The Resistance

The Resistance

For weeks now the old men rise 

to the low purr of yellow Cat

machinery and shuffle down their drives 

to mingle by the mailbox, weaving kin

and what women want as 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

like the Hell-thick clichés on the church

signs. So many things we don't know,

but we've paved 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 main 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.