Unauthorized Dump


Where general sun breaks down
In specific weeds,
Iron is invaded by air:
A doorless dryer
Tilts open upward,
Half-full of muddy water
And blackening clumps of leaves.

Something's coming other than the spring.
Late afternoon moves like a bulldozer
Over surrounding hills
Abandoned to growth;
By the river, trees
Fallen into the embrace of mud
Sink and darken,

And still the bed's uncovered skeleton
Remembers no marriage:
Each helix of its wired cage of springs
Adapts to the pile of chunked cement and rock
Where it was dumped.
Where general sun breaks down
In a few million weeds,

Crossing a dead stream and running out
Into the littered shadow of the wood,
The Ideal loses impetus.
Yet something keeps: what is it? In the sky,
A fallen color? Blackness in the leaves
Of the final rust
Metal concedes to air?

Even here, in this zero place
With fallen things
Stripped of decoration,
Scattered out
Like acorns, hardware, bones, like anything,
Something resists subtraction,
And is left.

The living nerve,
In its supple duct of cartilage and bone,
Knows, besides the hill
Scattered with shade and seed,
The old frameworks sprawling in the dirt,
Or the rusty coils
Holding their skeleton shape against the rocks,

That something else is here.
Outside our ignorance and entertainment,
There is another order to the world:
It is that thing
Left in unanswered silence after movement.
There is no description for it.

It is here to stay.