It starts with a railroad, a fort nearby
with plenty of guns in its armory,
and a promise of gold, silver, copper, oil, coal,
for the hills to be bowed toward the practical,
extractable enough for Eastern financiers
to send along their goonies and their threshers
and hang posters that spoke of a heroes bounty
to every down and out outcast who teemed in the cities.
They brought in the necessities: a saloon, a smelter,
a brothel, a bank, a slaughterhouse, a factory for plaster
and inevitably, ministers, to teach about the curse of Eve.
As families and graveyards grew, they believed they’d never leave
but the children soon became bored
with the choice of liquor and the lord
and moved upstate, to get away from all the gratitude
for the blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ, from the attitude
of acceptance for the losses in the mines and the fires,
of reverence for the well-connected vampires
who owned the town whole as everybody knew
and mixed its rivers red with the cadmium blue.
The price of silver dropped, and the town just dispersed
but something stayed behind, a right to be there, with the curse
that hung inside the lace, the last trappings of an outpost,
the god-forsaken hideaway of ghosts.
How we cherish them now, as we walk this blessed town.
How we pray that we could raise it from the ground.
