Local Receipt, Folded, Soaked

Local Receipt, Folded, Soaked:

1 tea 1 pkg chips 1 sandwich

Love brought me that far by the hand, without

The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed

And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned;

Then just kept standing there, not letting go.

                                        Seamus Heaney

                                        from "The Walk"

It's a road you go by knowing:

wouldn't you like to see

how far into the trees it sneaks

before the abutment of some

other property is KEEP OUT seen: laundry,

clapboard, 1 turned-on- a- pedal,

wheel-pocked-with-dew-

and-rust kid's bike--the kind

if you were a kid that would be

measured against the neighborhood

and seen, if new, a bucking 

wheelie of a steed.  Take it,

that vision, and walk up

and up and up the hill that could

be a literal killer in winter.

The litter is natural, its

pine and every quarter

of a mile maybe a deliberate,

old-blowdown-drug-from

the-once-lightening-struck-canopy

splintered trunk.  Deterrent only

for wheels, it's easily

stepped over, they flake

and break apart in the seeming

infinity of their age.  Sawn,

some ends.  and some, if  

I were still

a kid, a tusk of the fallen (because 

out mission was Alexander's

infantry and my brother 

was alive and we'd stumble

and die in the thick

curl of the tusk. And they'd

remain while we, lucky or un,

you decide, no favor

no quarter, went on

and on and on.  Cresting it all

is the handmade mortarleas

stone wall and within

the family of bones.  Old owners

of the land.  Maybe, when 

they were interred, there weren't

so many pine or oak covering

the kind of steep hill they were 

brought up, to rest in all

their finality, and the crest of it. 

On this old road in the woods.

On an old asphalt road at that.  Steep.

Curvaceous.  Kept, but covered.  

I brushed some needles and cones. 

I think: tree teeth.  I think:

pangolins.  I think: these people, 

sleeping, beneath their boulders

and stones.  I see the gate is already

open, as though they're waiting.

But it has been, if the moss and cross

and all the lichen growing over it

says anything at all, for years.  

I leave it that way.  And maybe

I'm seen in an upstairs KEEP

OUT window.  And maybe

because I leave the way I came,

I'm not.  Either way...

Either way.  And then I have

to wonder, what of the dead

we walk on and over who

have never been celebrated,

remembered.  Who we build

roads over and tamp them

with the weight of our passive

neglect.  What of them?  What comes

of all their loves and all their

sorrows?  No cemetery in the woods

for people like me to come upon

at the end of a disappearing road.

What of them and their last call: chips,

two slices of meat between two slices

of bread, and lucky, sweet tea.