Waiting For the Turkey, With Reduction
I want to walk across the field to the giant oak.
Two ropes hang from its outstretched branch.
They swing back and forth over the seat,
the one which they strung up for years;
and the seat sank with two holes in it, and was petrified, even below the thrushes.
It reminds me of fossils I’ve seen in museums
of animals that lived once but,
naturally, do not now.
The oak is the home of a family bloodline of cardinals;
the oak is theirs.
The rain wash seeps down the crook of their tiny necks,
and it would also seep down mine,
granted I walk through the field to their giant oak.
Next year I will be eleven years older than my students.
Most of them have never seen my favorite movie as a kid,
the one concerning large animals being made by man.
I was frightened at the symmetry of creation.
Around the telephone-pole rigging, a man is stuck
up to his ankles in the mud.
He breaks, and reconnects.
I smile and think of how a used fuse is like a broken collarbone.
The land right now holds no juice;
only salt is at the edges of the road.
The road is oblivious to the limestone permanganate over which it rests.
Seasoning, but I can’t think for what.
There is no such thing as grey fruit.
The earth has chewed up the fossils
of massive and very flightless reptiles
so that the oak tree could drink,
and so that another generation
might fly to a place.
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