"Martha, All I Had Was You and All You Had Was Me..."

[psalm_onethirtyone]

In summer the sun burns my arms brown
and the hair on my shoulders white as ashes
and the tar on the road sticks to my tires
when I drive to your house.
Where the farmers have ploughed it smells like dirt
and where they've planted the wind ripples
through soybeans, corn, oats, and any hate
left too late to cut.

Calves pasture beside their mothers, and
the lambs are old enough to sell for slaughter
but the fields I pass are full of ewes and grass
which have short memories.
The honeysuckle smell is starting to go
overpowered by the smell of us in our whitest clothes
trying to stay cool as we sit on your porch
and kiss each other.

Men on tractors pass distantly by
reaping their livelihood with red, blue, green machinery
bright as flowers or different kinds of beans
or your eyes.
Your fingers brush the white hair on my shoulder
and you say, "We should get the eggs now,"
but your hand is in my lap and me,
I am not ready.

Later we walk through the cemetery where the sheep graze,
past Mennonites in their sleek wooden wagons
and truck farms packing up their boxes
of bloodred cherries.
My hair is tousled from making love
and I have the egg basket in my brown fingers
and the names there in the mildewy stone
are my fathers'.