Through this maze of skeletal, slapped-up houses
runs a ribbon of sidewalk laid out this morning,
a gleaming wetness, a smell still bakery fresh,
an orphic door just now shut, reverberating, wrong.
Red wing blackbirds skim a field
where already the blocks have been surveyed,
where next week the bulldozers begin,
where next month the wives of soldiers will move in.
I smell the quick, vanishing protest of broken stalks,
I watch the look of a newly formed “O,”
the one round lip whitening with sap.
Giving way and giving way to man’s designs
the green world survives by horrible acquiescence,
and with elegant vanishing ink
each blackbird’s low flight inscribes the tangled manuscript.
Because there is no sound in this, the hammering
drone of cargo planes does not exist.
How can you fight this thistle and milkweed, soldier,
this stuff which fucks the very air around you,
which opens for the wind
and flaunts it in your face,
sends guards on duty into spasms of sneezing?
Bulldoze the whole patch out,
burn the dried-up piles of spindly dead
and watch your new sidewalks, how soon the first
                                                          cracks come.