The Body as a Midwestern Road

My shoulders have too long
held the natural world aside
for you. I heave with cold and crack

in lack of care; hot to touch
in summer and shimmering with
the promise of rain from a humid sky,

held too near the ground as it is
in August. The oil seeped
into my sternum, a dark opalescence

blooming from my dermis. Mind
the wild curves and incongruous
shapes of my lunged edges,

the scars left by plow blades
and teenaged boys who drive too fast
around hidden bends. Mind the potholes

of my past selves, gaped and viscous
unbecoming and poorly patched. Make
an anonymous place of me, traveled, forgotten,

quiet, and shaded—the not-fast way to no place
in particular. Give my body one of those
numbered names they give to rural,

unpaved cart-paths that no one should be on
at night, unless they live nearby,
unless they crave the stars and silence with me.

Pave over my body and tread
that careful rust of me, the burnt rubber at the heart
of things; pave over the cracked surface of me

where something might have grown again
in honest soil. Let my edges
crumble and collect sand or artifacts

of your brief passage, refuse, foreshadow
the way cities, one day, will resign
themselves, to collapse into grasslands.