The Colonial Instinct, St. Croix Watershed 2002

Well, you know it's true
I go in the morning to the twenty-acre wood
lodged between meaner homes.
One day I'll examine one day getting by, getting shorter.
And I'm not saying each slow minute
will fall apart into the present:
in the northern provinces of my county
farms export to small cities
the sweet flavors, the last
apples crowding the hills.
By the time the sun clocks heaven's noon
another set of homes will overtake
a field strewn with boulders
from the last ice age.

I wanted to write you. If only
telling were enough. It was
the first night of early darkness. Crowds gathered
under the black oak arms and I thought you wanted to hear
each man's throaty laugh: they were us,
really. We framed houses, poured driveways.
Planned the wooded suburbs to match
the lives we stored behind thick windows.
But then, they took hillocks with them,
mounds of dirt. The lonely, the misplaced
can't live here. Burning near the half-mile stream
at this suburb's mouth, they are no more ugly than those
who crowd the landscape, who want to steal our seeds,
the unfastening taking place this season.

 

Copyright © Albino Carrillo, 2002.  All Rights Reserved.

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