from Charlottesville, and dinner
with an old friend, I stop to take
a picture because the light is so
different. I even stop two blocks
beyond, pull over, and turn
around to go back.
The area’s being developed: a new office
building to the left, with ample parking,
and then bright new street lamps lining
the strip of ground between parking
spaces and street. And to the right,
a fenced in and large area of something
like townhome or condo construction, the kind of
development that will advertise, “You
could be home now” if you lived here and so
near the new Mellow Mushroom, the Wegman’s,
the Aldi, and the new Cabela’s.
Underneath these bright street lamps
grow recently planted saplings,
all at approximately the same height and not
yet given the time to spread in the air
and sun; to prune back the initial
branches of suburban sprawl; to shade
the cars as they drive through; to make
the sun, setting, squint through their leaves
that will deepen in their green
and learn how to flip in the breeze.
But this evening—the sun already set
and its last light being siphoned off as if
collected in a blood-bag to save
the next dying day—the light on these trees
is like that in a museum display soon
to be behind a window so patrons
won’t touch this bit of nature so rare, so
difficult to find and now arranged
and protected for our benefit
and its own.
But in this case it’s simply the light
I love—that has made me stop—
and its fluorescence, and the hue
and shade of green it makes the leaves
that seem like paper, as if part of a
set and onstage waiting for
direction but ready to break out
in a fit of impromptu
growing, creating new lines that break
past this artificial light and its reach
and so—when no one’s looking—defy
direction and take back
the neighborhood and the meadows
that once resided here and rolled
over to an old and toppling
barn and then down to the deep
woods, wild and unruly against
the sun-setting sky.
Published in The New Guard Review
Pete Follansbee: Published Poems 