Stanley Smith Is Dead

The empty shed still stands

one-eyed across the field where dirt-

clod wars rage in a blazing of buried

cap pistols shooting the dark,

their Roy Rogers handles turned to stone,

where voices lie stopped in clay, long

taken by cancer, heart attacks, real wars.

We took the long way home from the Company Store

with empty milk jugs full of pennies;

'shaking them against a world that would not end

when 'the chain light was pulled at night,

when the familiar dark would fill with model planes

and dreams as fragile as balsa wood,

their splintered takeoffs crashing one

after another in the flaming wreckage of years,

wingless against the night sky, plummeting

earthward in hospital corridors, in obituary

columns full of recognized names, burning slowly

in their separate descent, finally landing

in blue space-heater light where the ghosts

of Trigger and plastic pistols roar.