Drove

down with the moving particulars.
Honest work. Our human way stations.

At night the refineries and brown fields
glimmer and beckon.

Mythical kingdoms.
Colossus of Rome, her brutish size.

~

Strange how absence inhabits us,
becomes presence.

We accumulate open space,
the yawning memory of it brimming.

A meadow in spring,
minor symphonies.

~

We ravage things.
And I remember things
is a weak word,

a broad stroke

in a world craving specified thrust.
Then,

we ravage marshes and rivers.

We ravage the bodies
of our lovers

from time to time
because the urge is inexorable.

To abut annihilation.

~

Once, this was marshland.
Tall grass, fetid water.

No colonnade of human machinery,
clinquant in the dark.

We cannot imagine such silence.

Now,

boat trails through the marshes.
Clear veins.

We all have our own philosophies.

~

Men work towards dawn,
scuttling scarabs, routing

our urges on their proper
course. Downriver, the

refineries belch grandiloquently.

Such casual destruction.

~

The damp, rank pungent rot
of riverbanks. Of marsh land.

Of stagnation.

I remember my grandfather
walking the ruts of an old road,

a row of willows on his right.
Over there was the Olsen farm.

And there was the Stenson’s.
Gone now, just encroaching

subdivisions. His creek drained.
But still the smell: soil, water,

their eternal marriage.

~

Our lives are absences, filled
with scents, and with stories,

with letters sent frantically
in the night.

It's all the same chasm, but it
expands, and expands.

Until not one thing can anymore fill it.

Above, a plane glides for earth.
No signs of distress from such a height.

Just long promenades of light
carved through the dark.