Transformations

A Poem by Casey Truax

No one waits upon this mailbox anymore.

See this patch of grass, this gravel road

That leads to nowhere.

A tall yellow house once stood here,

And like every part of this land I saw

Again and again, I thought that it belonged to me.

Down the road the grapevines conquer

The fallen cinderblocks.

This was a barn, imposing in the starlight,

And next to it a great white farm house

Where an old man sat alone on his porch

To watch the fireworks. All gone.

In this field, once when I was young,

A Jack Russell chanced upon me. I followed him

To a deep ravine where blackberries grew,

And when the bales lay in rows at night

I climbed on top and leapt across them

One by one, the stars above my racing heart.

Then the machines rolled in and scoured the earth

To tracks of tread and mounds of mud

That flowed with orange rivulets of rain.

The rebar formed a latticework of rust

And plastic sheets that billowed in the wind

Denuded stacks of cinderblocks.

On weedy mounds the red tapes waved upon their stakes.

To me they were the ensigns of a creed

That preached an endless alchemy of forms.

The shadowed hulks of houses blotted stars

And soon their windows glowed and stirred

With scenes from other lives,

But the land was always just a land

Of earth removed, of earth reformed, of earth renewed.

The colors of our souls went over

Like the colors of the sun, already gone

But for the dusky memory

Of scattered witnesses.

© 2021 Casey Truax

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Reviews

Red Brick Keshner

Wow. Both the man and the fireworks have gone, or so it would seem. Bale hopping, star gazing - an idyllic evening that like the mailboxes lay forgotten and unused. I loved the fluid couplet on the farming world "Then the machines rolled in and scoured the earth
To tracks of tread and mounds of mud"
And the succeeding stanza that encapsulated a 'rural' cosmos marked by its cycle of activity, to me red tapes have symbolised. Without us, the land is just a land. Quite in contrast with aboriginal thought of us belonging to the land. Perhaps that is another discussion but could also be the other face to the same coin.Thanks for sharing. Frederick.

Posted 2 Years Ago

2 Years Ago

When I wrote this I wanted to avoid any sense that nature or development were better than the other... read more

2 Years Ago

I love that thinking, Casey. Both parts of a greater dynamic! That reconciles both viewpoints. Thank.. read more

Eilis

For me, the crux of the poem is the statement "I thought that it belonged to me." The poem feels like a loosing of illusion. I suppose we go through life believing all sorts of things that eventually become shattered in one way or another. The belief in ownership of any kind is in many ways illusory. We borrow things for a time or are lent them. The lover's heart. The strip of land we walk day to day. Even our own minds and bodies are only ours for a finite period of time. We have a need to be infinite but also to have belongings and to belong to something or somewhere. I like the way your poem shows how this sense of "having" flowers in the mind as we grow to know a place and feel a part of it. But, as you show, everything changes. There is nothing that is permanent. And as we all die, those who once maintained or protected places disappear and their protection disappears along with them. What is meaningful to one generation is often meaningless to the next. That was part of what came over strongly for me as I read this. The child tromps over the land, breathing in what he feels is his own--what partially defines him--only to discover that so much of what was believed was fleeting and only partially understood. Not sure if you read Seamus Heaney. I thought of his poetry a little as I read this. The intertwining of past and present and how we are part of the places where we grew, but we cannot keep them in spite of how we might want to. Excellent poetry, as ever.