Like Any Other

That day driving nowhere
we stopped at the Mills Mansion,
a jeweled estate draped like something frosted, brittle.
Its bitter blue hills rambled down to the Hudson.
Catlike, it perched, a living museum
for Ogden Mills, son of America’s Gilded Age,
for Ruth Mills, daughter of landowners
long before land could be pressed onto paper.
Escaping, we hiked its unused trail along the coast,
sought company in the catcalls of snowy egrets,
marsh wrens pointing their heads to the wind,
sandpipers, dotting river ruins of pagan gods left behind.
When the rain came it poured like silk over us,
echoed the space we’d long ago bridged
on new legs weak with water.
We ran back to watch the storm start over.
The gaunt mansion fluttering made us wish we’d stayed wooded,
trapped awhile longer with birdcall,
sounding out the shape of rain.
Our thoughts of decay, our bodies haloed
in amber light of the place between storms.

Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have appeared in Bluepper, Collidescope, and Chronogram, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Ligeia Magazine, Green Silk Journal, The Oddville Press, and Schuylkill Valley Journal.