OUTSIDE THE ABANDONED PACKARD PLANT

closed fifty-four years, the crickets

are like summer, are like night

in a field, but it is daytime. It is August.

There is no pastoral in sight—only

Albert Kahn’s stripped factory, acres

of busted and trembling brick façade

so vast there must be thousands

of crickets rubbing their wings

beneath makeshift thresholds of PVC

piping tangled in ghetto palm saplings

growing through a deflated mattress top

tossed over rusted industrial metal the shape

of an elephant dropped on its knees

dispensing invisible passengers into

moats of rubble dappled with what?

These crickets, their industrious wings

mimicking silence and song, lonely

background, until one beat-up maroon

Buick flies down Concord, accelerating

like the road just keeps going, like he’ll

actually get away with whatever he’s doing,

then two white cop cars, Doppler sirens

shrieking and braiding, but it is peaceful

other than that—you might think

you’re in the country as in not the city

as in wilderness under the bridge that used to say

MOTOR CITY INDUSTRIAL PARK

and now just punched out eyes and ARK