There, beside the cotton gin,
squats the fattest turkey buzzard in Georgia,
one wing either broken or certain,
elbow bent like our world
before logic descended from heaven
on a fiery cloud: fire that the ancients
deified with monuments—
triangles raised upon squares
in valleys where the dead
still rise when the river swells.
Fire that the welder masters with a torch,
fashioning entire cities of iron,
the fields around him still raw
from the picking, railroads
strung like licorice over a fallen ladder.
The tracks hardly rattle a word.
Poison sumac blushes while a tractor
pulls a plow through clay, and that
—that hammer you just heard?
That was an anvil giving way.