1. The City

The city grows
from a highway’s stem:
it’s a glittering circuit board,
a crystal that palpitates.

Night’s swept away
like a broken glass.

The day begins.
It prints the parking lots;
doors work like switches;
people are impulses in a system.

But often, a siren occurs—
the awakened man’s incredulous wail.

And the sky, that rotten lung,
bleeds, then blackens;
the windows on the walls
multiply their cells

Still curious, the infected moon
regulates its lens.


                  2. On the Outskirts

On the outskirts, the factory—
somebody’s chemistry set;
a junkyard, where the town
keeps throwing itself a way;
rust clots on the mangled iron;
pain in the sun’s aluminum glare…

There’s a hubcap, going blind
in a ditch; the dust,
spreading its cataract;
and a few yellow machines
that die like sunflowers,
dropping their parts in a field.

The hills are a pile of rags
in a pail of dirty thinner;
scrap metal trees crinkle
in the wind’s gray flame;
and the tumbleweeds roll
their barbed wire over the roads…

An airplane roars like a sperm
through a crack in the smog’s deep stone.


                  3. Along the coast

You stare (propped like a sick man)
from the car’s enchanted bed.

A hill nibbles at a field’s green fork;
an old arthritic fence
hobbles up toward a cloud.

A little factory smoke
grows abstract in the sky.

Only the cows have reached perfection.
Their quiet minds look empty.
The landscape requires them…
When the cows eat, the ground,
the shadows, even boulders,
rise and bow to each other.

Far away, the suburbs—
one cube cloning itself, like the stone
at the veteran’s cemetery.

And all along the coast
the sun drives over the sea.
Its windshields glitter in the waves.

1979


 = Daniel Myers