Gravel

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Gravel


For weeks now the old men rise 

from puzzles, from behind

little glass boxes, roused

by the guttural purr of Cat

machinery. They shuffle down


their drives to mingle

by the mailbox, offering

to all open ears their collection

of kin and what women want

as they watch the county

dig up the road to lay a sewer line

they were fine without. 


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 connection all their own, 

refusing to be silently disposed. 


Down at the mailbox stories 

brush one another, settle in,

not like concrete but woodsmoke

in the collar of a shirt,

like a recipe ruined if written down.


So many things we don't know, can't

find a detour to work around,


but we've been this way enough to say

that if the world may yet be saved

it will not be in a lab or at the end

of a paved road, but in the slow, gravel

communion of the left behind, right

under the metallic eye of the developers

in the very language they forced on us

and could never understand.

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