Crossing (05)

The parking lot across the street is very empty
because the import store is very closed.
Nor does the dairy fleet run to the cooling bin.
And the smokestack by the cooling bin is smokeless.
The day is cloudy, crows cross the cloud-banks,
caw and land among the trees, while the traffic crossing
is noiseless, and the cars don’t cross the footpaths,
and the paths the cars don’t cross are very empty.
Few caws, few cars, fewer people, fewer paths to cross.

The empty buses run, but the parking lot is empty
because the import store is closed Columbus Day.
Not that the rubber workers drop their machetes
or rubber-trees they cut won’t grow again, or land
reserved for rubber trees in semi-tropics not be razed,
or machetes be stilled in the middle of a field
or the basket-weavers cease their tying.

The import store won’t stop expanding with more baskets
or more spaces. The growers will need more land
for more semi-tropic rubber-trees, not that their leaves
are thick as cactus: a rubber plant, not rubber tree,
wilts on the casement. Wind can blow through both.
But wicker baskets can’t float, nor can rubber when raw.
Not that reeds won’t be weaved into baskets for the store,
nor paths not cross, life not continue, crows caw.

The inhabitants drifted, unaware of where they’d land.
They hadn’t crossed another shipping lane those days
when sailors defined the lanes they sailed by crossing them.
The traffic island deserted, no classes will be held in the future;
nor will there be classes today-- few crossings, fewer people,
fewer crows to caw. On the traffic island is a sign.

Who could know the island natives wrote them,
or could master the crossing-sign language,
not only stop or go -- red to cease, green go --
but caution, pedestrians too, more places to cross.
This is not the place to cross though,
not that it’s any trouble with fewer pedestrians,
less traffic, so many mute crossing streets,
so few imports or crossings or classes,
even fewer baskets, baby bassinets or hampers,
no wicker warp nor woof, no rubber-trees
cut into bar-stools, not wobbly as rubber
no lack of space or niches to place things,
small vessels to be fit primly into larger ones,
which in theory can continue ad infinitum,
as with kachina dolls or concentric compartments,
spheres that fit around a core too hot to touch or hold.

If the paths don’t cross, neither can the space
between the rubber of the tropics or the wicker
for which importing and paths are required.
Strange woods, rubber trees, no crows in them.
Empty traffic islands, universal sign-language.
Natives knew what red and yellow meant.
When a pedestrian stands there, natives hide,
letting signs they made from scrap-heaps speak for them,
the coast on which they landed surely not what they had had in mind,
green and given, unlike this traffic island. The import store
does not import their wicker-work or rubber-wood from them.

And the only tree on the traffic island is a sign.
Who has heard them speak the language of signs,
their perpetual stepping-stone to more places
where are grown the reeds of wicker or the rubber trees.
How time flies too, when adrift on rubber barques,
among bath toys, baby bassinets or wicker baskets,
an island in sight, a sign on the island
proclaiming: world over, crossing, diverge.