Harvest Poems

I

In wheat country
for miles
telephone wires and power lines
loop
between thin poles
standing across the country like people
saying the same things to one another over and over,
waiting to do something to the landscape.
Sitting on a w i r e,
one bird
keeps it from happening.

II

Afternoon,
with just enough of a breeze for him to ride it
lazily, a hawk
sails still-winged
up the slope of a stubble-covered hill,
so low
he nearly
touches his shadow.

III

You meet them with surprise
hidden
in the pale grasses.
In a landscapethat desperately needs color,
why do the flowers
stay
so close to the ground?

IV

A fieldmouse
crouches low
nibbling kernels of wheat
left where the combines worked last week.
A shadow
the size of a hawk
darkens the stubble
an inch away.
Before he can drop half a kernel to the ground,
one claw sure as steel
gathers
in his back.

V

Where will that plant grow
which floats upward and downward on the wind
like a dandelion seed?

VI

Looking absurd as a near-sighted scholar,
a grasshopper
chngs to a short blade of grass.
Having climbed so far out i nto space,
and finding the grass
too insubstantial to jump from,
but enough to hold him,
he climbs
slowly backwards,
then steps OE onto the ground,
stops there a moment,
and disappears
in one
invisible
leap.

VII

Star Thistle, Jim Hill Mustard, White Tops,
Chinese Lettuce, Pepper Grass:
the names of things
bring them
closer.

VIII

Women who marry into wheat
look out kitchen windows
seeing
nothing but wheat,
and then come back to
a backyard locust tree
beneath which
beautiful city streets spring alive,
night streets radiant with glowing lights
that brighten
as each new shining locust blossom
falls
into the dust and tall dry grass
where
for months
no rain will fall.

IX

Crickets plague the stubbled fields
Their songs
travel in low, thin lines,
beaded
where thousands of wheat stalks
interrupt their flow.