I've yet to meet the man who owns this land.
It's said he lives not far away.
So many times, I'd passed this way,
driving on an errand from a small
to a larger town, passing back again
when the run was done, never noticing
what lay beyond the shoulder
of a bland highway densely banked
with innumerable pines that were one day
gone--the trees had turned to timber,
lumber, chips, and sawdust.
Mongrel shrubs--plus remnants of what
had thrived before--now interspersed
an otherwise barren expanse.
Displayed as well were a pair
of broken shacks, former homes--
places where people perhaps found respite--
testifying that the forest was once a field
worked by those who lived here.
Westering I walked,
barely more than a pair of paces,
the shack showing a new mien
with every move I made.
Once a domicile, it seemed on its way
to standing straight again.
Or was this a different ruin,
just now drifting in 
from a plain or prairie
scores of miles and more
from here?  . . . if so,
it seems to bring along
a cauldron of dried grasses,
some tufted, some that spike in sync
with a fractured branch pointing skyward.
I trudged twenty paces around the shack, avoided most of the brambles
that grabbed at my ankles, then turned.
Now facing southwestward, I turned into an inquisitor of my senses, asking how the shack--almost whole a breath before--
could now display an arresting chaos.
A doorway lurched to the right;
in front lay wood that must have
drifted from a far-off shore. 
To the left, detritus
from a now-defunct thicket
crawled upward, harassing
a section of tin roof.  To the right and back,
a segment of roof plummeted
downward.  To the left and back,
a mottled swath of field
--autumn leftover, foretaste of spring--
beamed outward, its frame an odd polygon.  What was the gust--
what was the crash--
that made this mess,
this testament of asymmetry?
I had drifted too close,
was nearly drawn in-
to the innards of that shack,
was taken aback
by the barely restrained
explosure of that ensemble.
So I deferred a trip back
to that fallow ground, waited
for the start of spring, for a new view
of that torn terrain.  And at least
a stone's throw, not so near, this time. 
What a change--chartreuse
across the background,
wreckage resting, almost at ease.
Abject yet radiant--such was the swamp
of smashed forms that I saw toward the end
of a late February day.  A shambled roof
disclosed broken space, a former chamber
open now to anyone's gaze.  When the cabin
was young, its rooms were private purviews
where conversations played out,
meals were shared, worries vented,
where weariness received respite.
Nor are the dramas of begetting, of birthing
to be passed over.  And here children played,
did homework, received gifts, were punished.
But on this day as evening nears, the roof
kisses the ground.  A rusty swath is soaked
in light that swims upward--yet can't reach
the apex.  Or so it all seems, for
I have presumed to assess and only know
how uncertain I am about the above.
If this cone of rust could speak,
what might it say?
Or would it choose to scream,
irate beyond articulation?
A scream it could be--alarming,
of high pitch, blaring forth,
piercing complacence.
I go for the former, though,
decipherable sounds buoyant
on the unbothered air.
"Some days, it's like this:
I am a russet hog, replete with snout,
rooting into dirt, ravenous for an acorn.
I long also for onions, wild and rancid.
They suit me just fine.
But as the hours flow, flee, recur:
I am at times a petal--ripped from a red lotus--
buckling flotsam, foliage, and sky."
Wrongly was I taken in a rapture,
interest found where none need be.
Mudless was the approach from the road;
March drought had followed
February rains.
Here is what I saw:
A roof lacking walls below,
a broad brick column
--the backside of a hearth--
no chimney jutting above,
a tapered brick spire
that once harbored fire,
tree trunks writhing in all directions,
a blank triangle looping
to a far-off forest wall.
Out went my eye through the lens,
out into the seen, out went my eye.
A roadside site near where
a simple house once stood--
not a curbside scene since
no curb here was found,
only a bare dirt lane bordered
by a ditch.  The cross
is not a crucifix but did once
support a line where clothes
could dry or local grapes--
runts of the winegrape realm--
could swell and ripen.  No
doctrine in this orphaned
structure of wood about to rot,
no clue as to whether
those scattered blooms once
graced a garden or arrived here
by happenstance--though I am 
more saved here than in
some proper shrine with
all its rites and writs.
This field is not Elysian.
Fallow for a year or two,
it’s rampant with yellow blooms
of the commonest kind,
an end-of-summer type,
of no use to honeying bees,
a signature here in this outback
of nothing uncommon to come.
A dragonfly elects
to rudder a course across the waste.
A gone-astray monarch floats as well,
bereft of better butterfly fare.
Why slink behind a camera,
aping their self-forgetting ways?
Grass bleaches to the palest of greens
in the torrid August air while a sandy,
serpentine road appears as a rib,
a residue from ocean, beach, or dune.
. . . as indeed the dry way is,
for a primeval sea once washed here,
its border running north to south
across central South Carolina.
So what if a porch sags?
Its portico lapses as well,
rusting metal sheets
giving way to a grey grid.
A shrub of no species gives
no shade, yet would adorn the scene.
Diagonals of loose siding mark
the decades.  Windows, doorways gape--
and make the house a see-through,
make one wonder if it's there at all.
The road is a snake.
The house, an icon.
The clouds are stretch marks
as a November afternoon
matures and fades.
The radiating sun,
even as it wanes,
resists that all-devourer,
the camera sensor's capture.
Adieu, sadhappy shack! 
再见!  一路平安!
You submerge in summer green.
The forest that turned to field in order
to disclose you returns in mutated form,
not as a trove of useful pines,
but sprung from whatever seminal detritus
had dropped, the excrement of scavenging birds, on the arboreal floor.  A mongrel
tribe, botany's nomads and losers,
squirms skyward to engulf you,
sadhappy remnant.  No hanging trees here,
no crucifixions likely.  Too thin
to become boards for building, too tall
to render into canes for walking, too thick
--the bark stripped--for fearsome canes
for lashing, the saplings race upward, 
rampant in the too-bright sun
along the dull road ornamented only
with an edging of blank white
lozenges slouching westward.
Less likely, day by day, to be
seen or sought, you sink
beyond bother, beyond purpose.
www.thetoppledshack.com has been created as a community service by Nathaniel Wallace, Professor of English at South Carolina State University (Orangeburg, South Carolina), and by Giordano Angeletti, Webmaster, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, South Carolina State University.
Text and images are © Nathaniel Wallace, 2018.