I licked bacon grease off my fingers,
stared out the window at a field
being shoveled into the earth.
That’s the goal of farming:
to cover old land with the new,
to let the farm, again and again, eat itself.
I drank long cups of milk.
The farm, I realized, was very far
away from me. It had been
for a long time, but I could
still see the farmer driving his tractor.
He wasn’t sweating. Neither was I,
even though the day was cooking,
burning brown inside of us.
I bit into a donut. Powdered sugar
puffed around me and fell
like dust. A good farmer can
usually hear the weather change.
I watched him look up at the sky,
still hot and blue.
Then I did. I looked up.
It was brighter than I remembered.
We both stared far too long
at the sky: displayed, shining,
fat and thin at the same time.
It’s hard to describe the shape
of the sky.