Trees are pressed against flat sky like specimens 
in a botany book; weathers gray barns
in time, in art’s picturesque suspension.
I pass drought-brown skeletons of tractors,
rakes, bailers, half buried in prickered weeds.
 
In dawn’s cold clarity, I count highway
hawks, brake for the bridge over Crossman’s Creek,
chatter railroad tracks that have lost their shine.
Black dogs, like discarded tires, hold down
red-clay yards. Bus-stop children, serious
and silly, surely have heart-aches of their own.
 
Waiting for the one traffic light in town, I
am losing my argument with Time.
I pass the coin laundry, convenience
store, The Chicken Coop with rusting rooster
out front. The courthouse jury is sequestered
at the motel on Route 151.
 
Her house has small town gumption; white lights strung 
like a zodiac around porch eaves,
yard signs of still defeated candidates
are defiant in patriotic plastic.
 
The door opens, itself a platitude 
of expectation; she welcomes me with a 
casual kiss like a passcode approved.
She has risen in sweetness of motion
 
like the dawn I have driven through, a joy
that heroes me home. We harvest the twists
of fate in our kingdom of habit, true
to promises children will someday understand.
                        

            Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places?
                                                    Elizabeth Bishop “Questions of Travel” 
 
Our one fear is getting lost.
My wife has the map unfolded on her lap
as she would a picnic napkin as we ease 
our rental car toward the lazy Seine,
winning the roulette of traffic circles.
We confidence ourselves through
graffiti-ed outskirts and into the green
pastures, woodlands west of Rouen.
 
What conquering curiosity brings us to this travel;
did we not traipse our hometown thoroughly enough?
 
In dim light, the banner of linen and wool
is laid out before us like a scroll of scripture—
any ruler’s creed of arrogance and revenge.
We are enamored by the exquisite improbabilities
of depiction, observe in the margins the fanciful 
among real carnage, the blood
of the ordinary man that war always demands.
 
Is that Adam and Eve among the dragons?
Can we ever trust another man’s history?
 
We think of the fatigue, the sore fingers
of the embroiderers, their anxiety over a lost thimble, 
tangle of wool, their child’s unabating fever.
That their work survives at all is a miracle,
as we recall religious extremists smash
stone statues in Mosul, blow up Buddhas
in Bamiyan, burn books in Timbuktu.
                        

Like a snow-globe, dust swirls around the barn;
slow paling machinery parked as a 
centerpiece of labor’s life: the Adams
Leaning Wheel Grader, with grubby brass plaque
instructions is a humble legacy
of invention; no Massey-Ferguson
to pull it.  Under the trust of roof
teenagers discover the heft of bodies,
the lightness of sex. A pigeon chorus
beams down as alfalfa and fescue smell
of harvest grace, black snakes police the rats
and their associates.  The paddock births
burdock and thistle; and nostalgia gray
washes the red to drain its urgency.
Drab phoebes tend their young in mud and moss,
fly the un-paned window to weedy fields.
The bordering brook ambles to the sea.