'For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization,'
a small buddha sits absorbing all motion, deep rumbles beneath the earth, vibrating into the buddha's mind.
monogamous billboard / hermetic hay bales / fabco and zaber industries / tired joys and torrential fuel / magic body collision. /
great billows of smoke in the distance, dense and undulating, diaphanous backdrops for expansive steel frames, rusting, looming over concrete patches given up to weeds and debris. dead brown grass and gnarled leafless trees, endless shoals of gravel interweave with trampled brown-gold straw. intermittent pylons totter on iron-stain-red concrete footings that are being slowly expelled from the earth, by the earth. all the trees lean away, aghast, jealous, vicious, everlasting.
refraction's of sunlight glint through the balding pines, the culprits nothing more than piles and clumps of busted glass and torn plastic, stacks of uprooted tree trunks, shorn and systematized, are surrounded by yellow-brown heavy machinery. an unholy exhumation and grotesque display of remains. earth-shaping. and we've come to the place where they tear at the earth, all motors and steel, hungry, hungry, always empty. Herzog's container cars and shipping depot loading docks. waste treatment plants buried like middens, ancient and seaward.
a tiny hill-top graveyard is scattered with minuscule headstones looking over a muddy stream and the kudzu would choke these trees had it not already died. endless fields too ruined, spoiled, poisoned even to be fallow, consisting mostly of charred tree stumps and empty utility sheds. hawks circle in tight arcs, eyes tethered to the ground, wondering if prey can even live here. what dredge ponds that do form are fly-ridden, myopic, and mostly sludge. it is a wonder that the edges are a deep rich green and not a rotting-death brown.