The Mill Road

cut trees in piles

on a sawback hill

stripped and loaded and

bound with steel cable

hauled away on skeletal trucks

and ground to pulp in the mill –

the terminal index glows

What is manufactured naked

and rendered white

assumes a paralyzed identity –

useless bulk suspended in traffic

gathering rain –

a turbulence of engines

disengaged, even from themselves

in a slow blur of radio waves

and slow gray petroleum fog

Old men die here

dissolved in their private wars,

brief lovers in a land so alien

that were confused

with cinema and myth

before the proper lies could be told,

before the ink could dry

on the formal documents

that closed the deal

The wood creaks and shifts

The cable groans

Neither can be what it is

until the distortions of labor

have settled back into dead brains

long forgotten on another

wet and crushing day