Poem: "Hub, Stems, Circles" or "From Iron to Tomatoes"

Iron arteries & steel cells trace
through the nation. Ley lines of artifice
& industry, loads of coal, aluminum, timber;
the burden of utilitarian titans visecting town,
city, neighborhood; bifurcations of old choices
cemented, leaden, and transgenerational.

Every six minutes a train passes through town,
the equivalent & consistency of light piercing
the emptiness of the sun to earth; a fractal
equation of heavy, breathing life combusting
hydrocarbons, ancient but refreshed,
made new with the labors of the living.

Wheels cut through my transit, my day, my
circuitousroutes along their own stems
leading toward--and out from--some inexorable
hub, through which my late Apalachian
childhood nights return to me, that body
laying unsleeping in an old wood house swept
off by floodwaters but still remaining
rooted there & in memory--made firmer by
its rattling constitutoinal forbears, the
lives lost in timber & stone but resurrected,
like memories thundering in on the steely clouds.

In my daytime dreaming I discern not the
architect but the architecture, the texture
of that revolutionary movement, the vast arch
marked by breaths, heartbeats, sleepless nights,
the smiles & caresses of lovers, the doubleshifts
& empty bottles & freshly cleaned kitchen counters
awaiting spills of wine & the aromatic bleeding
of late summer tomatoes.