Swirling rows of budding wheat, and the mist settles upward:

a lone tractor paves patterns in the land, air taupe and hazy.

Tractor boy drives with poetic calm, raking hay as if in meter.

Bandana trailing from a pocket, he steers, wrist

flung over a hoopy wheel. Barn swallows in jittering waves

carve out figure eights in his wake. Years pass away

and now his daughter mows neighbors’ teeming yards.

In shorts cut at the knees, hat turned back, solitary

as a monk furrowing the labyrinth, she patterns her paces

to the hum of a Walkman, looping beneath the roar.

When the engine stalls to silence, the rip-cord converted

to prayer wheel turns over, catches in her curses.

She tries to shake the image from her mind: a neighbor

caught in his prairie fire, controlled burn become immolation.

When the engine fires up, she traces again the contours

of the land, churning small town grass into lumpy rows,

staining high tops green. She stops to listen as augur birds

chatter idly overhead, turning, engine-like, into themselves.

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