DAVID
RODERICK
The Carriage Road
When autumn turned
the trees
and there was nothing
left to do but rake their musk,
I’d bike along a carriage road
beyond
the place we called town.
I went slow down the road’s listening
so images still
came through:
a tractor idle in a field,
its silence held
in the empty
hood of my jacket.
Then instep, foothold, and sprocket
while an old
stone wall rolled past,
a hundred cracks for an eye
or the sight of a gun.
I thought
a man owned
that land and knew what it needed.
Some trees
were tied with ribbons,
planned takedowns
by a forester I’d never seen.
An awful smell
blew up
from the scutch,
something along
the lines of vetch
or the torpor of swampgas.
I’d heard about a teen who was hurt
on that road
while testing
the limits of his mini-bike,
his back broken
on an odd paradox of sand.
But no markers or ghosts,
just fire in
my legs as I pedaled
through the scent of the trash trees.
Puddles riddled
the road.
My path a collage of leaves.
And though I had no idea
I was
a burden to that place,
a noise in the center of its sleep,
I was
beginning to learn
that inanimate things have
a consciousness, that a tree remembers
its birth
in a basin of peat. 
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