Canaan

[00:12.99] For that year, your guise was the little patch of woods
[00:16.93] That stood behind your house.
[00:20.10] A spared phalanx of spindly elms
[00:22.76] On the edge of what once was.
[00:25.79] The train made its way through it every hour,
[00:27.87] And that streak of tired green light barrels by,
[00:30.69] clacking through the fecund underbrush.
[00:35.14] You'd listen to it as you tried to fall asleep.
[00:36.80] It was that tamed country aesthetic
[00:40.72] in which you sough solace.
[00:43.39] It came in the morning on the sprinklings of dew
[00:45.21] and faded with each sentimental sunset,
[00:48.32] which were like marmalade.
[00:52.00] I've tried to understand it myself,
[00:54.53] but it is almost too much.
[00:57.35] It is a river of muffled feelings and anxiety,
[01:00.50] a deep drink of silences,
[01:01.42] a nostalgia for the things that used to bring you joy.
[01:04.62] Yet you crumble to its neuroses,
[01:09.95] with your paranoid sense of necessary reassurance.
[01:13.82] The expanses of serpentine bliss and snaking paths
[01:16.86] that grow cindery in the late summer
[01:18.20] looped themselves around you,
[01:20.79] binding you to this most typical of place names.
[01:25.75] I have watched you wither,
[01:28.68] and succumb to this strange place.
[01:30.69] With a sense of disillusionment,
[01:32.05] you sought your perfection.
[01:35.54] So you constructed your glass jar,
[01:36.74] all vacuumed up with your sanity.
[01:38.74] You perched it on the ridge top where you could watch
[01:41.94] the manic depression unfold,
[01:45.68] teeming under the emerald grass.
[01:47.94]