Farmer's Songs

October passing.

Mornings now dark and damp with the spicy aroma of decay.

Crickets / street lamp blush / the incision of eloping / geese

Not alone and not quite together.

Who has a queen gets to choose how the knee is bent; who is a queen knows the weight of gold but suffers a tomb set apart.

Cider donuts, hot chocolate and the hunt for wood to burn. Hikers grind leaves in the way of pestles working the walls of their mortar.

A train groans westward along Chicago Drive and for a moment or two, crickets and emptiness are forgotten.

This and other ways to honor signed treaties.

Rain stayed longer than expected but so did tomatoes, peppers and carrots.

These and other grace notes farmers are singing.

Dylan all the way down now.

How a man can be so many rays of light even with a leaky soul.

Now the only bears are those coagulating in my blood.

Instead cardinals, dogs, and two bands of wild turkeys reclaiming land the land we steal every day.

Pieces of heart left to burn in the Serengeti.

I remember the way an elephant's eye both saw and contained the entire cosmos and it shook everything.

Love met me in that hot wind, in her whispering grasses, in the sacred cry of the Ibis floating above the dissolution of earth.

Wood smoke as the essence of timeless being.

Ancient of Days, where is the last scroll?