Late Summer Early Fall

from Field Stones
by Robert Kinsley

Here and there dust is rising
to settle in every corner of the state.
Men and machines march into the long fields
like soldiers solemn to the duties of the dying.
In the mid-west there is farmland turning
over and over like a semaphore for this
hard life, its darkness rising in black
clusters that refuse again and again the point of a plow.

But endings are not what you remember most
rather moments of light, the flash of
heat-lightning, or a streak of the real thing
striking just before rain.  Or the light
of morning coming over the tip of the barn
or the last light of day closing this world down,
that settles like dusk in your mind.
And then there is this - the flash of a hand
that waved to you over the wheel of a tractor,
that one you remember, as if it were a signal