I park my Plymouth

along the soft berm,

where the road rises

ever so slightly

above the warming fields,

above the dark earth

turned over in wet swells,

dark earth deeper than

the reach of a man's arm.

I leave the car and walk

back along the road,

walk perhaps half a mile

to a place where the berm

gives way to a ditch,

which curls out of the fields

to the hard edge of the road

and then turns back again

into the flat that conceals it.

I step carefully down

the slick sides of the ditch,

letting my boots sink

to where the ground compacts.

Water runs knee-deep and dark

at the bottom, where in autumn

the wildflowers rustle

their deep yellows and purples

against the dry breeze.

But in this season, the water

is beginning to thicken

with the inky wiggles

of thousands of tadpoles.

The hubcap is lying facedown,

and in its shallow, silver bowl

a few dozen have collected,

skimming the fine muck

already settled upon the metal.

In a crouch, I bring my fingers

slowly to the metal's edge,

and though a few of the tadpoles

spill over the rim as I lift it,

most of them remain there--

so conditioned to a liquid world

that they exhibit no concern

about the way the world sometimes

separates into smaller spaces,

realms that the eye can define

more easily

but even less contain.

I sit in the lean

shade of a birch

from which the white

bark is peeling

in layers and coils.

It is 103 degrees.

In the tall grass,

a praying mantis

sucks the juice

from a fat locust.

There are red foxes

in the narrow woods.

The weathered spruce

and ailing elm

shadow the creek

from the high sun.

To either side,

the bean fields lie

to the reach

of shaded eyes.

The water whispers

along its channel

of smooth clay.

What stones there are

have the elliptical

perfection,

the mineral weight,

of slow current.

In the Spring,

there were peacocks

in the woods,

indigo crests moving

among the raspberries

and the poison ivy,

bird shrieks and squawks

along the faint trails

worn by the foxes.

By June,

the peacocks were gone.

By late July,

the foxes were feasting

on the fat frogs

which came from the creek

with something

close to wonder

in their knobby eyes.

the sunlight aching

across the high blue,

aching terribly

like the young woman,

whose skin is like

goat's milk,

whose thighs will open

no farther.

we watch the village burn,

measure the intervals of dry wind

by the black smoke

lifting from the choking yards,

by the liquid elongation of flames

from tree to roof and roof to tree,

by the shattering of whole trees of leaves,

the upward float of ember clouds

before they collapse

like masses of charred moths,

by tarpaper shingles rising in broken sections

and spewing sparks

as though the house below were bellows,

by the degree of definition

in the shadow-image of a man

or of a large boy on a bicycle,

the upright pedaling to a furious wobble

through the maze of scorched fences,

the combustible bushes,

the showers of coals

erupting from brittle windows.

The clay road,

wagon-rutted,

marked by the very few

passages from here

to somewhere else,

does not reach

to the flat sky,

but vanishes

before the absence

of horizon,

funnels

past the oak

withered to its thick

trunk,

shocked through,

more wrecked than

reduced,

by lightning,

and two boys

with their shotguns

and lanky dogs

wait for the pigeons

massed

like a thunderhead,

moving as if drawn

along the road,

impervious

as each boy

empties his bag

of shells,

as the lead shot

rains against the sky,

as the broken birds

fall around the oak

like its first leaves

and its last.

I.

In the field behind our house,

the grasses grew waist-high

and green, and all summer

the wildflowers bloomed

violet, yellow, and blue.

The grasshoppers grew fat

in the middle space

between the beetle and the bee.

They could be caught,

and when held gently

between small fingers,

they drooled a brown juice

like the thick spit off a chew.

II.

You are still the only one I've known

who has seen locusts crackling

brown against the noon sky,

who has stood with a smoking

kerosene torch at the margin

of a field of dry winter wheat

and waited for the first few to plunk

against your work boots like hail

or gravel, who put fire to some

of his own labor and then with his father

sat in a pickup, watching the wipers

smash locusts to a thickening smear

until the wipers' motor finally

just quit for trying.

In the high blue afternoon,

when the sunlight draws

the deep colors to the surfaces

of things bound to the earth,

this season suggests

the tenuous state

of an elderly loved one

in marvelous health.

A gray horse gallops

through the tall grass,

through the dry stalks

of wildflowers

along the broad berm.

It enters and escapes

and enters again

the wild pulse

of its own shadow,

passes between

the darkened sky

and the darker line

of level, treeless ground.

When it veers, its hooves

strike off

the old macadam,

send up sparks

which crackle across

the still air

and touch the tinder

of the crickets' noise.

The bird stood

out in middle of the broad field

plowed so deeply that the dark earth

rose to the road in intestinal swells.

As my car passed, the bird looked up,

its eyes catching the gold glint of the early sun.

Shifting its feet, it dipped its beak again

into the carcass of tawny fur,

which itself must have stood out

as the rabbit crossed the bare, dew-wet ground

toward its long, terrible moment.

If someone had taken a photo of her--

in the last light, stooped in her garden

just beyond the bend in the country road,

with her small house behind her

and on all sides the fields extending,

rust-colored with the residue

of harvested beans--the photo

would have suggested a life far removed

from the spillage of image and sound

in which our breath finds its uneven rhythms.

And so when she heard the motor,

she glanced over her shoulder

and caught a glimpse of the car at the bend

in the road and a glimpse of what looked

like a black dog

running ahead of the car

and so directly toward her

that she started to straighten . . .

When she woke, she saw a bag of clear liquid

hanging from a silver pole, and her eyes

followed the clear tube from the bag

to the needle taped to her arm.

A drape had been drawn around her bed,

and she became aware of the soft shuffle

of soles across the floor beyond the cloth.

Her head throbbed against the bandage

wrapped tightly around it.

Someone had taken her clothes.

When she woke again, a nurse had clamped

two fingers against her wrist

and was peering at a watch with a gold band.

Her voice was much more girlish than her mouth:

"How are you feeling? . . .

A black dog? I don't remember anyone

saying anything about a dog.

It was a wheel come off a car that hit you."

Perched on the metal edge

of the green highway sign

that reads

NEIL ARMSTRONG AIRPORT

NEXT RIGHT

the bird works its full wings

like a Wallenda,

gauges the wind drafts

of the cars and rigs

hurtling over the asphalt

like capsules in fixed orbits

chasing the margins of space.

After the third or fourth cool day,

the yellow jackets seem to be

going through the motions

among the apples in the dirt,

and in the coarsening grass

the big locust's color darkens

from bright green to almost black--

like an old bull buffalo

it tilts on its haunches

too shot now even to stand.

This is the air

through which the crow passes

on its way to the corn.

This is the air

through which the wasp passes

on its way to the pear.

This is the air

through which the leaf passes

on its way to the soil.

This is the air

through which his laughter passed

on its way to the trees,

on its way to the trees.

At a place where the interstate

rolls itself out

in a very long, broad curve,

the flat farmland also opens

to a farther horizon.

There, a windbreak of trees,

diminished by distance,

pulls the eye on its line

to a single farmhouse,

standing enough apart

that it seems an indentation

in the empty sky.

After the soybean harvest,

the plant dust settles in long,

rust-brown, almost liquid rows

that with their small swirls

seem to smooth the ground.

It is a place where the spirit

stretches slowly to its limit

and, at the point of swallowing,

is swallowed.

Night, and the warm air wanders

the harvested fields,

and the dry nostrils fill

with the desiccated-

grasshopper smell

of vegetation

either finished

or fast retreating to root.

Revealed in the season

of hardening wind

and gradual ice,

even the thinnest branches

define themselves

against the gray sky--

as slender

and as intricate

as the trickles

of cold drizzle

across the tin roof

of the solid barn--

as the blue veins

webbing the back

of the woman's hand,

from the thickening wrist

to the still perfect taper

of the long fingers.

As I cross over the rise

in the flat highway,

I glance south and north

along the straight line

of rails, at the broad,

rectangular fields

to either side, the wet brown

of dark earth turned over

in long, regular swells.

Most of the trains run south

out of the stockyard

in Wapakoneta--

the black and white hides

of the auctioned cattle

visible, on sunlit mornings,

through the louvered panels,

the sound of the horn trailing

from distant crossings.

Stopping on the pebbled berm

at the far side of the bridge,

I walked one morning

back to the center and leaned

over the high guard rail,

listening for the awful, mournful

foreboding of slaughter

that I had thought might rise

through the racket of the cars.

After the last car had passed

into the dark space beneath

the bridge and then had emerged,

as I turned, on the other side,

I recalled a friend who had gone

out after a winter of blizzards

and had returned at dusk

with the clean skull of a cow

lost early in that season.

As part of their Ag grade,

the high school boys

went into the barns and fields

to search out pests--

everything from field mice and moles

to sparrows, starlings, and crows.

Each pest had a point value

based on its relative abundance,

with a mouse worth less than a mole

and both together less than a gopher.

A coyote or a chickenhawk

was worth as much as a whole township

of the smaller critters.

On the morning when scores were tallied,

the boys would board the buses

with doubled lunchbags

full of the heads of rodents and birds.

Despite the doubling,

the bags would show stains,

and the girls would shrink away,

even as they tried to gauge the scores.

The newcomer to a rural area

must learn to welcome questions

about the routes he drives.

Each new acquaintance brings advice

on a somewhat shorter route--

whether in miles or minutes--

or on one more convenient,

one more picturesque,

or one more (ambiguously) pleasant.

The differences, you learn,

are a matter of a few minutes

or a few miles, or of simple habit.

One slow tractor can cancel out

the miles or minutes that you began,

most earnestly, to depend on saving;

likewise, one person's habit is,

most often, another's dull constraint.

Thus, the newcomer must learn to mask

skepticism with gratitude.

And so when a co-worker warned me

that a connecting road I use

has been known in heavy snows

to fill with drifts as deep

as fifteen to twenty feet,

I merely smiled and said, "Really."

Most of the road lies flat to

the bean fields on either side.

Where it crosses a rail spur,

the road does drop, but not enough,

I thought, for such a drift.

Of course, I was proven wrong.

A few months later,

I turned onto the road

with snow falling and swirling

furiously across my line of sight.

Then I noticed the taillights

of a car some distance ahead

and felt the relief that comes

with having such a guide--

with the dumb faith in other eyes.

But as that car drew near the tracks,

it tilted oddly upward at the rear

and then completely disappeared.

I stopped.

After a few minutes,

I decided to back blindly out

along the way I came.

The next day, I stopped to watch

the winching out of that other car.

In the low screech of the cable

and the groan of the fenders

against the compacted snow,

I heard first my apology

and then the story I would tell

to each newcomer

with all the seasoned candor

that comes with such terrain.

It must be like this

out between the planets,

in the blank, black

spaces between stars--

to be so out in the open

and yet so lost from eyes.