Edward Wright Haile - A Drive Through Caroline

I can put my finger on the still-wet picture
and draw a fresh route in it down the middle.

A new farm here, an old farm there
turning into horses;
a new pond fallen into place,
a new earthen dam where, I am sure,
an ancient milldam got its hoof cloven
and stones went out of the community.

Waterskiers already claim it for spring,
but team practicing, they tell me in a team,
on the penmanship of wakes.

A jacobs ladder of trash lights up the ditch.
The feces of prosperity —
hunter-gatherers at work on their salaries,
pre-political, still mastering marriage.

An old man who walks without his cane
when he has to wave with it.

I am in a corpuscle, a drop
of automobile, and move through the veins
of my neighborhood on its warm beats.
If the paint begins to dry here,
I turn the corner and the picture is wet again.

Small grains, young pines, whose deer carcass?
crocus, refrigerator, daffodil,
on some gentleman’s backyard gallows
an engine block,
I am in the artery for fifty miles,
sap below twigs, sun arctic pale.

(Note: Caroline County, Virginia)

Edward Wright Haile

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