No More Chores

The old farmer nurses rheumatic joints
in a wheelchair beside the window.
He watches spring come
with all the fullness thereof,
his eyes dim with the smoke of the past.

Memory plows the years
where he planted his future,
he feels between thumb and finger
the earth’s soft body, his inward eye
shines with banners of leaves
waving from cornstalks.
Each morning he wakes
from dreams of past harvests
roused by the cry of a cock pheasant
in a nearby field.

He stares as if the days ran backward
through a mirror, in the corner
a spider waits in her web.
He tastes dust in the wind,
feels stems grow in his fingers,
the distant yammer of a tractor
reminds him of hard-calloused hands,
he smiles as he nods off to sleep.