David Patneaude's Blog: Different Worlds - Posts Tagged "castle-rock"

It's Poetry Month, so here's a poem from my yet-to-be-published novel CAUGHT IN THE WAKE, the sequel to the award-winning THIN WOOD WALLS.

Castle Rock

I often dream of Castle Rock,
its crumbling peaks of rosy scorched nakedness rising over sentry towers
and shacks and barbed wire and us in our ill-fitting hand-me-downs.
I dream of its long shadows and early sunsets and Mike,
my brother,
silhouetted against its face on a smoldering dead-end afternoon.

But lately in my dreams Mike's familiar image is gone,
and a stand-in named Sandy, a soldier, appears, inviting me on an adventure
and a getaway ride in a Jeep, and we slip without trouble past the armed guards
and through the forbidding gate, and reach the base of the red mountain,
and dripping sweat, hike to the summit, where the gauzy curtain of my life-long myopia drops away to reveal the giant panoramic movie screen in front of me,

and for long moments I can see for a hundred miles in every direction,
but no matter where I look, I see no sign of my brother, so I surrender,
finally, and halfway through our descent I hear a hushed hissed greeting and
look down at a thick coil of smooth mottled skin and rattles poised on a flat rock, and the serpent whispers from its deadly yawn that it hasn't come for me,
and I stumble back, startled, and it repeats itself: I haven't come for you.