Aerial Farm

"...the blue day opening
as the sunlight descends through it all like the return
of a spirit touching without touch and unable
to believe it is here..."

– W.S. Merwin, from "Before A Departure in Spring"









And before I had arrived by the old highways
that we remember when by car light our parents
knew the country roads back home to the cities
and those days in November after the fields
had been harvested stood like sun peach baskets and stayed
that way in our minds and we always wondered
what drove us from the family of the country
as today I stand in a farmhouse kitchen fermenting yogurt
the television in the corner quiet and unused
below windows that frame the fields of red clover
and fallen rye used I am told for crop cover
and there it is the picture I remember when ten
years old in my grandparents' white tall farmhouse
the aerial photograph of their entire acreage
I used to sit and watch that photograph
and wondered what it might be like to pass over
by small plane to capture the face of the earth
so interlinked by the purpose of corn and soy
a thousand little creatures hidden under their fallen
oak limbs as two cows stand against a wooden fence
silent as songs we only sing to ourselves
the only time their picture would ever be taken