The Trees
We’re bright against a dull landscape
Dripping with generic
roads and signs and
people
Feels dusty 1950s movie drive-in
tumbleweed Port Townsend
regret and crumbling
plaster
Bitter like public school
and trucks and
Ginsberg
Kerouac said not going to get
somewhere just
going
Like we were in our rusty car
feathered with dust
age
nostalgia
blocked only by
going fast
The only twisting feature that
rises against
flat rooftops low
to the ground
are dusty evergreens
whose woody spines twist
snaggly vertebrae
A child hunches behind the telephone
pole
evergreen hair mussed
rooted to the dusty ground
Others danced in
stationary symphony
behind the crumbling paint
humanoid statues
with insane shadows
in the fading light
We wanted to
break the tradition
like they broke the landscape
Here’s a tractor and a
dilapidated old house made
of has-beens
stop the car and stop the
heart
hefting a small mallet out of
the trunk
not too big or small
deadly child’s toy
that reeks of
rubber in the dying
sun
Broke the walls of the temple
and the skull’s alters
with blood cascading
in long infrared beams
back to the sun
and back to earth
Smiling with glee and terror
tearing the ground and
leaving the weapon
To go forever fast
away away
The boy behind the telephone
poll
has lost his human face
He’s just a bush
the hedge is square and
nothing breaks the flat heads
of trailer houses and
shanties
monotonous dust
billowing behind
furled tires
We left without reading her
sacred texts
gold and blue and
green
feathery book cover
love letters
calligraphy torn
from war and famine and
plague
every feather different and
ineffable
like the bushes with the
human forms
before
they lost
their shapes