A Possession

Scoured down to the bedrock
once in an ice age or so.
Uplands, a byway. Half collapsed,
a farmhouse, set back from the road. 
The crockery of loss, inferred.
Curiosity it was
that led me up the unpaved drive
to park. The windswept surround –
worn in places to glacier tracks,
back of any livelihood.
But someone’s druthers, once. A possession.

Guttering, late afternoon,
and transatlantic contrails stretched.
Vestigial, a mire of grasses,
a trail curled through trees downward,
unnamed, unguarded, underworld –
I met no one but stumbled upon 
some barbed fence-wire in the weeds 
and rusted farm machinery.
Home-steading’s residuum.
A fieldstone wall in extremis, sunk 
with a freight of moss. Flown pheasants, bear prints.

And the genius loci, very quiet:
near dusk, a white-spined porcupine 
lumbering absorbedly.
Going nowhere, its passional.