Earthworks

EARTHWORKS

She keeps her own pace slow by ours

rapid enough by hers where seasons are a few ticks

in a millennium. We think of it as work

because ours is, tending her, planning and managing

as if she needed us. On a working farm like this

for all we know the ground is playing with us,

with the hearty women greeting us today

for the tour, most of them impossibly young.

We sit on bales of hay watching a farm mother

in tight jeans shaving the skin off a pumpkin

then worrying human eyes into its still-blank face

with small tools while children jump

from bale to bale, then scurry off

to dig excitedly with shovels new to them

having never heard of work.

A barrel of oil

is the energy of roughly 25K hours of human labor;

also earthworks. We Americans each take

25 such barrels a year like an army of serfs

so we never have to grow our own food,

can visit a working farm like this for amusement.

Out of the furrowed ground come awkward stalks

of beans, tomatoes, corn each so unlike

their scrubbed regular faces lining the shelves

and counters in the supermarket.

Dirt startles our feet trained to pavement

an angry spaniel snarls, barks at us from its pen

for being where we don’t belong

the horse shakes her head and stamps impatient

for her dinner we’ve delayed.

Sands under the belly of the Ganges

not numberless but beyond easy calculation

as are the river’s waters in droplets measured

share moments that are sometimes under-thoughts

impractical, indifferent to use, motionless.