Opera Hour at Teaneck Creek Conservancy

Highways eighty, four, the Turnpike
Sing with the conservancy chorus: a chirrup
Of warbler, waxwing, oriole. Then the sibilate
Of the warning fingers of the phragmites.
The instrumentalist: one breeze from the West.

Now in joins a tenor of a train screech;
A howl burning the air for an archaic ascetic;
Now the bass of the jet. And soon, the pneumatic
Baritone of a sledge irrupts the lime and sand it
Had etched to a walkway that once had its way.

Tenebrous reminiscences of ancestors hiss
From the phragmites like a ragout of truth,
Regrets, and a reeking of the receipts of what
We must now pay for.

Five pipes, instruments of the chronicle
Of the possible: a could-have-been
Undoubtable advocate of an out-of-bounds
Unalterable history. Let not it be unlettered.
The antedates mediate all eco mandates.

Still the wooded copse espouses to occupy
And okay the alkyds lasting in the morass.

So much music everywhere, barred within
The envelope of Teaneck, moistening an adhesive
With a tongue that tries to speak.
The conservancy, enveloped, is dropped in a slot
Like a bill we have to pay, falling like a feather
To the crest of a past.
We excavate the acoustics of the chain gang,
That is wishing freedom again. They sing only
Of the weeds’ plea to an orchestral machine.
Still, the life, the sound, the wind and word.