Dinosaur Prints

Twenty tonnes of Barrie cubestone,
limestone blocks for wall building,
for retaining the hillside above a pond,
dumped on the drive,
several hundred pounds or so each
carted across the lawn on a two wheeled
tree carrier after our smaller ones blew their
tires off their axles on their way
down the grass grade to the swath cut from
the slope, hand mauled and grappled and iron
bar jimmied and wrangled into place,
three of us, for two days in the sun and
the growing black fly clouds that traveled
with each of us like the particulates
of our brain fields until the breeze
wrested them free.

In the footprint of the landscaped
property the aggregate impact
of the collected materials nags at me:
the stone, the gravel, the screenings,
the soil, the sod, all carted in
from elsewhere, all once part of the land, now
deconstructed escarpments, fields denuded
of soil, moraines extracted for gravel:
the full list trucked and delivered by
dinosaur technology and fossil fuels,
tiny brained, great big footed prints
creating order, defining a few hundred
feet of impression, reconfiguring a yard to
make statements amidst the banalities of suburbia
or the more pleasant pastorals of the monied classes.

And for me, the making of a living by
the crafts of re-arranging
disarticulated Earth,
re-articulating fragments of ancient beauty
for an hourly wage
and growing doubts.