The Season of Beans

Line breaks, spacing and indentations are skewed.

The Season of Beans

I

The farmer drinks real milk,
thick and fresh from the cow’s udders
with that pudding skin on top
and flies wobbling around, tainted by the acrid,
addictive aroma of manure and sweat.
He only knows
the roundness of spotted melons in moonlight,
dark-stained mornings awoken
by the trumpet of a rooster, summers of cold creeks,
earth tilling, wild animal smells, hay bailing, jarred peaches,
the wisp of warm wind carrying dust,
a sun-browned woman’s yellow hair and thin dress.

II

I once knew this lady, this beautiful, lost lady wearing petals
for a dress & a smell like nothing I ever smelled before.

III

Rain
and then more rain. The woman leaning with the wild
flowers and wet wind over the farmer
and the blanket swelling into a lake, caught in a sun-drenched
morning by love, unable to be carried away.
Her father in the distance with amber
whiskey and slick rifle, lightning spear from clouds
and wind heavy enough to hide his rough voice, her name,
the crack of a gun, his body falling face-down
limp into a stream, a woman’s breath caught by her hands
when they find him.

IV

Here I am, once again
all alone on this hot & beautiful
summer Monday. I’m cooking in the sun
but a cloud just covered it & it feels
good. I wish the entire blue sky were filled
with sun-covering clouds right now. I talked
to Dawn this morning. I miss her. I miss walking
together, heads together, our voices together & then her voice
singing alone. I want her
to come down & visit me in August.
It’s so damn hot out here.
Even the ink is dripping.

V

Chicken eggs piled high in a brown
woven basket, collected by his girl covered
with wood dust and feathers. He hates them but eats them
for the morning with her and the molasses-thick coffee she pours.
Unplowed fields and the horses, sweaty in their stables,
will not wait for the farmer. He kisses his girl, touches the valleys
of her ear with the tips of his soil-stained fingers, and leaves.
She watches him whistle towards the barn, sun blanketing his back,
and fills the sink.
Her porcelain face and pretty yellow hair slips in completely.

VI

I was thinking how I wished that I’d saved this journal for another
time. This isn’t the summer I hoped for or the one
I thought it would be.

VII

She was only always a mirage,
an illusion built of beer and the ache
of loneliness that comes when night leaves
him nothing to do but watch fire crackle in hearths
of brown stone, the mud and ash of wood beneath
his heels, an imagined memory as pungent
as the burning smell of cherry and birch smoldering it smelled
like her hair,
he tells himself, she is not real,
over and over until he tastes the salt and wet soil in his palms.

VIII

I’ll say it again. A nice big cloud over the sun
& everything not going in the direction I desired. It smells
like rain.

IX

A ghost
floats beside him as alcohol slides into his throat
and he sits on a wide machine, moving slowly, chopping
heads off wheat stalks, the kernels like nuggets of fools
gold. Let water wash over it, watch colors
disappear and all the smells
slip away with it.

It would come back after a rain. She smelled like sunflowers
in her dress, her thin dress. I’ll follow her
thin dress. It was
real.

X
Soil in his hair, soil in nails, soil
in the splayed creases coming from the corners
of his eyes where he begins to grow old
without her,
the crevices where he collects liquid like rows
in a cabbage field or the dip between two graves.
He wants to wash himself clean
in the pond beyond the tall, flaking barn where he tosses
hay into cool evenings.
He’ll dive headfirst into a stone,
crashing through moonlight – her face
when he found her lying still – and rise lifeless.
But he hears her, sees her
eyes glowing in the daisies at night,
the grass like her dress around his knees, the dress
she wore when she first found him bent
over a milk bucket alone and knowing nothing
but the season of beans. It is August.