David Mason: Three Poems

Combine

 

The tractor puffing diesel

crawled along the swath,

the hayfork pulling vines

into the combine’s maw,

and the high bin filled

with damp green peas—

a boy’s first shirtless job,

baked nut-brown from dark

all through the burning day

until the Sound beyond

the dikes bled red.

Gulls in the fields, crows

in the bramble hedges,

a field mouse squirming

on the fork boy’s tines

and the old mechanic standing

in white overalls mid-field

as if he’d lost his train

of thought.

Those hands of his,

work-swollen knuckles,

grease in the whorls a boy

discerned his future in,

even the one finger nipped off

at the top joint, even that

old pain recovered from

was prophecy of a kind

(we all bleed and lose

the fortuneteller says).

The work was slow enough

for thought, still more for books

read in all weathers

when the bosses left,

and reading under the sky

to the smell of marsh salt

and chaff and rotting vines,

education’s skin and bone

for learning’s ache

and the ache of learning,

gone to school in work

and for a time a living

wage to wage a life.

                        David Mason

 

Mending Time

The fence was down. Out among humid smells

and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks

moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands.

Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep

had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer’s woods

or coyotes might have got them, or the far road.

I remember the night, the moon-colored grass

we waded through to look for them, the oaks

tangled and dark, like starting a story midway.

We gazed over seed heads to the barn

toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw

the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue

moving without sound as if charmed

by the moon beholding them out of bounds.

Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn.

The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow

and the story unravels, the sunlight creeping back

like a song with nobody left to hear it.

                                    David Mason

The World of Hurt

Where are its borders—the world of hurt?

Not in these woods outside the window,

not in the helpful drone of the sea.

 

But the mind has trouble neglecting the news,

the acid comment, expedient bombing

and frontiers brimming with refugees.

 

She turned from the pictures to face me, the hurt

taking hold in her eyes. Right then I saw

from the ragged green of the woods, the bird

 

that had come for itself in the window, and banked

before impact, and left like a song

and was gone to die some other way.

 

A skill of intelligent flight. Or luck.

Her look changed when I told her about it.

The bird that flew off into the world.

                                    David Mason