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

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