Passing Slowly Through

A Bit of Blank Verse

“Hills, South Truro,” Edward Hopper (1930)

Passing Slowly Through

Upon this soulish field dawnings spread 
with bovine leisure—no epiphanies,
no jolt, no thunderbolt, but impulse slow
and thick, an almost changeless indolence.
The sunlight scatters, clouds accompany
black cattle over verdant-copper folds
recessing to the west, and to the east
they screen a brighter mess: the salvage yard,
whose gleaming immobility offsets
their silhouettes, profounder absences
of effort left to living things. They seem
to move no further than a listless search
for nourishment or words demands, but we
the herbivores and humans understand
what rumination asks of appetite. 
 
Here Someone still resides, presumably, 
amid the dead neglected metal—some
collector of these crumpled frames must save
whatever vehicles, bereft of souls,
have crashed this man-forsaken place.
Such sprawl a would-be denizen can build
along the road: a house, a shed, a church
converted long ago to a garage
where entropy, like accident, designs
a quiet, more compliant congregant.
Among the wreckage, dawdling unseen
while mammals chew their mediocre cud,
a stubborn Adam burnishes the name
embossed upon a retroreflective sign 
to mark his scrapheap garden Somewhere still.