The Resistance

The Resistance

For weeks now the old men rise 

to the guttural purr of Cat

machinery, shuffle down their drives 

to mingle by the mailbox and deliver

to any open ear their collection

of kin and what women want

while the county digs 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 click 

into place not like concrete

conclusions but woodsmoke, root-

whisper, blue-bird scent and horizon,

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 long nose of the developers

in the language they forced on us

and could never understand.