ROCKED-IN SPRING ON THE POHOT PLACE

                                    With history.
                                    It’s quiet here.
                                            – James Galvin (“Little Anthem”)

We need not name the places, but
to jog the memory where my spring box lid
of two-by-eights and twenty penny nails

fit roughly against more mortar and rock
to keep the leaves out of a cool, dark cave—
but not the rattlesnakes. The lid and rock

are gone, like the Pohots, small pond below
now for the livestock. Not the spring
with the galvanized tank plumbed to missing

little houses wallpapered with newspaper
and glossy, 1940 detective mags—beneath
a Live Oak, it always had a longer name.