Long Clapboards Poems

How empty can an inbox possibly be?
Not unlike a door..... practically off at hinges
The paint is definitely peeling
More than one shutter has fallen astray. 

One piece at a time

Have you ever seen that?
How old houses....
...

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"She will reign on the cliff above the quay, this derelict house restored to her former beauty. No beast of the field, nor bird in the air shall wander her halls. Now she belongs to...

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A deserted Victorian house stood off the county road just a little way.
To keep apace of living I rushed by it most every day.
For years I'd wanted to visit there to see what secrets it...

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On the wind-swept Nebraska prairie sits a building in wretched shambles,
Surrounded by a sagging fence and overgrown with prickly brambles.
It was once a bustling one-room school house, abandoned long ago.
Its weather-beaten clapboards, I judged to...

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Sundial
My passion is the silent weather vane
The gambrel brought such sorrow
Much I marveled this roughcast cairn
Eagerly I looked for the lintel

I have dreamed of the clocks
Eagerly I looked for the masonry
It was heterodox
Somewhat louder than...

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I could have fallen
Stepping down the hill slope
On the slippery roots
Not wearing my work boots
Just rubber-soled sneakers turning down Main.

A new-balanced moment
Walking back to my room
By tenement house-caves
A descendent of slaves
Hammers his clapboards shut to...

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A deserted old house stood off the county road a little way.
To keep apace of living I rushed by it almost every day.
For years I'd wanted to visit there to see what secrets it held,
And...

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Slender, whispering and flaming fireweed surrounds
the gray-weathered clapboards of the deserted
homestead whose torn gingham curtains blow among
the paneless windows with the gentle breeze of
summer morning.

Silence is challenged by harmonizing birds
who serenade the observer of the...

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Amid the glacial hills of central Maine
There stood forsaken, gray, an ancient farm,
Which always filled us with a vague alarm.
Atop the humpback ridge of a moraine,

Abandoned now, for centuries it stood,
Defying time, and ice, and...

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The realtor ushered us up the cracked sidewalk,
Paint peeling from the clapboards
Revealed a rainbow of colors in the cracks.
Like a geologist who looks at canyon walls
And sees the ebb and flow of oceans writ large,
We...

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Nestled deep in the tawny, drab woodland
Sedate cottage neither haughty nor grand
Sparse hovel of unassuming, itinerant brigand
Martial decor of detached highwayman starkly bland
The etched path sculpted by intemperate hand
No manicured garden on the scrubby strand
Briers...

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Urban legend now bared to the bone
Yet its trademark can no larger store clone
No glossy signs, spacious lots fealty to hone
But in colloquial parlance a tradition has grown
Larger Discount stores with dignity stand alone
Corner grocery,...

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The wind wolfed through the back porch
setting chime clappers to gong,
seething with ferocity, dropping power lines 
swacking the gutters against the clapboards.

Window panes rattle, chattering with the storms,
conversing with the tic tap and ping of...

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