Poem for Saturday

Emergency Haying
By Hayden Carruth

Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor
in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,

my arms strung
awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform.
Almost 500 bales we've put up

this afternoon, Marshall and I.
And of course I think of another who hung
like this on another cross. My hands are torn

by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced
by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat
is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended
on two points of pain in the rising
monoxide, recall that greater suffering.

Well, I change grip and the image
fades. It's been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains
brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop,

but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed.
Now is our last chance to bring in
the winter's feed, and Marshall needs help.

We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales
to the barn, these late, half-green,
improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds

or more, yet must be lugged by the twine
across the field, tossed on the load, and then
at the barn unloaded on the conveyor

and distributed in the loft. I help –
I, the desk-servant, word-worker –
and hold up my end pretty well too; but God,

the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands
are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe.
I think of those who have done slave labor,

less able and less well prepared than I.
Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony,
her father in the camps of Moldavia

and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers
herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands
too bloodied cannot bear

even the touch of air, even
the touch of love. I have a friend
whose grandmother cut cane with a machete

and cut and cut, until one day
she snicked her hand off and took it
and threw it grandly at the sky. Now

in September our New England mountains
under a clear sky for which we're thankful at last
begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches

in their first color. I look
beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills,
to the notch where the sunset is beginning,

then in the other direction, eastward,
where a full new-risen moon like a pale
medallion hangs in a lavender cloud

beyond the barn. My eyes
sting with sweat and loveliness. And who
is the Christ now, who

if not I? It must be so. My strength
is legion. And I stand up high
on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say

woe to you, watch out
you sons of bitches who would drive men and women
to the fields where they can only die.

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I spent a lot of the day with Gblvr, interrupted so I could take Adam to the orthodontist. We met at the mall and did a bit of looking at jewelry, then I left to retrieve Adam, who was getting his twelve-year molars capped as well as his braces adjusted. While he was with the dentist, I looked in Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor since those are in that mall, but I found only that Lord & Taylor has the most hideous clothes of any season I can remember, while everything I liked even a little in Bloomingdale's cost five times as much as I wanted to spend so I didn't try any of it on. I wish Holy Clothing made petites. Anyway, Gblvr came over when I got back and we watched Merlin and goofed off on Facebook, and I posted my review of "The Mind's Eye, though TrekToday has a new file system and it isn't even showing up on the main page yet, harrumph. Enjoy some of Longwood Gardens' conservatory orchids:

















We had dinner with my parents, then watched Arctic Tale on cable in the evening. Spoilers: It was interesting, but I can see why it didn't do nearly as well as March of the Penguins -- it does the same sort of anthropomorphizing of animals as that movie, even worse since it gives the main "characters" names...and in nature dramas like that, you can always be certain that the unnamed major players are going to die. So it came as no surprise when the young male polar bear collapsed from hunger and froze to death, but I really didn't expect the life of his sister to be dependent on eating the carcass of the "auntie" of the young walrus! Yes, we all know that animals eat one another to survive, but if you expect kids to root for a plucky girl character who eats another character's "auntie" -- that's what the movie called her -- I think you've seriously miscalculated. At least the film had a nice environmental message and beautiful filming of narwhals and murres, and the walruses are adorable even lying around farting together on an island.