The Resistance

THE RESISTANCE

For weeks now the old men rise 

to the low purr of Cat machinery 

and shuffle down their driveways 

to mingle by the mailbox, weaving kin

and has-beens as the county digs up

the road to lay a sewer line. Somewhere

far from here, rat studies have shown 

that if you isolate a sample from the control

they will develop—out of sheer, sinewy

resilience—an unstudied means

of communication all their own, refusing

to be silently disposed. Down

at the mailbox the stories click into place

like the faded clichés on the church

signs. If the world may yet be saved

it will not be in a lab or at the end

of a main road but in the slow, gravel

stories of the left behind, told 

right under the long nose of the developers

in a language they forced on us,

and—for all their many ears—

could never understand.