How different would my world have looked if someone had stopped to say
do I dare to raze a peach orchard
and raise buildings in its place?
When I once woke to the gently rolling earth—
nearly the norm on the coastal fault—
instead of an attic bedroom might I have seen swaying tree limbs,
fruit falling to the floor?
Then across the continent a decade and more later,
ensconced in labor’s tower,
to one side of the window, a layer cake of parking;
and to the other, twelve miles until the manifesting edge of wilderness.
A blue lump on the horizon.
Both coasts testaments to progress:
Orchards first, suburbs second, finally stacks of silicon and cubicles clawing toward the sky.
My own life mapped by an expectation of growth; not wild, but
from grace to grace, line upon line, whatsoever I accumulate
etched in silicon and spirit, perhaps, but not furrowed earth;
home, self, and work stepping in time with a slower Moore’s Law of rezoning for commercial
and residential use.
Ancient stories tell of mountaintops and groves.
Homes like heaven—
and I, here, desiring modern scripture to define sacredness in concrete
find only temples coming close and then only by blocking out the outside,
or through murals and, maybe, meditation, bringing some within.
To prosper in the land is spiritual, I know.
To profit from the land, human (though the reading gets confused).
But with firm flesh forgotten,
faith’s substance a tender thread,
bemoaning peaches pushed back past the freeways, I think:
Progress can be the pits sometimes.
How do I dress and care for this
when my spirit’s sole companion is a sliver of the sky,
and my soul is looking for mountaintops and groves.
After growing up in the same home all the way through high school, Peter V. Hilton has since bounced between coasts and heartland, condos and houses, and currently lives in the Midwest with Rebekah, their kids, a perpetual puppy, and his lawyer job at a global manufacturing company. His genre fiction appears under the name P. Vincent Horta, and since it’s been about a decade since he last took his poetry very seriously, he’s grateful to Irreantum for doing the same.
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