Loaves
(the last harvest)

Dust and poems
Philosophy and the buzz of grasshoppers
Grease
14mm on the sickle guards
Hawks diving on snakes
Blast furnace winds
Dreading and craving rain
And double pumping to facilitate finding third gear

Old Red and I
A 1972 Dodge C600
Pulled those hills for years
Three hundred bushels a load
I loved her eight cylinders and glass packs
She was a throat-y *****
No AC…No radio
Just combustion, torque and a five speed transmission
Zen and the art of hauling grain

@Twenty eight million five hundred and sixty loaves….

The dirt turned to memories
Stories that pulled the decades from the hills
And laid them out in the prayers and busted knuckles
Weathered hands turn to volumes
The hottest sweats of summer
The coldest winds of winter
Were rituals endured
What whittles away life
Sometimes need be loved



The land had taken him in
And together they had farmed
The solitude kept the humans untouchable
The hills became his lovers
Years turned over into decades
He did not know they were the last seeds
But the world had become a madness
It had exhausted his will
So he left it….to be his last harvest

As I waddle through the heat
I wish for knees from which to pray
The sun, the progenitor of this fruition
Golden we harvest

The hills whisper an ancient call
I grasp the earth between my fingers
Here the dirt and I are one
I cannot let go of her

The sheaves surrender to the sickle
The soul is sown
The soul is harvested
Ancient mouths rejoice

Harbors

blast furnace wind rolling off the prairie
the kind of wind that makes you realize
we were all born alone
I hugged the river hoping to find
some untouched ****** breath of cool
but ****** the **** for indifference he is
offered nothing
I headed up Hawthorne
wading through the souls
of the beautiful desperate
and the wicked surfeit

looking up I caught her eyes
hanging out her window
stretched out between
where love lives
and love dies
she looked down
peeling away the layers of her soul
offering a shade
that harbors the most twisted and distorted
remnants of love

later
on the outskirts
we watched Orion’s futility
our hearts gasped
as we touched
which was the hunter
and which was the prey
trembling
we fell into love
as the wind softened to a cool breeze

I tug at the edges of my reality
Just to make sure I am alive
Braking apart all the constituent elements
Of what it is to be human
That core mix
Of passion and reason
That yields and taxes
That starves and surfeits
What is more the soul
Than the flesh

Blackened skies yield truths
The way the winds drive your heart
In every direction
A poets vein hungers
For the needle of perception
That paints the picture
That may someday cure
The poet from being the poet

I’d spread myself across your canvas
If there was a certain amount
Of indifference agreed upon
At the outset
To start from zero
Releases us from the assuagement of resolve
Does anything need be more than zero

And I would open up all of I
If it were not for
That it has gotten old
And knowledge knows no religion
And I have no god
So the colors would run
The canvas more used than used
It would become faded and forgotten
Hung in repose
In the halls of a gallery that only admits
The sightless

But I would fall from grace here
Espousing such false and grandiose reflections
Silence begets silence
Words beget that…. resolve
For
It is the poets job is to kick indifference in the head
Until it bleeds some semblance of compassion

And so
As to not to end up praying to some small statue of myself
I will drip what I am across your canvas
Letting the colors bleed into the fabric of what we are
And if hung in repose
Then hung in that fragment of time
Where the poet grabs at some infinitesimal aspect of life
And breathes something
And breathes something
Into this…..