July in Indiana

The wispy cuttings lie in rows where mowers passed in the heat.
A parching scent enters the nostrils.

Morning barely breathed before noon mounted on tiers of maples, fiery and still. The eye smarts.

Moisture starts on the back of the hand.

Gloss and chrome on burning cars fan out cobwebby lightning over children damp and flushed in the shade.

Over all the back yards, locusts buzz like little sawmills in the trees, or is the song ecstatic?—rising rising until it gets tired and dies away.

Grass baking, prickling sweat, great blazing tree, magical shadow and cicada song recall
those heroes that in ancient days, reclining on roots and hummocks, tossing pen-knives, delved in earth’s cool underworld
and lightly squeezed the black clot from the blade.

Evening came, will come with lucid stillness printed by the
distinct cricket and, far off, by the freight cars' coupling clank.

A warm full moon will rise out of the mothering dust, out
of the dry corn land.