A DRONE OVER AMISH COUNTRY
We live in the past because there is nothing else to live in.
—Richard Howard, Alone with America
In plain frocks, teenage girls stock grocery shelves
at the cash-only store.
Harmonizing German hymns in aisles,
they cry, or seem to, with their whole selves
while Englischers lean on carts and stare.
Outside, whirligigs rattle, clacking out of time
with voices lighter than ether
pouring louder now from more frocked daughters
who load a carriage bed with garden lime.
They can’t escape the ache of old songs either—
or that’s what I prefer to hear as a drone
hovers over fresh hay
raked in a field on State Road 1: the notion
that an action, any action, once it’s done,
tends to ripple, echo, overstay.
Holstein odors. Diesel exhaust. A father
stands by his boy to explain
what dives and jags above the buggy lot
is a game another boy plays a little farther
down the way—a plane but not a plane.
The boy, five or six, grips his father’s pant leg.
His father says to let go.
He won’t. Buzzing in a loopy aureole,
the drone whirs, flashing a mini Gadsden flag,
as it descends, appearing to grow.
When sundown flares, columns of parked cars gleam
like embers in a coal furnace.
Even culverts glow, piddling last night’s rain,
where muddy ditches roil and seem
tinged with a clear, sudden unhiddenness.
The store is closing. The girls leave from the back.
Sheep eye their footfalls.
The girls, holding their shoes, walk barefoot on grass
beside an asphalt road tarred pupil-black,
humming in decreasing intervals.
