Well, you know it's true
            I go in the morning to the twenty-acre wood
            lodged between meaner homes.
            One day I'll examine one day getting by, getting shorter.
            And I'm not saying each slow minute
            will fall apart into the present:
            in the northern provinces of my county
            farms export to small cities
            the sweet flavors, the last
            apples crowding the hills.
            By the time the sun clocks heaven's noon
            another set of homes will overtake
            a field strewn with boulders
            from the last ice age.

            I wanted to write you. If only
            telling were enough. It was
            the first night of early darkness. Crowds gathered
            under the black oak arms and I thought you wanted to hear
            each man's throaty laugh: they were us,
            really. We framed houses, poured driveways.
            Planned the wooded suburbs to match
            the lives we stored behind thick windows.
            But then, they took hillocks with them,
            mounds of dirt. The lonely, the misplaced
            can't live here. Burning near the half-mile stream
            at this suburb's mouth, they are no more ugly than those
            who crowd the landscape, who want to steal our seeds,
            the unfastening taking place this season.
                    

Copyright © Albino Carrillo, 2002.  All Rights Reserved.