lime phosphate soda long defunct. A cloudy memory follows a teenager toward a newly opened store, but the new won’t thrive long. Nothing around here survives longer than the bygones.