Luke Whisnant

Rust

at the city dump

It flakes and falls like scales from the skin

of the toppled water heater. Brown,

ocher, mud, sienna, but mostly the red

of long-dried blood:

it crackles the line of barbed wire, pits

and eats the doors of old cars. Nuts

and bolts fused, frozen; corroded pipes,

windowscreens, hubcaps, tin can tops,

a typewriter rotted, all but z and j.

And there should, in this continual decay,

be some lesson, something more

than a resistance to easy metaphor.

But rust just is. Silent, endemic, it stops

at nothing. And, as they say, never sleeps.

__________________

From Street.