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I sing this morning: Hello, hello. I proclaim the bright day of the soul. The sun is a good fellow, the devil is a good guy, no deaths today I know. I live because I live. I do not die because I cannot die. In Tuscan sunlight Masaccio painted his belief that St. Peter’s shadow cured a cripple, gave him back his sight. I’ve come through eighty-five summers. I walk in sunlight. In my garden, death questions every root, flowers reply. I know the dark night of the soul does not need God’s eye, as a beggar does not need a hand or a bowl.

Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves are strung along a stick, the women standing in the August heat for hours—since first light— under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt. The older children hand the leaves from the slide, three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides waiting in what little shade there is: it’s ten o’clock, almost dinnertime. They pull the pails of cold lunch and Mason jars of tea out of the spring when they see the farmer coming from the field, their men stripped to the waist, polished by sweat and tired as mules. By afternoon, the loose cotton dresses, even the headrags are dark with sweat. Still their fingers never miss a stitch, though they’re paid not by the stick but by the day, and the talk—unbroken news of cousins and acquaintances— unwinding with the ball of twine, a frayed snuff-twig bouncing on one lip, the string paying out through their calluses, the piles of wide green leaves diminishing, until the men appear with the last slide and clamber up the rafters of the barn to line the loaded sticks along the tiers. It’s Friday: the farmer pays with a wad of ones and fives, having turned the mule out to its feed and water, hung up the stiffened traces and the bit. He checks again the other barns, already fired, crude ovens of log and mud where the crop is cured; in that hot dry acrid air, spreads a yellowing leaf across his palm, rolls an edge in his fingers, gauging by its texture and its smell how high to drive the fire. His crew is quiet in the pickup truck—did you think they were singing? They are much too tired to even speak, can barely lick salt from the back of a hand, brush at flies, hush a baby with a sugartit. And the man who owns this land is also tired. Everyday this week he’s meant to bring home pears from the old tree by the barn, but now he sees the fruit has fallen, sees the yellow jackets feeding there. He lights a Lucky, frames a joke for his wife—he’ll say their banker raised a piss-poor field this year. And she will lean against the doorjamb while he talks, while he scrubs his hands at the tin basin with a split lemon and a pumice stone, rubs them raw trying to cut the gummy resin, that stubborn black stain within the green.

This must happen just after I die: At sunrise I bend over my grandparents' empty house in Hazelwood and pull it out of the soft cindered earth by the Mon River. Copper tubing and electric lines hang down like hairs. The house is the size of a matchbox. I sprinkle bits of broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack needles in the open door of the porch. I scratch a Blue Tip and blow vowels of fire through the living room, the tunneled hallway. Flames run up the wooden stairs. I put my ear beside the hot kitchen window to hear the crackling voices of cupboards and walls. I flip the welder's mask: Sun off the rectangular glass, a rose glint before the white torch.

—for N.C. 1 Among all the harvests these are ones we make myth of— heat loosening squash spicing the dew as we rush to fill the restaurant order— haul our ripe crates. Organic cash crop: to market, to market. 2 New worlds on the sky, sungold solar systems. Gold balls on the chain. We map our hands in the scent of tomato. 3 Lost ones sag. Lost ones break. Birds peck. The ground oozes. The unpicked fruit wavers. We catch what we can. 4 Basic: between stalks for hours in binary motion—ripe/ not ripe, not mental really not boring either decisions of thumb & forefinger forging attunement between body & vine; as if picking were all we were made for— plop plop in crates in our upturned shirts. 5 I was in the field the day you called to say you’d lose the baby. How your sac was broken, and there was no saving it, just the waiting. I stood there, the whole day wrapped around me. I stood there, crying, smelling vine. 6 Another day of work. Another. 7 All month I thought of you, of us, the women, of all the trying to & breaking open. Of the rainsplit? ones, the ones that burst. And of the smells of vine & harvest. I wanted to give you tomatoes. 8 Here, a life is many ripened. Sprung, the seeded cells, a fragile mix of luck and tending. Warm furze blur of dust & buzzing. Tangle risen from the mud & marching. Here we are not self but species breaking as we bend & also fruiting pressing onward in the long bright tide: yes it breaks & yes it also swells—

We brought Hannah home today in afternoon sun with a crisp chill in the air on a hill overlooking the bay. Two women with a child and a shovel and a frozen placenta wrapped in aluminum foil placed in a red plastic bag. Hannah was brought into this world some say fourth others say fifth five days before. Before we brought her home. The weekend of rain softened the earth but the cold discouraged the shovel from denting more than the surface. I dug into the earth. The ground weakened beneath the strength I put into the shovel pounding the ground smooth and moist at first then cold and solid. Pounding the ground warmed my arms. I thought good thoughts for Hannah and her mother and prayed for us all. Remembering those who have passed on and those to be born and I thought of my children to be born and I thought of my father who has passed on. Breaking into the cold ground I thought of the day we brought my father home. Dinétah winter had frozen the ground and the earth chipped like ice, slivers of crunchy cold beneath our feet. Our bodies warmed by our work and the earth chipped like an old tree being chopped, taking hours to finish. Our bodies tired from our work and the earth piled high beside the hole like the clouds and just as fluffy. Our bodies natural returning to the ground. I dug into the ground digging out earth that would nourish Hannah digging out life that would embody Hannah and soon a small hole appeared four feet deep. There we stood two women with a child and a shovel and a frozen placenta wrapped in aluminum foil placed in a red plastic bag. The frozen mass of tissue and blood and life was placed in the small hole by Hannah’s mother and I felt her heat tissue and blood and life squatting with bloodied hands and cold earth bringing Hannah home.

I joy, dear mother, when I view Thy perfect lineaments, and hue Both sweet and bright. Beauty in thee takes up her place, And dates her letters from thy face, When she doth write. A fine aspect in fit array, Neither too mean nor yet too gay, Shows who is best. Outlandish looks may not compare, For all they either painted are, Or else undress'd. She on the hills which wantonly Allureth all, in hope to be By her preferr'd, Hath kiss'd so long her painted shrines, That ev'n her face by kissing shines, For her reward. She in the valley is so shy Of dressing, that her hair doth lie About her ears; While she avoids her neighbour's pride, She wholly goes on th' other side, And nothing wears. But, dearest mother, what those miss, The mean, thy praise and glory is And long may be. Blessed be God, whose love it was To double-moat thee with his grace, And none but thee.

Small wonder he’s not been sighted all winter; this old brock’s been to Normandy and back through the tunnels and trenches of his subconscious. His father fell victim to mustard-gas at the Somme; one of his sons lost a paw to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw: another drills on the Antrim hills’ still-molten lava in a moth-eaten Balaclava. An elaborate system of foxholes and duckboards leads to the terminal moraine of an ex-linen baron’s croquet-lawn where he’s part-time groundsman. I would find it somewhat infra dig to dismiss him simply as a pig or heed Gerald of Wales’ tall tales of badgers keeping badger-slaves. For when he shuffles across the esker I glimpse my grandfather’s whiskers stained with tobacco-pollen. When he piddles against a bullaun I know he carries bovine TB but what I see is my father in his Sunday suit’s bespoke lime and lignite, patrolling his now-diminished estate and taking stock of this and that.

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You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb,— Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, You did not come. You love not me, And love alone can lend you loyalty; –I know and knew it. But, unto the store Of human deeds divine in all but name, Was it not worth a little hour or more To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be You love not me?

Oblong, its jutted ends rounding into circles, The old sunken basin lies with its flat, marble lip An inch below the terrace tiles. Over the stagnant water Slide reflections: The blue-green of coned yews; The purple and red of trailing fuchsias Dripping out of marble urns; Bright squares of sky Ribbed by the wake of a swimming beetle. Through the blue-bronze water Wavers the pale uncertainty of a shadow. An arm flashes through the reflections, A breast is outlined with leaves. Outstretched in the quiet water The statue of a Goddess slumbers. But when Autumn comes The beech leaves cover her with a golden counter-pane.