When Lupine Trail Goes on Trial

Item: A scant 12 feet of asphalt,
too strait to let the comers pass
the goers, in contention now
for right-of-way.

Item: Said R/W enshrined in grant deed,
microfiche number-stamped
in government drawers
23 miles away at the County seat.

Not admissible as evidence:
the seasons before gates and fences,
before asphalt argument and
lawyers with their city-speak,

when the old black-oak stretched out
its roots, luxuriantly encroaching ease-
ment, drifing its leaves onto decomposing
granite, waving its green hands

at anyone passing by.

Borderlands

These days, we mark our mountain borders
with strung wire: woven mesh and barb.
A path that used to be for every man
is guarded by a neighbor with a shotgun.

Where once we picked a way through thickets
of cedar to a creek with its secrets
of columbine and tiger-lily, we come now
to a sign, NO TRESPASS.

In the lowlands, outskirts of the city,
cultivated fields are giving up to condos
hedged and paved, with dead-bolt locks,
electronically surveilled.

Who walks free now? We scan the few
barren spaces unsuitable for building,
and prize their weedy fringes
as a treasure, and wonder

if Earth will shrug us off
like so many stinging insects, blood-
suckers, with our barbs,
our bulldozers, our bullets.

Theodolite

In these days of boundary disputes
over rights-of-way, of fencing off
and gating out, who can rely
on the stars? As if celestial angles

so many light years away
could decide who rightfully owns
this spur of rocky outcrop
overlooking how many thousands

of estimated board-feet of timber
and a river dashing its cubic feet
per second of late-spring runoff
as fast as it can, away to sea,

and millions of us, restless,
thirsty, surging from state to
state, never content with where
we are. Call it human tectonics,

our Richter scale of unhappiness.
I have no sextant to show me
the altitude of stars,
only my compass that points

by declination toward a vast
unmapped, unmarketable magnet,
this yet-undeveloped land
under my feet.

The Stare

How should it care, that razor-
eye of hawk? Heaven’s
lungs pump hot, a-tremble
with June light

that just now joins the heart-
drum rolling from an alabaster
feathered breast. His race
stares down light:

volcanic, steel. Death
of gopher, flicker, crow
in a naked era of cinder and
talon. This is how

we meet his eye,
the land of rock on which
we live, learning
to love its fierce luminaries.