On coming across the shell of an old car, deep in the woods

 

Listen: the moss always wins,

its soft tide rolling over trees, leaves,

trails, and stone. The earth reclaims you.

Recall how it was, those days of future glory.

 

Down trees make more trees, the bark

and heartwood absorbed back into soil,

greedy seeds sliding down the cracks

to root, sprout, and thereafter burgeon.

 

It’s the same with the large bodies

of the sea, sinking slowly to sand,

then crabs, sharks, eels,

until nothing is left but bone.

 

There’s no place we haven’t left junk.

Islands of plastic, supporting their own

strange life, growing like cells. The carcass

of a moon rover left to silence.

 

Nothing will sprout here, no

seedlings of Dodge or Ford. No

birds of the air will be sustained

by the slow rot of the quarter-panels.

 

Take your despair slow. For many years,

it will feel like comfort.

---

 

Thom Caraway is neither the oldest poet, nor the youngest. He is precisely the age he is, at all times. At this moment, he is probably trying to build a pergola in his front yard. He is a poet, so certain tasks, especially math, sometimes elude him. But the level seems to work fine, and the pergola will have character.