A workaday poem, made in the workshop from what was at hand. I don't claim inspiration, but I do think about these things...
#12. Surfaces
This is the hollow world: clear-cut edged by
phantom stands of trees, view from asphalt
lush until the summit, T-shirt lifted
to reveal the wound—extraction and the
hasty, gaping scar. The ground’s gone rocky,
dust rasping in ravines once hushed with
moss, though the land is still imprinted
with pine shadow, cracked clay holding in
the heat, all yielding burned away. Softness
disappears, from air, from us, from all we
breathe and touch, a loss so deep we run
back to illusion—the outline of
a forest, imagining the part
to be the whole, and, like us, safe.
4/16/07
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