Dare Again Thoreau

"You've forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows
of swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows
ever stand in orchards: the crops aren't worth it,
and the roads are also just ditches and brushwood surface."
– Brodsky, from "A Part of Speech"









The ice of February remembers too the hours;
a bright white, replenished, amplified, by blue
is as of an old photograph washed gray azure
and those faces are of course by now not towers.
I see something of Thoreau in the scene of houses,
all cuddled huts, strung along by electric wires,
as the dormancy of mind he might have escaped.
I enter the mind of the photograph and listen close
to only mumblings under the breath not just
the masterpieces of the woods and as a crow
falls like ash from the corner of the photo
I know vapid soul does rush out of the squashed
hazard of these conveniences. Strike a thousand
fires to the hippocampus. Delight. Fear the washed
here among the world's dead walkers lost.