to someone from the hills
how much seems to hide
in a river valley
where everything’s in the open
members only
says the dick pic
on the remains of a bridge
for a vanished road
you don’t belong
say the name plates
turned blank again by years
of riverside mildew
here’s the poured concrete
shell of a house
almost everything organic
has rotted out
if you put your ear up to it
you can hear the sky
over there a dry canal bed
with thirsty sycamores
and a pyramid built
to kiln quarried lime
strata standing on end
like books on a shelf
paged through
by omnivorous roots
every floodplain is built
on wreckage and erasure
this is an indian path
on the oldest maps
people wandering upstream
deep into the hills
but not like shad
returning to spawn
more like shadbush
marooned on mountainsides
condemned to bloom only
when no one’s looking
while the flood sows
its own seeds
pods and baubles
evolved to float
horsetails bamboozling the ground
into turning vertical
but it’s privet that crowds
so many others out
running rampant after its escape
from the hedge clippers
clinging to its leaves as if this
were still the old country
passers-by direct me
to a midwestern native
american wahoo with
its pink capsules blown
revealing the fleshy red arils
so like its cousin bittersweet
glowing in the low
december sun
a hillside boulder chooses
this moment to depart
ending its journey
a foot from the trail
