Corn rustle. Milo rustle. Low yellow trembling in the soybean field. Fluffed metronomes of little bluestem registering each invisible scud.
Sharp curve of the hawk’s beak. Fieldscour, swoop.
Landed parcels run the eyes into rows. Geometric field borders, no line fences or rock walls to interrupt the mind’s eye, remind the “reader” of hereditary or earned cashflow. Stretching endlessly like a natural fact.
Strip malls of rotating limp-along stores. Parking lots gummed in the heat. Tire tread seduced from the tire, unspooling into tattered black ribbons along highway’s margin.
Cicada’s rasp and thud against the screen. Or as muffled chirr from inside the dog’s mouth. Hoppers, daubers, assassin bug, stink bug. Paper wasp, bagworm, looper – both common and bilobed, and eastern tailed-blue. Do keep the mouth closed in summer and fall.
Turtles stock still until approach, then thwip into the wet.
Mostly sky. Sometimes rotating.
& georgic interludes. High-wheeled crop sprayers piloting off the fields and into the morning commute, idling at the light with booms folded in. Inside the farmhouse, the smaller horse of rural industry steadies its presser foot, moves forward a straight line of stitching. Is this not also a georgic?
Low hum of root reach, root graft, hyphae extending plant and fungi into community, resources in the tallgrass shuttling in symbiotic (& competitive) undersong.
Put your ear to it: compass sending taproot, grasses mingling underground into shallow tangles. More anchoring than star reach, more network of care than above-ground splendor. Where the splendor is the care.
Only “space” and wind-shudder to the Airstreams barreling west, silver shoulders aching toward Colorado. Though every line’s eye lacks full perception. Take this daily scansion: filled with occlusions. I can hardly even see under the soil, let alone put my finger to history’s pulse.
Paleowater in the aquifer & recharge “slow” if the yardstick is human time. As far as the eye can see, thirsty green fields capital has fashioned.
How to write “landscape” when the ocular has such grip, when to register visible markers of the present will serve to certify? Every pastoral, including this one, risks sweeping clean history’s conscience. In the American vein, thick veil over the stygian face of forgetting every removal: people, animals, plants, water. And what of subjectivity’s static on its way to the perceptual fields? The eye is not the only oracle.
Here is cut root of Echinacea angustifolia. Open your mouth. It is never too late to learn. The buzz you feel on your gums is medicine.
