I-beam

Will someone please explain what happened here?
What's this puddle doing, for instance.
Even a wild reassessment of the unstable yellows in Turner's
              landscapes
don't change the notion the wind was involved
or that he was near-sighted and the horizon shifted a bit.
Get real here! It never quite occurs the way you imagined it.
Might be an almost bucolic patch of shrub oak,
sunstreaked and dwindling, but there's no more of that now.
A previous photo even shows how
the roadbed once looked. Those images fade into history and
              history
has a way of not coming back ...
until we're left with a sudden wind-gust
ruffling a field of weeds and debris and whatnot.

Copyright © 2008 Gerard Malanga All rights reserved
from Chelsea
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission