Like mill wheels through a dark current, its herringbone
treads paddled through clumped earth and stone,
tossing pressed clots of brown dirt off their
upswing to fall, then, and remingle, aerated.
The small hinged cap atop a burping exhaust pipe
flapped in slow panic like the mother killdeer who’d taken a clip
from the tiller blade’s edge for playing the martyr:
watched her furrowed nest of three eggs ploughed under
yet kept up her act while the flared cobra hoods
of the hammered rear-fenders cast shadows over sunned clods.
The valentine of the bucket seat perched on spring-coil: a metal palm-
leaf saddle burnished to a beach stone’s gleam
that said a scooped-out I love you to any-sized ass.
A grumbling muscle, the grey bowels would hiss
and steam tendrils of mist if a sun shower passed over,
otherwise content, compressed in a throaty, subsurface worksong or
hymn that rattled its tin and heated the field’s own dizzying heat.
I seemed to live on the thing when not in the bunkhouse, flat out,
dreaming spindly, front-axle dreams of the earth’s intractable
turning under bloated, gear-cog tires that stood still
as they spun. We learned to be emptied, to become pure
function that summer. Dragged, reversing into row after row, acre
upon acre, until distance accordioned, time folded,
moments, hours became interchangeable dead
space our labour languished inside of. Drawing
figure eights with the gleaming hoes we hunched over, avoiding
green seedlings that appeared every other second or so
like metronomic ticks pacing our breathing, becoming a flow
we sat and worked in and ignored, spitting. Our necks gathered sun,
tightened, itched. Not four people pulled on the implement but one,
one, one, and one. Cowed into silence by the Go-Down-Moses,
near-nirvana breadth and bent grind of each day. An aching gnosis
punctuated by deerfly bites or an arm’s numbed buzz when
a hoe rang the deep bell of a dislodgeable stone. We had fun,
alone together, dredging up privately what it was like to be elsewhere:
a moored midlake raft, drugged in a rec room, or almost untenable under
upright acres of mirrored glass, in a seed row of streetlight.