Raw Woods

There is, or was, a ball-field,
Hacked out of fast-growth forest,
That sums half your universe,

Metaphorically, of course,
Allegorically, of course.
No one lives in a ball-field.

Poems keep coming back to it,
Also metaphorically
But sometimes literally,

As poems come back to themselves.
There was the forest, growing,
Millions and millions of lives,

Rotten with plants and fungi,
Housing large and small mammals,
Snails, spiders, insects, worms,

And all the birds in its trees.
Then you came along with tools
And hacked a swath of woods down,

Devastation, in one sense,
Ecosystem engineering
In another. Yes, but why?

Your system in the system
Was less like a beaver dam
And more like a lekking ground.

It reflected exact rules,
Abstract and invisible,
Bounding inner and outer,

Places to run, wait, stand, watch.
Places where watchers gathered.
It had no lid, no shelter.

It couldn’t maintain itself.
You came. You performed. You went.
The floating wild seeds pushed in.

For years you cut and pushed back,
So the field could host your games,
Surrounded by waiting woods,

Open to weather and sky,
Allowed by weather and sky,
Sometimes. Sometimes is hard work.

The ball-field was abandoned,
As all ball-fields will have been,
And all those other lives surged

That could take the ball-field back.
The forest is growing fast.
The rules no longer apply.

No one cuts and measures lines,
Paints places to stand or run,
To show off or watch and cheer.

But the poems come back to check
The living progress of loss
Of the field, year after year.