The Decay of Progress and the Progress of Decay

Every time I go back to that town, 

more trees are missing. 

The swimming pool across the road 

is now swamp, reeds growing 

beneath the diving boards, 

cracks spiderwebbing plaster. 

The creek always flooded there, 

gray-brown mire spilling 

across the sandbox 

and turning the pool to muck. 

Now: no more jukebox glowing 

in the snack stand. No more Dixie cups 

littering the grass. One summer 

I came home and the doors 

were suddenly boarded up, 

and sometimes it happens like that—

you think you’re paying enough attention 

and then you look closer and see 

that the whole stream has shifted, 

silt covers the overgrown parking lot 

where you once crushed ice in your snow boots 

and the shack where you bought chicken 

is now closed, the roof caving in, 

moss growing over picnic tables. 

If you’re lucky, you’ll develop a taste 

for absence, find relief in the space 

of what remains. 

I used to want things so deeply it tasted like dirt. 

And what could ever live up to that—

to holding the earth, 

dark and rooted, in your mouth? 

There was one year when the creek 

didn’t flood, but a deer hopped the fence 

and drowned in the pool, 

and I watched from my bedroom 

as the water turned the color of black tea. 

I wonder what stain I’ll leave behind, 

what shape my absence will take. 

Will the creek keep flooding

or will it dry up? I like to think 

that the room where I slept 

will be forest someday, 

the house bulldozed or left to collapse 

next to where the deer dissolved 

in the ditch it was dragged to. 

Now—for absence, read 

transfiguration. 

A sapling growing from a seed 

in the dead deer’s belly. Wildflowers 

in the deep end. 

Florescence.