Field Report: April

i.

Mulching garlic: muck is heavy.
Everything is brown or gray.

Moving grasses, haying sprouts:
Cold knobs rise, ache in my fingers.

ii.

In this field not Pyrrah’s bones, or Deucalion’s
but human remains:

No war here
(though even here farmers do dig up old weapons—)

No ghost helmets,
though while we work, the radio

broadcasts poppy harvests and bombings:
limbs shattering in another country—

In our field today:
A lost child’s pink sunglasses.

iii.

Hot. Cold. Then a too-warm spell:
Navies of clouds come and go, come and go—

windstorms, birds
—north too soon.

In the greenhouse
we plant nightshades,

tomatoes & cucumbers:
Stage summer plenty while

the radio announces
dead seals in Labrador—

above us rose-throated grosbeak return
from Tulum & Oaxaca, o borderless migrants.

iv.

Across the hemisphere, farmers bend to the art.
Bow into broccoli, brassicae.

Push their bodies, machines.
Plant starts or seed.

Buy oil for tractors. Cross borders. Spray pesticides.
Virgil wrote by which signs shall we know?

We too are small against great constellations.
We plant when the sun shines. We augur & pray.