This Little Light

BY Brandon Krieg

This Little Light

Soy leaves yellowing,
October almost.

Osage orange,
softball rolled in a ditch,
its game abandoned.

Like gristle, this
marble cube
of commissioners’ names
wedged in
to the rebuilt bridge,
teasingly holding 1853 up

above the high-water Saucony
leaping like a dog in frenzy.

Nearby,
a sign designates
this corn this ragweed this road
State Game Lands 182,
name American

as Tintern Abbey is not, and every other tree
is stapled with
handbills proclaiming
our one commandment:
No Trespassing.

I bike a side road through
the gold-
brown, yellow-gold
patchwork of
hill farms, pass one barn
whose stone puzzle-wall lies in a neat heap,
needed piece
I place in this day
of golden-hour ditches
crossed by hundreds
of walking lantern flies
seeking trees of heaven.

They came, I heard, from across the world
on pallets of
goods stacked
in the new fulfillment centers

stretching from Allentown every direction.

On Main Street daily
I see adults show children
how to grind them out with toe-tip,
the little invasive lamps.

Who can blame them?
They have everything they need.