ROUTE 101 WOODBURN, INDIANA

On the horizon what are actually tall silver stacks
appear only as tiny needles poking up out of earth
frozen so solid it hurts just to think of climbing out of this truck.
All the farmhouses are beautiful and white and lonely.
Where is everyone? Even the cattle have stayed in today.
I can see their breath pouring out of faded, gray boards
and the rusted metal remnants of outbuildings
somehow standing after all that has happened here,
after the seasons and their private, familial tragedies
and the decades spent under open space and stars.
At the tire plant it will be warm and perhaps even hot;
smell of soft black licorice in a great white field: mint, anise.
Up ahead a mile or so there is something on this long
straight-as-an-arrow road and coming closer I can see now
at a quarter mile it is a trailer nearly doubled up
and a tractor a little mangled, a little twisted, a little tired.
And there it's driver standing as I pull on the air brakes
and they scream a sharp hiss into air forty-eight below,
in the field where the tractor is half-laying, idling.
And he is standing quite still, his breath so much like
the breath of cattle billowing into this air as a ghost,
a life unto itself slipping off into wind, another body,
gazing around turning his head one way slowly and then another
inspecting this new winter crop, this great field
of black holes he has sewn this morning.
As I call for a tow-rig on the radio
he begins harvesting, one by one
the fruits of sleepiness and ice,
and moving about slow and stiff
he is so much like an old, arthritic
winter bull I want to cry.

By James S. Profitt

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