Driving to my grandmother’s funeral, we passed
a wind farm. It was dusk. The road ran straight
over the land, a smooth path between shorn blue fields
and fields still standing with bleached-out stalks of corn
waiting for the night combine with its headlights,
farmers taking the ears at their peak moisture
content—so delicate that even one more dew
will change it. My grandmother died in her sleep
unexpectedly and was found the next morning
when she missed bingo. From the back seat my mother
said, “Look,” and the windmills appeared: one, two,
two hundred craning sleek and white out of the gloom,
wheeling with avian patience, as if all there was
was this task—to pull power from the sky and release it.