The Built Environment

by Emily Hasler

     a waste and ownerless place
Botolph

There is in this place as little as can be
imagined, so things stand in for each other:
metal turns to wood, wood
to bone, ruins to wrack—
in this already regretting wind,
both scourge and the salt to heal it.

The air is most of the materials
needed for the church and the best
of the gutting fire. This creamy crag
is a flushwork of creatures, late of the land.
Moving mudstone is a tracery of bubbles
forming, bursting, flat and still as water,
thick and permanent as the first render—
a thin layer that dries as it cracks.