Bales of Hay
The summer rain wrings miracles
As far as fields can reach,
This year turning chlorophylls
That winter left like bleach
To tints as lush as astroturf
On the night’s neon TV,
Waving in the wind like surf
On the pasture’s foaming sea,
Blades of timothy and wheat
That fill like magic with the deeds
That leave the land up here replete
With the mystery a meadow needs
To conjure up idyllic hay,
To raise up flowers, oaks, and weeds
From the sky’s laconic grey,
Cradling in its infant breeze the seeds
Of mankind at its birth,
Pulling from its naive stems
The extremities of earth,
The evolutionary gems
That hold us captive to their run,
Hiding in their simple sheen
The essence of the shrinking sun,
Atomic secrets in their green,
The hothouse where the world’s begun –
And yet, laid out now in dales
And drained of life, this paragon
Of horticulture pales,
And lets once-incubating rains
Bleach its dying bales of sky,
Of the bloom which youth ingrains,
Now turned to nothing more than dye.
September 13th, 1999, Tippet Alley
Explanation
Chlorophyll is the secret of all food, converting sun to human life. Without it, we wouldn’t exist.
Cathy says the rhythm of this poem feels field-like, rhymes bending over like waving wheat to touch the next stanza, inner rhymes continuing the end rhymes of the preceding group. The vast DNA which is a microcosm of our own spirit, which feeds us, turns at the end of the harvest to simply a color, easily bleached out by late summer rain, depleting hay of its nutrients, its early miracle reduced by time to mere colors, like old people, their “candles quite gone out.” The force, rain, which instills life, also takes it away.
Cathy says that bales of hay are like books: we take wavy pieces of hay and bind them up into this geometric capsule, rectangular pages of hay, bound in chlorophyll, like the ideas that fuel our lives. Then we send the bales, the pages, out into the world.
We recreate ourselves the way chlorophyll recreates hay, in rectangular forms that last forever, books and discs and photos. We are so much hay.