Steven Schroeder | older than mountains
On gray days, these
Pennsylvania back roads are
Saturated with melancholy.
Billboards and chain stores
Exude the noxious stuff
That clings close
To abandoned shops,
Broken hinges, roadside
Garbage, rust red tractor
In a weedy field,
For Sale sign
On a fence that needs
Mending. It oozes
Up from coal mines,
Shafts of oil wells
Long abandoned, hangs over
Ancient mountains
That show their age,
Smudges what is left of summer
Into low clouds with
The beginning of Autumn,
Mingles remnants
Of an exhausted storm
With a spent landscape
That drifts toward
Eisenhower highways
Built to survive nuclear war
But not this sadness
Creeping into a restaurant
With diners who gather
Fragments of lives in stories
Older than mountains.
from texas review | 2002
