Morning birds. Belting toads. Cats I’ve never laid eyes on before.
Coming out of the woodwork. Back barn repair and expansion
and tailend of firewood season starts every garden. In my head.
Out the window the other day saw a young chicken eating another one.
Hawk picked the bones clean clean down to her shoulders.
I buried the rest of her.
Fragrant mud.
Clean pajamas.
Short grass. Embedded yellow. Three leaves outspread.
And torn wax paper. And broke-leaning picnic table.
And gravel dented by tire tread. Leaves alive and dead.
Brown roots. Paled maize flowers misplaced by poplars.
And freedom
and an unmade path to walk
and roadways to drive along.
To follow, so far, so long, not even seen like litter.
Buildings so full of people, from so many castes,
not viewed like trash. Light blue sharing violet
in pale cloud-filtered light, at the tip of a blade of grass.
Not a needle in a stack of hay, not one of the same
stacked one on top of another, but piles of pure plethora.
Plethora festering on plethora on plethora.
A cracked black plastic spoon.
A styrofoam corner. And me.
Shoe-wrapped feet, and seated body,
and black bag, and marble journal,
and phone whistling Modest Mouse.
Short grass, embedded with yellow,
and three leaves outspread.
All torn like wax paper.
All broke and leaning.
And I am writing.
What you are reading.
It is amazing what wind brings to the world.
Breath.
Movement.
Stirring
high up
in trees.
A long travelled breeze.
Here to see hair lifted.
Made light with spirits.
Baptism.
Exhaled like hot breath from some southern ocean.
Sun-governed beaches lapped by rabble rousing water.
Exhausted.
Panting.
Thrown up moisture with hands in prayer.
Here is your answer right here at some distant place on the earth.
Cold air against warm shoulders and worth, moving in the wind.
Like dying could be cast off and flung into the air
for some strange distant person to hear,
who might find amazement at it.
Who might call it worth.
Crackling green wood
clinging shriveled brown leaves
popping and burnt wildly.
A flame just to sit beside me,
mostly idly.
Frogs with the curious voices of men speak masked in treeline.
Just a few, but they’re creeping in.
A rattling at the door from the inside, a feline,
truly getting comfortable in her windowsill,
finally still.
Listen to the soldier. The guard. The dog barking across the yard.
Imaginary shifting feet and postures.
Hostile, even toward darkness,
And ignorance especially.
Then there is howling casting base crescendos through the further distance.
Car horns sound in an instant and echo off brick walls.
In her driveway, a neighbor taking a call.
A hyper owl, and close, fluctuating cricket sounds.
Then fire again.
Illuminating a flickering page,
consuming an old pine log,
now quiet.
All the noisy young green wood is burnt up. Gone.
This is the stage when flame takes a heavy piece of wood,
and makes it light
again.
Writer Actor Farmer 