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Red Pines
Every day I drive to work
and it is the same thing. Listen
to two minutes of political news
or economic disaster. Turn it off. Sail
past farmlands with birds.
Sit at my desk, answer, type, question.
Drive home between the same
houses for sale. Work to Friday.
On Saturday the sun shines down
on the oasis of meadow and I get up
to walk the still-wet grass into the end
of summer. Sunflowers fall away
from the sun, petal-stripped but big
bellies of seeds still feeding the traffic
of chickadees. Goldenrod and Canada
thistle sputter in ragged frizzles out of
dirty brown stems; royal pokeberries
droop down down down like antique
necklaces from the necks of dowagers.
Long they stood, these thin strong
spines, day in and out. Would I
complain in their constant stillness,
rejoice in the skyslide of a storm?
So slow ! this meadow watching, and yet
too rushed the machinery of what I live.
Now they fall headlong, tassels touching
each other over the path, weaving a baldachin
over half-moons of egg-yolk mushrooms.
Orbs of green walnuts revolve around them
in planetary randomness.
Rain on my glasses blurs sight:
My favorite red pines in a long row glowing
and backlit — Are needles dying among
the soft green plumage? Tenderly I pull
a cluster, and without resistance they release
and fall into my palm, spent. Some blight
is taking the trees. O Beauty, where to?
I am always at the edge, this side of that. A fly
flies in and out, drawn to some heat
in me, or scent: the other. I am apart, skin
side out, embarking or disembarking
onto the path whose current pulls me
into the fields like kindness.
What honeyed dark energy sings
from the yellow soybeans in the field
next door as the beans dry brown, harvestable,
the green leaves going going almost gone?
Can the farmer, scientist
or economic analyst answer:
No matter the speed of matter,
no matter where we are falling,
what makes the heart keep accelerating?
Poetry should be heard.
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