Wind Shift \ Plowing In August

Alan: Suddenly, sooner or later, everything changes.  At the height of summer’s rule, autumn enters on the wind, singing of impermanence.

Wind Shift

                        for Nancy

There is an ache to August, that for you

walks with the shadow of your first, lost child,

and as for me lives in this wind, grown wild,

that, day by heedless day, slips furtive through

the sun’s lowering gate.  This northern air,

assertive, hints now of fall, when it comes.

The nuthatch snagging seeds, cicadas’ thrums,

goldenrod, speak a language, urgent, spare

as the yellowleg’s cry from the salt marsh

at dawn, and the loon’s distant keen at dusk.

We feel a restlessness, beyond the musk

of spent flowers, ripening fruit; sense the harsh

suchness of impermanency; how Time

steepens.  Come, take my hand.  We’ll share the climb.

Nancy: Out after breakfast for a morning of bug bites, scratched skin and sweat – some mornings I wanted to quit, to say no.  But the reward: squash and beans and corn planted among the stumps; the pride of a hard job well done.

Plowing In August

We cut the spruce in July.

I doubt that this ground has ever been broken:

cut, pastured, abandoned to raspberry and hardhack

and then to a crop of tormented spruce so chewed

and bitten and asymmetrical that in two weeks of cutting

we were lucky to get two poles and a post, and the rest

firewood and poor at that.

Sometimes I worked barefoot, limbing

ahead of the saw, liking the cool slippery feel

of the needles, the liquid way they moved

under my feet.  I should wear boots, everyone

tells me that, but I liked the feel.

July was hot.  What little warmth we had

this summer was in July.  It seemed airless

and buggy in the thickets of spruce; by ten

in the morning I felt grimy and scratched, and yet

the piles of slash smelled of Christmas,

and the work was satisfying.

By August we were ready to plow.  Plowing

is more than steel, it’s shoulder and calf and thigh,

especially plowing like this, biting Vs in to each stump,

skirting the largest roots, tearing the sinewy skin

apart.  I can only offer to pile the largest stones to the side,

to bring a cool drink, not wanting to be inside

while the new ground is turned for the first time, wanting

to remember the cool needles with my bare feet, thinking

that they are there in pools.  But they have slipped

underground, and now I like the feel

of the dusty stony soil and the rough web of roots.

After the plowing, we walk back and forth, back and forth,

seeding buckwheat in the new ground.

By next Spring, I won’t expect to see spruce there; by June

the corn will be high enough to hide the stumps.  I hope

that by July I will have cleared east of the barn, all the way

to the alders.  We ought to be plowing in August,

again, a day just like this, next year.