Fields not ours.
The tree-lined roads,
with nothing behind them,
as if to hide absence,
clearings, the hours
you can’t go on
and do, and then there are those who keep rabbits
penned with a lock.
I am walking in the world of insects
and the America of the caged,
all encircled, the gnats in streetlights all brightened,
and the June bugs at the sewn screens,
the dogs in cages
waiting to fight.
The dirty feet of my past
still walks on these roads.
What can I call this land of the religious
or what can be said but Jesus washed the feet of the poor
and tired and sick.
I call this love, he would
not have swerved a car to kill that dog,
that turtle, that cat,
and at night the tree trunks would be
holy candles instead of the gone,
they would be candles in the body of thick forests
still alive,
nothing cleared for the cattle.
And the old turtle I saw yesterday
walking across the hot road
over what must have looked by day like water,
a mirage, and the man who tried to run over it.
How I hate it. How it makes me violent
as him, to him.
But, oh, the smell now of crushed mint
held to me
as I see that turtle survived
and I carried him, big, heavy, peeing
to the other side of the road
of this America.