Riddle

You never baled hay after the rain; you never baled
until the grass was dry as dust, raked over from
the bottom up and turned a light green from the
darkness it had drunk from the black soil
he'd fertilized the winter before with manure.
You never baled it wet because in the moww,
under thousands of bales, that wet grass
heated up and caught fire over time. A hot bale
they called it.

In the heat your body caked with chaff;
It was so bad you blew black snot into a hanky,
and the water you poured down yourself from the pewter
or plastic wash basins she set out an hour ago
was black, too. In the shade it didn't matter.
You'd lie there to catch a wink before she put up the meal.
Coolness and water soaking in deep after heat.

We stacked the bales in criss-cross rows, using their weight
and roughness as friction to pack them together. The wagons
had no sides, just four by fours nailed with two wood planks
at top and bottom in the back. The whole load rested against this
and rode on itself, self contained. (When I began
to write poetry, I imagined poems made like that.)

Dad tried to get a week or two off from the factory to bale.
But if it rained that week, he baled after a single or double
shift, sometimes a night shift. I don't blame him
for dreaming of the day when I'd load and unload
the wagons myself, even with his surly self-hate
and lack of emotions resembling love.

The moww was under a tin roof. As you stacked the bales
higher, the air grew scarce and hotter. Later on, I
recited Pound and wrote poems in my head all day
under that heat and sweat, like a Zen koan to
disembody myself from the drudgery and boredom--
compared to the fires of Blake and luminous Provence.
My father hated my addiction to words. If only
from envy, or maybe just because it had no use.
But my love of riddles came in handy once.
The baler broke a link in the chain that ran the crusher.
The chain in his hands, he tried to piece it together
again, but the links did not fit right. He snidely asked me;
I didn't see it either. We lost a day waiting for the mechanic.
That night I dreamed how the pieces fit.

When I told them I'd seen it that way, they laughed.
And when I showed them, they did not know what to say.
We just went back to work, tucked it away as one of those things.
I used to sing songs to the sound of the tractor and baler.
How strange to think of these things. The rain
on the roof has its music, too: the music of the past
and a life that no one will ever live again. Those times come
together as pieces in a dream, but the links
are jumbled, and I don't believe I'll ever put it together again.

copyright 2011 Charles David Miller. All rights reserved.