at the city dump
It flakes and falls like scales from the skin
of the toppled water heater. Brown,
ocher, mud, sienna, but mostly the red
of long-dried blood:
it crackles the line of barbed wire, pits
and eats the doors of old cars. Nuts
and bolts fused, frozen; corroded pipes,
windowscreens, hubcaps, tin can tops,
a typewriter rotted, all but z and j.
And there should, in this continual decay,
be some lesson, something more
than a resistance to easy metaphor.
But rust just is. Silent, endemic, it stops
at nothing. And, as they say, never sleeps.
—from Street