Aesthetically Invasive (#50)

I see you, western New York,

Finger lakes wolf-clawed

Across the map, sleeting sheets

Of snow peppering the salted

Highway. Two hundred and fifty six

Miles of abandoned tractors,

Silos filled with hollow sky,

Green verge of fencerow

And shaggy headed reeds,

Aesthetically invasive, nodding

“Yes, yes” where Wegman’s

Parking lot meets the marsh.

This is precisely the same

Everywhere, what we all know

Without seeing, a single emerald

Cover crop at the clover leaf

Just outside Rochester. We rise,

Merging, above the stone-

Picked fields, where black-hatted

Mennonites have returned, swept

Here on the same wind that

Stirred the lake schooners,

The bankers and businessmen,

The moldering barons of Buffalo.