If you git work,
write,
That's what they shouted after your great
and no-so great whomevers,
who trudged away down wagon ruts walking
so as not to piss off the mule, away
from Bumfuck, Georgia, Flathead, Tennessee,
the iron skillets strapped to their backs
receding into dots on the map,
while those remaining took up
pickaxes or lit candles
over their foreheads then descended
to various infernos.
The travelers had it no better:
bandits slit their throats; their oxen
fell sick and slobbered; their babies' faces
were masked in lengths of calico
they'd crimped to buy.
And still, they bore it,
being washed forward like so much
gorgeous debris, ferried by will
and the dumb hope that by grunting up
the next hill, one could reach a clearing
gold with sunflowers and there
burdens could be unstrapped, boots
unlaced, and everyone could sink
knee-deep in a humming splendor.
That's wrong, of course.
History proves it.
Once you reach the final point
of all those roads cut by granite-faced
ancestors and even your own
forgettable efforts, then the spirit
is so stalled by arrival
that the long grasses become a cage,
the long fields blank
linoleum in a gleaming kitchen,
where you wonder how the chairs stand
so empty, and on certain nights,
with your full belly leaned into the sink
and cool water piped over your wrist,
you suddenly long to shove your arm
down the disposal or rest your head
in the trash compactor or just climb in your not-quite-paid for wagon
to breathe clouds till you can stop
breathing, stop sitting there and start
worm-farming, that thankless trade
no one wrote back about,
the quiet work for which you were born.