After a Terrible Thing Happened


I emerged from that place
Owning nothing
And came to this place where the path makes
A rough mosaic
Out of the scattered gravels and busted jars,
To find nothing more

Than what I saw wrecked black-barked in a jumble of vine,
Its mud-spattered
Entanglement of branches strangling the creek,
Its heart involved
In knotted roots nerved with a fine hair;
So I walked awhile

After the intelligence at the hull of things
Neglected not saved
And crusted with other lives than our own:
Until I felt
My skeleton turn to old iron
Forgotten in the mud

Edging a scrap-grounds. There were a few trees,
Thin saplings,
Hard by a broader wood of sycamores
Where no one looked.
My cold metals sank in the stunned-still world
All day

As only shadows moved over the dirt
And wreckage
And spidery nerves of root
Where a tree
Caught between others leaned over the creek:
All day

Sun burned on the unsalvaged metal
And moved slowly away
Over the stubs of weeds at the woods' edge
Until light eroded
Red in the distant emptiness of fields
Where dismantled things

Sank in embedded mud. A loose tree propped alive
Where only
A thicket of other limbs prevented its
Tearing away
From the bank it held part-lifted in its roots,
Leaned still

While the shadow of the woods crossed
Fallen things
Strewn with broken glass, and a far scattering of nuts
Cracked by the sun
Or rotten, bruised and buried: whatever there was stood
While only the light moved

On my iron skeleton rusting in the mud.
Those acorns cast
Shadows the length of oaks and the transparent
Color of locust shells
Over the wilderness of abandoned chassis
Where I stood

Watching the scrap-grounds darken in the shape
Of the caught tree
Hung half-dangling; and its slow roots forgot
The tangled shape
They had displaced for years in the packed bank,
And felt for other mud.

My nerves felt for the world:
All afternoon,
With the slow burn-out of daylight on the limbs,
I watched
Things shift through the empty rungs of trees
Until I felt myself

Lurched-loose and uprooted over the strangled creek
And scrap of the world,
Restrained only in iron-gray tanglings;
But I turned
From the shock of being torn away
To move again.

I walked to the next place on a rough path
Through the shifted woods
Where that ruined metal sank in the rusting sun
All afternoon,
As its cast-off purpose blackened with other scrap
Left unclaimed

In the taste of the mineral, November air,
And its flawed ribs
Stuck from the weedless mud
Dead-still by the brown
Water of the long ditch where the shadow fell,
Wrecked and loosening

In the only world that happens.