Some Bad Moon
As a boy I saw these fields swollen gold
with wheat. I loved watching
the combines, the men
of calloused hands
and their satisfaction
as they grabbed the wheels
as tenderly as their women,
knowing it was time to top.
They’re gone, and the harvesters
sit crooked and grim
in reflected moonlight. They wear
the tired posture of old aunts
propped in porch chairs
to lose their dignity, to sway
and be sad until they die.
They have that vague, insulted look
in their shadowed headlights,
the silence and rusty stink
of stillborn phrases
on their tongues. Darkness bursts
from them like frightened blackbirds.
In the cracked ground there’s a footprint
pressed in hard like a fossil.
A boy’s perhaps, or the man
grown from him. Waiting long
for a rooster to bring nothing
but that same familiar crow,
and taking its own good time.
[first appeared in Flint Hills Review]
Patrick Carrington is a New Jersey poet and the poetry editor at Mannequin Envy (www.mannequinenvy.com) and author of Thirst (Codhill, 2007), Rise, Fall and Acceptance (Main Street Rag, 2006), and the forthcoming Hard Blessings. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Connecticut Review, The Potomac Review, Rattle, The Evansville Review, The New York Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, and other journals.