Jeremiad for Spring

Consider the slagheap seeping
below the county’s tanned hide—

below the trampled pastures,
the leafless beans, the very clay

sighing as it subsides. This is summer
leaching away. Floodlit at shift’s end,

the prison smolders like dawn
on the horizon. Bleared headlights

rill along the highway toward
a sign strobing a beat against

the dark, slurred fog of empty fields.
Overhead, nighthawks snag

and pitch in the neon half-light.
Inside, men drink beyond

remembering the roads home—
crumbled blacktops snaking

creek bottoms past homesteads
burnt or rotted to chimney-framed

wallows. They drive through flurries
of cottonwood leaves fluttering

like ash from the listing trunks
of Baptist churchyards, the stained

glass patched with plywood. The lane
peters out into a derelict barn-lot

swamped with honeysuckle, full
of rusted moldboards and harrows

that say in deep shadow this is nowhere
you belong. This is the corn-belt

in the age of AIDS, of erosion—
whole histories gone in a wash

of acid rain and crystal meth. How long
until the mud blooms green again

with the burn of anhydrous, until the soil
shifts in slow sheets across the road?

.