Notes Towards A Painting

Notes Towards A Painting
by Eric Phetteplace
No people.
Exhaust fumes,
some red-eyed rabbits
blink distressing
semaphores, twitch
their gray haunches.
They imply an ever
so slight movement.
Suck and grope.
Paws and mouths
but no people
to ruin the speechlessness
of legumes that grow
in vast underground
networks, that resonate
a musical symbiosis
with the rhizobia
in their root nodules.
Maybe some empty
clothes, only if covered
in milkweed stains,
only if drowned
in incongruent flora:
swamp oak, bluegrass,
star thistles, liverworts
and the disparate
ecosystems they imply.
Then there can be some
plaintive moles and mice,
a few more rabbits,
more industrial
effervescence
in a stark neon
frame.