Poetry of Place

COUNTY ROAD

The settlers are gone, cabins
rotted or burned. What remains:
the school house foundation,
moss-garden-capped concrete;
a Model T, sunk to its fenders,
kneeling under the trees.
A trail -

choked with balsam and alder,
roadbed rutted, muddy, sodden,
a permanent bog of memory
bordered by sentinel trees.

Penny candy from the co-op;
Noreng's berries, big as
hens' eggs, too juicy to ship
anywhere; dances - pump organ,
squeezebox, fiddle, the whole
village at the school; crossing the ice-
bridge for mail; the storm
that took Harold Dahl.

Crawl over tree-trunks,
muck through jewel-weed,
tread bear scat in blackberry brambles,
swim sedges over your head.
Lose the trace in the marsh. Turn back.
This is no wilderness. Still,
you've come to the end of the road.

Sand Island
Apostle Islands National Lakeshore

This poem is from Judith Strasser's Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles