Fruit of the Season's Slush Fund

Being that
she's always to be found
in space made by concertina wire
a drab and tattering habit fashioned
by many charming seasons

                                 (the gray sound of spokes
                                 yelled deuce behind the baseline—
                                 courted trapping in a tennis skirt)

For what it's worth, preferring
a third, green rail, fifth wheel,
wrenched at the rhumb line, scabs
pushing barbs, ragged paths by what passes
for a pick-up in the night.

Picked up and driven home:
the Post Road pitted with sown salt, hitching
posts adrift in dirty snow
and stonewalling
in the rearview mirror, a semblance
of permafrost
making all shoes insensible.

Let down, rather
than recoiled
from time
in time for the local pandemic
of porchlight, inoculating
a revival of whist
under the weather.

What's more:
her paper fan-shaped frock
unfolding
into little dead places.