“… If an assembly line were long enough
it could stretch beyond the projects to some countryside
where an unimaginable pastoral unfolds as far as the ocean,
containing cows, perhaps, containing birds, containing trees.
Pack your bags, sweetheart. Or, screw it — just send for your things.”
from I’m Gonna Move to The Outskirts of Town
by T.R. Hummer, The Infinity Sessions, 2005
We have nightmares about beetle kill, because this is what happens when you’ve burned the manual as the manual suggests. This is the phenomena of cutting onions; this is what happens when
you promise yourself not to worry
about the trees anymore.
If we could bottle the wind, we wouldn’t drink it — we’d sell it
at the farmer’s market alongside the homemade candle booth
where we’d walk by and pinch lit wicks, blackening our fingertips
in case, some time later, we need to re-identify ourselves.
Drinking kava, chain smoking cigarettes, packing boxes
while using a Sharpie to draw spider webs across your arm.
You have no idea where you are going but you’re sure
you’ll come out pure, totally transformed and armed
with the knowledge that cows are deadlier than sharks.
You’re in love with the idea of something. Light slanting through a doorway.
Humble brags in conversations with yourself on the interstate.
The past pulling you by the back of the ear while chainsaws rehearse in the snow
at the paper mill, grating to finally get the hero template just so.
You’ll wonder at the end if it will matter who’s fault it is, but know this: The good song is always better radio organic. Zoom out
for clarity. Say fly only as a verb, never as a noun, and remember the buffalo you love are actually North American Bison.
We were afraid until we discovered the longest palindrome is tattarrattat,
which seemed appropriate as we sit on our hands
on this last day of autumn, watching everyone we love
walk through one door, then another,
then out back into the orchard.
