The gold of a declining sun varnishes
Rich brown the hayfield, then burnishes
It to copper as a hill intercepts
The evening sparkle of summer.
The chill that crosses my sticky
Reddened face merges with the burning
Of my heat-red ears, a raw-grit
Shiver from forgotten working days.

Leaning on the fender of a rusted,
Ruined truck wallowing in the slight
Mud between the hills, I search
For Dark Towers or Redemption.
God-Made-Flesh walked a drier land,
A mid-eastern desert of
Grazing sheep and arid gardens,
I have been many times told.
The devil walked a drier land,
A parched desert of rumor
Where temptation and hallucination
Meet in meaningless copulation.

I've walked the hayfield uncertainly,
Sneezing through my richest moments
With seeds and pollen token of
Each watery-eyed deliverance.
I've walked the hayfield tired as Cain
Mowing grain to feed Abel’s flock,
Breathing my sweat like seawater,
Burning age into my arms and back.
I face backward, to the close-dropped
Hills whose rocks slowed my day
And whose rabbits retreat always
Into higher grass, never fresh-cut safety.

I touch a fender --- the truck died
Years ago, before the house that's
Last year's kindling, before the road
Turned back to hayfield, before I came.
The truck died in seventy-nine,
Took its last haying after eight years
Of highways, twelve more of fields
And summer dry-heat cursing.
I face backward, despite the day,
Despite every chance to share
Celebrations of summer with the
Sprite-like memories of Pagan dreams.

Behold the beast, the mortal memory
Of ruin as it survives the twice annual
Regenerative spiral of the haying,
A less transitive carcass, a nightmare.
Behold the desert, where trucks
Fail to rust and dead houses
Stand until wind or man
Can bring them to the ground.
Behold the hayfield, where new
A generation of rabbits begins
The cycle that leads them by the
Dozen to accidental, bloody death.

I face backward, scarcely seeing
A sky of stars meeting a hillside
Of lightning bugs, as I blankly rise
From the rust-cancered fender.
Remembering my doorway, my path,
My clear-night shivers from
The heat of exhaustion pacified,
I stand, unwilling to leave.
At last I focus on the over-spilling Milky Way,
And past the body-itching hayfield lust
That ties me to the roughwood flatbed
Ford, shaky after last year's second haying.

6/85

Index     A First Star