Churches

The abandoned ones end up like weathered barns,
the sort you see from the road and dream of,
forgotten places you'd never actually fill
with horses or the labor of your own hands,
because who'd want to invest in a ruin?
Yet you walk in one day, watch dust turn gold
in the light of those achingly simple windows,
run your hand along the stalls, the wood
still coarse as if raised only yesterday,
and breathe the air. Someone was here,
kneeling down in a bed of dry hay, working
pieces of iron from the curve of another's feet.

TempleCone is the author of five chapbooks of poetry- Eurydice & Orpheus (Finishing Line, forthcoming) Radiolaria (Pudding House, 2007), Quandary Farm (Pudding House, 2007), A Father's Story (Pudding House, 2007), and Considerations of Earth and Sky (Parallel Press, 2005). He has received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Poetry, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and the John Lehman Award in Poetry from Wisconsin Academy Review, and was an Open Contest Winner in Best New Poets 2005. An assistant professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis, Maryland with his wife and daughter.