Wendy Battin

Lot

Come out of the city by I-95

in the center lane: passed left,

passing right bubble after

bubble-world, an elbow out or driver's

palm cupping the wind,

giving like a kite a moment, human

limbs that make the flight

a bird-migration, mind, mind,

mind not by communion curving here

but publishing the shape of space

for who might read it. Tract gives way

to field, to waste, but how the road banks

on this S makes a new down,

meets my G's securely.

Mountains soon. Scrub here,

as only farms could make it,

having failed. One tree ahead

is humpbacked under vine, behind

and gone; sunflowers buckle

under their seed-heads.

Half the weeds out there

are medicine or food,

even the kudzu whose root

thickens ginger sauce and cools a fever.

Proves nothing, except we are not

special, that chemistry describes us,

suggests we are not aliens on the earth,

despite our foreign manners.

Weed eats what weed gets. Bach

dopplers by, at 80 barely cruising.

[fr. Little Apocalypse]

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