Color Fields

Color Fields

Flowering tapestries ripple over
Gently undulating hilltops.
Yellow and gold glimmer
Under white clean summer sol.
Silk orange wings flutter butterflies
From their nodding perched aloft.

A cloud of circular spinning gnats
Billow and contract
Around the leaking sweet sap of
A broken stalk of wild grass.

Voluminous brown, rising in a rooster's
Tail from the cutting roads within this
Field of grain and wildflowers.
Growling and grinding pickup, rusted and 
Ancient, choking and pressing through
Dusty trails to an old home.

Overalls and weathered leather age,
A slammed rusted pick-up door,
A need for the feeling of the viscous
Grass-juice, that life-giver of
This haven of the insect,
This Empire of the King snake.

Caught in a raspy inhalation,
A wheezing saturating breath
Drags in the delicious balm of
The land's flower beds into his
Blackened lungs, lungs desperate 
For treatment such as this,
The healing in the burning sun,
The revitalizing sting of gusts
From the dirt road's plumed scarf.

Weight given to one leg,
A test, then the next
Onward to the clay-red timber
Supporting a creaky bowed roof.
This man strains his tired
Neck to look out over the flowing
Heave of wheat.

His teeth meet the white of day,
Lips parting to an old smile. 
Lines, cut by age and sun, are pushed
Up by quivering lips. Eyes redden.

The fathomless singing of wind through 
Hundreds of miles speak to him in the
tongues, cooing praise
From arching reeds and piccolo fronds.
Arms; thick, wiry bulbous instruments of labour;
Reach to embrace the elements. Jubilant
sigh uttered with the quakes of youth shudder in
Reverberation.

He is of and from the land, his sweat nurtured
And the black soil reached up and nestled his
Crops; or did once.

His large and haggard legs
Made forth, transporting this
Ancient into the leaning, crimson
Barn, the vestiges of a time once lived.
Great and strong, like those ardent
Beaked rainbowed fish, back home once more
To rest.