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.

Is this 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 yellow, a trace

of the sun, remembers, as if dry beams had been torn

from their stalk.  So small, they call simply, as loud

as your opened eyes spoke the first day you were born.