American Versailles

A spectre haunts some palace imitation,

Sidewalks long split by weeds mark the visitation,

Though there is no book to sign anymore, no ticket to enter,

Somehow in spring it’s always winter, here at whatever was before.

Leaves scrape and whisper against bare rafters, saying that the sparrows know what’s to come after,

Some long shadow ending in a spike still chides the woods long over, forcibly retreated by metal,

Where were you, where were they, where were the roots to hold when all required mettle, two t’s, two e’s, the kind that comes in pairs? What do I stand for and why weren’t both there?

No one answers, but all could have done.

The river busies itself with all observations, taking with its movement the impressions and sending them along, cycling over world as water does when it is air or goes to ocean, narrating of places miles away and years ago, where concrete shapes made muscle and in their turn were emptied.

Replenishing itself, the river needs no such husks of greed, hungering instead and always for flow and changing form.

Had they adapted its river ways, here there might be more.

Instead, winks of shine and gleam, mocking from the floor. So have others done to undo much, and for want of something besides surface.

This palace that it was never meant to be, crumbling at its core, pillars overloaded crashing with incapacity, so much weighted wrong in lack of proper keepers.

Some house that could have held, except by those tasked with all such care. Curious winds curl through in investigation, sightseeing over failure and abandon, pressing for the culprit of the crumble.

Storm clouds rumble, disallowing such an ask. Pass through, pass through, for this is not your task.

It was theirs. Now they are like you, a rush with no voice, a gust soon over, a crystal ball for ice or swelter. Like you now, wind, they have no shelter. They gave none, though they had this structure, supposed to last the ages without crack or rupture.

Rain makes choreography on all the jagged edges left behind—now for the dance and pay them no mind! We are the rain and the reign of it now. Life where they had left none, cycles vital, not some sobbing shadow of faux merit not even meriting the grief. Here, pour out no sentiments but seizing what they thieved.

The spectre is rejected by the place it’s supposed to haunt, unworthy even of the tangle in its wake. A ghost gone begging for a house that will take it.

Here, there are none. Unmade, this collection of symbols meant to define and refine the actions.

A passage of no soul, a body of no heart, a mind of no matter.

And where the grass grows, one could ask, “here, and when, what should have mattered?”

Over the heads of the bastions-turned-crypt, eyes able to make darkness day seem like an echo with a song gone hollow, from some memory sent to a grave too soon. Feather in rhythm and shake take wing… “who? who? who?”

Copyright © 2025 by Amy A. DeCew, all rights reserved