Michael Bazzett
The Time Preserve
In those days, they had a different
way with parks. They began with razor
wire around six blocks of abandoned houses.
A handful of intersected asphalt lanes
and utility poles, perhaps three dozen
streetlights. They were sure to include
pocked metal grates stamped at the foundry
and sagging telephone cables that cut
the sky into luminous pieces ―then
they waited until vines twined wire and
saplings speared weed-shattered pavement,
each crack frothing green. Porches
collapsed like ancient mouths. The sour
smell of sodden furniture. Entire houses
eaten silently by weeds. After ten years
they opened the gates and noted how
insects & moisture persist―admiring
the buckthorn-riddled outbuildings
ventilated with shafts of shiny wood
and skeletal clapboard risen with wisteria―
they stalked the roads softened and
burst with the expansion of water
breathing: all this to merely glance
time's shadow flickering like a startled
cat through a quickly wrecked world.
Michael Bazzett's poems have appeared in West Branch, Beloit Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Carolina Quarterly, Pleiades, and Smartish Pace, among others, and his work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. New poems are forthcoming in Cream City Review, Rattle, Berkeley Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.
Return to November 2012 Edition
In those days, they had a different
way with parks. They began with razor
wire around six blocks of abandoned houses.
A handful of intersected asphalt lanes
and utility poles, perhaps three dozen
streetlights. They were sure to include
pocked metal grates stamped at the foundry
and sagging telephone cables that cut
the sky into luminous pieces ―then
they waited until vines twined wire and
saplings speared weed-shattered pavement,
each crack frothing green. Porches
collapsed like ancient mouths. The sour
smell of sodden furniture. Entire houses
eaten silently by weeds. After ten years
they opened the gates and noted how
insects & moisture persist―admiring
the buckthorn-riddled outbuildings
ventilated with shafts of shiny wood
and skeletal clapboard risen with wisteria―
they stalked the roads softened and
burst with the expansion of water
breathing: all this to merely glance
time's shadow flickering like a startled
cat through a quickly wrecked world.
Michael Bazzett's poems have appeared in West Branch, Beloit Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Carolina Quarterly, Pleiades, and Smartish Pace, among others, and his work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. New poems are forthcoming in Cream City Review, Rattle, Berkeley Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.
Return to November 2012 Edition