27) Floating Clouds & Wal-Mart $courge (for Dian)

“The USA slowly lost it’s mandate

in the middle and later twentieth century

it never gave the mountains and rivers,

trees and animals,

a vote.

all the people turned away from it

myths die; even continents are impermanent…”

Gary Snyder from his poem Tomorrow’s Song

“How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist

Government two-world Capitalist-Imperialist

Third-World Communist paper-shuffling male

non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats

Speak for the green of the leaf?

Speak for the soil?”

Gary Snyder from poem Mother Earth: Her Whales

I noticed that semi-truck drivers now use the Wal-Mart parking lots as rest stops, parking their trucks in the netherworlds of the lot to sleep. I also noticed an odd phenomenon. There seem to be an extremely high number of dead/roadkill animals within close proximity to the entrances and exits of Wal-Mart. Not just your usual deer, raccoon and possum, although I witnessed many of these; but an unusually high number of dogs and cats, (feral or dumped) some chickens and a coyote.

“Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia

head South over basins of the Chiang, The Ho,

what we call China

On flyways they have used a million years.

Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars, the monkeys,

like snows of yesteryear

Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground

Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.”

Gary Snyder from Mother Earth: Her Whales

Technorati tags: Gary Snyder, Wal-Mart, animals, roadkill, truck drivers, American myth, roadside attractions, travel, displacement of wildlife, feral cats, dogs, shopping, clearcutting, forests, fast food nation