Acres

everyone lives trapped in a revolving industrial garage with five-ton caution-striped hydraulic doors.

--

there's a black hole in the rearview mirror
as we drive out of nothing, into nothing
the world materializing fifty feet ahead
and dissolving as we pass.
we exist in a circle of definition
going nowhere at fifty-seven miles per hour.

--

We walk along fallow fields, jumping marshes and wading through reeds. We walk along the hedgerows under a leaden sky, into tangled apple trees whose withered fruits lie bleeding and frozen in the mud. All the trees have claws, here. Fingers reach across the pond, eating its icy casing, dyeing it aquamarine, dyeing it blackish and brackish as it starts to rain, and the pool becomes a drumskin, every drop a ring of sound, rippling into our eyes and our ears. We follow the memory of deer up the hill, into true woods. The moss and the ferns are rebels, survivors, verdantly alive in the monochrome scene. Our boots crunch down the slope, over stream and through brambles that tear our skin and clutch at our hair, onto a landscape laid belly up, open to the mercy of the sky... I wander in a daze toward a fallen cloud, a bit of still-frozen snow...? Through someone else's eyes I see the dead goose, its saline feathers sooty and rubied, strewn across the clover. Ornithinian ribs tear at the leaking sky, the ruined head tucked under one mangled, outflung wing. I sing a lament as I walk. I can hear the hunter in the woods; I am dressed all in brown. I sing as I capture the tiny hooves, scattered limbs, the pile of skin, the empty shell, the head, still erect. I sing in the sunlight to the open sky, to the strewn feathers and whitest down, the tangled intestines, the empty eyes and crushed beak, the crumpled feet. The shots ring, ever nearer, and I flinch; I wander, stagger, and weave; I scatter.