Field Design
       

We have no roof to contain the small flock
of red-winged blackbirds that fly scattershot
from our green cornfield.
                                          They semaphore
brief messages, flashes of red
aimed at that mousing cat
who waits to pounce hotly,
an annunciation of the brevity of all life.

We exhale the weight of this July day
as the cornfield exhausts a white mist.
The crop's green tips fold over so fully,
not yet ready to tassel or give to us
in a fever its fruit.

But what needs our attention so gready?—
not our temporality, not our confinement,
as we watch the birds fly out. Those
feelings are always present.

No, it is that the summer's
a hundred years old already and the heat
paralyzes our limbs, dims the eyes so
we are reduced and no longer see

our design in the corn rows that we
planned, rows going on and on, around
the contours of the flood plain.

We can't see the fences anymore
between this field and our neighbor's,
the acres all one piece now, scrolling
across the flood plains to the bluffs
on either side. And where are we now?

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Copyright © 2015 Rebecca A. Spears All rights reserved
from Crazyhorse
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission