Technological Butting

Only now is this a vacant lot
that once was thriving with human negligence:
a feral over-brimming world, that made neighbours
of the bird and cottonwood, tansy splash and berry thorn,
height-of-human-breaching, last-light-catching grass,
pitched Christmas trees and browning cloudhead seeds.

One working day the gentle realm was ripped
from the sleeping strata up. Two great backhoes
perch, ton-weight tilted on raw dirt mounds.
One takes dirt and drops the load around
a sump of cement sunk deep and plumb,
while the other pounds with a giant tamper

the naked clay, shaking the foundations
of the surrounding houses. This day rumbling
promises through floors, the future home foundations
will be assured. As with a pressure sprayer's
laser of tight water that fine tunes the filth
into powdering everything else with silt

while making a pavement immaculately clean;
and what permits the condominum's weathered walls'
repair, but the five-ton hoist that churns the garden paths
to mud, makes the concrete snap; same, bowel-quaking
bases of homes begets the home-to-be a steady base;

this technological butting always seems to be the case.