Friday Poem: "Fallow"

In the 1980s, Germantown, Maryland was still a bit rural. I lived in a neighborhood on Schaeffer Road that was directly across the street from a cattle farm, owned by the enigmatic Mr. Hargett. His cows would often gather near the fence in the mornings, watching me as I waited for the school bus.

In the late 90s, the whole place was sold off to a developer that plopped hundreds of housing-bubble properties onto it. Now it's known as Hoyles Mill Village and features street names like "Foolish Pleasure Road" and "Gate Dancer Lane." It felt like my old neighborhood was a pioneer colony of bacteria that exploded in the petri dish of Montgomery County.

Fallow

In the place where you grew up, 
years like shrugged snakeskins gather, 
pile, shuffle: walk into the scrape,
trip on your toppled landmarks.  

Sparrows gnat the breeze, 
darting their ghosts and yours
through the faint wallowing 
grunts of bulldozer traffic.  

Everything weed-blown, cracked in the lapse
of time.  You pass the quiet farm 
across the street, the farmer dead, 
cows sold off, land parceled 
by out-of-town heirs—
briars weave hollow ribcages in the pasture, 
unmown grasses pile in chlorophyll waves.

Flecks of shadow slide over this tangle, 
a murder of crows launched 
one by one from the power line.  
The barbed wire has fallen into low, un-fanged knots; 
the electric fence, your terror at age nine,
is cloaked uncharged in burgeoning poison ivy. 
Surveyors have sprayed their neon arrows, 
pounded their bright-ribboned stakes. 

Lean in, try to catch one whiff of childhood air 
in the riot of holly
crowding across the driveway—
then stare into the empty gullet
of your only sympathy:
the rusty, squeaking jaw
of the flabbergasted mailbox.

This poem originally appeared in the chapbook Techniques of Avalanche Survival: Poems.