Renfrew Park in the Yellow Month
The gleaner that soon will glean this gently rolling field
of corn will not be Millet’s gleaners but a machine
almost as tall as the stone house almost three centuries old
perfectly conserved yet always closed above a ruin
of an old mill on Antietam creek where brochure myth
tells of two little girls scalped while washing clothes
to become bloody headed ghosts livening a dull tour’s riff
from room to room about how owner after owner chose
to redo the larger museum house for two hundred years.
But back to this behemoth gleaner; that wonder will be fun
to watch as it sluices wide swaths, rips withered ears
from crackling stalks, shucks kernels into a golden churn
in a thundering drum, and sprays a wake of crimson cobs
for catbirds to follow like gulls swarm a trawler’s spume,
though the pilot riding above this rumble in his lofty cab
won’t be listening to Copland’s Ode to the Common Man
in his orange electronic ear muffs but more likely a program
of yammer by aggrieved callers, yet days before this mowing
we two just “true to one another” like a gloomy old poem
says, having no choice in these sullen times that match our slowing,
walk our usual walk up the mazing path where flurries
of mustard butterflies fan open and shut on low asters
and high goldenrod clusters and flitter up like silly fairies
to frolic before us, heedless to the season’s old disaster.
of corn will not be Millet’s gleaners but a machine
almost as tall as the stone house almost three centuries old
perfectly conserved yet always closed above a ruin
of an old mill on Antietam creek where brochure myth
tells of two little girls scalped while washing clothes
to become bloody headed ghosts livening a dull tour’s riff
from room to room about how owner after owner chose
to redo the larger museum house for two hundred years.
But back to this behemoth gleaner; that wonder will be fun
to watch as it sluices wide swaths, rips withered ears
from crackling stalks, shucks kernels into a golden churn
in a thundering drum, and sprays a wake of crimson cobs
for catbirds to follow like gulls swarm a trawler’s spume,
though the pilot riding above this rumble in his lofty cab
won’t be listening to Copland’s Ode to the Common Man
in his orange electronic ear muffs but more likely a program
of yammer by aggrieved callers, yet days before this mowing
we two just “true to one another” like a gloomy old poem
says, having no choice in these sullen times that match our slowing,
walk our usual walk up the mazing path where flurries
of mustard butterflies fan open and shut on low asters
and high goldenrod clusters and flitter up like silly fairies
to frolic before us, heedless to the season’s old disaster.
