Since the pyramids are so far,
my car slows: a dome of pasture
between river and gravel road,
the mundane and the baffling,
a grass tarpaulin staked
fast by erect oak-girths is
(no doubt) a clamshell-draped
chief’s hermitage for skirting
futurity’s weathers.
It interrupts its scenery:
drifts of cattle, ruminants
who never ponder or blunder
plundering beneath the surfaces
of things, disperse around it
as the wind must, the barbed-
wire chevroned cedar fencerows
do, the white-glittery
farmhouses atop neighboring
knolls have. No digger’s scars
pocket its green slopes—its celts,
chert-yellow bones, potsherds
intact, as if by river
beside it or gravel road
time forks aside, omitting
an oval, unaccountable
lapse of the inevitable,
skirting it altogether.
