Frost on the Fields

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Trethewey, Eric

so heavy it looks like snow at first.

And ice at the edge of the pond, in ditches too.

Everything contracts outside and inside:

sky the cold steel of November,

one more November starving what lives on warmth,

the year gone gaunt with it, the pastures brown,

brown the hillsides and the trees emptied of leaves,

the last of them swept off in a river of wind.

Later, walking, I see the frost has melted.

But the day's hard light does not relent,

reveals all that it touches in keen-edged clarity,

even sodden leaves in the ditches,

a lash of dark birds flicking above the landscape,

bleached grass hugging the earth's skull.

An oak leaf still stemmed to a branch tugs away

and sinks on the air, the landscape's last lowered flag.

Hunkered on a post, a turkey buzzard

flaps into ungainly flight as I pass.

Why are we not better than we are?

All around me the dead leaves lie.

The day exhales one last breeze, subsides

to a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet

palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time.