I.

You wade across,
the stalks graze your waist, everything
beating inside the wheat, buzzing
through the blond hairs of your bare thighs.
This field is enough to hide in.
You shed your robe, lie, stretch your limbs
across the rough green, an indentation;
the sharp blades fall back around you.
Down in, the blades on your face, the sun
entering your skin and the coarse stalks
intertwined in the strands of your hair.
Each life here crawls or rises or flies.
There is only the movement in the heat
and the heat arriving: sweat in every crevice,
collecting where limbs bend, behind knees,
in the fold where breast falls to chest.
Above you, the stems
of Queen Anne’s lace,
the tilt of the queens’ necks
falling back to the wide June sky.

II.

They’ve come with the bushhog.
Today this field is flat as horizon.
You take your bare feet to the center
and the flatness pulls you down.
Rising around, only the tight bales
of darkening hay — everything that buzzed
caught, trapped inside with only their last expressions.
You await the storm here,
where its coming is most known.
Listen. The dense drops already
heave themselves toward pavement
out on the main road.
                                                    Bring it on, sky.
Send the wind billowing up my flimsy dress;
make it cool and my nipples
will rise in answer. Deliver the thunder: bold
invisible tremors inside clenched air
like quake waves zagging up
through each layer of planet.
Carry the rain to this field,
my body a shield to the plot where I lie.
I will get what the ground gets.