The Valley of Baal

The truck descended forked roads.
The morning mist tinged with anesthesia.
The only radio broadcast from a Hartford, CT seminary,
angel children voices, Salvation Army brass bands...

The townhouses were scattered and bare.
Leopards in the derelict shop windows.
The soapy musk of laundromats and coolant.
Old men with pinched trousers and tentpole erections,
shuffled the sidewalks.
Voices in front of Sunday bars,
accents and slang from some forties' movie.
Barking and laughing, jolly and rugged.

He parked the truck by a thick field.
Resin from the long-slung branches dripped on the hood.
He walked amid the weeds and overturned beehives,
only stopping when he noticed--
The stones lapping the hemoglobin from his bare soles.
The ivies and poison dander reddening his flesh and lungs.
The fishheads piled in some sloppy offering.

He was frozen as the first face appeared,
some giant glistening green thing...
peering from around the abridging trees.

The second face lapped and purred,
eyes black as pen ink.
Its whiskers upset a robins' nest,
its teeth gobbled the eggs.

The third and final face,
with the lean nose and waxed expression,
the countenance of a Duke...
blinked and dislodged a fir.
Ashen smoke wafted toward the open spaces.

He ran.
Then drove.
Always in concentric circles,
always past the same inclines and billboards,
always always always...

For that was the curse to those who came here--
The duty to lost spaces.