What wasn’t hidden wasn’t plainly there.
Year by year I tracked our well’s steel-capped PVC-pipe
headpost leaning vaguely as it disappeared
in cedar-shrub, growing palisade, evergreen and tight.
I liked to crawl back and stare
into the source, rampant for cool air
ushering up, signal of elsewhere.
Elsewhere — under three feet of soil, ground up
by glacier, laid over clay fourteen times thicker, world-making drab
stacked on another twenty feet sand, loam, lost downs,
next a lake in shale, no eye sees it, shifty slab
in its bed, and trilobites pressed
in their portraits of absence.
I’d pry up the flap and disinter cobwebs.
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