This all but abandoned ground,
prickly with stories,
is where the town began.
Blocks of fire-stained sandstone
darken the weeds along its edges
and a few old buildings have limped
into the new millennium.
Behind a soft focus of rain
the new highway is taking shape,
exhaling already its wet breath of rubber,
its brutal sweep of concrete and speed
floating strangely, disconnected,
as if quarried from the sky.
But the bulldozers and men in hard hats
are busy, digging out and filling in,
pulling down and tidying up
the scraps of a past
few even remember.
In the mist the pines
are full of ghosts, spectral assemblies,
their pale, scattered protests
ineffectual before the jackhammer
conviction of progress.