It is the twelfth of September:
cranberry crates piled upon windswept
railroad tracks serve as wooden
refuge for crows & children flushed
with chase. Their fathers pick
golden stems in cowboy hats,
shielding their faces from strange heat.
Horsetail creeps through the sandy earth
beneath their feet, as they
peer at a hunched thing
arising from a barn that is caked
in peeling white paint.
The children imagine
it is wet snow on the creature
whose milky-dull eyes can scarcely
open. They remember a time
when its deceased owner—a woman
the children called Lita–
told stories, of a land where
bald eagles flocked like crows & of
her dream, where it was
the twelfth of September-harvest
& there was water
