Hills of Silver

Hills of Silver

All left out junk of the human creation,

Anthropocene garbage, five hundred years and

only the scars on the land fill with water.

A bake sale of tires and wire.

Tonnage of back fill and board feet.

American rails and parking lots, oil and gas.

Burnt out bar b cues, pits for back fill somewhere else.

Carpets sodden, wrecked, dumped.

Who can make anything worth something again?

Everything of plastic bleaching colors in the sun,

breaking down like a billion used tires.

Mosquito breeders, hog waste,

the dilapidated passions of illness and consumption.

A run on toilet paper and hand sanitizer

scouring the flora and microbes of our insides

to make our minds as transparent, antiseptic and bright

as the clean room under microscope for the silicon storage

of meme breeders and conquerors of distance as time as

quantum integers entwined at a distance to laugh and spin.

The food yard full of beat down ruts and pushed gravel.

What a bower for the lover’s serenade.

What a tumble for the grass.

Inchoate, mesmerized, tonnage of slough and

grab bags for the kids.

Play me fiddle crab.

Buy me idle loon.

Gregarious functionaries meet us half way.

The dust and the mites, the bougainvillea

and the eukaryotes of the gut, the rhizomes of the mushroom

foamed up the side of the tree and everywhere below the ground

where the bacteria perform the work of mountains and

algae lays its claim for waste and growth and abundance.

My personal story.

Fast in a hand hold, nudged in a grip.

The light of my mind can shine only a little longer.

The words start to elude me.

That gift for the drift if I claim it.

Reason’s slight release of all the teeming images,

the mere suggestions of a deeper language susceptible to all.

A call out card, branch of olive, blackened thorn of wrongs

done by me and on to me, piled as ignorant obfuscation,

heaped as rotting compost, thought like the blaring TV

and all of its surety.

I take the weather however it comes, the scourge of wind,

the piled snow and mired traffic, right with the fears of the crowd.

The mighty us with murdered mouth, the broken and the strong among us

unfinished as the start of a meal or the dream of big projects in America.

The greater strength of Latin America, the South of America, Alabama, Florida, Tegucigalpa.

Shave headed prisoners, tie strings of their jammie pants wagging loose.

Even the birds and the bugs are on the wing and looking up.

The old man’s blood pressure.

The young girl’s drawer-

her oils and powders, perfumes and combs.

This and that man,

All of those women out walking.

Which lane?

Fast track, country road, forest trail,

Nature reclaims quickly,

the salty brine of the shore, the rush of wind over the water.

Things held precious as an idea reveal latent tracks as a hard layer below the mud.

Die hards of compassion looking out for everyone.

Lovers whispering of the future.

Cats and dogs and river mice and

the old crone stork nesting on the chimney looking from her dry beak eye

at the waste of the flat land, the rubble and refuse,

the knee deep sileage and sewage,

the back up of all of us aware that we are too much and too many,

too selfish and precious to leave behind.

We are the otter and the rim of toasting glasses that clink and know you,

that sink and believe in that wet fertility, that green gut and thick black mud

like Iowa and Kansas before the roads or after the people’s apocalypse

when the Spring and morning’s sun seem again like a bowl with its

round dome of sky all in order,

Crinkling as gentle rain on last year’s leaves.

Rolf's Poems and Pictures

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