Three Sketches

1. Baker's Store

Mild grey morning,
snow spits from the
blowsy sky.
Black ice pitted with dirt
and grease, bad breath
of transmissions, draws back
like gums in an old man's mouth,
displaying old troubles.

April morning like a bad hangover--
waking to the destruction.
Bottles and cans, trash, tobacco tins.
Does the good we do outlive us
or are we survived by this
stain we make on the world, inchoate
memory of our unthinking?

Big doe grazing on shoots
in the just-cleared garden
of the brick house.
Bounds away when I come down.

A 4x4 refilling diesel at the pump.
Two men stand by watching the gauge
roll, scared by the price of things.
The lights stay on
over the gas pumps into morning,
sensing the darkness.


2. On the Dam

Three steps out and I'm dizzy--
dance with it, don't freeze, be
loose, be light... The water so high
and rushing, snow pack on the
stones and the
stones' disrepair, sliding, pieces
broken off, cracks and gaps. I pick
my way; the water charges
over and through and under, around
the broken dam. It swirls
away like a wind and is never
ending. A small tree
is growing here, roots in the mud
of washovers, up here,
where once men piled stones
to hold back the river.


3. On the Road

I fill a bag with trash
on the way back
up Barker Road. Pick
them up one by one, cans
and bottles, but I leave
the jars red with
tobacco spit,
their lids screwed back
tight, they lie on their sides,
the liquid pooling.

Two beagles running up the road,
broken loose, mud happy,
hunters in off season,
slipped their chains.

A kestrel circling high,
catches a thermal, she has
the large view of the region
in which we are all detail,
mapped. One kestrel floating,
wheels in low, then rises.
Then her mate.