What a crime was done here.

I'll not dwell on the original theft and murder

of the mound builders. Not lament the trampling of

dune face and sand blows, the winnowing of the beach grasses

to a single species. I'll not mourn the buck sawed pillaging of

two hundred foot white pines; the magnificent legs of god.

Pitch fires in twenty foot diameter stumps

smoldered throughout the longest winter. Poets of the day said

it looked like vents to hell; portals to middle earth.

 

This forest joisted every city in the Midwest;

framed the ties and trestles of the Great Northern and C&O.

They were so huge, so many even the most imaginative

couldn't conceive a landscape without their spires and

towering canopies. So they swooned to the bustle and industry

of skidders, toppers, blade backs and draft teams. Sacrificed to profit.

Bear and moose felled, skinned, expunged.

A smaller, safer world.

 

The glacial splaying of Lake Michigan skived the earth

a thousand feet at its blue core. A trillion fish ago came commerce

and sportsmen. The cities of the new century spooled sludge into

her belly. When she reared with the angry gales of the three sisters

to snatch crew and cargo they called her demonic.

When she leached their poisons back to the watershed's marrow

they christened her foul. We know the truth.

 

There sleeps in the heart of this county an afterimage of paradise.

Lamented in our dreams, glimpsed in the indignant pall of a fox's eye,

snatched in the plaintive call of the common loon, salted with our

hunger to return to the garden. Every fall from grace brings sin.

Our bones know guilt and with what price comes progress. Our bones know.

Our bones.

Return to the Index of Synapse 40, Summer 1997