OXYANA, WEST VIRGINIA

      None of it was ever ours: the Alleghenies,

      the fog-strangled mornings of March,

      cicadas fucking to death on the sidewalks,

      the pink heads of rhododendrons

      lopped off by the wind.

      We wrestled earth with alchemy,

      turned creek beds into wineglasses

      the Roosevelts used at state dinners,

      fueled fires hot as the sun’s dreams.

      And there was light: a mile deep

      in the underworld mines,

      beaming from our foreheads

      like wings through dust.

      Not even the days we called beautiful.

      Autumn weekends when DC drove in

      to take pictures. Women in silk dresses

      picking our apples, posing,

      holding our bushel baskets

      with a tenderness we’ve never known.

      Snow days, belly-crawling

      onto the frozen lake

      to hear the ice recite the Iliad.

      Not Hog Hill where Massey Energy

      dumped cinder, the gray waste

      between breaths, poisoned trees

      black like charred bones,

      where we burned cars while girls

      wrote our death dates on our palms

      with their tongues—even now,

      rain choking the throats of smokestacks,

      the river a vein of rust and trash.

      Have you ever seen so many cold faces

      slapped in the afternoon?

      So many voices screaming— Wake up.

      This is beyond desire.

      This is looking through a hole

      in the wall around heaven.

      How do you forget that—

      a world without ruin,

      a world that can’t be taken?

      Where once was faith,

      there are sirens: red lights spinning

      door to door, a record twenty-four

      in one day, all the bodies

      at the morgue filled with light.

      Who can stand another night

      stealing fistfuls of pills

      from our cancer-sick neighbors?

      Of the railcars crying,

      the timber trucks hauling away

      the history of a million birds?

      Pitiful? Maybe. But oblivion is all we have.

      And if we want to chop it down

      or dig it up or send it screaming