The Factories of Eden Have Fallen to Ruin

Things were built here once,
pieces now unrecognizable
fragments of rusted metal,
still sharp enough to hurt
through the sole of a shoe
if you don’t walk carefully.

In the heat of this late summer
day, the open and echoing guts
of this place, the lonely shade
of a building fallen to ruin, where
the noise of birds outside and
their strident conversation
seems far away, so that we are
swallowed up inside and
become a part of this disuse,
this quiet, hot, mausoleum
to industry.

And our parents told us to
steer clear of this place, for
fear of cuts and tetanus, for
fear of teenagers with their
stolen cigarettes and bottles
of beer, for fear of the knowledge
of death, not just of people like
uncle Ernie who was pasty
and strange in a box while
the organ played, but of
ways of living, of customs
and lives driven tombward
in the course of time.

But our legs become tired
riding from town to town,
and the wide gravel entrance
at the edge of the two lane
is now shady with wild growth
of softwood trees, and the
still-pungent smell of creosote-treated
lumber hangs in the air on a
warm day, and to we, who are
young, the shine of broken
bottles and the buried treasure
of a corroded ball bearing
the size of a marble is too much
to resist,

And we are pulled in, out the back
and onto the broken remnants of
a concrete loading ramp, now
spray painted with the braggadocio
of high-schoolers and how they
went all the way with a girl named
Jolene, the broken bottles of
Michelob against this wall—

The apple

This hulk of a factory--

the tree of knowledge of good
and evil

And most of all,
mortality, for if the things
we join together and
create by the force of our
labor can find their doom,
it surely means that we are far from
immune.