gray fields

the land around me is flat

though over the corner of the highway there

slinks a gully into a ravine, which quietly grows

into a valley,

an arena for dirt devils to dance.

i quietly skirt the side of the hill, on

my right the fields naked of crops, barns empty

of years and of hay.

that dirt is gray - not brown with dry anticipation

nor yet black with the life that shoots out of death -

gray - not the loud green of the valley or the brash

browns of the hillsides but gray.

Gray with a quiet tired nod, gray as a

concession to overuse and abuse,

gray that knows no other life as it looks

bemused and puzzled at the valley where it

struggles to hold its grain down to earth as sun

pulls the gold - gray, i say, with quiet

shattered dreams of a single good harvest traded

for a dozen half-reapings and now gray with

baffled loss and denial and false cheer and an awful

resignation.

once i met a farmer with eyes brown with a longing

quiet and suppressed, as if he were Noah waiting on a flood.

"don't farm nothin," he said with a dark, quiet smile that did not

need me to understand, but "it's gonna take a while

for this land to come back.... maybe by the time your son

wants to farm." and i wonder about that when i

look up ahead at the corn harvest over land that

once was gray and wonder if rachel's

eyes will ever be green again.

and, by way of disclaiming, rachel does not exist. or rather, she's not named rachel. the story about the farmer is true, and the quotes are unedited.