Soon Scrap Heap
Look at all that pollution over Tempe.
The sky and the freeway one color: cement,
like the fallen wheelbarrow
skidded up against the barrier
of the carpool lane
coated in its own adhesive chalk,
gray cough of commerce,
of “growth,” the powder of delayed
but certain obsolescence crusts
its wooden handles, grooved and dry.
Like everything here, dry enough
(cracked, gaunt, reduced
to some dwindling pith—)
not being dust yet
amounts to citizenship,
still votes.
Oh! not everyone old
is dwindling pith! Here
we must depend
on that. Retirees,
the monsoons turned into haboobs,
right? You remember,
the creosote smell of the rain,
the glaze—
Can I make the joke about white chickens?
Shall we just keep staring into the rearview mirror,
the barrow upside down . . . oh look, the cops are stopping.