Soot blossoms: nature works in fits and starts
wedged in here between two coursing interstates,
gray as developers’ photographs. By the creek, rats
drink the rainbow runoff of suburban waste,
scatter at my flashlight whenever I come back
evenings to think, sit beneath this bone-cold chimney
standing houseless among bankrupt wrecks:
a bulldozer rusted in place, forgotten machinery
littering the plot like fossils, a yellow dinosaur
backhoe that sits in a hole, its neck broken
off at the pin. Steel cascades of cars roar
a stone’s throw away; the halogen currents darken
behind those hills. Soil is the foundation now
as ever, clay bricks giving way to weeds
that by degrees recover this scabbed acre, show
both man and nature building, the risk of seeds.