Looking back it’s still gritty, there’s somehow more
work, making something from the gifts
of wood and stone, looking back they
crafted some kind of living from this
confluence,
rivers flowing north and south.

Look around, they used to say, don’t stop in town,
keep going, get to where you’re going and
somehow making this little town just steps from the woods our version of
inner city, the butt of jokes
but holding spokes to the kingdom,
the intersection of semi automatic and macrobiotic and scrap metal,
hand carved and home grown and hewn from the fleece of each of us.

Look around now, we’re building, reconstructing, shoring up,
battening down hatches and remembering
but ever forward
Bridges, walls, holding spaces
our memories the foundation

Around the bend from the gas station, the one on the right
or the left, if you’re coming from out of town
when lugging cans and smelling the sour remains of a thousand others,
take a moment, redeemed,
get a scratch ticket after filling the tank,
nickels back from bottles and hope for a
jackpot,
take a look.

There’s a certain tree
branches outstretched, no leaves, toward the pond,
you’ll see it, look up,
just past the salvage yard where you poke around,
searching for a classic make and model,
just past there,
who knows what leaking into the ground.

Don’t pull over because there’s no shoulder and
hope no one is behind you but if you can
slow down, look up,
into the tree,
before you get to that one lumberyard, it’s there in the tree,

a bald eagle, un-endangered, the size of a tall chicken up there,
still somehow a symbol.
Grasping a limb through a snowy winter and watching,
surveying and promising some kind of freedom hope
to a corner of a town, commuters and fishers and salvagers,
and we watch back, looking up,
necks craned as much as possible without going off the road,
still trying until it hurts
to find an America to look up to.