Woven between trees,
near where the asphalt rises
to a peak on Pheasant Hill,
there's a dirt road speckled
with fieldstone, sloped with neglect
and summer squalls, marking the place
where the terrors of children
come to life.
Bulbous trunks, splotched
and bloated with seasonal
cancer, shuffle in close,
cross their cutlass branches
in a brittle salute. The children
race through, the fat ones
wheezing, certain of being
plucked and deboned by trolls,
dangled from an oak branch,
twisted in twine.
The condo managers uprooted
the streetlights long ago, tore
concrete to move it elsewhere,
a month of surgery which left
this scar, this resentful flap
of weed and gravel. The children
know theft is wrong; they seek out
the abandoned places, the gullies
and ravines ringed with chains
and ribbons by the adult world,
dissected by spidery blueprints,
town meetings, surveyors--
finally, the smoking yellow
crawlers with metal maws.
The children adopt
the motions of compliance,
flash fruit juice smiles
at mom and dad; coats half-on,
they rush out the door to form
bundled packs, exhale anxious clouds
with their leader, wiry and limber.
They'll follow him
down the dirt road, eyelids
shivering deep in sockets--
they'll secretly wish, as does he,
that some nightmare tendril
winds them tight, rends them
into thoughtless shards
of fieldstone.