Ranch

This simple waving hill
Where the old hay lies
Victim to the sickle
On long fields before it dies,

The moving plain of timothy
Below the nearby rill
Where shadows make a rolling sea
From sky’s instructive grill,

All of it seems plain enough to those
Who stop to watch the cattle stand,
But, on these high plateaus
Where the value of the land

Is rung up by its ills,
The baler’s fate, the coming freeze,
Those annoying daffodils,
The forest fire on the breeze,

The prices that the clouds impose
On the bales before they dry,
Growing winds among the rows,
Closing patterns in the sky,

Laws which this year say
That what you feed your cows
Is no longer legally called hay
And not a crop the state allows,

Horses being equally forbidden
As agricultural authenticators
Because they’re usually ridden
Not by cowboys but by out-of-staters;

Here nature husbands up her metaphors
Until the winter snow
Interrupts the constant wars
Over beauty’s fragile show,

Meadows caught in some surprise
That a flurry might expose
This chaos as a mere disguise
Which an hour could transpose,

Complex circles of the tractors
Leaving codes for UFOs,
A landscape where exhausted actors
Reap the secrets that the summer sows.