Poems by Scott Norton

They’ve created a small mountain in my name. At its base are the chassis of my old cars and appliances. The topsoil derives from a thousand hampers’ worth of my discarded clothing, shirts with one lost button, trousers with pocket holes. Now all that mulching cotton nourishes the roots of plants, while layers of polyester trap the rain in aquifers. Along the interpretive trail, I find my old futons and sofas recycled as park benches. The preserve boasts many splendors: a freon stream, a moraine of clamshell takeout containers, a lake iridescent with sunblock. This alkaline tufa of frothy white corrosion is a monument of all the batteries that have served me. Even the air tastes familiar, as if collected from the highway shoulder where I once hung a coffee filter for a school project, the paper disk blackening like our lungs. I’ll go as far as the next valley, which is verdant, I’m told, with loam enriched by half a century’s scrapings from my plate.