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Aggregate conveyor pokes above the treeline at sunrise.
Silhouettes of crows perched in the silhouettes of trees,
fires not yet ripped through here. Sun orange and correctly
ascending over new mountains of developers’ slag—
all the For Lease signs along the artery, all the Styrofoam castles
forming in the boonies. The signs won’t stay up in the wind.
School buses bumping down the highway like apocalypse.
Earth mounded up, garbage gathering at the stumps of hills,
a canal of it grazing the houses’ foundations.
Brownfield and a flash of fresh woodchips. Blue branches
and red ones and yellow ones in the sea of greys,
winter unending but constantly interrupted.
To cross this high over a creek, to stay that far away
and claim to live here. I had a dream about a return
of warmth, sudden and lively. Scratching a dog’s ears
and getting a nuzzle in return. People gathered beside water.
A big five-armed birch. I woke to maples
bleeding sap on the sidewalks. I woke trying to tally
the loss in a clearcut, all that intelligence wiped out
for parcels of capitalist language. How I might also be
a tree ripped out, and the machinery, interrupting
any chance to dig in, to know somewhere.
The fury that builds whenever we pull up stakes.
And the need to do it, to follow the money. The relief I feel.