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)