Stone Arabia
The horses bisect the field
pull the cutting plow,
guided burden, churning
a soil-fold, wave of earth
turned up
for the gulls to pick; they
follow the farmer, cut the
April air with hollow-boned wings
scurrying beetles,
grubs and red worms
the wages
for following the plow’s wake.
The field turns from tan and
green-flecked
to uniform brown,
lowliest color on the wheel
offset by a fencerow
where the wren’s syrinx bursts
with the air-blast
of a tiny lung—wind thimble
muscle-trill—warbling with
the sexual urge to build.
Black cows punctuate
the green page of pasture,
move in cued diagrams,
knee-deep in spring-flush
mouths bent to grass, growing
the soft bones of fetal calves
on alfalfa, white clover
which they pull
from the fallow field
while the whiff
of their sweet-smelling shit
is wound in the spool
of this sentence.
