Jane Mead

Rain so dark I can’t get through— train going by in a hurry. The voice said walk or die, I walked,—the train and the voice all blurry. I walked with my bones and my heart of chalk, not even a splintered notion: days of thought, nights of worry,—lonesome train in a hurry.

What struck me first was their panic. Some were pulled by the wind from moving to the ends of the stacked cages, some had their heads blown through the bars— and could not get them in again. Some hung there like that—dead— their own feathers blowing, clotting in their faces. Then I saw the one that made me slow some— I lingered there beside her for five miles. She had pushed her head through the space between bars—to get a better view. She had the look of a dog in the back of a pickup, that eager look of a dog who knows she's being taken along. She craned her neck. She looked around, watched me, then strained to see over the car—strained to see what happened beyond. That is the chicken I want to be.

Do you know what whole fields are? They are fields with a dog and a moon. Do you know the answer — for the many? Except there would be vineyards. Meaning there would, as usual, be commerce. Money, and a game of sorts to play it. Meanwhile — Emma lost in the cover-crop. Top of her head bobbing through mustard-flower. It is, after all, still here — The real world, the outstretched earth, Rain, soil, copper for pennies.

slicing this frozen sky know where they are going— and want to get there. Their call, both strange and familiar, calls to the strange and familiar heart, and the landscape becomes the landscape of being, which becomes the bright silos and snowy fields over which the nuanced and muscular geese are calling—while time and the heart take measure.