Harvest (poem)
Harvest
He introduced the arguments he called his bulletproofs
The morning of a hot day
Three on a bluff high in view of the sea
Again to dig and sift wanting the shape of a ring
Among oddities of metal, often handles of ammo boxes
They were to assign a date and weight to scraps found
The weight might be the barest few grams
The charm to be worked as a numbers scheme
But in that sense not a charm, an attempt
to precipitate magic from a system
That we have everything
That everything is confined
That our quest has been making illusion
In the face of time
Feel rushed, feel filled in the lungs with atomized saline
Feel whisked on a whirl-a-go, dizzied, and while aseat
bereft of balance, imagine duty tossed askance
or hear the roar of a brown-toned storm
colored by splintered endeavor, dying miners coiled in rawedged
copper, bristled ends ripped with the light from the walls
the cited pages are 37 and 38
80 and 81
Numbers raspberry and chocolate, vanilla
Advertisements of February boxes, with picoted satin ribbons
Our wine truffle sampler
Our hand-filled cream puffs, shiny-glazed as vinyl boots
Within our time the days will leave
A leaf to extract from a heap of regret
Likely enough the treat we never ate
But if each worker’s task were to classify and set aside
The gold would spin to straw
The straw to shoots returning the light they’ve saved
Harvest
Haunt of Thieves (part three)
(2022, Stephanie Foster)