Headway beyond Fresh Kills
        Staten Island, NY, 2001

What was a flagging headway of salty trees
became the open sound of broken towers—
slight flashes, worn reefs—the fusty port unnosed
and sodden to the if and whether, re-schoonered.

Sinking skiff, as if you rake a book,
slug your nosce te ipsum boulders,
and stalk on sly. Unread stick
the craw, headway, landfill, scratching it,

and there a slow crow bobs about in the feckless
way of carrion, gagging on his chanticleer of days.
What’s wrong with his deep dazzled larynx?
It’s racking the roost of what fattens, soundboard

of raze, the groan before I AM, ghost in hand
worth two in the whoosh. You scold the salty cedar
and bludgeon through threadworn dune churning
grass away from the flesh wilderness of light—

can’t steal atonement, not from a fetid earth,
so much waste, lamentation
that is all you sow on earth and all
you need to sow before the dark zilch down.

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Copyright © 2012 Lois Marie Harrod All rights reserved
from American Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission