for Julian

Earth is getting ready to harden and dim
in an unmoving winter.  A dry yellow curl
bends the grasses the long year has tufted and brimmed.

Their tops start to flatten, hushed by the hurl
the wind sends through the trees, and soon they will bow.
Layered on grain, quick-shadowed like pearl,

sky-thick gray clouds anchor down to plow
the black plunging earth.  As the furrows grow strange
and dark with their shadows, the morning grows.  How

can a harvest this cold wrinkle open and change?
Laced into earth by their last anxious stalks,
the fields wait.  Nothing’s there, in the sky’s empty range,

but the emptying wind that listens and talks,
or else barely stutters, stumbling by
on its way to bring snow.  The day-darkened hawks

slow their long wheeling, up the thin sky,
and then push back downward with shuddering grace
to catch the dry answer that time makes?  The high

piled grain, the bleached houses and barns, lean.  You place
fourteen dense kernels of looming seed-corn
with care in my left hand.   Their saffron-hard trace

of the sun is alive, a long memory torn
from a stalk.  So smooth, they call quiet, as loud
as your opened eyes spoke the first day you were born.

First collected in Eve (Story Line Press, 1997, Reprinted by Carnegie Mellon University Press Contemporary Classics Poetry Series, 2011)