The establishment of our new Government
seemed to be the last great experiment
for promoting human happiness.
—George Washington, January 9, 1790
My neighbor has decided to destroy our cul-de-sac
by removing every tree from his property,
apparently hoping a lunar landing module
will mistake his yard for the Sea of Tranquility.
But for now, cranes crane, saws scream,
and trees fall with earth-shaking thumps.
Trunks and limbs the size of trunks
litter his yard like a logjam. Late one night,
I heard rumbling in the street. I raised my blind
and saw a dozer struggling up a flatbed
attached to a pick-up the size of a flatbed.
Knowing how our street’s become an oil slick,
I went out to see if this truck was leak free.
“Can I help you with something?”
surreptitiously I asked. “No,
I’ve about got it,” a man said.
How our conversation moved from tree destruction
to his complaints about Venezuelan gangs in Colorado
and how you can’t go anywhere without hearing Spanish
and him asking if I watch Fox News, I can’t say.
But it did, and though I wish I’d said
I bet he wouldn’t mind hearing Norwegian
or Danish all that much, at least I did
nudge him around his flatbed, point, and say,
“I guess you didn’t see our sign,”
our Harris / Walz yard sign. Also, I said,
“I think everyone deserves a chance,
regardless of where they’re from.”
He asked if I’d heard of Hannity.
All in all, we had a civil talk, but
I also wish I’d compared our cul-de-sac
to our country if his guy wins, how
the experiment that has lasted two hundred
forty-eight years, at so much cost,
will come to its end,
and much more than trees will be lost.
–
Mark Williams‘s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, Writers Resist, and other journals and anthologies. This is his sixth appearance in Poets Reading the News. He is the author of the poetry collection, Carrying On. His fiction has appeared in The Baffler, Eclectica, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. He lives in Evansville, Indiana, with his wife, DeeGee.
Photograph by Mark Williams.
