The Carriage Road

When autumn turned

            the trees and there was nothing

left to do but rake their musk,

I’d bike along a carriage road

beyond the place we called town.

I went slow down the road’s listening

           so images still came through:

a tractor idle in a field,

its silence held

in the empty hood of my jacket.

Then instep, foothold, and sprocket

           while an old stone wall rolled past,

a hundred cracks for an eye

or the sight of a gun.

I thought a man owned

that land and knew what it needed.

           Some trees were tied with ribbons,

planned takedowns

by a forester I’d never seen.

An awful smell blew up

from the scutch,

           something along the lines of vetch

or the torpor of swampgas.

I’d heard about a teen who was hurt

on that road while testing

through the scent of the trash trees.

           Puddles riddled the road.

My path a collage of leaves.

And though I had no idea

I was a burden to that place,

a noise in the center of its sleep,

            I was beginning to learn

that inanimate things have

a consciousness, that a tree remembers

its birth in a basin of peat.