For Ruth Moritz
Enthroned like the captain of a ship
astride the bridge, I hold
the John Deere 7700 combine steady
on course southward straight
into the tide, hold unswervingly, hard
on the far shore. From this altitude
the world’s been reduced to two
by long division-blond or blue—it’s minimal,
the blond is dazzling, the field below almost
a fathom deep, transparent, pure sunlight
flashing over surfaces of water, its brilliance
eddying, crossed by whitecaps, cats’-paws, its surface
undulates for miles, it parts and heals
itself, it seethes, a shifting brightness, foaming
in a surf, its tresses sexual, glittering
in riffles, kneeling as I ride them. High
in my throbbing, air-conditioned cab
I’m so detached, I could laugh
at the clichés I learned in social studies,
“breadbasket of the nation,” and those documentaries,
“The Story of Steel,” “The Story of Coal,”
duller than my teachers, who were
immutable, balding, broken-down adults, all
plagiarists reciting faithfully their pages
of official facts. I understand now
why farmers so stubbornly remain.
Swinging clockwise again around
the corner and lowering the header back
into the bays of waving wheat that shimmer now,
so pale, so Scandinavian, away, away, away
toward the horizon, I know why
farmers are such incurable romantics.
They count upon some central place
like this, where what a person makes
is tangible, valued by the bushel, where
an inch still costs an inch—this place that must
sooner or later refute the solipsist.
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