Each day we hunt like grackles
through the fields for whatever the plows
have turned over, heads down,
the world’s ripe belly open in its bloodless way,
all chance & no regret, one field pretty much
like any field, the clouds in the distance
indistinguishable from any other clouds
in any other sky, though maybe a storm
is rolling at us dog-eared and panting,
a hero with a thousand eager faces turned
a thousand directions at once, none of them
intentional, all of them inevitable, all of them
looking into the necessary future with us
or without us as we follow the plows,
dogged in our labors, the dirt firm as hands
taking our hands to hold us in place
as what’s coming tumbles in to take us
along or pass us unnoticed by, the earth
broken, the absolute sky broken, the rain
when it falls littering the fields with divots
like coins paid in good faith for the passage
from one shore to the next, to a place where
no one remembers to wait for us in the untilled
fields of Elysian grass, our heads still bent
under cloudless skies that aren’t our skies,
looking for nothing in the dirt of those pitiless
gardens except reasons to keep on looking.
John Blair has published seven books, including The Shape of Things to Come (Gival) and Playful Song Called Beautiful (Iowa), winner of the Iowa Prize for Poetry. His poems and stories appear in the Colorado Review, Poetry, and Georgia Review.
Photo by Adonyi Gábor on Unsplash
