It will be a long long time before we see
these cumulations again, these birds again, Carolina
conure wafting westward with the smell of
cockleburs, noise plummeting
It will be a long long time before we see
these peatlands again, compress burn decay store
again: Bog, Fen,
brackish plummeting
Watch now these stiff men, pale
dim faces like the ground we pasture
skillful with sickle and the tearing and the grazing
Watch now these sick men, shale
as the ground cutting farmlands to sudden boundary,
selfish, it seems, to the battle of
worms in the ground,
for their gnawing, smothered soon
with the interests in their ichor,
their silver, their plenty,
will birth old problems, old illness, old
borrowers, will dam like this soil clogged
in the sediments by which this bog coalesces
to new niches, new soils, new
gardens, the salt of the water minced
with the fire and the vegetation
the mosquitos and marrow, the green and the
nausea of motion in this eroded and rooted place.