Feb. 20 03

(In Other Words, Everything I Touch Confirms My Flaws)

Power cables leap above access roads upon which live the pious
among yards of rusting flat-bed trucks brushed by ferns in early spring,
the ground beside them spongy with spaghum moss or pine needles.
The wind through the trees is very damp, and deep within the woods
are conceived yearlings that will leap into the roads by June,
while cables that pylons bolster cross rural counties
connecting to transformer stations coils of lovely copper wire
wound more precisely than buns of hair on fastidious church ladies
from which the cables travel to and fro above the humble abodes
with their canoes and rusting trucks with plastic pools or swings
or abandoned school buses with windows broken and punctured tires
slanting into bogs or marshy soil. You also think of spring
as you watch those vehicles corrode, the layers of paint
unpeeled by neglect or fire, surfaces scaled and coruscated
as walls of abandoned foundries on which constantly trickle
from corrugated tin roofs and rotted beams the aftermath
of rain or melting snow. It’s already spring in one’s head:
you melt as does the snow. But the thaw has been postponed,
the salty flats [covered] with a layer of half-ice, half-slush,
the pylons leap-frogging one another above grass either
golden as Illinois wheat or dull-brown as an unwanted mutt
baying at full moons in a junkyard, its proprietor lost
in deliriums of drink inside a shack concealed behind empty barrels
and the zinc-scaled disconnected parts of a ventilation system
that in its prime breathed upon its tenants the mold-laced air
and dust of space that, regardless of origin, swirls desultorily
before the faces of matrons with someone over for tea and fruit-cake,
the woollen chair-backs trapping dander beneath ancestral portraits
and die-stamped seascapes in which the breaking waves defy physics
as they race the land, a promontory absent picnickers bedecked
in 19th century finery and toting baskets more suitable
for balls of yarn and darning needles than the food one takes
to the seaside. Someone has painted himself in a corner here,
and wishes a window could be cracked, that the radiator
wasn’t adjusted so high, wilting the wild-flowers and Joe Pye weed
on the windowsill, the junkyard dust spinning in discrete columns
of sunlight, more than several motes instead of dried-up apples
to the eye. So one has written oneself into the circumstances
one has begun and filled in to the very last detail.