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| Nightfall after rain |
Turn off the wet and steaming macadam
in the quiet after the thunder has passed,
thumping now softly behind the misted ridges,
and find the ruts of a farm road
along the edge of the dripping woods,
the cardinals and sparrows singing
and fluttering dry on their perches,
tractors parked in their sheds,
cows filing toward barns,
men of the land falling asleep on their couches,
work mapped on their broad hands,
still for the first time since daybreak,
as light lifts from the fields
whose contours they've known all their lives,
the silence of evening filling the hollows
and spreading over the hills,
no human sound but your breathing,
and you want to sit down in the beaded high grasses
to watch the does step out of the trees
and into the corn, ears cocked, tails twitching,
and then their dappeled fawns,
and you think it's been a good day,
a day without news,
and you want tomorrow the same.
