Eraserhead Takes a Hike

The Bethabara beaver pond
is a place of queer contrast.
An acre of beer colored water
cornered by a busy crossroads
in bottomland.

Here, the line is drawn.

As I walk the perimeter,
my boots make soft suction
slurp prints in watery peat,
while the car bass pounds like migraine.

A sturdy dam of leaves, sticks,
and mud backs the water
flooding the root systems.
Gray timbers stand as great skeletons
splinter spined, broken backed, fallen,
twisted in wild angle sculpture.

Beaks poke from dead wood homes
catch yellow in sunshine.
Frogeyes periscope peep,
mud turtle lumbers off a log.
Iridescent crest crowns a paddling wood duck,
Ahh, to have such a pate,
my plainness shames me.

Then a billboard steals a piece of sky:
“Biggie Size those Fries!”

The smugness of Saturday afternoon.
Gaudy strip mall, gawking motorists
endless mess of motion.
Through tinted Lexus glass
a socialite stylishly drags a “Slim.”
I see eye-whites in sideways gaze.
Me, all faded in denims
fool grinning, my hair stuck and standing
in “Eraserhead” fountains of fiber.

Bojangles’ Chicken, ribbed for her pleasure
Mr. Pibb’s saccharine swill, nature defiled
in cups and cartons strewn.
Plastic shop bag handles hook in briar,
rustle and flap, like surrender.

But I say, God Damn the phone store,
the Chinese carry out, those sweaty gym machines,
that life insurance “rock,” all this casual carelessness.
May the bog seep, spread, swallow,
and leave behind a place where winds whisper the gold grass,
and sway the creaking trees.