On the outskirts
of town
in an open space
where someone’s gathered the bones
of houses, pipes and such —

Johnson’s Scrapyard, or Pulaski’s Salvage,
some place like that
with some name like that —

all the refrigerators
with their doors off like burial vaults
skewed crazy on end, and the doors
in a separate pile, you know the kind of place

where it looks like a bomb went off
but that’s not what happened,
just the normal tear it up and cart it somewhere
where we don’t have to see it every day kind of place,

full of old corrugated iron
and the odd bike sticking up
out of the rusty creek that’s always on the border,
maybe a fence with barbed wire, some frontier
you recognize somehow, kind of place
you loved as a kid but now you tell your own kids
to stay away, that kind of obsolete —

yes,
that kind of place where a car you couldn’t
put back on the road legally gets reused
to move stuff, a Buick with its back
torn open like a pickup truck, seats used
by the little shack where the attendant sits
and waits for something, that kind of man

with greasy Dickies and a name tag, sitting smoking
Mustang cigarettes, yes, he goes home at night
to kids too, maybe kids your own kids
know but don’t talk to much,
that kind of place,
you know the kind of place I mean?

Well,
because your lawn and garden
and garage with its stainless concrete floor
and all that oil you studiously avoid,
all the things you replace,
all that stuff has to go somewhere

and that’s home too,
no matter how far out of town you put it,
no matter how hard you try to forget it’s there,
that kind of place you were told to avoid,
it’s dangerous out there, someone
could get hurt.

Yeah,
that’s home too.  Don’t pretend
you don’t know, or that it’s not true.
Ask your kids sometimes
where they ride their bikes
when they’re gone a long time.
They’ll probably lie,
like you did once.
But you’ll know.