FARM PRESENCES

Who made the sunken road?

What places should we approach

more lowly?

All the hornets have left their nest.

Supple it hangs,

rich with hollowness,

and I, too, have so many travellings

out from myself.

Left when the others were pushed out

by green leaves,

one dogwood bloom remains:

its whiteness a sermon,

faint as a fairy tale’s certain regret.

Why aren’t barns

called, instead,

cathedrals?

Drinking from standing water,

the chickens prance like queens

and shimmy; they are emphatic songs

scouring an ancient yard.

No melancholiacs are they.

Blissful incurables!

Never far away and thick with corn,

the feed barrel—sated,

indeed vivid, and in a way

I can’t my own—yellows

its sordid interior.

appeared in Pleiades, Volume 20: 2