Yahara Winter

"Out here in the fields, few social affairs,
on backwood lanes, rarely a horse or carriage;
bright daylight, but I shut by bramble wood door,
in empty rooms rid myself of dusty thoughts."
     – T'ao Yuan-ming, "Returning to My Home in the Country, No. 2







The weary traveler today passes rickety farm fields
at 75 miles per hour his eye on the busy interstate.
The land becomes a long series of drift less hills,
shallow valleys lined by broken corn sagging.
There had been a season many years ago that I walked
thirty miles from West Salem to Sparta along the road;
the barely visible contours of the limestone bluffs
that I rush past today in such a hurry to head north,
had sunk into my hot bones, my mind became the fields.
I had stopped walking for a moment, exhausted,
not enough water, a t-shirt wrapped around my neck,
and as I sat behind the hill there was no sound of road.
The ancient whispering of the farmers was the wind
that slipped through razor thin ears of the cornstalks.
Was that hawk who, off in the distance, not visible,
shrieked to me or to absence of the abandoned field?
By the time I reached the city my legs were too tired.
Dust had gathered in the sweaty hairs of my arms.
I took the ditch growth of goldenrod as my sign
to keep moving on to the next shrinking oak savannah.