“Moving”
by Stephen C. Behrendt

The field beside us, lying south, is devastated:
sewer lines splay their crooked fresh veins across red earth
flattened by artifice of backhoe and bulldozer
where corn traded space with beans on undulating expanses
for decades in sun-warmed homesteaded fields.

The last remains of little sloping watercourses
lie in ruins, willows and scrub oaks snapped and shattered
by diesel-powered developers' engines, yellow and rusty,
their jagged shards pointing, accusing, at the sharp blue sky,
their cropped and drooping branches weeping withered leaves.

Now houses must go in, it seems, the animals retreat
as they always must, who lived here, fed and slept
among the crops, the hollows, passed at dusk along the ridgeline:
the wary deer with outspread ears, watchful, cautious;
coyotes passing in the dark, singing in the pasture.
Even the orioles will go now, the cottonwood reduced to rubble
where they hung their basket nests every year
and called like chimes at daybreak.

Each deer we see, like the fresh fawn my daughter spied at dawn,
may be the last on this land, this little shelter we hold against the tide
and will leave this summer, migrating eastward from the sprawl.
The animals will find other haunts, other shade,
will crop meagre neighborhood gardens, leave tracks and scat,
rattle in the dark the cans and boxes, the stacked refuse
that sustains in moonless, rainy summer darkness
their furtive, furry spirits along night's margins.

The Ontario Review, Inc. #65